Paranoia and the White

Hegemon
1ACs, OVs, and Extensions
 1AC
Despite the narrative of decreasing boots on the ground,
US military presence is increasing: secret drone bases are
being established throughout the Greater Horn of Africa,
particularly in Djibouti and Ethiopia, and surveillance
points against the war on terror, even against the
desires of Ethiopians

Whitlock and Miller 11 (Craig and Greg, [Writers for

Washington Post], U.S. building secret drone bases in Africa,
Arabian Peninsula, officials say,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-
building-secret-drone-bases-in-africa-arabian-peninsula-officials-
say/2011/09/20/gIQAJ8rOjK_story.html //DF)

The Obama administration is assembling a constellation

of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in
the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly
aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in
Somalia and Yemen, U.S. officials said. One of the
installations is being established in Ethiopia, a U.S. ally in
the fight against al-Shabab, the Somali militant group that controls much of that
country. Another base is in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where a small fleet of
hunter-killer drones resumed operations this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the
unmanned aircraft could effectively patrol Somalia from there.The U.S. military also
has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in
Djibouti, a tiny African nation at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In addition, the CIA
is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula so it can deploy armed drones over Yemen. The
rapid expansion of the undeclared drone wars is a
reflection of the growing alarm with which U.S. officials
view the activities of al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and
Somalia, even as al-Qaedas core leadership in Pakistan has been weakened by U.S.
counterterrorism operations. The U.S. government is known to have
used drones to carry out lethal attacks in at least six
countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The negotiations
that preceded the establishment of the base in the Republic of Seychelles illustrate
the efforts the United States is making to broaden the
range of its drone weapons. The island nation of 85,000
people has hosted a small fleet of MQ-9 Reaper drones
operated by the U.S. Navy and Air Force since September
2009. U.S. and Seychellois officials have previously acknowledged the drones presence but have said
that their primary mission was to track pirates in regional waters. But classified U.S.
diplomatic cables show that the unmanned aircraft have
also conducted counterterrorism missions over Somalia,
about 800 miles to the northwest. The cables, obtained by
the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, reveal that U.S. officials
asked leaders in the Seychelles to keep the counterterrorism
missions secret. The Reapers are described by the
military as hunter-killer drones because they can be
equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided
bombs. To allay concerns among islanders, U.S. officials
said they had no plans to arm the Reapers when the
mission was announced two years ago. The cables show,
however, that U.S. officials were thinking about
weaponizing the drones. During a meeting with Seychelles President James Michel on
Sept. 18, 2009, American diplomats said the U.S. government would seek discrete [sic], specific
discussions ... to gain approval to arm the Reapers should the desire to do so ever arise, according to a
cable summarizing the meeting. Michel concurred, but asked U.S. officials to approach him exclusively for
permission and not anyone else in his government, the cable reported. Michels chief deputy told a U.S.
diplomat on a separate occasion that the Seychelles president was not philosophically against arming
the drones, according to another cable. But the deputy urged the Americans to be extremely careful in
raising the issue with anyone in the Government outside of the President. Such a request would be
politically extremely sensitive and would have to be handled with the utmost discreet care. A U.S.
military spokesman declined to say whether the Reapers in the Seychelles have ever been armed.
Because of operational security concerns, I cant get into specifics, said Lt. Cmdr. James D. Stockman, a
public affairs officer for the U.S. Africa Command, which oversees the base in the Seychelles. He noted,
however, that the MQ-9 Reapers can be configured for both surveillance and strike. A spokeswoman for
Michel said the president was unavailable for comment. Jean-Paul Adam, who was Michels chief deputy in
2009 and now serves as minister of foreign affairs, said U.S. officials had not asked for permission to equip
the drones with missiles or bombs. The operation of the drones in Seychelles for the purposes of counter-
piracy surveillance and other related activities has always been unarmed, and the U.S. government has
never asked us for them to be armed, Adam said in an e-mail. This was agreed between the two
The State
governments at the first deployment and the situation has not changed.
Department cables show that U.S. officials were sensitive
to perceptions that the drones might be armed, noting
that they do have equipment that could appear to the
public as being weapons. To dispel potential concerns, they held a media day for
about 30 journalists and Seychellois officials at the small, one-runway airport in Victoria, the capital, in
November 2009. One of the Reapers was parked on the tarmac. The government of Seychelles invited us
here to fight against piracy, and that is its mission, Craig White, a U.S. diplomat, said during the event.
However, these aircraft have a great deal of capabilities and could be used for other missions. In fact,
U.S. officials had already outlined other purposes for the drones in a classified mission review with Michel
and Adam. Saying that the U.S. government desires to be completely transparent, the American
diplomats informed the Seychellois leaders that the Reapers would also fly over Somalia to support
ongoing counter-terrorism efforts, though not direct attacks, according to a cable summarizing the
U.S. officials stressed the sensitive nature of this
meeting.
counter-terrorism mission and that this not be released
outside of the highest ... channels, the cable stated.
The President wholeheartedly concurred with that
request, noting that such issues could be politically
sensitive for him as well. The Seychelles drone operation has a relatively small
footprint. Based in a hangar located about a quarter-mile from the main passenger terminal at the airport,
it includes between three and four Reapers and about 100 U.S. military personnel and contractors,
according to the cables. The military operated the flights on a continuous basis until April, when it paused
the operations. They resumed this month, said Stockman, the Africa Command spokesman. The
aim in assembling a constellation of bases in the Horn of
Africa and the Arabian Peninsula is to create overlapping
circles of surveillance in a region where al-Qaeda
offshoots could emerge for years to come, U.S. officials
said. The locations are based on potential target sets,
said a senior U.S. military official. If you look at it
geographically, it makes sense you get out a ruler and
draw the distances [drones] can fly and where they take
off from. One U.S. official said that there had been
discussions about putting a drone base in Ethiopia for as
long as four years, but that plan was delayed because
the Ethiopians were not all that jazzed. Other officials
said Ethiopia has become a valued counterterrorism
partner because of threats posed by al-Shabab. We have
a lot of interesting cooperation and arrangements with
the Ethiopians when it comes to intelligence collection
and linguistic capabilities, said a former senior U.S.
military official familiar with special operations missions
in the region. An Ethiopian Embassy spokesman in Washington could not be reached for
comment Tuesday night. The former official said the United States relies on Ethiopian linguists to translate
signals intercepts gathered by U.S. agencies monitoring calls and e-mails of al-Shabab members. The CIA
and other agencies also employ Ethiopian informants who gather information from across the border.
Overall, officials said, the cluster of bases reflects an
effort to have wider geographic coverage, greater
leverage with countries in the region and backup facilities
if individual airstrips are forced to close. Its a conscious
recognition that those are the hot spots developing right
now, said the former senior U.S. military official.
The drone and the law reduce the surveilled figure to a
structural position of biological object-hood: the zero-
point of anti-black violence. The way the camera reduces
the body to a target via heat signature demonstrates the
disposability politics inherent in the biopolitical regime
PUGLIESE, Joseph 2013 (State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical
Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones. Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research
Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at
Macquarie University)

Everything in this Heideggerian exposition can be effectively transposed

to illuminate the operations of drone screen technologies in order to
entrap and reduce the surveilled human figure into an object that
can be antiseptically killed from a distance. The antiseptic vision of
war that is produced by the parenthetical logic of the use of drone
technologies is further enhanced by the clinical language deployed
by the drone operators in their identification of suspect targets. The
drones infrared camera, with its digitally enhanced zoom, enables
the sensor operators to detect the heat signature of a human body
from significant distances. The term heat signature works to
reduce the targeted human body to an anonymous heat-emitting
entity that merely radiates signs of life. This clinical process of
reducing human subjects to purely biological categories of radiant
life is further elaborated by the US militarys use of the term
pattern of life: TheCIAreceivedsecretpermissiontoattackawiderangeof
targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a
dramaticexpansionofitscampaignofdronestrikesinPakistansborderregion.
Theexpandedauthority...permitstheagencytorelyonwhatofficialsdescribeas
pattern of life analysis, using evidence collected by surveil lance cameras or
unmannedaircraft.Theinformationwasusedtotargetsuspectedmilitants,even
whentheirfullidentitieswerenotknown...PreviouslytheCIAwasrestrictedin
mostcasestokillingonlyindividualswhosenameswereonanapprovedlist...
someanalystssaidpermittingtheCIAtokillpeoplewherenameswereunknown
32
createdaseriousriskofkillinginnocentpeople. The military term pattern
of life is inscribed by two intertwined systems of scientific
conceptuality: algorithmic and biological. The human subject
detected by drones surveillance cameras is, in the first scientific
schema, transmuted algorith- mically into a patterned sequence of
numerals: the digital code of ones and zeros.Convertedintodigitaldatacodedaspattern
of life, the targeted human subject is reduced to an anonymous
simulacrum that flickers across the screen and can be effectively
liquidated into a pattern of death with the swivel of a joystick.
Viewed through the scientific gaze of clinical biology, pattern of life
connects the drones scanning technologies to the discourse of an
instrumentalist science, its constitutive gaze of objectifying
detachment, and its production of exterminatory violence . Patternsoflifeare
whatarediscoveredandanalyzedinthepetridishofthelaboratory.Inthisway,thetargetedhumansubjectsofAfghanistan,Pakistan
orYemenarerepresentedastypesofbacteriaandotherlowlifeorganismsthatcanbeexterminatedantiseptically. The
CIAs
Counterterrorism Centers chief has boasted that, thanks to their
drone automated execution program, We are killing these sons of
bitches faster than they can grow them now.3
3

This increasing military presence in Africa is not an

isolated incidence; rather, it is a lynchpin in the process of
maintaining hegemony. US hegemony especially after
9/11 has been characterized by the paradox of the
catastrophe within the dream world, the impending attack
that requires a limitless war to be fought both to protect
itself and justify its existence. Exposing these circuits of
power and hallucinations of ever-drawing conflict is key to
break from this epistemology
McClintock 9chaired prof of English and Womens and Gender Studies
at UWMadison. MPhil from Cambridge; PhD from Columbia (Anne, Paranoid
Empire: Specters from Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib, Small Axe Mar2009,
Issue 28, p50-74 //DF)[Dont read blue]

By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and
dangerous hallucinations: the promise of benign US globalization
and the permanent threat of the war on terror. I have come to feel that we

cannot understand the extravagance of the violence to which the US

government has committed itself after 9/11two countries invaded, thousands of

innocent people imprisoned, killed, and tortured unless we grasp a

defining feature of our moment , that is, a deep and disturbing
doubleness with respect to power . Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies
of global omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding
with
nightmares of impending attack, the U nited S tates has entered the
domain of paranoia : dream world and catastrophe. For it is only in
paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both deliriums of
absolute power 1and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the
spectral and nightmarish quality of the war on terror, a limitless war against a limitless
threat, a war vaunted by the US administration to encompass all
of space and persisting without end. But the war on terror is not a real war, for terror
is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls
elsewhere a consensual hallucination, 4 and the
US government can fling its military
might against ghostly apparitions and hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the

cost of catastrophic self-delusion and the infliction of great

calamities elsewhere. I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible (the
better politically to challenge) those established but concealed circuits of
imperial violence that now animate the war on terror. We need, as urgently, to
illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence
abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxesthe modern slave-ships on
the middle passage to nowherethat have come to characterize the United States as a super-
carceral state. 5 Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a
long-established but primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more
aggressively as an overt empire, does the terrain and object of intellectual
inquiry, as well as the
claims of political responsibility, not also extend beyond that useful fiction of the

exceptional nation to embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we

theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship
with the ordinary, but which also at the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of
ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would
render itself invisible, casting states of emergency into fitful shadow and
fleshly bodies into specters? For imperialism is not something that
happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored. Rather, the

force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within , the nature and violence of the nation-
state itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire are we, the people? And who are the
ghosted, ordinary people beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute us? We now inhabit a
crisis of violence and the visible . How do we insist on seeing the
violence that the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while
also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence ? For to allow the spectral, disfigured people
(especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and
penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held

US claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the traditional

self-identity of the U nited S tates as the uniquely superior, universal
standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national
mythology of originary innocence now in tatters . The deeper question,
however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence without becoming
beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6 Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture we must also
find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the
authority of vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt
the great forgettings of official history. Paranoia Even the paranoid have enemies.
Donald Rumsfeld Why paranoia? Can we fully understand the proliferating circuits of
imperial violence the very eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast
without understanding the pervasive presence of the paranoia that has
come, quite violently , to manifest itself across the political and cultural

spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply Hofstadters famous identification
of the US states tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia as an inherent
contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between
deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness
with respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11), can
produce pyrotechnic displays of violence . The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I
argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8 Let me be clear: I do not see
paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on
terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged mind, or Hegelian cunning of reason, nor by what
Susan Faludi calls a national terror dream. 9 Nor am I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological
diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do not have psyches or an unconscious; only people do. Rather, a
social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as paranoid if the dominant
powers governing that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory cultural
narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent
superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term paranoia is
analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective national psyche, nor as a description of a
universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing and being attentive to
contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the
contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries to conceal. Paranoia is in this sense what I
call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and society, between
psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary,
for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories
of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and
revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we
understand such debauches of cruelty? A critical question still remains: does not something terrible have to
happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary
people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with,

and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we need to
take a long, hard look at the simultaneously
humiliating and aggrandizing rituals of militarized
institutions, whereby individuals are first broken
down, then reintegrated (incorporated) into the
larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body ,
the methods by which schools , the military,
training camps not to mention the paranoid
image-worlds of the corporate mediainstill
paranoia in ordinary people and fatally
conjure up collective but unstable fantasies of
omnipotence . 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia
into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate our moment: the crisis
of violence and the visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call the enemy deficit. I
explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at Guantnamo and Abu
Ghraib. I argue that Guantnamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that torture itself is paranoia
incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carbys brilliant work, those contradictory sites
where imperial racism, sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11 The Enemy Deficit: Making the
Barbarians Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not come. Some people arrived from the frontiers,
And they said that there are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution. C. P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians The barbarians have declared
war. President George W. Bush C. P. Cavafy wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in 1927, but the poem haunts the
aftermath of 9/11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient dj vu. To what dilemma are the barbarians a kind of
solution? Every modern empire faces an abiding crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its power over

territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafys insight is that an imperial
state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the
barbarians . It is only the threat of the barbarians that constitutes
the silhouette of the empires borders in the first place. On the other

hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with perpetual nightmares of
impending attack. The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected
from which we cannot part . And without the barbarians the
legitimacy of empire vanishes like a disappearing phantom. Those
people were a kind of solution. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in
December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States and the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare.
The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism, Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration vanished.
Where were the enemies now to justify the continuing escalation
of the military colossus? And now what shall become of us without
any barbarians? By rights, the thawing of the cold war should have
prompted an immediate downsizing of the military ; any plausible external
threat had simply ceased to exist. Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army,
bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use having an army that did nothing but train, he said. Theres
got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for. Dick Cheney likewise complained: The
threats have become so remote. So remote that they are difficult
to ascertain . Colin Powell agreed: Though we can still plausibly identify specific threats
North Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like thatthe real threat is the unknown, the uncertain . Before
becoming president, George W. Bush likewise fretted over the postcold war dearth of a visible
enemy: We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they are out there. It is now well
established that the invasion of Iraq had been a long-standing goal of the US administration, but
there was no clear rationale with which to sell such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the
Project for the New American Century produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to
make such an invasion palatable would require a catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl
Harbor. 12 The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem
of legitimacy, offering the Bush administration what they would claim as a political casus
belli and the military unimaginable license to expand its reach .
General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon: There is a
huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing
opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our homeland, which gives
it some oomph. In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking during the attack, Now we can
perhaps attack Osama Bin Laden. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, America
will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before. Charles
Krauthammer, for one, called for a declaration of total war. We no longer have to search for a name
for the post-Cold War era, he declared. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. 13

This creates a chain of warfare and resentment,

continuously reproducing violence and thus crisis points
for hegemony to co-opt. The 21st century neo-imperialistic
engagement with the Middle East proves US enforcement
of hegemony fractures populations, props up unstable
regimes for self-interest, and causes inter- and intra-
regional war

Muzaffar 7 (Chandra, [Author, Political Scientist,

International President of JUST], Hegemony, Terrorism,
War- Is Democracy the Antidote? //DF)

There is no doubt at all that hegemony uses

From terrorism let us now turn to war.
war to extend and expand its power. Recent examples provide the
evidence. The U.S. led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 enabled the
superpower to plant its flag in that country, and, at the same time,
to extend its influence over Central Asiaa region of the world where Russia still
carries some weight and which China eyes with some interest. Apart from American bases in a couple of
its geopolitical presence in the oil rich region also
Central Asian republics,
means that it is capable of exercising some control over the export
of that commodity. This has enhanced its hegemonic power both
regionally and globally.5 Similarly, the U.S.s conquest of Iraq in 2003
was designed to strengthen its dominant position in the worlds
largest oil exporting region. Iraq itself has the second largest oil
reserves in the Middle East. It is also blessed with an abundance of
watera fact of some significance since the Middle East, according
to some analysts, may be one of those areas that could well witness
conflicts over water in the future. Besides, Iraq is strategically located,
with Syria, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia as its immediate
neighbors. Going to war in Iraq had another motive. It was to oust President Saddam Hussein and to
destroy the Baathist government because Saddam was a staunch opponent of Israel. Weakening and
eliminating governments and peoples movements in the Middle East that regard Israel as a morally and
politically illegitimate entity has been central to U.S. foreign policy for almost four decades now. Given
Iraqs oil wealth and its scientific military infrastructure, it was potentially a formidable foe of the U.S.s
closest ally and partner in the Middle East. This is why Saddam had to be crushedfor Israels sake.6
Deploying the U.S.s massive military might serve to secure its
hegemonic power and to assist its allies to enhance their strength
which is at the core of the agenda of the Bush Administration as
defined by the neo-cons. Even before George W. Bush assumed the presidency in early
2001, the neo-cons like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, and
Lewis Scooter Libby among others, in association with Dick
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, were already planning and plotting to
use U.S. fire power to re-shape the politics of the Middle East in
order to reinforce its grip over the regions oil and to fortify Israels
position.7. CripplingSabotaging the democratically elected Hamas in
Palestine and trying to replace it with a leadership that is
subservient to Israels interest, attempting to eliminate an
autonomous movement like Hizbullah in Lebanon with the aim of
bolstering a weak pro-U.S. regime in Beirut, targeting the
independent-minded government in Damascus, and most of all,
manipulating the nuclear issue to prepare the ground for some sort
of military action against an Iran that refuses to bow to the U.S. and
Israelapart from the Iraq war are all part-and-parcel of the neo-
cons elaborate agenda for establishing total hegemony over the
Middle East as a prerequisite for global hegemony. After five years, some
commentators are convinced that the agenda is in tatters. The peoples resistance to the
U.S. led occupation of Iraq compounded by the unrelenting Sunni
Shiite violence, the continuing popularity of Hamas in spite of the
immense suffering that the masses have had to endure, Israels
failure to defeat Hizbullah in the thirty-four day Lebanon war and
the latters success in forging a multi-confessional coalition against
the Beirut government,8 and Irans expanding geopolitical
significance in the region due to an extent to the emergence of a
Shiite-dominated regime in Baghdad brought about ironically by the
U.S. occupation, have separately and collectively helped to thwart
the neo-cons grand design. The neo-cons have also been
checkmated by the situation in the U.S. itself. A majority of
Americans are now opposed to their countrys involvement in Iraq
and want their soldiers to come home quickly.

This outwardly expanding violence and paranoia is

generated internally at first: the shattered corpses and
stolen resources of Native Americans, and the denial of
this racist imperial carnage, sets a foundational racist
pattern of butchering
Street 4
(Paul Street, author, March 11, 2004. [Those Who Deny the Crimes of the Past Reflections on
American Racist Atrocity Denial, 1776-2004, http://thereitis.org/displayarticle242.html)//TR

It is especially important to appreciate the significance of the vicious, often explicitly

genocidal homeland assaults on native-Americans, which set foundational racist and
national-narcissist patterns for subsequent U.S. global butchery, disproportionately directed at non-
European people of color. The deletion of the real story of the so-called battle of Washita from the official Seventh Cavalry history
given to the perpetrators of the No Gun Ri massacre is revealing. Denial about Washita and Sand Creek (and so on) encouraged US
savagery at Wounded Knee, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in the Philippines, the denial of which encouraged US
savagery in Korea, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in Vietnam, the denial of which (and all before) has recently
encouraged US savagery in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its a vicious circle of recurrent violence , well known to mental
health practitioners who deal with countless victims of domestic violence living in the dark shadows of the imperial homelands
crippling, stunted, and indeed itself occupied social and political order. Power-mad US forces deploying the latest
genocidal war tools, some suggestively named after native tribes that white North American
pioneers tried to wipe off the face of the earth (ie, Apache, Blackhawk, and Comanche helicopters)
are walking in bloody footsteps that trace back across centuries, oceans, forests and plains
to the leveled villages, shattered corpses, and stolen resources of those who Roosevelt acknowledged as
Americas original inhabitants. Racist imperial carnage and its denial, like charity,
begin at home . Those who deny the crimes of the past are likely to repeat their
offenses in the future as long as they retain the means and motive to do so. It is folly, however, for
any nation to think that it can stand above the judgments of history, uniquely free of terrible consequences for what Ward Churchill
calls imperial arrogance and criminality. Every new U.S. murder of innocents abroad breeds untold
numbers of anti-imperial resistance fighters, ready to die and eager to use the latest
available technologies and techniques to kill representatives even just ordinary citizens
of what they see as an American Predator state. This along with much else will help precipitate an inevitable
return of US power to the grounds of earth and history. As it accelerates, the U.S. will face a fateful

choice , full of potentially grave or liberating consequences for the fate of humanity and
the earth. It will accept its fall with relief and gratitude, asking for forgiveness, and making true
reparation at home and abroad, consistent with an honest appraisal of what Churchill, himself of native-
American (Keetoowah Cherokee) ancestry, calls the realities of [its] national history and the responsibilities that history has
bequeathed: goodbye American Exceptionalism and Woodrow Wilsons guns. Or Americans and the world will face the likely
permanent imperial war and the construction of an ever-more imposing U.S. fortress state,
alternative of
perpetuated by Orwellian denial and savage intentional historical ignorance. This savage
barbarism of dialectically inseparable empire and inequality will be defended in the last wagon-train instance by missiles and bombs
loaded with radioactive materials wrenched from lands once freely roamed by an immeasurably more civilized people than those who
came to destroy.

Thus, we need to inhabit the academy as radical

intellectuals dedicated to uncovering and fighting against
the hidden genocide analytic thats produced in the
academy to justify these policies
Rodriguez 12 (Dylan Rodrguez is professor and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at
the University of California, Riverside, where he began his teaching career in 2001. Author of 2 books, he is
a founding member of Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, a national movement-
building collective that seeks to fulfill the social and historical vision of abolition. Racial/Colonial Genocide
and the Neoliberal Academy: In Excess of a Problematic, American Quarterly, Volume 64, Number 4,
December 2012, Project Muse)//TR

Such intellectual practices can renarrate racial terror and miserythe forms of suffering
endemic to multicultural civil society. Within this collective work, there is possibility for
effective (though never permanent) denaturalizations and politicizationsof the forms of
human suffering, entrapment, and vulnerability that are otherwise routinely embedded in the
current worlds institutional protocols, and death-inducing organization of resources. In such
instances, radical intellectuals inhabitation of existing institutional sites can enable both ethical
opposition to structures of domination and creative knowledge production that strives to glimpse the
historical possibilities that are always just on the other side of terror and degradation. Intellectuals
engaged in such projects are always more than academics, in the sense that their scholarly
engagement is not secured by the academy proper. This expansive grounding is an
antidisciplinarity of a certain kind: if what animates their intellectual work is what I have tentatively
named an abolitionist desire, such radical intellectuals always understand themselves to be working in
alien (if not hostile) territory. The academy is never home: some of us are subject to eviction and
evisceration, alongside the surveillance, discipline, and low intensity punishment that accrues
to those of us who try to build modalities of sustenance and reproduction within liberationist
genealogies, particularly when we are working and studying in colleges and universities .6 I am
undecided as to whether the university is capable or worthy of being transformed from its dominant
historical purposes, or if it ought to be completely abolished. For now, I am interested in the radical
creativity that can come from the standoff position in-and-of-itself. Such a position reveals that
the fundamental problem is not that some are excluded from the hegemonic
centers of the academy but that the university (as a specific institutional site)
and academy (as a shifting material network) themselves cannot be
disentangled from the long historical apparatuses of genocidal and
protogenocidal social organization. Placed in the context of the United States,
we can see that (1) genocidal methodologies and logics have always
constituted the academically facilitated inception of a hemispheric America,
and (2) genocidal technologies are the lifeblood of national reproduction
across its distended temporalities and geographies . The recent flourishing of
scholarship that rehistoricizes regimes of incarceration, war, sexuality, settler-colonialist power, and
gendered racist state violenceincluding much of the work that has recently appeared in this very journal
constitutes a radical reproach of institutional multiculturalism and liberal pluralism. The point to be
multiculturalism and pluralism are essential to both the
amplified is that
contemporary formation of neoliberalism and the historical distensions of
racial/colonial genocide.7 It is for this reason that I do not find the analytics of
neoliberalism to be sufficient for describing the conditions of political work
within the U.S. academy today. It is not just different structures of oppressive
violence that radical scholars are trying to make legible, it is violence of a
certain depth, with specific and morbid implications for some peoples future
existence as such If we can begin to acknowledge this fundamental truth
.

that genocide is this place (the American academy and, in fact, America
itself)then our operating assumptions, askable questions, and scholarly
methods will need to transform. At a moment of historical emergency, we might find principled
desperation within intellectual courage.

This act of inhabiting the academy as radical intellectuals

exposing the circuits of power undergirding military
presence in the Great Horn of Africa creates epistemic
friction to challenge the material relegated to the
shadowlands

JOSE MEDINA, 2011 Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance:

Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism [ Ph. D.,
Northwestern University (1998), PhilosophyM.A., Northwestern University (1995), Philosophy
B.A., University of Sevilla (1991), Philosophy]

What we need in order to maintain possibilities of resistance always

open is epistemic friction. As Wittgenstein puts it: We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough

ground! I want to define epistemic friction as follows: EPISTEMIC FRICTION consists in the
interrogates epistemic
mutual contestation of differently normatively structured knowledge, which
exclusions, disqualifications, and hegemonies. Epistemic friction is acknowledged and
celebrated in pluralistic views of our epistemic negotiations and our cognitive lives, but not every king of epistemic
pluralism makes room for epistemic friction in the same way. In this section I want to explore the implications of a
thoroughgoing epistemic pluralism for genealogical investigations. For this purpose, I will compare and contrast Foucaults
pluralism with two different kinds of epistemic pluralism that can be found in American philosophy, arguing that
Foucaultian pluralism offers a distinctive notion of epistemic friction that has tremendous critical force. Different
experimental and agential standpoint can make different contributions to genealogical investigations and even offer
 Given the right socio-political conditions, the
alternative genealogical histories.

critical reconstruction and reevaluations of our beliefs can

(and should) be reopened and resumed whenever new
standpoints appear on the scene, but also whenever we discover
that certain voice or perspective were never considered or
were not given equal weight. Thus it is not surprising that populations feel particularly
compelled to reopen the conversation about their past when the socio-political conditions change in such a way that
voices and perspective that had previously been ignored or not fully taken into consideration can now participate
differently in the reconstruction of their past because they enjoy a different kind of agency. For example, this has
been happening periodically in different ways and on different fronts in the public DEBATES
about past dictatorial regimes that have taken place in countries such as Argentina, Chile, or
Spain. In these countries different publics have demanded a sustained effort to critically revisit the reconstruction of
a shared past in the light of evidence, testimony and articulations or interpretations of facts that

challenge established beliefs or are simply not integrated in the

collective memory and OFFICIAL HISTORY in circulation.
There is a plurality of lived pasts and of knowledges about the pasts
that resists unification and creates FRICTION. But what are we to make of this
resistance and friction? Pluralistic views of truth and knowledges make productive use of these forms of epistemic friction
and resistance, whereas monistic views regard epistemic diversity always as a problem. I will restrict myself here to
pluralistic views, but I want to emphasize that different kinds of epistemic pluralism involve different normative attitudes
with respect to epistemic diversity and the kinds of epistemic friction and resistance that heterogeneous perspectives can
exert. He continues By contrast, the radical epistemic pluralism that we find Foucault is not
melioristic in this sense. On this more radical pluralism, epistemic frictions
are more tools for learning they are tools for unlearning (for
undoing power/knowledges- e.g. for undoing ways of remembering
and forgetting, when it comes to the knowledge of the past. On this
view, epistemic frictions are not merely instrumental or
transitional- that is tools for, or steps toward, harmony or conflict resolution.
Epistemic frictions are sought for their own sake, for the forms
of resistance that they constitute. This is why I call this more radical epistemic pluralism
that can be found in Foucault A GUERRILLA PLURALISM. It is not a
pluralism that tries to resolve conflicts and overcome struggles, but instead
tries to provoke them and re-energize them. It is a pluralism that aims not at the
melioration of cognitive and ethical lives of all, but rather, as the (epistemic and socio-political
resistance of some against the oppression of others. This is pluralism that
focuses on the gaps, discontinuities, tensions and clashes among
perspectives and DISCURSIVE PRACTICES. With respect to knowledge
of the past, Foucaultian genealogical investigations do not simply revive alternative memories that can act as corrective
of each other and cooperate without losing their specificity, as a Jamesian meliorist pluralism would have it.
 1AC With Comments
Despite the narrative of decreasing boots on the ground,
US military presence is increasing: secret drone bases are
being established throughout the Greater Horn of Africa,
particularly in Djibouti and Ethiopia, and surveillance
points against the war on terror, even against the
desires of Ethiopians

Whitlock and Miller 11 (Craig and Greg, [Writers for

Washington Post], U.S. building secret drone bases in Africa,
Arabian Peninsula, officials say,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-
building-secret-drone-bases-in-africa-arabian-peninsula-officials-
say/2011/09/20/gIQAJ8rOjK_story.html //DF)

The Obama administration is assembling a constellation

of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in
the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly
aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in
Somalia and Yemen, U.S. officials said. One of the
installations is being established in Ethiopia, a U.S. ally in
the fight against al-Shabab, the Somali militant group that controls much of that
country. Another base is in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where a small fleet of
hunter-killer drones resumed operations this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the
unmanned aircraft could effectively patrol Somalia from there.The U.S. military also
has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in
Djibouti, a tiny African nation at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In addition, the CIA
is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula so it can deploy armed drones over Yemen. The
rapid expansion of the undeclared drone wars is a
reflection of the growing alarm with which U.S. officials
view the activities of al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and
Somalia, even as al-Qaedas core leadership in Pakistan has been weakened by U.S.
counterterrorism operations. The U.S. government is known to have
used drones to carry out lethal attacks in at least six
countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The negotiations
that preceded the establishment of the base in the Republic of Seychelles illustrate
the efforts the United States is making to broaden the
range of its drone weapons. The island nation of 85,000
people has hosted a small fleet of MQ-9 Reaper drones
operated by the U.S. Navy and Air Force since September
2009. U.S. and Seychellois officials have previously acknowledged the drones presence but have said
that their primary mission was to track pirates in regional waters. But classified U.S.
diplomatic cables show that the unmanned aircraft have
also conducted counterterrorism missions over Somalia,
about 800 miles to the northwest. The cables, obtained by
the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, reveal that U.S. officials
asked leaders in the Seychelles to keep the counterterrorism
missions secret. The Reapers are described by the
military as hunter-killer drones because they can be
equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided
bombs. To allay concerns among islanders, U.S. officials
said they had no plans to arm the Reapers when the
mission was announced two years ago. The cables show,
however, that U.S. officials were thinking about
weaponizing the drones. During a meeting with Seychelles President James Michel on
Sept. 18, 2009, American diplomats said the U.S. government would seek discrete [sic], specific
discussions ... to gain approval to arm the Reapers should the desire to do so ever arise, according to a
cable summarizing the meeting. Michel concurred, but asked U.S. officials to approach him exclusively for
permission and not anyone else in his government, the cable reported. Michels chief deputy told a U.S.
diplomat on a separate occasion that the Seychelles president was not philosophically against arming
the drones, according to another cable. But the deputy urged the Americans to be extremely careful in
raising the issue with anyone in the Government outside of the President. Such a request would be
politically extremely sensitive and would have to be handled with the utmost discreet care. A U.S.
military spokesman declined to say whether the Reapers in the Seychelles have ever been armed.
Because of operational security concerns, I cant get into specifics, said Lt. Cmdr. James D. Stockman, a
public affairs officer for the U.S. Africa Command, which oversees the base in the Seychelles. He noted,
however, that the MQ-9 Reapers can be configured for both surveillance and strike. A spokeswoman for
Michel said the president was unavailable for comment. Jean-Paul Adam, who was Michels chief deputy in
2009 and now serves as minister of foreign affairs, said U.S. officials had not asked for permission to equip
the drones with missiles or bombs. The operation of the drones in Seychelles for the purposes of counter-
piracy surveillance and other related activities has always been unarmed, and the U.S. government has
never asked us for them to be armed, Adam said in an e-mail. This was agreed between the two
The State
governments at the first deployment and the situation has not changed.
Department cables show that U.S. officials were sensitive
to perceptions that the drones might be armed, noting
that they do have equipment that could appear to the
public as being weapons. To dispel potential concerns, they held a media day for
about 30 journalists and Seychellois officials at the small, one-runway airport in Victoria, the capital, in
November 2009. One of the Reapers was parked on the tarmac. The government of Seychelles invited us
here to fight against piracy, and that is its mission, Craig White, a U.S. diplomat, said during the event.
However, these aircraft have a great deal of capabilities and could be used for other missions. In fact,
U.S. officials had already outlined other purposes for the drones in a classified mission review with Michel
and Adam. Saying that the U.S. government desires to be completely transparent, the American
diplomats informed the Seychellois leaders that the Reapers would also fly over Somalia to support
ongoing counter-terrorism efforts, though not direct attacks, according to a cable summarizing the
U.S. officials stressed the sensitive nature of this
meeting.
counter-terrorism mission and that this not be released
outside of the highest ... channels, the cable stated.
The President wholeheartedly concurred with that
request, noting that such issues could be politically
sensitive for him as well. The Seychelles drone operation has a relatively small
footprint. Based in a hangar located about a quarter-mile from the main passenger terminal at the airport,
it includes between three and four Reapers and about 100 U.S. military personnel and contractors,
according to the cables. The military operated the flights on a continuous basis until April, when it paused
the operations. They resumed this month, said Stockman, the Africa Command spokesman. The
aim in assembling a constellation of bases in the Horn of
Africa and the Arabian Peninsula is to create overlapping
circles of surveillance in a region where al-Qaeda
offshoots could emerge for years to come, U.S. officials
said. The locations are based on potential target sets,
said a senior U.S. military official. If you look at it
geographically, it makes sense you get out a ruler and
draw the distances [drones] can fly and where they take
off from. One U.S. official said that there had been
discussions about putting a drone base in Ethiopia for as
long as four years, but that plan was delayed because
the Ethiopians were not all that jazzed. Other officials
said Ethiopia has become a valued counterterrorism
partner because of threats posed by al-Shabab. We have
a lot of interesting cooperation and arrangements with
the Ethiopians when it comes to intelligence collection
and linguistic capabilities, said a former senior U.S.
military official familiar with special operations missions
in the region. An Ethiopian Embassy spokesman in Washington could not be reached for
comment Tuesday night. The former official said the United States relies on Ethiopian linguists to translate
signals intercepts gathered by U.S. agencies monitoring calls and e-mails of al-Shabab members. The CIA
and other agencies also employ Ethiopian informants who gather information from across the border.
Overall, officials said, the cluster of bases reflects an
effort to have wider geographic coverage, greater
leverage with countries in the region and backup facilities
if individual airstrips are forced to close. Its a conscious
recognition that those are the hot spots developing right
now, said the former senior U.S. military official.
The drone and the law reduce the surveilled figure to a
structural position of biological object-hood: the zero-
point of anti-black violence. The way the camera reduces
the body to a target via heat signature demonstrates the
disposability politics inherent in the biopolitical regime
PUGLIESE, Joseph 2013 (State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical
Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones. Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research
Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at
Macquarie University)

Everything in this Heideggerian exposition can be effectively transposed

to illuminate the operations of drone screen technologies in order to
entrap and reduce the surveilled human figure into an object that
can be antiseptically killed from a distance. The antiseptic vision of
war that is produced by the parenthetical logic of the use of drone
technologies is further enhanced by the clinical language deployed
by the drone operators in their identification of suspect targets. The
drones infrared camera, with its digitally enhanced zoom, enables
the sensor operators to detect the heat signature of a human body
from significant distances. The term heat signature works to
reduce the targeted human body to an anonymous heat-emitting
entity that merely radiates signs of life. This clinical process of
reducing human subjects to purely biological categories of radiant
life is further elaborated by the US militarys use of the term
pattern of life: TheCIAreceivedsecretpermissiontoattackawiderangeof
targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a
dramaticexpansionofitscampaignofdronestrikesinPakistansborderregion.
Theexpandedauthority...permitstheagencytorelyonwhatofficialsdescribeas
pattern of life analysis, using evidence collected by surveil lance cameras or
unmannedaircraft.Theinformationwasusedtotargetsuspectedmilitants,even
whentheirfullidentitieswerenotknown...PreviouslytheCIAwasrestrictedin
mostcasestokillingonlyindividualswhosenameswereonanapprovedlist...
someanalystssaidpermittingtheCIAtokillpeoplewherenameswereunknown
32
createdaseriousriskofkillinginnocentpeople. The military term pattern
of life is inscribed by two intertwined systems of scientific
conceptuality: algorithmic and biological. The human subject
detected by drones surveillance cameras is, in the first scientific
schema, transmuted algorith- mically into a patterned sequence of
numerals: the digital code of ones and zeros.Convertedintodigitaldatacodedaspattern
of life, the targeted human subject is reduced to an anonymous
simulacrum that flickers across the screen and can be effectively
liquidated into a pattern of death with the swivel of a joystick.
Viewed through the scientific gaze of clinical biology, pattern of life
connects the drones scanning technologies to the discourse of an
instrumentalist science, its constitutive gaze of objectifying
detachment, and its production of exterminatory violence . Patternsoflifeare
whatarediscoveredandanalyzedinthepetridishofthelaboratory.Inthisway,thetargetedhumansubjectsofAfghanistan,Pakistan
orYemenarerepresentedastypesofbacteriaandotherlowlifeorganismsthatcanbeexterminatedantiseptically. The
CIAs
Counterterrorism Centers chief has boasted that, thanks to their
drone automated execution program, We are killing these sons of
bitches faster than they can grow them now.3
3

The high-resolution camera is also symptomatic of the

mode of inquiry that overdetermines visual perception,
colonizes thinking and eliminates difference.
Spanos 8 (William V., works @BU and you know who he is, American
Exceptionalism in the Age of GlobalizationThe specter of Vietnam, pg 39-
40//The Guy Risko)

I will provide a more specific critical genealogy of the representational history that culminates in the
metamorphosis of a productive na- tional self-doubt into a pernicious national mental sickness later in this
book.5 It will suffice for my present purpose to enumerate those aspects of the history of the
representation of the Vietnam War that are crucial to the rethinking of Althussers problematic.1. The
obliteration of the historical reality of the Vietnam War means the obliteration of a war bordering on
genocide initiated by the United States in the name of the myth of American exceptionalism, which is to
say, in the name of the ontological principles that allegedly distin- guishes this New World from the Old
World.2. This forgetting of the war has been enabled by a metaphysical thinking (in its
post-Enlightenment, i.e., technological or instrumental allotrope), a mode of inquiry that, as
the etymology of metaphysics suggests (meta ta physika, from after or above the be-ing of
being), privileges visual perception over all the other, immediate,
earthbound, senses in the pursuit of truth. Metaphysical thinking, in
other words, reduces the matter of its interestthe differential
dynamics of beingto a totalized spatial object (picture, map, theatrical
stage). Thus, knowledge production becomes inquiry into a field,
area, province, domain, realm, region, territory to be
dominated (region, e.g., derives from the Latin, regere, to rule or regulate; domain, from
dominus, master).3. As the various appropriations of the Hegelian
dialectical view of history make clear, the announcement in the post-Cold War period of
the universal triumph of the idea of liberal democracy is
synchronous with the global triumph of metaphysics, that is, with
the world hege- mony of representational thinking .4. Insofar as it
means the annulment of an understanding of being that
acknowledges its radically differential temporality, the advent of the
end of history also means, therefore, the advent of a totally
spatialized world, the age of the world picture (Die Zeit des Weltbildes) as
Hei- degger calls the advent of modernity.65 . If one attends to the spatial
metaphorics that saturates, indeed, informs the structure of
thinking in the age of the world picture, it can be said, without
putting quotation marks around the words, that the globalization of
visual perception is tantamount to the colonization of thinking itself .
It means, in other words, the establishment of the Pax Metaphysica,
the peace that has subdued and accommodated the errant and warring forces of originative and
differential thinking.6. This Pax Metaphysica, in turn, has justified, if it has not entirely enabled, the Pax
Americana. I use these Latin terms harking back to the ruse of the Pax Romana not only to
suggest that the representational/ panoptic thinking of the age of
the world picture is imperial in essence, but to suggest as well that
the globalization of this spatializing thinking what Martin Heidegger
proleptically called the planetary triumph of technology of the world system7 constitutes the
historical fulfillment of its dialectical logical economy. Under the
gaze of its luminous imperial eye, any other that cannot be
contained within or accommodated to its circumferential horizon is a
shadow, and any truly other kind of thinking is now necessarily
inconceivable, impossible, that is, nonexistent, no(-)thing . We might
say, with Heidegger, a thinking other than metaphysical in its culminating technological mode is
phantasmic and thus an outrage against truth.87. But our knowing nowat this limit situationthat
science wishes to know nothing of the nothing is also an awareness of the limits of this privileged way of
thinking that claims to know no limits. At this end, in other words, the nothing transforms itself into a
phantasm that provokes anxiety in the scientific observer. To appropriate Derridas Specters of Marx to
my purposes, the nothing becomes a revenant that re- turns to haunt the discourse and practices of this
To thematize the em-
triumphant science that has relegated it to the status of nonbeing.
powering visual metaphorics informing this truth discourse, it
returns to visit the visitor.9
This increasing military presence in Africa is not an
isolated incidence; rather, it is a lynchpin in the process of
maintaining hegemony. US hegemony especially after
9/11 has been characterized by the paradox of the
catastrophe within the dream world, the impending attack
that requires a limitless war to be fought both to protect
itself and justify its existence. Exposing these circuits of
power and hallucinations of ever-drawing conflict is key to
break from this epistemology

McClintock 9chaired prof of English and Womens and Gender Studies

at UWMadison. MPhil from Cambridge; PhD from Columbia (Anne, Paranoid
Empire: Specters from Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib, Small Axe Mar2009,
Issue 28, p50-74 //DF)[Dont read blue]

By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and
dangerous hallucinations: the promise of benign US globalization
and the permanent threat of the war on terror. I have come to feel that we

cannot understand the extravagance of the violence to which the US

government has committed itself after 9/11two countries invaded, thousands of

innocent people imprisoned, killed, and tortured unless we grasp a

defining feature of our moment , that is, a deep and disturbing
doubleness with respect to power . Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies
of global omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding
with
nightmares of impending attack, the U nited S tates has entered the
domain of paranoia : dream world and catastrophe. For it is only in
paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both deliriums of
absolute power 1and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the
spectral and nightmarish quality of the war on terror, a limitless war against a limitless
threat, a war vaunted by the US administration to encompass all
of space and persisting without end. But the war on terror is not a real war, for terror
is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls
elsewhere a consensual hallucination, 4 and the
US government can fling its military
might against ghostly apparitions and hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the

cost of catastrophic self-delusion and the infliction of great

calamities elsewhere. I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible (the
better politically to challenge) those established but concealed circuits of
imperial violence that now animate the war on terror. We need, as urgently, to
illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence
abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxesthe modern slave-ships on
the middle passage to nowherethat have come to characterize the United States as a super-
carceral state. 5 Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a
long-established but primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more
aggressively as an overt empire, does the terrain and object of intellectual
inquiry, as well as the
claims of political responsibility, not also extend beyond that useful fiction of the

exceptional nation to embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we

theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship
with the ordinary, but which also at the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of
ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would
render itself invisible, casting states of emergency into fitful shadow and
fleshly bodies into specters? For imperialism is not something that
happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored. Rather, the

force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within , the nature and violence of the nation-
state itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire are we, the people? And who are the
ghosted, ordinary people beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute us? We now inhabit a
crisis of violence and the visible . How do we insist on seeing the
violence that the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while
also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence ? For to allow the spectral, disfigured people
(especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and
penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held

US claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the traditional

self-identity of the U nited S tates as the uniquely superior, universal
standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national
mythology of originary innocence now in tatters . The deeper question,
however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence without becoming
beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6 Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture we must also
find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the
authority of vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt
the great forgettings of official history. Paranoia Even the paranoid have enemies.
Donald Rumsfeld Why paranoia? Can we fully understand the proliferating circuits of
imperial violence the very eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast
without understanding the pervasive presence of the paranoia that has
come, quite violently , to manifest itself across the political and cultural

spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply Hofstadters famous identification
of the US states tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia as an inherent
contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between
deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness
can
with respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11),
produce pyrotechnic displays of violence . The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I
argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8 Let me be clear: I do not see
paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on
terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged mind, or Hegelian cunning of reason, nor by what
Susan Faludi calls a national terror dream. 9 Nor am I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological
diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do not have psyches or an unconscious; only people do. Rather, a
social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as paranoid if the dominant
powers governing that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory cultural
narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent
superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term paranoia is
analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective national psyche, nor as a description of a
universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing and being attentive to
contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the
contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries to conceal . Paranoia is in this sense what I
call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and society, between
psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary,
for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories
of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and
revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence . For how else can we
understand such debauches of cruelty? A critical question still remains: does not something terrible have to
happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary
people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with,
and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard
look at the simultaneously humiliating and aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby
individuals are first broken down, then reintegrated (incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified,
obedient fighting body , the methods by which schools , the military, training camps
not to mention the paranoid image-worlds of the corporate media
instill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally conjure up
collective but unstable fantasies of omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to
trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three
crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the visible, the crisis of imperial
legitimacy, and what I call the enemy deficit. I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as
they emerge in the torture at Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantnamo is the
territorializing of paranoia and that torture itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make visible, in
keeping with Hazel Carbys brilliant work, those contradictory sites where imperial racism, sexuality, and
gender catastrophically collide. 11 The Enemy Deficit: Making the Barbarians Visible Because night is here
but the barbarians have not come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any
barbarians. And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution. C. P.
Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians The barbarians have declared war. President George W. Bush C. P. Cavafy
wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with the force of an uncanny
and prescient dj vu. To what dilemma are the barbarians a kind of solution? Every modern empire faces an
abiding crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its power over territories and peoples who have

not consented to that power. Cavafys insight is that an imperial state claims
legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians . It is only
the threat of the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the
empires borders in the first place. On the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians

disturbs the empire with perpetual nightmares of impending attack. The

enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we cannot
part . And without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes
like a disappearing phantom. Those people were a kind of
solution. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the
United States and the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism,
Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration vanished. Where were the
enemies now to justify the continuing escalation of the military
colossus? And now what shall become of us without any
barbarians? By rights, the thawing of the cold war should have
prompted an immediate downsizing of the military ; any plausible external
threat had simply ceased to exist. Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army,
bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use having an army that did nothing but train, he said. Theres
got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for. Dick Cheney likewise complained: The
threats have become so remote. So remote that they are difficult
to ascertain . Colin Powell agreed: Though we can still plausibly identify specific threats
North Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like thatthe real threat is the unknown, the uncertain . Before
becoming president, George W. Bush likewise fretted over the postcold war dearth of a visible
enemy: We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they are out there. It is now well
established that the invasion of Iraq had been a long-standing goal of the US administration, but
there was no clear rationale with which to sell such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the
Project for the New American Century produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to
make such an invasion palatable would require a catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl
Harbor. 12 The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem
of legitimacy, offering the Bush administration what they would claim as a political casus
belli and the military unimaginable license to expand its reach .
General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon: There is a
huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing
opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our homeland, which gives
it some oomph. In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking during the attack, Now we can
perhaps attack Osama Bin Laden. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, America
will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before. Charles
Krauthammer, for one, called for a declaration of total war. We no longer have to search for a name
for the post-Cold War era, he declared. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. 13

This creates a chain of warfare and resentment,

continuously reproducing violence and thus crisis points
for hegemony to co-opt. The 21st century neo-imperialistic
engagement with the Middle East proves US enforcement
of hegemony fractures populations, props up unstable
regimes for self-interest, and causes inter- and intra-
regional war

Muzaffar 7 (Chandra, [Author, Political Scientist,

International President of JUST], Hegemony, Terrorism,
War- Is Democracy the Antidote? //DF)

There is no doubt at all that hegemony uses

From terrorism let us now turn to war.
war to extend and expand its power. Recent examples provide the
evidence. The U.S. led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 enabled the
superpower to plant its flag in that country, and, at the same time,
to extend its influence over Central Asiaa region of the world where Russia still
carries some weight and which China eyes with some interest. Apart from American bases in a couple of
its geopolitical presence in the oil rich region also
Central Asian republics,
means that it is capable of exercising some control over the export
of that commodity. This has enhanced its hegemonic power both
regionally and globally.5 Similarly, the U.S.s conquest of Iraq in 2003
was designed to strengthen its dominant position in the worlds
largest oil exporting region. Iraq itself has the second largest oil
reserves in the Middle East. It is also blessed with an abundance of
watera fact of some significance since the Middle East, according
to some analysts, may be one of those areas that could well witness
conflicts over water in the future. Besides, Iraq is strategically located,
with Syria, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia as its immediate
neighbors. Going to war in Iraq had another motive. It was to oust President Saddam Hussein and to
destroy the Baathist government because Saddam was a staunch opponent of Israel. Weakening and
eliminating governments and peoples movements in the Middle East that regard Israel as a morally and
politically illegitimate entity has been central to U.S. foreign policy for almost four decades now. Given
Iraqs oil wealth and its scientific military infrastructure, it was potentially a formidable foe of the U.S.s
closest ally and partner in the Middle East. This is why Saddam had to be crushedfor Israels sake.6
Deploying the U.S.s massive military might serve to secure its
hegemonic power and to assist its allies to enhance their strength
which is at the core of the agenda of the Bush Administration as
defined by the neo-cons. Even before George W. Bush assumed the presidency in early
2001, the neo-cons like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, and
Lewis Scooter Libby among others, in association with Dick
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, were already planning and plotting to
use U.S. fire power to re-shape the politics of the Middle East in
order to reinforce its grip over the regions oil and to fortify Israels
position.7. Crippling the democratically elected Hamas in Palestine
and trying to replace it with a leadership that is subservient to
Israels interest, attempting to eliminate an autonomous movement
like Hizbullah in Lebanon with the aim of bolstering a weak pro-U.S.
regime in Beirut, targeting the independent-minded government in
Damascus, and most of all, manipulating the nuclear issue to
prepare the ground for some sort of military action against an Iran
that refuses to bow to the U.S. and Israelapart from the Iraq war
are all part-and-parcel of the neo-cons elaborate agenda for
establishing total hegemony over the Middle East as a prerequisite
for global hegemony. After five years, some commentators are convinced that the agenda is in
tatters. The peoples resistance to the U.S. led occupation of Iraq
compounded by the unrelenting Sunni Shiite violence, the continuing
popularity of Hamas in spite of the immense suffering that the
masses have had to endure, Israels failure to defeat Hizbullah in the
thirty-four day Lebanon war and the latters success in forging a
multi-confessional coalition against the Beirut government,8 and
Irans expanding geopolitical significance in the region due to an
extent to the emergence of a Shiite-dominated regime in Baghdad
brought about ironically by the U.S. occupation, have separately and
collectively helped to thwart the neo-cons grand design. The neo-
cons have also been checkmated by the situation in the U.S. itself. A
majority of Americans are now opposed to their countrys
involvement in Iraq and want their soldiers to come home quickly.

This outwardly expanding violence and paranoia is

generated internally at first: the shattered corpses and
stolen resources of Native Americans, and the denial of
this racist imperial carnage, sets a foundational racist
pattern of butchering
Street 4
(Paul Street, author, March 11, 2004. [Those Who Deny the Crimes of the Past Reflections on
American Racist Atrocity Denial, 1776-2004, http://thereitis.org/displayarticle242.html)//TR

It is especially important to appreciate the significance of the vicious, often explicitly

genocidal homeland assaults on native-Americans, which set foundational racist and
national-narcissist patterns for subsequent U.S. global butchery, disproportionately directed at non-
European people of color. The deletion of the real story of the so-called battle of Washita from the official Seventh Cavalry history
given to the perpetrators of the No Gun Ri massacre is revealing. Denial about Washita and Sand Creek (and so on) encouraged US
savagery at Wounded Knee, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in the Philippines, the denial of which encouraged US
savagery in Korea, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in Vietnam, the denial of which (and all before) has recently
encouraged US savagery in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its a vicious circle of recurrent violence , well known to mental
health practitioners who deal with countless victims of domestic violence living in the dark shadows of the imperial homelands
crippling, stunted, and indeed itself occupied social and political order. Power-mad US forces deploying the latest
genocidal war tools, some suggestively named after native tribes that white North American
pioneers tried to wipe off the face of the earth (ie, Apache, Blackhawk, and Comanche helicopters)
are walking in bloody footsteps that trace back across centuries, oceans, forests and plains
to the leveled villages, shattered corpses, and stolen resources of those who Roosevelt acknowledged as
Americas original inhabitants. Racist imperial carnage and its denial, like charity,
begin at home . Those who deny the crimes of the past are likely to repeat their
offenses in the future as long as they retain the means and motive to do so. It is folly, however, for
any nation to think that it can stand above the judgments of history, uniquely free of terrible consequences for what Ward Churchill
calls imperial arrogance and criminality. Every new U.S. murder of innocents abroad breeds untold
numbers of anti-imperial resistance fighters, ready to die and eager to use the latest
available technologies and techniques to kill representatives even just ordinary citizens
of what they see as an American Predator state. This along with much else will help precipitate an inevitable
return of US power to the grounds of earth and history. As it accelerates, the U.S. will face a fateful

choice , full of potentially grave or liberating consequences for the fate of humanity and
the earth. It will accept its fall with relief and gratitude, asking for forgiveness, and making true
reparation at home and abroad, consistent with an honest appraisal of what Churchill, himself of native-
American (Keetoowah Cherokee) ancestry, calls the realities of [its] national history and the responsibilities that history has
bequeathed: goodbye American Exceptionalism and Woodrow Wilsons guns. Or Americans and the world will face the likely
permanent imperial war and the construction of an ever-more imposing U.S. fortress state,
alternative of
perpetuated by Orwellian denial and savage intentional historical ignorance. This savage
barbarism of dialectically inseparable empire and inequality will be defended in the last wagon-train instance by missiles and bombs
loaded with radioactive materials wrenched from lands once freely roamed by an immeasurably more civilized people than those who
came to destroy.

Thus, we need to inhabit the academy as radical

intellectuals dedicated to uncovering and fighting against
the hidden genocide analytic thats produced in the meta-
narrative of military presence and bolstered by the
academy
Rodriguez 12 (Dylan Rodrguez is professor and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at
the University of California, Riverside, where he began his teaching career in 2001. Author of 2 books, he is
a founding member of Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, a national movement-
building collective that seeks to fulfill the social and historical vision of abolition. Racial/Colonial Genocide
and the Neoliberal Academy: In Excess of a Problematic, American Quarterly, Volume 64, Number 4,
December 2012, Project Muse)//TR

Such intellectual practices can renarrate racial terror and miserythe forms of suffering endemic to
multicultural civil society. Within this collective work, there is possibility for effective (though never
permanent) denaturalizations and politicizationsof the forms of human suffering, entrapment, and
vulnerability that are otherwise routinely embedded in the current worlds institutional protocols, and
death-inducing organization of resources. In such instances, radical intellectuals inhabitation of existing
institutional sites can enable both ethical opposition to structures of domination and creative knowledge
production that strives to glimpse the historical possibilities that are always just on the other side of terror
and degradation. Intellectuals engaged in such projects are always more than academics, in
the sense that their scholarly engagement is not secured by the academy proper. This
expansive grounding is an antidisciplinarity of a certain kind: if what animates their intellectual
work is what I have tentatively named an abolitionist desire, such radical intellectuals always understand
themselves to be working in alien (if not hostile) territory. The academy is never home: some of us are
subject to eviction and evisceration, alongside the surveillance, discipline, and low intensity
punishment that accrues to those of us who try to build modalities of sustenance and
reproduction within liberationist genealogies, particularly when we are working and studying
in colleges and universities.6 I am undecided as to whether the university is capable or worthy of being
transformed from its dominant historical purposes, or if it ought to be completely abolished. For now, I
am interested in the radical creativity that can come from the standoff position in-and-of-
the fundamental problem is not that some are
itself. Such a position reveals that
excluded from the hegemonic centers of the academy but that the university
(as a specific institutional site) and academy (as a shifting material network)
themselves cannot be disentangled from the long historical apparatuses of
genocidal and protogenocidal social organization. Placed in the context of the
United States, we can see that (1) genocidal methodologies and logics have
always constituted the academically facilitated inception of a hemispheric
America, and (2) genocidal technologies are the lifeblood of national
reproduction across its distended temporalities and geographies . The recent
flourishing of scholarship that rehistoricizes regimes of incarceration, war, sexuality, settler-colonialist
power, and gendered racist state violenceincluding much of the work that has recently appeared in this
very journalconstitutes a radical reproach of institutional multiculturalism and liberal pluralism. The point
multiculturalism and pluralism are essential to both the
to be amplified is that
contemporary formation of neoliberalism and the historical distensions of
racial/colonial genocide.7 It is for this reason that I do not find the analytics of
neoliberalism to be sufficient for describing the conditions of political work
within the U.S. acaedemy today. It is not just different structures of
oppressive violence that radical scholars are trying to make legible, it is
violence of a certain depth, with specific and morbid implications for some
peoples future existence as such If we can begin to acknowledge this
.

fundamental truththat genocide is this place (the American academy and,

in fact, America itself)then our operating assumptions, askable questions,
and scholarly methods will need to transform . At a moment of historical emergency, we
might find principled desperation within intellectual courage.

This act of inhabiting the academy as radical intellectuals

exposing the circuits of power undergirding military
presence in the Great Horn of Africa creates epistemic
friction to challenge the material relegated to the
shadowlands

JOSE MEDINA, 2011 Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance:

Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism [ Ph. D.,
Northwestern University (1998), PhilosophyM.A., Northwestern University (1995), Philosophy
B.A., University of Sevilla (1991), Philosophy]

What we need in order to maintain possibilities of resistance always

open is epistemic friction. As Wittgenstein puts it: We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough

ground! I want to define epistemic friction as follows: EPISTEMIC FRICTION consists in the
interrogates epistemic
mutual contestation of differently normatively structured knowledge, which
exclusions, disqualifications, and hegemonies. Epistemic friction is acknowledged and
celebrated in pluralistic views of our epistemic negotiations and our cognitive lives, but not every king of epistemic
pluralism makes room for epistemic friction in the same way. In this section I want to explore the implications of a
thoroughgoing epistemic pluralism for genealogical investigations. For this purpose, I will compare and contrast Foucaults
pluralism with two different kinds of epistemic pluralism that can be found in American philosophy, arguing that
Foucaultian pluralism offers a distinctive notion of epistemic friction that has tremendous critical force. Different
experimental and agential standpoint can make different contributions to genealogical investigations and even offer
Given the right socio-political conditions, the
alternative genealogical histories.

critical reconstruction and reevaluations of our beliefs can

(and should) be reopened and resumed whenever new
standpoints appear on the scene, but also whenever we discover
that certain voice or perspective were never considered or
were not given equal weight. Thus it is not surprising that populations feel particularly
compelled to reopen the conversation about their past when the socio-political conditions change in such a way that
voices and perspective that had previously been ignored or not fully taken into consideration can now participate
differently in the reconstruction of their past because they enjoy a different kind of agency. For example, this has
been happening periodically in different ways and on different fronts in the public DEBATES
about past dictatorial regimes that have taken place in countries such as Argentina, Chile, or
Spain. In these countries different publics have demanded a sustained effort to critically revisit the reconstruction of
a shared past in the light of evidence, testimony and articulations or interpretations of facts that

challenge established beliefs orintegrated in the

are simply not
collective memory and OFFICIAL HISTORY in circulation.
There is a plurality of lived pasts and of knowledges about the pasts
that resists unification and creates FRICTION. But what are we to make of this
resistance and friction? Pluralistic views of truth and knowledges make productive use of these forms of epistemic friction
and resistance, whereas monistic views regard epistemic diversity always as a problem. I will restrict myself here to
pluralistic views, but I want to emphasize that different kinds of epistemic pluralism involve different normative attitudes
with respect to epistemic diversity and the kinds of epistemic friction and resistance that heterogeneous perspectives can
exert. He continues By contrast, the radical epistemic pluralism that we find Foucault is not
melioristic in this sense. On this more radical pluralism, epistemic frictions
are more tools for learning they are tools for unlearning (for
undoing power/knowledges- e.g. for undoing ways of remembering
and forgetting, when it comes to the knowledge of the past. On this
view, epistemic frictions are not merely instrumental or
transitional- that is tools for, or steps toward, harmony or conflict resolution.
Epistemic frictions are sought for their own sake, for the forms
of resistance that they constitute. This is why I call this more radical epistemic pluralism
that can be found in Foucault A GUERRILLA PLURALISM. It is not a
pluralism that tries to resolve conflicts and overcome struggles, but instead
tries to provoke them and re-energize them . It is a pluralism that aims not at the
melioration of cognitive and ethical lives of all, but rather, as the (epistemic and socio-political
resistance of some against the oppression of others. This is pluralism that
focuses on the gaps, discontinuities, tensions and clashes among
perspectives and DISCURSIVE PRACTICES. With respect to knowledge
of the past, Foucaultian genealogical investigations do not simply revive alternative memories that can act as corrective
of each other and cooperate without losing their specificity, as a Jamesian meliorist pluralism would have it.
 OV
[McClintock 09 Pt. 1] Paranoia has come to dominate the
American conception of global politics especially in the
post-9/11 era. This is because of the inherent paradox
within hegemony: the need to both maintain the promise
peace & prosperity and fighting a permanently impending
threat. Within American foreign policy this has manifested
into the ever-present enemy on the border characterized
as the War on Terror, the limitless war against a limitless
and dynamic threat. This open global space to dominate
and militarize is what allows the hegemon to access
absolute power, and so it expands its control centers to
ensures patterns of cyclical violence necessitating this
absolute power response.
[Whitlock and Miller 11] The Greater Horn of Africa is one
of these centers the US has occupied to spread its anti-
black surveillance. Couched in the light of counter-
terrorism operation for global peace against an absolute
evil, the US has built secret drone bases in the Horn of
Africa, including Ethiopia and Djibouti, to fight Al-Qaeda
affiliates in Somalia and Yemen. The entire operation has
proceeded so far with lies and manipulation, with the US
helping shape Ethiopian policy and already being
caught lying about not weaponizing drones. Specifically of
note is the detached clinical language used to describe
the process- areas full of people are reduced to target
zones, Ethiopians become a representative of a country
we have objectified.
[Pugliesse 13] This is also what Pugliesse considers to be
central to the biopolitical anti-blackness of the drone and
its operator. This same type of abstraction from what we
consider human is found within drone operation: Bodies
are reduced to heat signatures to determine their status
as target/not-target; potential enemies are solely defined
by their enemy status and have no humanity,
demonstrated by the boastings of the Chief of
Counterterrorism in the CIA about killing them sons of
bitches faster than they can grow them. Even the way
the military determines life is this clinical separation from
any form of empathy or recognition: life is reduced into
pattern of life, already abstracting it into a quasi-
mechanical process, and then is broken down into
algorithmic patterns that are displayed on the drone
screen enabling the operator to end a life with a button.
[Spanos 08] Spanos argues that this is part and parcel of
the way visual perception and spatialization have come to
colonize American thinking. American expansion
proceeded through the metaphysical trick of reducing life
and space to a picture to be seen and conquered, much
like the way American military officials have broken
Ethiopia down from a country of distinct people to a
geographic landscape to determine drone routes and
targets from. Within American exceptionalism the entire
world has been reduced to this picture to be conquered
and dominated. Anything that exists outside of this
purpose is eradicated as an undesirable shadow.
[McClintock 09 Pt. 2] McClintock says it is this method of
sanitizing violence and making war a clinical operation
that needs to be exposed as the imperial circuits of
power. Paranoia develops through closed doors and closed
classrooms, making certain forms of knowledge
acceptable and other hidden or de-legitimatized. This is
why the manifestation of US imperialism pre-9/11 was
primarily covert: without an obvious and aggressive
enemy the vision of American imperialism was harder to
sell to the general population, but following 9/11 the
image of a world out to hate America and its values and
freedom has become the national icon. This demonstrates
the way this hegemonic epistemology becomes calcified-
when the end of conflict comes American military officials
actively seek the next war. Empirical examples prove:
between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the head of
the US Army, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell all complained
about the lack of an identifiable enemy, bemoaning that
training is a waste of an army and it needs an appetite
for combat. Bush said We do not know who the enemy
is, but we know they are out there- the paranoia of the
figureless, shapeless, ever-present enemy. From this
comes a satisfaction from and even a drive towards
victory in combat and killing the enemy- In 1997 a group
of neocons at the Project for the New American Century
produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to
make such an invasion palatable would require a
catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl
Harbor. The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution,
both to the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy,
offering the military unimaginable license to expand its
reach. General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit
that the attacks were an immense boon: There is a huge
silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. .
. . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have
the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our
homeland, which gives it some oomph.
[Muzaffar 07] Our Muzaffar evidence says this neo-
imperialism has resulted in failed states, increased
tensions, overall destabilization and the formation of
terror groups as a last resort to fight these policies;
essentially a geo-political factory of crises to sustain the
necessity of hegemony. Muzaffar explains the original
premise behind the War on Terror was hegemonic
expansion of control over land and resources, specifically
control over oil commodities and a key strategic point to
monitor Central Asia (much like how the drones are
currently being pitched as monitoring points for the
volatile Middle East). All of Bushs advisors had
specifically been planning and orchestrating a grand
scheme to manipulate Middle Eastern politics and
interests, including sabotaging the democratically elected
Hamas in Palestine and trying to replace it with a
leadership that is subservient to Israels interest,
attempting to eliminate an autonomous movement like
Hizbullah in Lebanon with the aim of bolstering a weak
pro-U.S. regime in Beirut, and targeting the independent-
minded government in Damascus.
[McClintock Pt. 3] Within uncovering these circuits of
power, we need to think through events on an individual,
local sense as well. Hegemonys forced focus on nations
obscures the magnitude of violence that occurred within
these areas- we come to view lives as parts of the nation
instead of individual lives. This is what McClintock calls
imperialism manifesting from within, reconfiguring
violence and ordinary bodies into distant clinical specters.
However, to recognize this specters is to cut against the
grain of US exceptionalism- it forces a recognition of
atrocities the US committed, which interrupts the myth
the US is a global protector acting for the good.
Dylan Rodriguez says that the act of working against the
pernicious exceptionalist myth while in the academy as
per the 1AC allows us to recognize the tension within
producing knowledge that intentionally disrupts the
academys genocide analytic and allows creative
knowledge production in institutional sites that are
supposed to be calcified. Specifically the 1ACs form of
anti-disciplinarity to the process of American
militarization is key towards reconfiguring our
epistemology- recognizing that the specter of paranoia
that pervades interpretations of external events means
that we understand academic scholarship is inherently
biased towards necessitating warfare which transforms
how we learn and act within these sites
Jose Medina says that this type of anti-disciplinarity is a
form of guerilla pluralism to inject multiple narratives
against the hegemonic interpretation. The goal of this is
to create epistemic friction- not seeking unity with
existing power structures but rather working to create
disruption. In this specific case, the 1ACs refusal to
strategically essentialize the law for a specific policy
against military presence is because that option seeks a
unity with current power structures and necessarily
sacrifices some of the objective of anti-disciplinarity; by
engaging in our revealing and antidisciplinarity without
turning to this fixed acts, we use epistemic friction
provoke conflict, seek to point out gaps and clashing
perspectives, focuses on tension and constantly re-
investigating how our knowledge is produced. The 1AC
thus isnt a single speech act that solves all problems but
rather is a constantly producing form of scholarship that
is a process rather than a product.
 I! Extensions- Street and McClintock
Racial expendability outweighs war since unlike war
people of color dont return home to a so-called peaceful
civilian life but rather remain constantly defined within
the battlefield

Mrquez 2012 (John D. , The Black Mohicans:

Representations of Everyday Violence in Postracial Urban
America, American Quarterly, Volume 64, Number 3,
September 2012, pp. 625-651, d/l: muse) //jl

This comparison between black and Latino youth and soldiers of war
indicates the flawed logic spun by the postcolonial paradox. Soldiers
return from the scene of war to civilian life. Youth of color never
leave the scene of war, despite how it has been discursively
disguised. They are produced within it, within political (juridico-
economic) relationships and the architectures of settler colonialism,
the political field of embattlement as the site of production of
subjects of violence, of expendability. Trauma studies, and now the
epidemiological position of Slutkins Ceasefire, move too quickly away from this
relationship, therefore, having a difficult time not reproducing the
image of the bloody savages against whom the noble savage, as an
exception, is relationally legitimated as worthy of
inclusion/salvation, a legitimation that serves to delay, not destroy,
the deconial turn. In sum, as noted earlier, the risk in addressing ghetto violence by privileging
the psychosocial and not the structural/economic resides in that the argument may be associated with the
This danger, however, is also a
culture of poverty thesis or its contemporary versions.
significant part of the problem, one exacerbated by the postracial,
or postcolonial paradox: that is, the binary structure versus culture,
when politicized by the media or by government officials never
accounts for a subaltern perspective on expendability. Nevertheless, the
structural critique cannot be abandoned. The economic hardships wrought by deindustrialization have,
indisputably, contributed to a steady rise in ghetto violence in Chicago over the past thirty years. Fanon
himself did not work outside a critique of capitalism. He saw class as linked to race as essential to a
comprehensive system of domination, a double process resulting in multiple definitions of what it means
to be subprime. Fanons Wretched of the Earth built on Karl Marxs concept of alienation, a denial of being,
of self-knowledge, that Marx argued was produced by class. The alienation of Fanons model, his asking,
In reality, who am I?,71 is produced by race, the impact of expendability on subaltern subjectivity, not
detached from class. As he explains, If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double
processprimarily economicsubsequently, the internalization, or, better, the epidermalization, of this
inferiority.72 In Fanons view, the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the racial other created Europe
Expendability, as a base effect of race, then precedes
and its capitalism.
and sustains economic exclusion and exploitation; hence neither
economic inclusion nor the postracial illusion of it can abridge it.

The delineation of life and death zones makes war and

inequality inevitable, paving the way to planetary
annihilation
Balibar 2004
Etienne, Prof of Philosophy @ U of Paris-X, We, The People Of Europe?: Reflections On
Transnational Citizenship, p. 126-129 //mm

I am aware of all these difficulties, but I would maintain that a reality lies behind the notion of something "unprecedented."
Perhaps it is simply the fact that a number of heterogeneous methods or processes of extermination (by which I
mean eliminating masses of individuals inasmuch as they belong to objective or subjective groups) have themselves
become "globalized, that is, operate in a similar manner everywhere in the world at the same time, and so
progressively form a chain, giving full reality to what E. P. Thompson anticipated twenty years ago with the name
exterminism. In this series of connected processes, we must include, precisely because they are heterogeneousthey do not
have one and the same "cause," but they produce cumulative effects: 1. Wars (both civil and foreign, a
distinction that is not easy to draw in many cases, such as Yugoslavia or Chechnya). 2. Communal rioting, with ethnic
and/or religious ideologies of cleansing. 3. Famines and other kinds of absolute
poverty produced by the ruin of traditional and nontraditional economies. 4. Seemingly natural catastrophes,
which in fact are killing on a mass scale because they are overdetermined by social, economic,
and political structures, such as pandemics (for example, the difference in the distribution of AIDA and the
possibilities of treatment between Europe and North America on one side, Africa and some parts of Asia on the other),
droughts, floods, or earth-quakes in the absence of developed civil protection . In the end it would
be my suggestion that the
"globalization" of various kinds of extreme violence has produced a
growing division of the "globalized" world into life zones and death zones. Between these
zones (which indeed are intricate and frequently reproduced within the boundaries of a single country or city) there exists a
decisive and fragile superborder, which raises fears and concerns about the unity and division of mankind[sic]something like
a global and local enmity line, like the amity line that existed in the beginning of the modern European seizure of the world.
It is this superborder, this enmity line, that becomes at the same time an object of permanent show and a hot place for
intervention but also for nonintervention. We might discuss whether the most worrying aspect of present international politics is
"humanitarian intervention" or "generalized nonintervention," or one coming after the other. Should We Consider Extreme
Violence to Be "Rational" or "Functional" from the Point of View of Market Capitalism (the "Liberal Economy")? This
is a very difficult questionin fact, I think it is the most difficult questionbut it cannot be avoided; hence it is also the most
intellectually challenging. Again, we should warn against a paralogism that is only too obvious but nonetheless frequent: that of
mistaking consequences for goals or purposes. (But is it really possible to discuss social systems in terms of purposes? On the
other hand, can we avoid reflecting on the immanent ends, or "logic," of a structure such as capitalism?) It seems to me, very
schematically, that the difficulty arises from the two opposite "global effects" that derive from the emergence of a chain of mass
violenceas compared, for example, with what Marx called primitive accumulation when he described the creation of the
preconditions for capitalist accumulation in terms of the violent suppression of the poor. One kind of effect is simply to
generalize material and moral insecurity for millions of potential workers, that is, to induce a massive proletarianization or
reproletarianization (a new phase of proletarianization that crucially involves a return of many to the proletarian condition from
which they had more or less escaped, given that insecurity is precisely the heart of the "proletarian condition"). This process is
contemporary with an increased mobility of capital and also humans, and so it takes place across borders. But, seen historically,
it can also be distributed among several political varieties: 1. In the North it involves a partial or deep dismantling of the
social policies and the institutions of social citizenship created by the welfare state, what I call the "national social state," and
therefore also a violent transition from welfare to workfare, from the social state to the penal state (the United States showing
the way in this respect, as was convincingly argued in a recent essay by Loc Wacquant). 2. In the "South," it involves
destroying and inverting the developmental programs and policies, which admittedly did not suffice to produce the desired
takeoff but indicated a way to resist impoverishment. 3. In the "semiperiphery," to borrow Immanuel Wallerstein's category, it
was connected with the collapse of the dictatorial structure called "real existing socialism," which was based on scarcity and
corruption, but again kept the polarization of riches and poverty within certain limits. Let me suggest that a common formal
feature of all these processes resulting in the reproletarianization of the labor force is the fact that they
suppress or minimize the forms and possibilities of representation of the subaltern within the state
apparatus itself, or, if you prefer, the possibilities of more or less effective counterpower. With this
remark I want to emphasize the political aspect of processes that, in the first instance, seem to be mainly "economic." This
political aspect, I think, is even more decisive when we turn to the other scene, the other kind of
result produced by massive violence, although the mechanism here is extremely mysterious. Mysterious but real,
unquestionably. I am thinking of a much more destructive tendency, destructive not of welfare or traditional was
of life, but of the social bond itself and, in the end, of
bare life. Let us think of Michel Foucault, who used to oppose
two kinds of politics: Let live and let die. Inthe face of the cumulative effects of different forms of extreme violence
or cruelty that are displayed in what I called the death zones of humanity, we are lead to admit that the
current mode of production and reproduction has become a mode of production for
elimination, a reproduction of populations that are not likely to be productively used or
exploited but are always already superfluous, and therefore can be only eliminated
either through political or natural meanswhat some Latin American sociologists call problacion
chatarra, garbage humans, to be thrown away, out of the global city . If this is the case, the
question arises once again, what is the rationality of that? Or do we face an absolute triumph of irrationality? My suggestion
would be: it is economically irrational (because it amounts to a limitation of the scale of accumulation), but it is politically
rationalor, better said, it can be interpreted in political terms. The fact is that history does not move simply in a
circle, the circular pattern of successive phases of accumulation. Economic and political class struggles
have already taken place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the result of limiting the possibilities of
exploitation, creating a balance of forces, and this event remains , so to speak, in the "memory"
of the system. The system (and probably also some of its theoreticians and politicians) "knows" that there is
no exploitation without class struggles, no class struggles without organization and
representation of the exploited, no representation and organization without a tendency
toward political and social citizenship. This is precisely what current capitalism cannot
afford: there is no possibility of a "global social state" corresponding to the "national social states" in some parts of the world
during the last century. I mean, there is no political possibility. Therefore there is political resistance, very violent indeed, to
every move in that direction. Technological revolutions provide a positive but insufficient condition for the deproletarianization
of the actual or potential labor force. This time, direct political repression may also be insufficient.
Elimination or extermination has to take place, "passive" if possible, "active" if necessary; mutual
elimination is "best," but it has to be encouraged from outside. This is what allows me to suggest (and it already takes me to my
third question) that if the "economy of global violence" is not functional (because its immanent goals are indeed contradictory),
it remains in a sense teleological: the "same" populations are massively targeted (or the reverse: those
populations that are targeted become progressively assimilated, they look "the same"). They are qualitatively "deterritorialized,
as Gilles Deleuze would say, in an intensive rather than extensive sense: they live on the edge of the city,
under permanent threat of elimination, but also, conversely, they live and are perceived as
"nomads," even when they are fixed in their homelands, that is, their mere existence, their
quantity, their movements, their virtual claims of rights and citizenship are perceived as a threat for
"civilization."

This racism is the root cause of violence

Foucault 76 (Michel, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College
de France, 1975-1976, p. 254-257 Trans. David Macey, MV)

racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the

What in fact is
domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what
must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the
human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are
described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting
the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a
population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a population that appears
to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more
accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as
races. That is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum
addressed by biopower. Racism also has a second function. Its role is, if you like, to allow the establishment
of a positive relation of this type: "The more you kill, the more deaths you will cause" or "The very fact that
you let more die will allow you to live more." I would say that this relation ("If you want to live, you must
take lives, you must be able to kill") was not invented by either racism or the modern State. It is the
relationship of war: "In order to live, you must destroy your enemies." But racism does make the
relationship of war-"If you want to live, the other must die" - function in a way that is completely new and
that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower. On the one hand ,
racism makes it
possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of
the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of
confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: "The more inferior
species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated , the fewer
degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more Ias species rather than individual-can
live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate." The fact that the other
dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the
other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something
that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer. This is not, then, a military, warlike, or political
relationship, but a biological relationship. And the reason this mechanism can come into play is that the
enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are
threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the biopower system, in
other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political
adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race.
There is a direct connection between the two. In a normalizing society ,
race or racism is the
precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society,
you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first line a biopower, and
racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed.
Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the
State. So you can understand the importance-I almost said the vital importance-of racism to the exercise
of such a power: it is the precondition for exercising the right to kill. If the power of normalization wished to
exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or
in other words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments,
mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I say "killing," I obviously
do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone
to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection,
and so on. I think that we are now in a position to understand a number of things. We can understand, first
of all, the link that was quickly-I almost said immediately-established between nineteenth-century
biological theory and the discourse of power. Basically, evolutionism, understood in the broad sense-or in
other words, not so much Darwin's theory itself as a set, a bundle, of notions (such as: the hierarchy of
species that grow from a common evolutionary tree, the struggle for existence among species, the
selection that eliminates the less fit) naturally became within a few years during the nineteenth century
not simply a way of transcribing a political discourse into biological terms, and not simply a way of
dressing up a political discourse in scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking about the relations
between colonization, the necessity for wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness,
the history of societies with their different classes, and so on. Whenever, in other words, there was a
confrontation, a killing or the risk of death, the nineteenth century was quite literally obliged to think about
them in the form of evolutionism. And we can also understand why racism should have developed in
modern societies that function in the biopower mode; we can understand why racism broke out at a
number of .privileged moments, and why they were precisely the moments when the right to take life was
imperative.
Racism first develops with colonization, or in other words,
with colonizing genocide. If you are functioning in the biopower
mode, how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations,
and to kill civilizations? By using the themes of evolutionism, by
appealing to a racism. War. How can one not only wage war on one's
adversaries but also expose one's own citizens to war, and let them
be killed by the million (and this is precisely what has been going on
since the nineteenth century, or since the second half of the
nineteenth century), except by activating the theme of racism.
 I! Extension- Muzaffar
Terror organizations are the specter of US Heg- paranoia
against the threat on the border causes the US to fund
rebel groups in countries, destabilize the regions, and
force populations into terror attacks as a last resort-
empirically proven
Muzaffar 7 (Chandra, [Author, Political Scientist,
International President of JUST], Hegemony, Terrorism,
War- Is Democracy the Antidote? //DF)

Al-Qaeda, the worlds most notorious terrorist network, was, in a sense, a response to the
most obvious manifestation of global hegemony, namely, military
power. As soon as the United States had established a military base
in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1991, immediately after the Kuwait War, the al- Qaeda leader, Osama
bin Laden, announced to the world that he would attack Dhahran. He
considered the establishment of an infidel military base in Islams
holiest landSaudi Arabia, where Islams two holiest cities, Mecca and Media, are situatedan act
of sacrilege.1 In June 1996, al-Qaeda was allegedly involved in a bomb attack upon the base, killing 19
American airmen and wounding 250 others. Two years later, al-Qaeda targeted U.S. embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania. This was followed by the 2000 assault on a U.S. warship, the USS Cole, off the coast of
Yemen. The climax was of course the infamous 9-11 episode when al-Qaeda operatives allegedly smashed
aircrafts into the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Almost three
thousand men and women were massacred in those horrendous tragedies on the eleventh of September
2001. There is no need to emphasize that the WTC was a symbol of U.S.s global economic power while the
After 9-11, U.S. global hegemony
Pentagon represented its global military might.
continued to provoke al-Qaeda and other terrorist outfits. Since the
U.S. and its allies had invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 in order
to oust the Taliban regime that was protecting Osama, the invasion
became the justification for further terrorist attacks. The Bali
bombings of October 2002, purportedly carried out by a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, the
Jemaah Islamiyyah, were primarily to avenge the Afghan invasion. Then in
March 2003, the U.S. and its allies embarked upon a second military
invasion. This time the target was Iraq. One year after Iraq was conquered, al-
Qaeda struck again; it was responsible for a dastardly carnage at a
Madrid railway station. The unconcealed aim was to compel the
Spanish government to withdraw its soldiers from the U.S. led force
in Iraq. Al-Qaeda succeeded in its objective. If we reflect upon al-Qaeda attacks,
it is obvious that the military, political, and economic dimensions of
U.S. hegemony figure prominently on its radar screen. It is seldom
acknowledged, however, that the cultural dimension of hegemony has also been
a consideration. For instance, during their trial, a couple of the Bali bombers
inveighed against Western cultural imperialism and how it was
destroying the identity and integrity of indigenous communities . By
arguing that hegemony in all its manifestations breeds terrorism, we
are in no way condoning terrorism. Al-Qaedas deliberate targeting of non- combatants
and civilians in generalin East Africa, on 9-11, in Bali, in Madridhas been condemned by right-thinking
people everywhere. Leading Muslim theologians and scholars have not only denounced al-Qaedas
misdeeds from a humanitarian perspective, but have also castigated Osama and his underlings as men
who have shamelessly violated the essence of Islamic teachings.2 Nonetheless, if we fail to
recognize how hegemony control and dominance over people
leads to acts of terror, we will be no better than the proverbial
ostrich that buries its head in the sand. There is perhaps another interesting aspect
to hegemony and terrorism that is not widely acknowledged. Al-Qaeda, which now claims to be
fighting U.S. hegemony, in fact owes its origin to the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), which helped to arm and fund the outfit as part of the
resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the eighties. It
served U.S. interests to create and sustain organizations like al-
Qaeda since the U.S. was determined to defeat the Soviet Union at
all costs.3 Indeed, the utter failure of the Soviet Army to maintain its grip upon Afghanistanat least
20,000 of its soldiers were killedwas one of the more important reasons for the eventual collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991. What this implies is that since al-Qaeda had also contributed to the Soviet demise, it
would not be wrong to hold it partially responsible for the emergence of the U.S. as the worlds sole
if American hegemony
hegemonic power. It may be appropriate at this point to ask:
comes to an end, will al-Qaeda terrorism also cease to exist? Without
American hegemony, al-Qaeda will lose much of its constituenc y. That
segment of the Muslim population that applauds Osama because he is prepared to stand up to the
it will be more difficult
arrogance of hegemonic power will disappear immediately. Besides,
for al-Qaeda to recruit its operatives. In this regard, it is the U.S. led
occupation of Iraqmore than any other eventthat has accelerated
al-Qaedas recruitment drive! Having said that, we must nonetheless concede that even
without U.S. hegemony, al-Qaeda may still be around. It nurses a foolish dream of establishing a global
Islamic Caliphate based upon its doctrinaire Wahabist ideologyan ideology that dichotomizes the world
into pure Muslims and impure infidels, deprives women of their dignity, subscribes to a bigoted, punitive
concept of law, and has no qualms about employing violence in pursuit of its atavistic goals.4
Condo
 2AC
Condo is bad and a voting issue for fairness and
education:
Ethically irresponsible- allows neg teams to run immoral
positions with no risks- lynchpin of American
Exceptionalism
No depth- no focused discussions with multiple
conditional arguments, kills education, Depth over
breadth- Leads to breadth, use skills to research other
topics in depth. Depth also key to educated topic-specific
debate.
No reciprocity- Aff cant kick the Aff
Counter Interpretation- Neg should be unconditional- S!
depth by forcing certain positions, encourages strategical
choices, more reciprocal
Neg flex not key- already have multiple DAs and T
violations they could run, as well as case neg.
Disclosure checks- Neg can determine their best
competitive CP after seeing Aff
Being neg easy- plenty of generic arguments with links to
aff.

Independently- Conditionality is merely cultural tourism

whiteness allows the privileged tourist to vacation in the
identity of the exotic other secure in the promise of a
return to safety and comfort at the end of the adventure-
thats a parasitic form of politics

Nakamura 2k, Lisa Ph.D., Graduate Center, City University of New York (English), "Race
In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet", 2000
Tourism is a particularly apt metaphor to describe the activity of racial
identity appropriation, or "passing" in cyberspace. The activity of "surfing," (an
activity already associated with tourism in the mind of most Americans) the
Internet not only reinforces the idea that cyberspace is not only a place where travel and mobility are
featured attractions, but also figures it as a form of travel which is inherently recreational, exotic, and
exciting, like surfing. The choice to enact oneself as a samurai warrior in LambdaMOO constitutes
a form of identity tourism which allows a player to appropriate an Asian racial
identity without any of the risks associated with being a racial minority in
real life. While this might seem to offer a promising venue for non-Asian characters to see through the
eyes of the Other by performing themselves as Asian through on-line textual interaction, the fact that the
personae chosen are overwhelmingly Asian stereotypes blocks this possibility by reinforcing these
stereotypes. This theatrical fantasy of passing as a form of identity tourism has
deep roots in colonial fiction, such as Kipling's Kim and T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of
Wisdom, and Sir Richard Burton's writings. The Irish orphan and spy Kim, who uses disguise to pass as
Hindu, Muslim, and other varieties of Indian natives, experiences the pleasures and dangers of cross
cultural performance. Said's insightful reading of the nature of Kim's adventures in cross cultural
passing contrasts the possibilities for play and pleasure for white travelers
in an imperialistic world controlled by the European empire with the relatively
constrained plot resolutions offered that same boy back home. "For what one cannot do in
one's own Western environment, where to try to live out the grand dream of a successful
quest is only to keep coming up against one's own mediocrity and the world's corruption and
degradation, one can do abroad. Isn't it possible in India to do everything, be anything, go
anywhere with impunity?" (42). To practitioners of identity tourism as I have described it
above, LambdaMOO represents an phantasmatic imperial space, much like Kipling's Anglo-
India, which supplies a stage upon which the "grand dream of a successful
quest" can be enacted. Since the incorporation of the computer into the white collar workplace
the line which divides work from play has become increasingly fluid. It is difficult for employers and indeed,
for employees, to always differentiate between doing "research" on the Internet and "playing": exchanging
email, checking library catalogues, interacting with friends and colleagues through synchronous media like
"talk" sessions, and videoconferencing offer enhanced opportunities for gossip, jokes, and other
distractions under the guise of work.3 Time spent on the Internet is a hiatus from "rl" (or real life, as it is
called by most participants in virtual social spaces like LambdaMOO), and when that time is spent in a role
playing space such as Lambda, devoted only to social interaction and the creation and maintenance of a
convincingly "real" milieu modeled after an "internation al community," that hiatus becomes a full fledged
vacation. The fact that Lambda offers players the ability to write their own descriptions, as well as the fact
that players often utilize this programming feature to write stereotyped Asian personae for themselves,
reveal that attractions lie not only in being able to "go" to exotic spaces, 4 but to co-opt the exotic and
attach it to oneself. The appropriation of racial identity becomes a form of
recreation, a vacation from fixed identities and locales . This vacation offers
the satisfaction of a desire to fix the boundaries of cultural identity and
exploit them for recreational purposes. As Said puts it, the tourist who passes
as the marginalized Other during his travels partakes of a fantasy of social
control, one which depends upon and fixes the familiar contours of racial
power relations.
 1AR
Conditionality means you reject the team because it
causes 2AC strategy skew, preventing in depth analysis of
issues link turns their education claims while making fair
debate impossible. It rewards negative teams that are
fast who dont test the aff in-depth and do so from a point
of meaningless advocacy.
You should hold them responsible for the practice of
conditionality an aff ballot to deter the practice
improves the state of debate in our community. The more
teams punished for reading multiple conditional
advocacies, the less likely they are to do so at all in the
future.
Counter-interpretations are self-serving and arbitrary
because theres nothing to base it on which just allows
them to morph it between debates.
We link turn strategic thinking because the negative is
never forced to think strategically about how to deal with
the aff or how their arguments would interact with one
another which also produces net worse advocacy skills
because they never have to defend anything, worst form
of political engagement
Argument depth impact turns neg flex because it means
the neg is forced to think about and debate the case
instead of dividing the 2AC with meaningless advocacies
which also increases negative strategic thinking which is
best for education.
Multiple angles is offense for us because conditionality
decreases substantive discussion of a test from a
particular angle which means we never determine
whether a particular test of the plan is legitimate.
Separate tests in separate rounds solve their offense
because it maximizes K and policy education in each
scenario. Advocacy is a d/a to conditionality because real
world advocates have to defend their positions.
ATs
 AT: Academy Co-Opts
Cooption guaranteed in the status quo- politics already
begins from a flawed approach that gets trapped within
an academic culture and pre-disposes war as an inevitable
result and theorizes the enemy ever-present on the
border. McClintock uses three examples to demonstrate
the military-academic-political complex: Prior to 9/11,
General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army,
bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use having an army
that did nothing but train, he said. Theres got to be a
certain appetite for what the hell we exist for. In 1997 a
group of neocons at the Project for the New American
Century produced a remarkable report in which they
stated that to make such an invasion palatable would
require a catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new
Pearl Harbor. The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling
solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of
legitimacy, offering the military unimaginable license to
expand its reach. General Peter Schoomaker would
publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon:
There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a
tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing
opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have
actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some
oomph.
Rodriguez argues that, as the Project for the New
American Century report demonstrated, leaving the
academy on its own/not challenging its epistemological
base allows it to continually produce scholarship that
shapes public opnion towards warfare and paranoia.
However, being a radical intellectual within the academy
is to already acknowledge the inherent tension of
producing knowledge against the hegemonic narrative-
Rodriguez says The academy is never home: some of us
are subject to eviction and evisceration, alongside the
surveillance, discipline, and low intensity punishment that
accrues to those of us who try to build modalities of
sustenance and reproduction within liberationist
genealogies, particularly when we are working and
studying in colleges and universities. However, through
producing knowledge under this assumption and
specifically aiming to disrupt the narrative of benign
American omnipotence is a way to create ethical
opposition and positive knowledge production from within
the academy.
Jose Medina says that the 1ACs injection of multiple
narratives against the hegemonic interpretation is a form
anti-disciplinarity, a guerilla pluralism. The goal of this is
to create epistemic friction- not seeking unity with
existing power structures but rather working to create
disruption. In this specific case, the 1ACs refusal to
strategically essentialize the law for a specific policy
against military presence is because that option seeks a
unity with current power structures and necessarily
sacrifices some of the objective of anti-disciplinarity; by
engaging in our revealing and antidisciplinarity without
turning to this fixed acts, we use epistemic friction
provoke conflict, seek to point out gaps and clashing
perspectives, focuses on tension and constantly re-
investigating how our knowledge is produced. The 1AC
thus isnt a single speech act that solves all problems but
rather is a constantly producing form of scholarship that
is a process rather than a product- solves for the
Scholarship D/A above
 AT: Decol Isnt a Metaphor
The 1AC never claims to decolonize, rather we refuse
research to actively fight institutional bias and clear
spaces for decolonization
Tuck & Yang 2014 (Eve [State University of New York at New Paltz] and Wayne [University of California, San
Diego], R-Words: Refusing Research, Humanizing Research (2014): 223-248, d/l:
https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-R-Words_Refusing-Research.pdf) //jl

One way to think about refusal is how desire can be a framework,

mode, and space for refusal. As a framework, desire is a counterlogic
to the logics of settler colonialism. Rooted in possibilities gone but not
foreclosed, the not yet, and at times, the not anymore (Tuck, 2010, p. 417),
desire refuses the master narrative that colonization was inevitable
and has a monopoly on the future. By refusing the teleos of colonial
future, desire expands possible futures. As a mode of refusal, desire is
a no and a yes. Another way to think about refusal is to consider using
strategies of social science research to further expose the complicity of
social science disciplines and research in the project of settler colonialism .
There is much need to employ social science to turn back upon itself as
settler colonial knowledge, as opposed to universal, liberal, or neutral
knowledge without horizon. This form of refusal might include bringing
attention to the mechanisms of knowledge legitimation, like the Good
Labkeeping Seal of Approval (discussed under Axiom III); contesting
appropriation, like the collection of pain narratives; and publicly
renouncing the diminishing of Indigenous or local narratives with blood
narratives in the name of science, such as in the Havasupai case
discussed under Axiom II. As long as the objects of research are
presumably damaged communities in need of intervention, the
metanarrative of social science research remains unchallenged: which
is that research at worst is simply an expansion of common knowledge
(and therefore harmless), and that research at best is problem solving (and therefore beneficial). This metanarrative
justifies a host of interventions into communities, and treats
communities as frontiers to civilize, regardless of the specific
conclusions of individual research projects. Consider, for example, well intended research on
achievement gaps that fuels NCLB and testing; the documentation of youth violence that provides the rationales for gang injunctions
and the expansion of the prison industrial complex; the documentation of diabetes as justification for unauthorized genomic studies
and the expansion of anti-Indigenous theories. Instead,
by making the settler colonial
metanarrative the object of social science research, researchers may
bring to a halt or at least slow down the machinery that allows
knowledge to facilitate interdictions on Indigenous and Black life. Thus,
this form of refusal might also involve tracking the relationships
between social science research and expansions of state and corporate
violence against communities. Social science researchers might design
their work to call attention to or interrogate power, rather than
allowing their work to serve as yet another advertisement for power.
Further, this form of refusal might aim to leverage the resources of the
academy to expand the representational territories fought for by
communities working to thwart settler colonialism. We close this
chapter with much left unsaid. This is both because there is so much to
say, and also because, as we have noted, all refusal is particular.
Refusal understands the wisdom in a story, as well as the wisdom in
not passing that story on. Refusal in research makes way for other r-
wordsfor resistance, reclaiming, recovery, reciprocity, repatriation,
regeneration. Though understandings of refusal are still emergent, though so much is still coming into view, we want to
consolidate a summary of take-away points for our readers. A parting gift, of sorts, as each of us takes our leave to map our next steps
as researchers, as community members, within and without academe. We think of this list as a tear-away sheet, something to cut out
and carry in your pocket, sew into a prayer flag, or paste into your field notebooks.

Paralleling colonization with the mind and other practices

isnt a problem when done so transparently in order to
show the interconnections that prop up oppression- Their
demand for action only is violent and reductive

Nakata et al 2012 (N. Martin & Victoria Nakata, Sarah

Keech & Reuben Bolt, Decolonial goals and pedagogies
for Indigenous studies, Decolonization: Indigeneity,
Education & Society Vol.1,No.1,2012, pp.120-140 d/l:
http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/viewFile/18
628/15551) //jl

As well, in the context of the international field of Indigenous Studies

scholarship, the
borrowing of concepts and meanings across groups (for example,
sharing and talking circles
from North America to Australia) also generalises from the specific inter-
relations between
traditional knowledge practice, colonial experience, and
contemporary concerns and goals that
exist in local spaces. This need not be a problem if brought to
awareness in analytical accounts;
knowledge re-working routinely involves utilising other ideas. It is a
problem if this knowledge
production is not transparent and mystifies its sources by a practice
of homogenising or
universalising the Indigenous. A familiar risk re-presents: that of
misrepresentation of
Indigenous people via generalisation, misunderstanding, or
distortion of knowledge, social meanings and the social functions of
knowledge organisation. All these practices evidence a determined
but arguably too hurried movement from colonial critique to the
instatement of alternative Indigenous knowledge positions.
Decolonial theorist, Maldonado-Torres, speaks of the problems of pre-
occupation with claims for emancipation and identity above
epistemic concerns: The problem emerges when liberation is
translated as a claim for immediate political action, a kind of
political immediatism that becomes antipathetic to theoretical
reflection...When the two combine, that is, the worst aspects of the
claim for identity and those of the search for liberation, then we
have a form of what Lewis Gordon calls epistemological closure. (2011,
p. 4)
 AT: Deterrence S!
US deterrence policy is the acceptance of the citizens as
hostages of the nuclear super state--- they hold our very
survival in their hands so concessions of the will of
citizens must be made. This turns the government
defense function on its head and makes the lives of
citizens expendable for the greater good of the state war
machine. This is why the state cannot be an ethical actor

Deudney 95
Daniel, Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins Political Fission in On Security ed.
Lipschutz The Deformation of State-Civil Society Relations//L-Cam

The inability of a state apparatus of less than comprehensive scope to secure itself in the nuclear era has
revolutionary implications for the basic relationship between the state apparatus and the
citizens of polity. If citizens were purely consumers of protection services, and if states were purely
providers of such services, then a consolidation of protection providing institutions could be
expected in the nuclear era. In the absence of such a consolidation, state apparatuses are thrown into a curiously antagonistic
relationship to their citizens. Deformations of the citizen-state relationship can be expected to exist in all
legitimate polities possessing nuclear weapons, but they should not be particularly pronounced
and visible in those polities where the state apparatus role as servant of the citizenry has been
most extensively and effectively institutionalized. Life in a world of nuclear-armed states sunders the common
interest between the state apparatus and citizenry. The state apparatus interest in autonomy is thrown into
conflict with civil societys interest in survival. The basic fact of life in the nuclear world is simple: The state
apparatus can no longer relate to civil society as the effective protector of civil society from
destruction. Nuclear destruction does not, however, confront countries in an unmediated form but is experienced in
terms of the deterrent relationship. As long as deterrence does not fail, the gap that exists between
security promise and performance is potential rather than actual. By maintaining nuclear weapons
only for the purposes of deterrence ( i.e. only to retaliate against an attacker using nuclear
weapons), the state apparatus can achieve a partial substitute for military viability. As long as
deterrence does not fail, the relationship between nuclear weapons and societal destruction remains a potential rather than an actual
one. Deterrence seems to be an innocuous nuclear age approximation and extension of the
traditional role of the state apparatus as defender of civil society, or at worst making the best of a bad
situation, but it has a deeper meaning for the relationship between the state apparatus and civil
society. A strategy of deterrence turns the relationship between civil society and the state
apparatus on its head. For a state apparatus to hold nuclear weapons for the purpose of
deterrence means that the state apparatus makes a conscious decision to accept its own civil
society as a hostage. As the legal theorist John Barton notes: [Nuclear deterrence] affects the philosophical
relationship between government and citizen, for in the nuclear era a government can defend its
own citizens only through threats to attack other nations citizens or through agreements with
other governments, sometimes even designed to leave its own citizens vulnerable. The
governments defense function is in a sense turned against its citizens, and part of the unity of
interest between government and citizens is lost .
Strategies of deterrence rely upon the logic of pre-
emption --- a set of teleological assumptions that force us
to lash out violently and necessitate the deployment and
detonation of nuclear weaponry.

Massumi 7
(Brian, Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption Theory & Event, 10.2, projectmuse) PhD Yale
University 1987, Professor & Lecturer @ Montreal University.

The President's own admission of the need for a change and the Democrats' subsequent regaining of
control of both houses of Congress led many to the conclusion that the direction of the country was about
to take a major turn. It is certain that there will be adjustments. But it should be remembered that Bush
Preemption remains the
referred to a change in "tactics," not a change in "strategy."
official military strategy of the United States. It can be argued that preemption is
in any case far more than a specific military doctrine of a particular administration. It can be plausibly
argued that preemption is an operative logic of power defining a political age in as
infiltrating a way as the logic of "deterrence"
infinitely space-filling and insiduously
defined the Cold War era. By an "operative" logic I mean one that combines an ontology
with an epistemology in such a way as to trace itself out as a self-
propelling tendency that is not in the sway of any particular existing
formation but sweeps across them all and where possible sweeps them up
in its own dynamic. Preemption is not prevention. Although the goal of both is to neutralize
threat, they fundamentally differ epistemologically and ontologically. Epistemologically, prevention
assumes an ability to assess threats empirically and identify their causes. Once the causes are identified,
appropriate curative methods are sought to avoid their realization. Prevention operates in an objectively
knowable world in which uncertainty is a function of a lack of information, and in which events run a
predictable, linear course from cause to effect. As we will see, this is very different from the
epistemological premise of preemption, and entails a divergence from it on the ontological level as well.
Prevention, in fact, has no ontology of its own because it assumes that what it must deal with has an
objectively given existence prior to its own intervention. In practice, this means that its object is given to it
predefined by other formations, in whose terms and on whose terrain it must then operate. A preventive
approach to social conflict might analyze it, for example, as an effect of poverty, objectively quantifiable in
terms of economic and health indexes. Each index is defined by a specialist formation (economics,
medicine) in relation to a norm specific to that domain and against which goals may be set and success
measured (annual income, mortality rates, life expectancy, etc.). The preventive measures will then
operate as a political extension of the concerned specialist domains (economic analysis extended into
politics as aid and development, medicine extended into vaccination programs, etc.). They will be
regulated by the specialist logics proper to those fields. Prevention has no proper object, no operational
sphere of its own, and no proprietary logic. It is derivative. It is a means toward a given end. Because of
this,preventive measures are not self-sustaining. They must be
applied. They must be leveraged from an outside source with
outside force. They are not an organizing force in their own right. They
run on borrowed power. Deterrence takes over at the end of this same process,
when the means of prevention have failed. Deterrence makes use of
the same epistemology prevention does, in that it assumes
knowability and objective measurability. However, because it starts
where prevention ends, it has no margin of error. It must know with
certainty because the threat is fully formed and ready to detonate:
the enemy has the bomb and the means to deliver it. The imminence of the
threat means that deterrence cannot afford to subordinate itself to objects, norms, and criteria passed on
to it from other domains. If it did, its ability to respond with an immediacy proportional to the imminence of
in the
the threat would be compromised. Since it would not hold the key to its own knowledge,
urgency of the situation it would be haunted internally by the spectre of a
possible incompleteness of the knowledge coming from the outside. Since
its operations would be mediated by that outside domain, neither would it hold a direct key to its own
actions. Since it would be responding to causes outside its specific purview, it would not be master of its
own effects. The only way to have the kind of epistemological immediacy
necessary for deterrence is for its process to have its own cause and
to hold it fast within itself. The quickest and most direct way for a process to
acquire its own cause is for it to produce one. The easiest way to do this is to
take the imminence of the very threat prevention has failed to neutralize and make
it the foundation of a new process. In other words, the process must
take the effect it seeks to avoid (nuclear annihilation) and organize
itself around it, as the cause of its very own dynamic (deterrence). It
must convert an effect that has yet to eventuate into a cause: a
future cause. Past causes are in any case already spoken for. They have been claimed as objects of
knowledge and operational spheres by a crowded world of other already-functioning formations. Now for
a future cause to have any palpable effect it must somehow be able
act on the present. This is much easier to do and much less mysterious than it
might sound. You start by translating the threat into a clear and present
danger. You do this by acquiring a capability to realize the threat
rather than prevent it. If your neighbor has a nuke, you build the
nuclear weaponry that would enable you to annihilate the adversay,
even at the price of annihilating yourself by precipitating a "nuclear
winter." In fact, the more capable you are of destroying yourself
along with your enemy, the better. You can be certain the enemy will follow your lead in
acquiring the capability to annihilate you, and themselves as well. The imminent threat is then so
imminent on both sides, so immediately present in its menacing futurity, that only a madman or suicidal
regime would ever tip the balance and press the button. This gives rise to a unique logic of mutuality:
(MAD). Mutually assured destruction is equilibrium-seeking. It tends
"mutually assured destruction"
toward the creation of a "balance of terror." MAD is certainty squared: to the
certainty that there is objectively a threat is added the certainty that it is balanced out. The second
The assurance must be maintained
certainty is dynamic, and requires maintenance.
by continuing to producing the conditions that bring the cause so
vividly into the present. You have to keep moving into the dangerous
future. You have to race foward it ever faster. You have to build more
weapons, faster and better, to be sure that your systems match the
lethality of your opponent's, give or take a few half-lives. The
process soon becomes self-driving. The logic of mutually assured
destruction becomes its own motor. It becomes self-propelling. Now
that you've started, you can't very well stop.

The logic of deterrence is predicated on the sacrifice of

cities and minority bodies for the sake of the clean body
politic that will be rebuilt by the proper white body- their
crisis politics are used to elide the structural exclusion of
non-white bodies

MacCannell 84
[Dean, Baltimore in the Morning... After: On the Forms of Post-Nuclear Leadership Diacritics, Vol. 14, No.
2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer, 1984), pp. 39-40]

Before Hiroshima, it was still possible to conceive of the use of administrative power to mute and
harmonize structural oppositions as when a neighborhood or community effectively balances and
coordinates the interests of several social classes and ethnic groups without requiring them
to sacrifice their identity in the process. Poverty was disproportionately distributed among the
blacks, but there were also significant numbers of poor whites, there were urban blacks as
well as rural blacks, and the cities had their share of the rich. Under these circumstances, most
administrators could easily empathize with the problems of the others, or find some local parallel, and most serious problems could be
felt in common. After World War II, as is well known, there was a historically unprecedented and rapid
demographic shift in the United States which, in less than two decades, produced a rigid new parallelism
of oppositions with black-urban-poor on one side and white-suburban-rich on the other. The
magnitude and drama of this shift has been described in hundreds of books and articles which provide fine empirical detail. Its causes
have been analyzed- usually traced to the mechanization of the Southern cotton harvest and to the Depression-and its effects in terms
of human misery and waste have been measured, not just on the side of urban poverty but suburban alienation as well. One can read
this shift, as many have, as a structurally peculiar and dangerous situation, as an indication of hostility toward minorities on the part of
the dominant white culture, and wonder why so little administrative effort went into channeling these demographic forces into new
forms of mutual cancellation and balance. Or, one can read this change, as I will here, as the emerging link
between post- Hiroshima strategic foreign policy and the new domestic order that everyone, starting with
Einstein, understands, at least in their hearts, to be the primary fact of life in the nuclear age: that is, as an expression of the
nuclear unconscious. The Doctrine of Deterrence and the Concept of Limited Survivability: The kind of thinking that
led to the targeting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was intensified after the war . Presi- dent Truman, in
a 1948 letter to his Secretary of the Army, a letter which can be ambiguously read as a scolding for a request for new bombs, or as a
lesson on their proper use, exclaims: You have to understand that this isn't a military weapon. It is
used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses .... [Herken
256] In response to the earliest criticisms of the use of the atomic bomb on civilians, former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, in a
1947 Harper's article explains: [T]he atomic bomb was more than a weapon of terrible destruction: it was a psychological weapon....
[I]t was not one atomic bomb, or two, which brought surrender; it was the experience of what an atomic bomb will actually do to a
community, plus the dread of many more.... [Quoted in Bernstein 15-16] This line of reasoning had already received technical
reinforcement from Yale political scientist Bernard Brodie and other early post-war civilian strategists who made
models of nuclear exchanges and determined that "cities of over 100,000 population" are
the only targets of sufficient economic value to justify the use of atomic weapons . They reasoned
that atomic bombs are just too expensive to use on military targets which typically would be worth no more than the bomb and the
cost of its delivery [F. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 30]. Thirty-five years
later a military analyst reflected on the origin of the idea of deterrence by threat of massive retaliation
in the following way: [B]efore the ashes of Japan were cold, the earliest thinkers about nuclear war hit on the idea that, if there was
not effective defense against nuclear attack ... you had only to rely on the threat of retaliation in kind; they
all thought in terms of what came to be called 'city busting.' [L. Martin, The Two-Edged Sword: Armed
Force in the Modern World (London: Weidendeld and Nicolsen, 1982), 18] Basic Assumptions of the Doctrine of Deterrence and
Their Effect on Domestic Structure: 1. Survivability: Nuclear strategists must assume limited
"survivability." (I cannot con- cern myself here with the evidence for and against the validity of this assumption. I am per-
sonally among those who do not believe that an all out nuclear attack can be survived. But this does not change the fact that our
nuclear strategists must believe in survivability, or fun- damentally alter the total design of our current nuclear posture.) According to
this idea, the cities will be blown away, but sufficient numbers of people will survive to rebuild American
An
society. According to one official United States Government Civil Defense Manual I read, this will take approximately four days.
assumption that is never stated but is always implicit in survivability scenarios is that the survivors will
be people who are closely in touch with the unique spirit of America, and the values of the system
of "free enterprise." No government planner has envisaged a post-attack rebuilding by people who
never much benefited from American society, or quite understood what America was all about, that is,
by people who lived at a disadvantage on the margins of society.
 AT: Democratic Peace Theory
Multiple major conflicts disprove DPT

Rosato 11
Sebastian, Dept of Political Science at Notre Dame. The Handbook on the Political Economy of War,
Google Books

Despite imposing these definitional restrictions, proponents of the democratic peace cannot
exclude up to five major wars, a figure which, if confirmed, would invalidate the democratic
peace by their own admission (Ray 1995, p. 27). The first is the War of 1812 between Britain and the
United States. Ray argues that it does not contradict the claim because Britain does not
meet his suffrage requirement. Yet this does not make Britain any less democratic than the United States at the time
where less than half the adult population was eligible to vote. In fact, as Layne (2001, p. 801) notes, "the United States
was not appreciably more democratic than un re formed Britain." This poses a problem for the
democratic peace; if the United States was a democracy, and Ray believes it was, then Britain was
also a democracy and the War of 1812 was an inter-democratic war. The second case is the
American Civil War. Democratic peace theorists believe the United States was a democracy in 1861, but
exclude the case on the grounds that it was a civil rather than interstate war (Russett 1993, pp. 16-
17). However, a plausible argument can be made that the United States was not a state but a union of states,
and lhat this was therefore a war between states rather than within one. Note, for example,
that the term "United States" was plural rather than singular at the time and the conflict
was known as the "War Between the States."7 This being the case, the Civil War also contradicts
the claim. The Spanish-American and Boer wars constitute two further exceptions to the
rule. Ray excludes the former because half of the members of Spain's upper house held
their positions through hereditary succession or royal appointment. Yet this made Spain little
different to Britain, which he classifies as a democracy at the time , thereby leading to the conclusion
that the Spanish-American War was a war between democracies. Similarly, it is hard to accept his claim that the Orange Free State was
not a democracy during the Boer War because black Africans were not allowed to vote when he is content to classify the United States
as a democracy in the second half of the nineteenth century (Ray 1993, pp. 265, 267; Layne 2001. p. 802). In short, defenders of
the democratic peace can only rescue their core claim through the selective application of
highly restrictive criteria. Perhaps the most important exception is World War I, which, by
virtue of the fact that Germany fought against Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and the
United States, would count as five instances of war between liberal states in most analyses of
the democratic peace.9 As Ido Oren (1995, pp. 178-9) has shown. Germany was widely
considered lo be a liberal slate prior to World War I: "Germany was a member of a select
group of the most politically advanced countries, far more advanced than some of the
nations that are currently coded as having been 'liberal* during that period." In fact, Germany
was consistently placed toward the top of that group, "either as second only to the United States ... or as positioned below England and
above France." Moreover, Doyle*s assertion that the case ought to be excluded because Germany was liberal domestically, but not in
foreign affairs, does not stand up to scrutiny. As Layne (1994, p. 42) points out, foreign policy was "insulated from parliamentary
control" in both France and Britain, two purportedly liberal states (see also Mearsheimer 1990, p. 51, fn. 77; Layne 2001, pp. 803
807). Thus it is difficult to classify Germany as non-liberal and World War I constitutes an important exception to the finding.
 AT: Extinction Scenarios/DA Impacts
Scholarship D/A: The Negatives scope of global extinction
as a possible result of our dissent in a classroom is a way
of abstracting us from real individual agency and the
change that promotes. They begin from a flawed approach
that gets trapped within an academic culture that pre-
disposes war as an inevitable result and theorizes the
enemy ever-present on the border. McClintock uses three
examples to demonstrate the military-academic-political
complex: Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of
the US Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use
having an army that did nothing but train, he said.
Theres got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we
exist for. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for
the New American Century produced a remarkable report
in which they stated that to make such an invasion
palatable would require a catastrophic and catalyzing
eventlike a new Pearl Harbor. The 9/11 attacks came as
a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the
problem of legitimacy, offering the military unimaginable
license to expand its reach. General Peter Schoomaker
would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense
boon: There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War
is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing
opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have
actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some
oomph. Thus the US is necessarily tied to extinction
scenarios as a way to preserve hegemonic justification

Preserving the future by destroying the present destroys

v2l and locks in authoritarianism
Haver 99 (William Haver (1999): Really Bad Infinities: Queer's Honour and the
Pornographic Life, Parallax, 5:4, 9-21)//TR

In Body Fluids, an essay as remarkable for its prescience as for its rigour, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille ask in the context of
what we have come to know as safer sex discourse in the AIDS pandemic: What will we say to those who ignore
advice and continue to make contacts known to be at risk? Will we treat them as irresponsible, to be lectured
to, put under observation, and converted? In that case, our future scenario is assured: that of the
child in the glass bubble, for whom the outside environment means death ; that of the
obsessional struggle against all unmonitored contact as potentially the source of death . 1 Much
has happened in the fourteen years since Stengerss and Gilles essay first appeared. We have learned, for example, that the
pandemic is interminable, that we are, and will be, in what we call our being, of AIDS (with the full force of the partitive:
we belong to AIDS as its ownmost), 2 and that we
can therefore no longer think of the future as the
restoration of a putatively uncontaminated past; we have learned, perhaps, that so-called safer sex is not a state of
being, and that latex is no guarantee of immortality; we, some of us, have learned the hard way (there being no easy way) the
existential irrelevance of both hope and despair; we have learned that the fact that we both are and possess bodies means that our
bodies are our unavoidable exposure to danger, that there never is, has been, nor can be a
place of safety; more, that the fact of our embodiment is the fact of our utter nontranscendence, our
finitude. And we have had to live the future scenario of which Stengers and Gille warned us in 1985; absolutely nothing has
happened to deprive their question and their warning of their cogency, for we have seen technical advice pertinent
to our pleasures pressed into the service of a thoroughly authoritarian, albeit thoroughly stupid,
moralism. Indeed, safer sex discourse, including not only verbal admonition but an entire range of material and institutional
practices, has become an essential part of an entire scientific medical technology of social control such that all illness,
disability, and death itself have become essentially moral failings rather than misfortunes.

Commodification of the planet for corporatization and

scientific inquiry means the sum total of every ecological
catastrophe will end the planet we must reorient our
politics

Ehrenfeld 5
(David, Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources @ Rutgers University, The
Environmental Limits to Globalization,Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2 April 2005)

The known effects of globalization on the environment are numerous and highly significant. Many others are undoubtedly unknown.
Given these circumstances, the first question that suggests itself is: Will globalization, as we see it now, remain a permanent state of
affairs (Rees 2002; Ehrenfeld 2003a)? The principal environmental side effects of globalization climate change, resource
exhaustion (particularly cheap energy), damage to agroecosystems, and the spread of exotic species, including
pathogens (plant, animal, and human)are sufficient to make this economic system unstable and short-
lived. The socioeconomic consequences of globalization are likely to do the same. In my book The Arrogance of Humanism (1981),
I claimed that our ability to manage global systems, which depends on our being able to predict the results of the things
we do, or even to understand the systems we have created, has been greatly exaggerated. Much of
our alleged control is science fiction; it doesnt work because of theoretical limits that we ignore at our peril. We live in a dreamworld
in which reality testing is something we must never, never do, lest we awake. In 1984 Charles Perrow explored the reasons why we
have trouble predicting what so many of our own created systems will do, and why they surprise us so unpleasantly while we think we
are managing them. In his book Normal Accidents, which does not concern globalization, he listed the critical characteristics of some
of todays complex systems. They are highly interlinked, so a change in one part can affect many
others, even those that seem quite distant. Results of some processes feed back on themselves in unexpected
ways. The controls of the system often interact with each other unpredictably. We have only indirect
ways of finding out what is happening inside the system. And we have an incomplete understanding
of some of the systems processes. His example of such a system is a nuclear power plant, and this, he explained, is why system-
wide accidents in nuclear plants cannot be predicted or eliminated by system design. I would argue that globalization is a similar
system, also subject to catastrophic accidents, many of them environmentalevents that we cannot define until after they have
occurred, and perhaps not even then. The comparatively few commentators who have predicted the collapse of globalization have
generally given social reasons to support their arguments. These deserve some consideration here, if only because the environmental
and social consequences of globalization interact so strongly with each other. In 1998, the British political economist John Gray,
giving scant attention to environmental factors, nevertheless came to the conclusion that globalization is unstable and will be short-
lived. He said, There is nothing in todays global market that buffers it against the social strains arising
highly uneven economic development within and between the worlds diverse societies. The result, Gray
from
unceasing stream of new technologies, unfettered market competition
states, is that The combination of [an]
and weak or fractured social institutions has weakened both sovereign states and
multinational corporations in their ability to control important events. Note that Gray claims that not
only nations but also multinational corporations, which are widely touted as controlling the world, are being weakened by
globalization. This idea may come as a surprise, considering the growth of multinationals in the past few decades, but I believe it is
true. Neither governments nor giant corporations are even remotely capable of controlling the
environmental or social forces released by globalization, without first controlling globalization itself. Two of the social
critics of globalization with the most dire predictions about its doom are themselves masters of the process. The late Sir James
Goldsmith, billionaire financier, wrote in 1994, It must surely be a mistake to adopt an economic policy which makes you rich if you
eliminate your national workforce and transfer production abroad, and which bankrupts you if you continue to employ your own
people. . .. It is the poor in the rich countries who will subsidize the rich in the poor countries. This
will have a serious impact on the social cohesion of nations . Another free-trade billionaire, George Soros, said
much the same thing in 1995: The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences.
Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime. How much more powerful these statements are if we factor
in the environment! As globalization collapses, what will happen to people, biodiversity, and ecosystems? With respect to people, the
gift of prophecy is not required to answer this question. What will happen depends on where you are and how you live. Many citizens
of the Third World are still comparatively self-sufficient; an unknown number of these will survive the breakdown of globalization
and its attendant chaos. In the developed world, there are also people with resources of self-sufficiency and a growing understanding
of the nature of our social and environmental problems, which may help them bridge the years of crisis. Some species are adaptable;
some are not. For the nonhuman residents of Earth, not all news will be bad. Who would have predicted that wild turkeys (Meleagris
gallopavo), one of the wiliest and most evasive of woodland birds, extinct in New Jersey 50 years ago, would now be found in every
county of this the most densely populated state, and even, occasionally, in adjacent Manhattan? Who would have predicted that black
bears (Ursus americanus), also virtually extinct in the state in the mid-twentieth century, would now number in the thousands
(Ehrenfeld 2001)? Of course these recoveries are unusualrare bright spots in a darker landscape. Finally, a few ecological systems
may survive in a comparatively undamaged state; most will be stressed to the breaking point, directly or indirectly, by many
environmental and social factors interacting unpredictably. Lady Luck, as always, will have much to say. In his book The Collapse of
Complex Societies, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988) notes that collapse, which has happened to all past empires, inevitably
results in human systems of lower complexity and less specialization, less centralized control, lower economic activity, less
information flow, lower population levels, less trade, and less redistribution of resources. All of these changes are inimical to
globalization. This less-complex, less-globalized condition is probably what human societies will be like when the dust settles. I do
not think, however, that we can make such specific predictions about the ultimate state of the environment after globalization, because
we have never experienced anything like this exceptionally rapid, global environmental damage before. History and science have little
to tell us in this situation. The end of the current economic system and the transition to a postglobalized state is and will be
accompanied by a desperate last raid on resources and a chaotic flurry of environmental destruction whose results cannot possibly be
told in advance. All one can say is that the surviving species, ecosystems, and resources will be greatly impoverished compared with
what we have now, and our descendants will not thank us for having adopted, however briefly, an economic system that consumed
their inheritance and damaged their planet so wantonly. Environment is a true bottom lineconcern for its condition must
trump all purely economic growth strategies if both the developed and developing nations are to survive and
prosper. Awareness of the environmental limits that globalized industrial society denies or ignores should not, however, bring us to an
extreme position of environmental determinism. Those whose preoccupations with modern civilizations very real social problems
cause them to reject or minimize the environmental constraints discussed here (Hollander 2003) are guilty of seeing only half the
picture. Environmental scientists sometimes fall into the same error. It is tempting to see the salvation
of civilization and environment solely in terms of technological improvements in efficiency of energy
extraction and use, control of pollution, conservation of water, and regulation of environmentally harmful activities. But
such needed developments will not be sufficientor may not even occur without corresponding
social change, including an end to human population growth and the glorification of consumption, along
with the elimination of economic mechanisms that increase the gap between rich and poor .
The environmental and social problems inherent in globalization are completely interrelatedany attempt to
treat them as separate entities is unlikely to succeed in easing the transition to a postglobalized world. Integrated
change that combines environmental awareness, technological innovation, and an altered world view is the only answer to the life-
threatening problems exacerbated by globalization (Ehrenfeld 2003b). If such integrated change occurs in time, it will likely happen
partly by our own design and partly as an unplanned response to the constraints imposed by social unrest, disease, and the economics
of scarcity. With respect to the planned component of change, we are facing, as eloquently described by Rees (2002), the ultimate
challenge to human intelligence and self-awareness, those vital qualitie swe humans claim as uniquely our own. Homo sapiens will
either. . .become fully human or wink out ignominiously, a guttering candle in a violent storm of our own making. If change does not
come quickly, our global civilization will join Tainters (1988) list as the latest and most dramatic example of collapsed complex
societies. Is there anything that could slow globalization quickly, before it collapses disastrously of its own environmental and social
weight? It is still not too late to curtail the use of energy, reinvigorate local and regional
communities while restoring a culture of concern for each other, reduce nonessential global
trade and especially global finance (Daly & Cobb 1989), do more to control introductions of exotic species (including
pathogens), and accelerate the growth of sustainable agriculture. Many of the needed technologies are already in place. It is true that
some of the damage to our environmentspecies extinctions, loss of crop and domestic animal varieties, many exotic species
introductions, and some climatic change will be beyond repair. Nevertheless, the opportunity to help our society move past
globalization in an orderly way, while there is time, is worth our most creative and passionate efforts. The citizens of the United States
and other nations have to understand that our global economic system has placed both our environment and our society in peril, a peril
as great as that posed by any war of the twentieth century. This understanding, and the actions that follow, must come not only from
enlightened leadership, but also from grassroots consciousness raising. It is still possible to reclaim the planet from a self-
destructive economic system that is bringing us all down together , and this can and this can be a task
that bridges the divide between conservatives and liberals. The crisis is here, now. What we have to do has become obvious.
Globalization can be scaled back to manageable proportions only in the context of an
altered world view that rejects materialism even as it restores a sense of communal
obligation. In this way, alone, can we achieve real homeland security, not just in the United States, but also in other nations,
whose fates have become so thoroughly entwined with ours within the global environment we share.
 AT Heg: Hard Power Shell
Stability through heg is a lie- the only empirics prove less
hegemony led to more peace

Fettweis 11 (Christopher J., 9/26/11, [Department of

Political Science, Tulane University], Free Riding or
Restraint? Examining European Grand Strategy,
Comparative Strategy, 30:316332, EBSCO //DF)

there is no evidence to support a direct

It is perhaps worth noting that
relationship between the relative level of U.S. activism and
international stability. In fact, the limited data we do have suggest the
opposite may be true. During the 1990s, the United States cut back
on its defense spending fairly substantially. By 1998, the United States was
spending $100 billion less on defense in real terms than it had in 1990.51 To internationalists, defense
hawks and believers in hegemonic stability, this irresponsible peace dividend endangered both national
and global security. No serious analyst of American military capabilities, argued Kristol and Kagan,
doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet Americas responsibilities to itself and
if the pacific trends were not based upon
to world peace.52 On the other hand,
U.S. hegemony but a strengthening norm against interstate war, one
would not have expected an increase in global instability and
violence. The verdict from the past two decades is fairly plain: The
world grew more peaceful while the United States cut its forces . No
state seemed to believe that its security was endangered by a less-
capable United States military, or at least none took any action that would suggest such a
belief. No militaries were enhanced to address power vacuums, no
security dilemmas drove insecurity or arms races, and no regional
balancing occurred once the stabilizing presence of the U.S. military
was diminished. The rest of the world acted as if the threat of
international war was not a pressing concern, despite the reduction
in U.S. capabilities. Most of all, the United States and its allies were
no less safe. The incidence and magnitude of global conflict declined while the United States cut its
military spending under President Clinton, and kept declining as the Bush Administration ramped the
No complex statistical analysis should be necessary to
spending back up.
reach the conclusion that the two are unrelated. Military spending figures by
themselves are insufficient to disprove a connection between overall U.S. actions and international
stability. Once again, one could presumably argue that spending is not the only or even the best indication
of hegemony, and that it is instead U.S. foreign political and security commitments that maintain stability.
Since neither was significantly altered during this period, instability should not have been expected.
Alternately,advocates of hegemonic stability could believe that relative
rather than absolute spending is decisive in bringing peace . Although the
United States cut back on its spending during the 1990s, its relative advantage never wavered .
However, even if it is true that either U.S. commitments or relative
spending account for global pacific trends, then at the very least
stability can evidently be maintained at drastically lower levels of
both. In other words, even if one can be allowed to argue in the alternative
for a moment and suppose that there is in fact a level of
engagement below which the United States cannot drop without
increasing international disorder, a rational grand strategist would
still recommend cutting back on engagement and spending until that
level is determined. Grand strategic decisions are never final; continual adjustments can and
must be made as time goes on. Basic logic suggests that the United States
ought to spend the minimum amount of its blood and treasure while
seeking the maximum return on its investment. And if the current era of stability
is as stable as many believe it to be, no increase in conflict would ever occur
irrespective of U.S. spending, which would save untold trillions for an increasingly debt-
ridden nation. It is also perhaps worth noting that if opposite trends had unfolded, if other states had
reacted to news of cuts in U.S. defense spending with more aggressive or insecure behavior, then
If increases in
internationalists would surely argue that their expectations had been fulfilled.
conflict would have been interpreted as proof of the wisdom of
internationalist strategies, then logical consistency demands that
the lack thereof should at least pose a problem. As it stands, the only
evidence we have regarding the likely systemic reaction to a more
restrained United States suggests that the current peaceful trends
are unrelated to U.S. military spending. Evidently the rest of the world can operate
quite effectively without the presence of a global policeman. Those who think otherwise base their view on
faith alone.
Our Muzaffar evidence proves that the way the Negative
constructs their impact scenarios is the same logic and
rhetoric used for years to further US neo-imperialism in
the Middle East: this neo-imperialism has resulted in
failed states, increased tensions, overall destabilization
and the formation of terror groups as a last resort to fight
these policies; essentially a geo-political factory of crises
to sustain the necessity of hegemony. Muzaffar explains
the original premise behind the War on Terror was
hegemonic expansion of control over land and resources,
specifically control over oil commodities and a key
strategic point to monitor Central Asia (much like how the
drones are currently being pitched as monitoring points
for the volatile Middle East). All of Bushs advisors had
specifically been planning and orchestrating a grand
scheme to manipulate Middle Eastern politics and
interests, including sabotaging the democratically elected
Hamas in Palestine and trying to replace it with a
leadership that is subservient to Israels interest,
attempting to eliminate an autonomous movement like
Hizbullah in Lebanon with the aim of bolstering a weak
pro-U.S. regime in Beirut, and targeting the independent-
minded government in Damascus.
And- This is already beginning to manifest in anti-
American sentiment within the originally pro-West Yemen,
as Yemeni daily reality turns into the site of an undeclared
US war: this is the cyclical turn of imperialism to produce
the crisis it then saves
Schwedler 9/27 (Jillian, [Professor of Political Science at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, and a member of the Editorial Committee of The Middle East
Research and Information Project, publishers of Middle East
Report] Is the U.S. drone program in Yemen working? 9.27.15
https://lawfareblog.com/us-drone-program-yemen-working //DF)
For al-Qaida, the drone program is a gift from the heavens. Its
recruiting narrative exploits common misperceptions of American
omnipotence, offering an alternative route to justice and
empowerment. Regardless of American perceptions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the
attacks, what Yemeni could now deny that the United States is waging
an undeclared war on Yemen? Most recently, this narrative of direct U.S.
intervention has been further substantiated by U.S. material and
intelligence support for the Saudi-led military campaign aimed at the
return to power of the unpopular and exiled-President Abed Rabbo Mansour
Hadi. Photographs of spent U.S.-made cluster bombs are widely
circulated. Nor have drone attacks ceased; alongside the often
indiscriminate Saudi-led bombing, American drones continue their
campaign of targeted assassination. One might think that the Saudi
attacks would not help al-Qaida, but it is contributing to al-Qaidas
growth in Yemen. The indiscriminate targeting of the Saudi-led
campaign undermines any sense of security, let alone Yemeni
sovereignty. And AQAP-controlled areas like the port of Mukalla are
not being targeted by Saudi or Gulf troops at all. The United States aims to take
up the job of targeting AQAP while the Saudi-led (and U.S.-backed) forces focus on defeating the Houthis
and restoring Hadi to power. But the overall situation is one in which those
multiple interventions in Yemen are creating an environment in
which al-Qaida is beginning to appeal in ways it never had before .
For these reasons, the U.S. use of drones to kill even carefully
identified AQAP leaders in Yemen is counterproductive: it gives
resonance to the claims of the very group it seeks to destroy. It
provides evidence that al-Qaidas claims and strategies are justified
and that Yemenis cannot count on the state to protect them from
threats foreign and domestic. U.S. officials have argued that the drone program has not
been used as a recruiting device for al-Qaida. But it is hard to ignore the evidence to the
contrary, from counterinsurgency experts who have worked for the U.S.
government to Yemeni voices like Farea Muslimi . Its not just that
drone strikes make al-Qaida recruiting easier, true as that probably
is, but that they broaden the social space in which al-Qaida can
function. America does not need to win the hearts and minds of Yemenis in the service of some
grand U.S. project in the region. But if America wants to weaken al-Qaida in
Yemen, it needs at a minimum to stop pursuing policies that are
bound to enrage and embitter Yemenis who might otherwise be
neutral. There is an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look
like a nail. The U.S. military let alone its drones is not the only tool on
which the United States can rely. But when the measure of success is
as narrow as the killing of a specific person, the tool gets used with
increasing frequency. Indeed, drone strikes have significantly expanded under the Obama
administration. It is crucial to see the bigger picture, the one in which
long-time Yemeni friends tell me of growing anti-U.S. sentiment
where there was previously very little. Public opinion toward
America has clearly deteriorated over the past decade, and to
reverse it may take much longer. But the use of drones to kill people
deemed enemies of the United States, along with the Saudi-led war
against the Houthis, is expanding the spaces in which al-Qaida is
able to function.

American primacy is waning now- stubbornly trying to

hold on sparks backlash

Quinn 11
Adam, Lecturer in International Studies at the University of Birmingham, July 2011, The Art of
Declining Politely: Obamas Prudent Presidency and the Waning of American Power,
International Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 4, p. 803-824
As for the administrations involvement in the Arab Spring, and latterly military intervention from the
air in Libya, these episodes also serve better to illustrate Obamas tendency towards restraint and

limitation than to showcase bold ambition. Both its record of public statements during the unfolding of the
Egyptian revolution and inside accounts after the event suggest that the administrations strategy was to ride
with caution a wave of events largely beyond its own control. The United States thus edged over a
period of days from expressing confidence in Mubarak to seeking a months-long quasi-constitutional transition to eventually
facilitating his abrupt defenestration, as events on the ground changed the balance of probabilities as to the ultimate outcome. In
eschewing either rigid public support for Mubarak, as some regional allies would have preferred, or
early and vocal backing for the protesters, Obama was successful in what was surely the primary
objective: to avoid rendering Americas interests hostage to a gamble on either the success
or the failure of the protests. 91 Given Egypts strategic importance, such dithering, as contemporary critics often
termed it, might justifiably be praised as a sensible reluctance to run out ahead of events. 92 In its approach to Libya,
the administration seems similarly to have been guided more by the movement of events
on the ground than by any overarching plan, and to have retained a default instinct of reluctance throughout.
93 The decision to intervene directly with air power was made only after it became clear that anti-Qadhafi rebels were in
imminent danger of total defeat in their last redoubt of Benghazi, after which bloody reprisals by the government against disloyal
citizens could be expected. In a major presidential address to the American people regarding operations in Libya, a chief priority
was to reassure them as to the limits of the operation. The President insisted that his decisions had been consistent with the
pledge that I made to the American people at the outset that Americas role would be limited; that we would not put ground
troops into Libya; that we would focus our unique capabilities on the front end of the operation and that we would transfer
responsibility to our allies and partners. Once the first wave of bombing was complete, he explained, the United States would
retreat to a supporting role, with the transfer of responsibility to others ensuring that the risk and cost of this operationto our
military and to American taxpayerswill be reduced significantly. Although it was right and necessary for
the US to intervene, he said, there would be no question of using American resources on the

ground to achieve regime change or nation-building . To be blunt, he observed, we went down that
road in Iraq That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya. His vision of
leadership was one whereby the US reserved the right to use unilateral military force to
defend our people, our homeland, our allies and our core interests, but in cases where our safety is not
directly threatened, but our interests and our values are the burden of action should not be
Americas alone. Real leadership, he argued, creates the conditions and coalitions for
others to step up as well; to work with allies and partners so that they bear their share of the burden and pay their share
of the costs. 94 On the very same day that Obama outlined his vision for American and western leadership in the defence of
liberal values at Westminster in May 2011, he also made remarks at a press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron that
underlined the limits of what America would contribute to the campaign in Libya, making it apparent that the high-flown ideals of
Westminster Hall would be closely circumscribed in their implementation in practice. 95 It was explications such as these of
the meaning of American leadership in the new era that inspired the unfortunate phrase
leading from behind. 96 Thus the chief message emanating from the Libyan intervention
was not, in fact, broad endorsement of liberal intervention as a general principle. Rather, one of the
clearest signals from the President was that nothing resembling the resourceintensive operation in Iraq (or perhaps, by
implication, Afghanistan) could or should ever be attempted again. Captain of a shrinking ship As noted in the opening
passages of this article, the narratives of Americas decline and Obamas restraint are distinct but
alsocrucially connected . Facing this incipient period of decline, Americas leaders
may walk one of two paths . Either the nation can come to terms with the reality
of the process that is under way and seek to finesse it in the smoothest way possible. Or it
can rage against the dying of the light , refusing to accept the waning
of its primacy . President Obamas approach, defined by restraint and awareness of
limits , makes him ideologically and temperamentally well suited to the former course
in a way that, to cite one example, his predecessor was not. He is, in short, a good president to
inaugurate an era of managed decline . Those who vocally demand that the President
act more boldly are not merely criticizing him; in suggesting that he is weak and that a tougher policy is needed, they
implicitly suppose that the resources will be available to support such a course. In doing so
they set their faces against the reality of the coming American decline . 97 If the United
States can embrace the spirit of managed decline, then this will clear the way for a judicious
retrenchment , trimming ambitions in line with the fact that the nation can no longer act
on the global stage with the wide latitude once afforded by its superior power . As part of such
a project, it can, as those who seek to qualify the decline thesis have suggested, use the significant resources still
at its disposal to smooth the edges of its loss of relative power, preserving influence to the
maximum extent possible through whatever legacy of norms and institutions is bequeathed
by its primacy. The alternative course involves the initiation or escalation
of conflictual scenarios for which the United States increasingly lacks the resources
to cater: provocation of a military conclusion to the impasse with Iran ; deliberate escalation of
strategic rivalry with China in East Asia; commitment to continuing the campaign in
Afghanistan for another decade; a costly effort to consistently apply principles of military
interventionism, regime change and democracy promotion in response to events in
North Africa . President Obama does not by any means represent a radical break with the traditions of American
foreign policy in the modern era. Examination of his major foreign policy pronouncements reveals that he remains within the
mainstream of the American discourse on foreign policy. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in December 2009 he made
it clear, not for the first time, that he is no pacifist, spelling out his view that the instruments of war do have a role to play in
preserving the peace, and that the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with
the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. 98 In his Cairo speech in June the same year, even as he sought distance
from his predecessor with the proclamation that no system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other,
he also endorsed with only slight qualification the liberal universalist view of civil liberties as transcendent human rights. I
have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things, he declared. The ability to speak your mind and have a say in
how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and
doesnt steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas. 99 His Westminster speech
repeated these sentiments. Evidently this is not a president who wishes to break signally with the
mainstream, either by advocating a radical shrinking of Americas military strength as a
good in itself or by disavowing liberal universalist global visions, as some genuine dissidents from
the prevailing foreign policy discourse would wish. 100 No doubt sensibly, given the likely political reaction at home, it is
inconceivable that he would explicitly declare his strategy to be one of managed American decline. Nevertheless, this
is
a president who, within the confines of the mainstream, embraces caution and restraint
to the greatest extent that one could hope for without an epochal paradigm shift in the
intellectual framework of American foreign policy-making. 101 In contemplating the diminished and diminishing weight of the
United States upon the scales of global power, it is important not to conflate the question of what will be with that of what we
might prefer. It may well be, as critics of the decline thesis sometimes observe, that the prospect of increased global power for a
state such as China should not, on reflection, fill any westerner with glee, whatever reservations one may have held regarding US
primacy. It is also important not to be unduly deterministic in projecting the consequences of American decline. It may
be a process that unfolds gradually and peacefully, resulting in a new order that
functions with peace and stability even in the absence of American primacy.
Alternatively, it may result in conflict, if the U nited S tates clashes with
rising powers as it refuses to relinquish the prerogatives of the
hegemon , or continues to be drawn into wars with middle powers or on the periphery in spite
of its shrinking capacity to afford them. Which outcome occurs will depend on more than the
choices of America alone. But the likelihood that the United States can preserve its prosperity and
influence and see its hegemony leave a positive legacy rather than go down
thrashing its limbs about destructively will be greatly increased if it has political leaders
disposed to minimize conflict and consider American power a scarce resourcein short,
leaders who can master the art of declining politely. At present it seems it is fortunate
enough to have a president who fits the bill .
Scholarship D/A: The Negatives embracement of realism
begins from a flawed academic culture that pre-disposes
war as an inevitable result and theorizes the enemy ever-
present on the border. McClintock uses three examples to
demonstrate the military-academic-political complex:
Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US
Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use having an
army that did nothing but train, he said. Theres got to
be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for. In
1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New
American Century produced a remarkable report in which
they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would
require a catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new
Pearl Harbor. The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling
solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of
legitimacy, offering the military unimaginable license to
expand its reach. General Peter Schoomaker would
publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon:
There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a
tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing
opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have
actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some
oomph.
Pursuit of hegemony is a fantasy of control that relies
upon construction of threatening Otherness this
prompts resistance and create a permanent state of
conflict [If you have time only]
Chernus 6 (Ira, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-
director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program-
University of Colardo Boulder, Monsters to Destroy: The
Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, p. 53-54//TR)

The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial

omnipotence on a global scale. The neocons want to turn that
fantasy into reality. But reality will not conform to the fantasy; it
wont stand still or keep any semblance of permanent order. So the
neocons efforts inevitably backfire. Political scientist Benjamin Barber explains that a
nation with unprecedented power has unprcedented vulnerability:
for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to preserve
what it already has, and so is almost by definition always
overextended. Gary Dorrien see insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another way, too:
For the empire, every conflict is a local concern that threatens its
control. However secure it may be, it never feels secure enough. The
[neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. Just
below the surface of the customary claim to toughness lurked
persistent anxiety. This anxiety was inherent in the problem of
empire and, in the case of the neocons, heightened by ideological
ardor.[40] If the U.S. must control every event everywhere, as neocons assume, every act of
resistance looks like a threat to the very existence of the nation.
There is no good way to distinguish between nations or forces that
genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that dont. Indeed, change of any
kind, in any nation, becomes a potential threat. Everyone begins to look like a threatening monster that
might have to be destroyed. Its no surprise that a nation imagined as an implacable enemy often turns
into a real enemy.When the U.S. intervenes to prevent change, it is likely
to provoke resistance. Faced with an aggressive U.S. stance, any
nation might get tough in return. Of course, the U.S. can say that it
is selflessly trying to serve the world. But why would other nations
believe that? It is more likely that others will resist, making hegemony harder to achieve. To the
neocons, though, resistance only proves that the enemy really is a threat that must be destroyed. So the
likelihood of conflict grows, making everyone less secure. Moreover,
the neocons want to do it all in the public spotlight . In the past, any nation
that set out to conquer others usually kept its plans largely secret. Indeed, the cold war neocons regularly
blasted the Soviets for harboring a secret plan for world conquest. Now here they are calling on the U.S.
to blare out its own domineering intentions for all the world to hear. That hardly seems well calculated to
achieve the goal of hegemony. But it is calculated to foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the
home front that the neocons long for. Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that neocons always offer a
statement of enveloping peril and no hypothesis for any real solution.They have no hope of
finding a real solution because they have no reason to look for one .
Their story allows for success only as a fantasy. In reality , they expect to find nothing but
an endless battle against an enemy that can never be defeated . At least
two prominent neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: We should not try to convince people
that things are getting better. Michael Ledeen: The struggle against evil is going to go on forever.[41]
This vision of endless conflict is not a conclusion drawn from observing reality. It is both the premise and
the goal of the neocons fantasy. Ultimately, it seems, endless resistance is what they really want. Their
call for a unipolar world iensures a permanent state of conflict, so that the U.S. can go on forever proving
its militarily supremacy and promoting the manly virtues of militarism. They have to admit that the U.S.,
with its vastly incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign army. So they
must sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in novel, unexpected
They must make distant changes appear as huge imminent
ways.
threats to America, make the implausible seem plausible, and thus
find new monsters to destroy. The neocons story does not allow for a final triumph of
order because it is not really about creating a politically calm, orderly world. It is about creating a society
full of virtuous people who are willing and able to fight off the threatening forces of social chaos. Having
superior power is less important than proving superior power. That always requires an enemy. Just as
neocons need monsters abroad, they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can justify their
shrill call for a stronger nation (and a higher military budget). The more dire their warnings of insecurity,
the more they can demand greater military strength and moral resolve. Every foreign enemy is, above all,
another occasion to prod the American people to overcome their anxiety, identify evil, fight resolutely
Hegemony will do no good
against it, and stand strong in defense of their highest values.
unless there is challenge to be met, weakness to be conquered, evil
to be overcome. The American people must actively seek hegemony
and make sacrifices for it, to show that they are striving to overcome
their own weakness. So the quest for strength still demands a public
confession of weakness, just as the neocons had demanded two decades
earlier when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack through a window of
vulnerability. The quest for strength through the structures of
national security still demands a public declaration of national
insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing to overcome. The more
frightened the public, the more likely it is to believe and enact the
neocon story.

US Heg provokes terror- outfits the terrorists, and causes

resentment and support for terror in response to
invasions and destruction of the Middle East
Muzaffar 7 (Chandra, [Author, Political Scientist,
International President of JUST], Hegemony, Terrorism,
War- Is Democracy the Antidote? //DF)

Al-Qaeda, the worlds most notorious terrorist network, was, in a sense, a response to the
most obvious manifestation of global hegemony, namely, military
power. As soon as the United States had established a military base
in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1991, immediately after the Kuwait War, the al- Qaeda leader, Osama
bin Laden, announced to the world that he would attack Dhahran. He
considered the establishment of an infidel military base in Islams
holiest landSaudi Arabia, where Islams two holiest cities, Mecca and Media, are situatedan act
of sacrilege.1 In June 1996, al-Qaeda was allegedly involved in a bomb attack upon the base, killing 19
American airmen and wounding 250 others. Two years later, al-Qaeda targeted U.S. embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania. This was followed by the 2000 assault on a U.S. warship, the USS Cole, off the coast of
Yemen. The climax was of course the infamous 9-11 episode when al-Qaeda operatives allegedly smashed
aircrafts into the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Almost three
thousand men and women were massacred in those horrendous tragedies on the eleventh of September
2001. There is no need to emphasize that the WTC was a symbol of U.S.s global economic power while the
After 9-11, U.S. global hegemony
Pentagon represented its global military might.
continued to provoke al-Qaeda and other terrorist outfits. Since the
U.S. and its allies had invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 in order
to oust the Taliban regime that was protecting Osama, the invasion
became the justification for further terrorist attacks. The Bali
bombings of October 2002, purportedly carried out by a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, the
Jemaah Islamiyyah, were primarily to avenge the Afghan invasion. Then in
March 2003, the U.S. and its allies embarked upon a second military
invasion. This time the target was Iraq. One year after Iraq was conquered, al-
Qaeda struck again; it was responsible for a dastardly carnage at a
Madrid railway station. The unconcealed aim was to compel the
Spanish government to withdraw its soldiers from the U.S. led force
in Iraq. Al-Qaeda succeeded in its objective. If we reflect upon al-Qaeda attacks,
it is obvious that the military, political, and economic dimensions of
U.S. hegemony figure prominently on its radar screen. It is seldom
acknowledged, however, that the cultural dimension of hegemony has also been
a consideration. For instance, during their trial, a couple of the Bali bombers
inveighed against Western cultural imperialism and how it was
destroying the identity and integrity of indigenous communities . By
arguing that hegemony in all its manifestations breeds terrorism, we
are in no way condoning terrorism. Al-Qaedas deliberate targeting of non- combatants
and civilians in generalin East Africa, on 9-11, in Bali, in Madridhas been condemned by right-thinking
people everywhere. Leading Muslim theologians and scholars have not only denounced al-Qaedas
misdeeds from a humanitarian perspective, but have also castigated Osama and his underlings as men
if we fail to
who have shamelessly violated the essence of Islamic teachings.2 Nonetheless,
recognize how hegemony control and dominance over people
leads to acts of terror, we will be no better than the proverbial
ostrich that buries its head in the sand. There is perhaps another interesting aspect
to hegemony and terrorism that is not widely acknowledged. Al-Qaeda, which now claims to be
in fact owes its origin to the Central Intelligence
fighting U.S. hegemony,
Agency (CIA), which helped to arm and fund the outfit as part of the
resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the eighties. It
served U.S. interests to create and sustain organizations like al-
Qaeda since the U.S. was determined to defeat the Soviet Union at
all costs.3 Indeed, the utter failure of the Soviet Army to maintain its grip upon Afghanistanat least
20,000 of its soldiers were killedwas one of the more important reasons for the eventual collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991. What this implies is that since al-Qaeda had also contributed to the Soviet demise, it
would not be wrong to hold it partially responsible for the emergence of the U.S. as the worlds sole
if American hegemony
hegemonic power. It may be appropriate at this point to ask:
comes to an end, will al-Qaeda terrorism also cease to exist? Without
American hegemony, al-Qaeda will lose much of its constituenc y. That
segment of the Muslim population that applauds Osama because he is prepared to stand up to the
it will be more difficult
arrogance of hegemonic power will disappear immediately. Besides,
for al-Qaeda to recruit its operatives. In this regard, it is the U.S. led
occupation of Iraqmore than any other eventthat has accelerated
al-Qaedas recruitment drive! Having said that, we must nonetheless concede that even
without U.S. hegemony, al-Qaeda may still be around. It nurses a foolish dream of establishing a global
Islamic Caliphate based upon its doctrinaire Wahabist ideologyan ideology that dichotomizes the world
into pure Muslims and impure infidels, deprives women of their dignity, subscribes to a bigoted, punitive
concept of law, and has no qualms about employing violence in pursuit of its atavistic goals.4
 AT: Inequality Getting Better
Inequality high specifically in richest countries
Weinger 11(Politico Reporter Mackenzie, Wealth gap widening in U.S., globally, report
says, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/69803.html#ixzz1qTqJ62Q6)//TR

The gap between the rich and the poor isnt just widening in the United States - it has hit its
highest level in more than 30 years in the worlds wealthiest countries. According to an Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development report released Monday, income inequality is on the rise in the United States and most
other developed countries. The average income of the richest 10 percent across developed countries
is about nine times more than that of the poorest 10 percent of the population in those
countries, the report found. The U.S. where the Occupy Wall Street movement exploded to protest the disparity
between the richest 1 percent and the remaining 99 percent ranks in with the fourth-highest inequality level, coming after Chile,
Mexico and Turkey. Overall, the report stated, inequality among U.S. workers has risen by 25 percent since 1980. Around the
world, income inequality grew in 17 of the 22 OECD countries , the report stated. It rose by more than four
percentage points in Finland, Germany, Israel, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Sweden and the U.S., while falling in Greece and Turkey.
The gap remained stable in France, Hungary and Belgium. The OECD report recommended that governments combat the issue of
income inequality by reviewing their tax systems, creating more jobs and investing in human capital. The social contract is starting to
unravel in many countries, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurra said, according to a press release. This study dispels
the assumptions that the benefits of economic growth will automatically trickle down to the
disadvantaged and that greater inequality fosters greater social mobility. Without a comprehensive
strategy for inclusive growth, inequality will continue to rise. And its a good time to be part of the U.S.s one percent:
The top earners have more than doubled their share of the national income between 1980 and 2008, moving from 8 percent to 18
percent. And those in the U.S. that make it into the richest one percent typically stay there only 25 percent drop back into the 99
percent, according to the report. But for anyone in the bottom 10 percent of full-time workers in the
U.S., things continue to get worse: The gap between them and the wealthiest jumped by
almost one-third, more than in most other developed countries , the OECD found.
 AT: Kagan
They read a piece of Kagan evidence -1. Kagan leads to
increased tensions with China 2. He supports violating
international law 3. He completely misrepresents
realism- this means the epistemology of their argument
is inherently flawed

Hadar12 (Leon, Senior Analyst at Wikistrat,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/the-reality-
of-american-p_b_1293836.html, The Reality of American
Power: Why Robert Kagain is wrong, 2/22/2012,//PG)

it is Kagan who refuses to face the reality of current

But if anything,
American global power. He also misrepresents the views of Zakaria
and other realist foreign policy analysts who believe that the most
ineffective way to maintain American power and influence is by
continuing to do what Kagan has been advocating since the end of the Cold
War -- engaging in unnecessary and wasteful wars in the Middle East
and picking-up costly diplomatic fights with China and Russia while
raising US defense budget to the stratosphere, igniting anti-
American sentiment worldwide and eroding US credibility . Which brings
me back to the inscription in the Key West cemetery. Imagine now that the physician who was taking care
of that very sick Key Westerner -- let's call him Dr Kagan -- was not only dismissing the dangerous
symptoms exhibited by his patient. How would we have reacted when we found out that the medical
doctor was actually the one who had recommended that his patient take an health-inducing (and
democracy promoting) trip to the Greater Middle East -- with a long stay in Iraq -- where the poor man
Indeed, there
contracted the deadly virus that led eventually to his demise? Military quagmires
is an element of the theatre of the absurd in the spectacle of Kagan,
the geo-strategist who was the leading intellectual cheer-leader for
the decisions to invade Iraq and launch the Freedom Agenda in the
Middle East that were so central to the erosion of US global position.
He is now lashing out at others for their lack of faith in American power that he had so helped to diminish
so much. Kagan also fails to recognise that the policies he and other neo-conservative intellectuals
advocated -- that were embraced by the Administration of George W Bush -- played directly into the hands
of the Chinese, who were delighted to see the Americans drown in the military quagmires in the Middle
East while they were spending their time and resources in opening new markets for their trade and
investments, including in Afghanistan and Iraq where security was being provided by US troops. And
much of what Kagan writes about the potential threat to the post-World War II international
system created by the US makes little sense. The policies pursued by the second
Bush Administration based on the unilateral and pre-emptive strikes
against against real and imaginary aggressors with weapons of mass
destruction, and right and obligation of the US to do 'regime
changes' in other sovereign nation-states, were the ones that ran
contrary to the set of international rules promoted by the US and its
allies after 1945. In fact, these policies violated international rules
established by the Westphalian Peace of 1648 to which China and
Russia continue to adhere (hence, their most recent opposition to Western military
intervention in Syria). Moreover, it seems that Kagan believes that continuing
to accumulate power and using it more often is the surest way
prevent American decline. Preoccupied with the high-brow discourse about high-power he
refrains from engaging in such 'boring' subjects, like how to fix America's fiscal problems, to revive its
manufacturing base, and to reform its ailing public education system. All Americans need to do is to
It is quite depressing to see that
believe in their power -- and it will come to be.
despite the fact that Kagan the geo-strategist has been so wrong in
the past and helped to contribute so much to the decline in
American power, he continues to be taken seriously by American
policymakers and the media
 AT: Liberal Peace Theory

Their evidence isnt supported by studiesempirical

evidence proves the correlation between unipolarity and
peace is negative

Monteiro 12
(Nuno P. Monteiro, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, Why Unipolarity Is Not
Peaceful, International Security, Vol. 36, No. 3,
www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ISEC_a_00064)//TR

In contrast, the question of unipolar peacefulness has received virtually no attention. Although the past decade has witnessed a
resurgence of security studies, with much scholarship on such conflict-generating issues as terrorism, preventive war, military
occupation, insurgency, and nuclear proliferation, no one has systematically connected any of them to unipolarity. This silence
is unjustified. The first two decades of the unipolar era have been anything but peaceful. U.S. forces have
been deployed in four interstate wars: Kuwait in 1991, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan from 2001 to the present, and Iraq
between 2003 and 2010.22 In all, the United States has been at war for thirteen of the twenty-two years
since the end of the Cold War.23 Put another way, the first two decades of unipolarity, which make up less than 10 percent of
U.S. history, account for more than 25 percent of the nations total time at war.24 And yet, the theoretical consensus continues
to be that unipolarity encourages peace. Why? To date, scholars do not have a theory of how unipolar
systems operate.25 The debate on whether, when, and how unipolarity will end (i.e., the debate on durability) has all but
monopolized our attention. In this article, I provide a theory of unipolarity that focuses on the issue of unipolar peacefulness
rather than durability. I argue that unipolarity creates significant conflict-producing mechanisms that are
likely to involve the unipole itself. Rather than assess the relative peacefulness of unipolarity vis--vis bipolar or multipolar
systems, I identify causal pathways to war that are characteristic of a unipolar system and that have not been developed in the
extant literature. To be sure, I do not question the impossibility of great power war in a unipolar world. Instead, I show how
unipolar systems provide incentives for two other types of war: those pitting the sole great power
against another state and those involving exclusively other states. In addition, I show that the type of
conflict that occurs in a unipolar world depends on the strategy of the sole great power, of which there are three. The rst two
defensive and offensive dominancewill lead to conflicts pitting the sole great power against other states. The third
disengagementwill lead to conflicts among other states. Furthermore, whereas the unipole is likely to enter unipolarity
implementing a dominance strategy, over time it is possible that it will shift to disengagement. I support my theory
with several empirical examples. These do not aim at systematically testing my argument, for two reasons. First, the
unipolar era is too short a period to test structural mechanisms. Second, the United States has consistently implemented a
strategy of dominance, limiting opportunities to test my claims on the consequences of disengagement.26
 AT: Obama Means Were Good

Focus on Obama as black success recreates the binary of

bloody and noble savages living in urban jungles

Mrquez 2012 (John D. , The Black Mohicans:

Representations of Everyday Violence in Postracial Urban
America, American Quarterly, Volume 64, Number 3,
September 2012, pp. 625-651, d/l: muse) //jl

Nearly two hundred years later America has yet to eliminate all the
bloody savages from its land. In descriptions of urban jungles like
Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and New York City, these two figures reappear both in
sociological explanations, in media stories of uncountable young
deaths, and in celebrations of black success. For instance, urban
ethnographies, like Andersons, reproduce the paired bloody
versus noble savages, in the distinction between decent
families and street poeple. Above all, he explains, this environment means that
even youngsters whose home lives reflect mainstream valuesand the majority of homes in the
While still
community domust be able to handle themselves in a street oriented environment.25
living the scene of nature, in postracial America, like in Fenimore
Coopers reborn United States, black and Latino boys raised by
decent families, with their reflection of middle class values, can
hope to follow in the footsteps of Americas first black president.
President Obamas image elevates the veneer of success
discourse to another extreme. His exceptional story of decency and
black success renders postracial stories of racial overcoming
credible. Much like Fenimore Coopers Hawkeye, and unlike other black leaders (like
Reverend Jeremiah Wright), Obama is also virtuous, embraces (racial) peace, is
progress-oriented, and is intelligent. Hybridity (in his case physical)
also functions to sustain his claim as a capable leader. He stresses
his own whiteness to symbolize a lack or revengefulness about past
antiblack racism. Like the moral vision of Mohicans, he also stood poised to progress beyond the
scene of nature. Like Hawkeye, Obama is depicted to understand two worlds, an
understanding derived from his biracial body. As Obama explains in his speech
titled A More Perfect Union, I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I
was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Pattons Army
during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth
Obama is the hybrid, the neo-Mohicanblack
while he was overseas.26
enough, white enough, and intelligent enough to guide a postcivil
rights nation. Like Fenimore Coopers Hawkeye, he appears as a coalition builder with whites,
representing a type of nobility. Like Uncas, he is also often depicted as a white man inhabiting a nonwhite
News coverage routinely
phenotype. Cause Clbre: The Media and the New Mohicans
juxtaposes the image of Obama as a signifier of racial progress with
the images and sounds of the latest black or Latino youth murdered
by a peer. This juxtaposition, I argue, has serious impact on the very
situation of racial oppression that Obamas election had supposedly
reconciled. Frequently returning pairings such as bloody savage
versus noble savage, Mohican versus Huron, and street versus
decent derive from the same socio-logical schema, which produces
the subaltern, condemns the subaltern, and renders the subaltern
expendable while showing that a few of them, the ones already
morally elevated, deserve access to economic opportunities and the
state protections available to middle-class Americans.
 AT: Identity Politics Bad

Black and Latino/a subjectivities is distinct from the static

conceptions of identity it begs a larger question of
meaning

John D. Marquez, 2013 Black-Brown Solidarity Racial

Politics in the New Gulf South (Assistant Professor of
African American and Latino/a Studies. He Received a
Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies. at the University of California, San
Diego).
I
BuildingonTreysintervention,hisblurringoftheboarderbetweenblackandLatino/asubjectivities,andtheinspirationofgangstarapperslikeIceCube,inthisbook

examine thehistoric and contemporary circumstance that have produced recent fusionsofblackandLatino/a
subjectivities intheHoustonmetropolitanarea.Someofthosefusions haveresultedinexpressionofpolitical
solidarityorcollectiveresistanceofthetwogroups,acounterhegemonicassemblage.InthisinterdisciplinarystudyI
analyzeexpressivecultures,ethnographicdata,popularmedia,historicalarchives,oralhistories,legaldocuments,andtheoriesaboutracialpowertoarguethathoustonslocation

blacksand
on the southern Gulf Coast and its history as a region shaped by racial dynamics of the Old South have created a condition through which

Latinos/ashave sharedacommonexperienceastargetsofstatesanctionedviolence andnumerousother

forms of discrimination. That shared struggle has produced a wariness of racial power or a

subjectivitythatoftenbondsthetwogroupstogetherpolitically.Thesebondsareevidentacrossadiversediscursive
terrainincludingrecentgrassroots,activists,andantiracistmovementsHecontinues Theconceptofsubjectivityherevariesfrom

thatofidentity: the latter is a more common term used to describe

how oppressed groups relate to oppression. Identity is a static
concept suggesting a fixed and homogeneous social consciousness
unable to maneuver through time, circumstance, and discursive
schema. The concept of subjectivity complicates this description and
the presupposition that structure its political significance or
meaning.SubjectivityisatermthatwasintroducedbyMichelFoucaultascritiqueofneoMaristconceptualizationsoftherelationshipbetweenthestateand
ideologybyAntonioGramsciandLouisAlthusser.While thetermidentityisusedtofixagazeupontheoppressed in

order to understand the relations of power, Foucault developed the term subjectivity to call(s) critical attention to

oppressionitselfandtoawarinessofpowerwithinthepsychesofindividualsinsociety.Thiswarinessisirreducibletoamodesofproductionnarrativeandinstead
reflectsanarrayofoppressiveorcontrollingconditions,disciplinaryprocessesbasedonthemeaningascribedtobodies,spaces,andbehaviorsandthenormativediscoursesand
socialcategoriesinwhichtheyaresituated.Foucaultdescribestheseprocessesassubjectification,alsocommonlyreferredtoassubjection,aconditionormodalityofpower
thatisalsoacomponentofwhathehascalledgovernmentalityandthat,moreimportantly,generatessubjectivityindiscretewaysaccordingtotimeandspace.Althoughrace
wasnevercentraltoFoucaultsconceptualization,theyarestillusefulforunderstandingtheeffectsofsubjectificationonthedomainofracialpoliticsinmodernnationstates.
KellyOliverhaseffectivelyarguedtheimportanceofscrutinizingsubjectivitiesindebatesregardingoppressionwithincolonialorpostcolonialformations.Likewise,subject
positionscannotbedelinkedfromsubjectivitiesifoneistrulyinterestedinunveilingthewaysanyformofoppression,andmorespecificallythoseformsofqualifyasviolently
traumatic,shapetheagencyandimaginationoftheoppressedandultimatelyinfluencethemultiplewaystheyproduceandperformracialpoliticsinthepublicrealm.Ananalysis
ofsubjectpositionwithoutcriticalscrutinyofhowthepsycheinterpretsandshapesbehavioralresponsestoinjusticeresultsindepictionoftheotherorsubalternasamereartifact
ofvictimizationandnotasanactiveagentwhoparticipatesinandoftenrestructuresthedomainofpolitics.Oliverexplainsthesubjectivityisexperiencedasthesenseofagency
andresponseabilityconstitutedintheinfiniteencounterwithothernesstherealmofethics.Andalthoughsubjectivityislogicallypriortoanypossiblesubjectposition,inour

myprimarygoal inwritingthisbookistodemonstrate
experience,thetwoarealwaysinterconnected.Consideringsuchaninterconnection,

how collective memories of similarformsofsubjectionhavefunctionedasanimaginative adhesive that

oftenbondsthesubjectivitiesoftworacialsubjectpositions,blackandLatino/a,resultingin
acompoundsubjectivityaswellasatransracialandtransethicsubjectpositionfromwhichblacksandLatinos/ascanandoftendocollectivelyengagein
newformsofresistance. Thesecompounds havebecomemorefrequentduetodemographicshifts causedby

theglobalpoliticaleconomicdemandsofneoliberalism oftenreferredtoasglobalization and

thebroaderassortmentoftimeandspacecompressionneoliberalismhasproduced.Neoliberalismhasintensifiedtherateatwhichinformationisexchangedandthetransnational
immigrationpatternsfromtheglobalSouthtotheglobalNorth.IthasinitiatednewpatternsofresidentialsegregationincitiesintheurbanNorthwithinwhichmanyimmigrants
fromtheglobalSouthhavetakenupresidenceasneighborsofexistingminoritygroups.
 AT: Opacity
Opacity within groups prevents coalition building to
confront prejudice

Nagda 6 Professor @ U of Washington (Biren Ramesh,

"Breaking Barriers, Crossing Borders, Building Bridges:
Communication Processes in Intergroup Dialogues,"
Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 62, No. 3, 2006, pp. 553
576)
The existing research in intergroup contact and education has focused primarily on pedagogical and
psychological processes. Yet, recent work suggests the importance of a third conceptualization of process,
communication processes, centering on the situational context and interactions people have within the
personal sharing in a
intergroup encounter. Yeakley (1998), for instance, found that
supportive environment distinguished participants in intergroup
encounters who had positive experiences from those who had
negative ones. Furthermore, the extent of intimacy of personal sharing in the communication
determined the depth of intergroup connection that can result. Consistent with this observation, Nagda
and Zuniga (2003) examined the significance of dialogic engagement, defined as speaking, listening,
The more the participants valued dialogic
and asking questions.
engagement, the more positive they were on a variety of outcomes:
thinking more about their racial identities, better perspective taking
abilities, more comfort in communicating across differences, and
more motivated to bridge differences. Involvement in such
interactive communication also fosters comfort in
interracial/interethnic situations, learning from diverse peers, and
reduction in unconscious prejudice immediately after sustained
intergroup encounters (Werkmeister-Rozas, 2003; Yeakley, 1998).

Blackness is always already opaque; their indirect speech

as opacity promotes white elitism

Walter 2011 (Christina [University of Maryland, College

Park] Review: Ashes Taken for Fire, d/l: muse) //jl
Bell's study specifically investigates how modernism thematizes the conflict between an originary, fluid
subjectivity whose sensorium bears "contravening material/cultural/historical inscriptions" (12) and the
social "imperatives of positionality" (14) that pressure the subject to abandon the "experimentality of its
own experience" in favor of an illusory social coherence and belonging (2). Bell argues that
modernism not only understands this chaotic subjectivity as "a
sphere of unbound improvisation and possibility," it works to
develop an idiom that can capture this potential by making affective
materiality the impetus for its stylistic colors, contours, fragments,
[End Page 194] sounds, and silences. Ultimately, Bell contends that
modernism identifies those subjects who live out their multiplicity as
existing in a "zone of blackness" that signifies death, opacity, social
abjection, and fugitivity from self-mastery (3). These resistant subjectsthe
anthropomorphic model of which, Bell argues, is racial blacknessinternalize their exclusion from the
"legislating zone of 'normativity'" and so are indifferent to social recognition (31). Formal modernism, Bell
suggests, mirrors the threat of such indifference to cultural norms by enacting the "excess of meaning that
over-burdens every term" by which characters announce their "completeness" (11). Bell's reading
convincingly challenges critics who center modernism on a self-contained "I" removed from social reality,
showing that modernist aesthetics refuses "to reduce itself to the neutralized function of mere
representation" and instead locates transformative power in the body and its figuration (5). Modernism's
anti-identitarian politics thus abrogates "any pretense to solution" and dislocates itself from "mythic
continuity" and "affirmative belonging" (6). Ashes Taken for Fire has three major parts. The first reexamines
British literary impressionismoften seen as solipsisticvia Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus" and
Woolf's Jacob's Room, tracing how this movement mimes the elusiveness of the subjective void and the
construction of social identity over it. Conrad's novel, Bell argues, uses the interactions between racially
black characters, Donkin and James Wait, and their white shipmates to read two styles of social dealings
with chaotic subjectivity. Donkin preys on his shipmates by exchanging a performance of social abjection
for material assistance, while Wait, by contrast, remains utterly unresponsive to every "applied designation
by which he would be interpellated" (49), leading his shipmates to both fear and desire him as the
elimination of the difference against which they define themselves. Through Jacob's Room, Bell
underscores the role of modernist idiom in embracing such a fractured subjectivity. The shifting focalization
indirect discourse through which Woolf depicts protagonist Jacob Flanders stages
and free
opacity, even though Jacob himselfacting as an elite white maleworks
subjective disorder and
to identify and thereby limit others who dwell happily in a realm of
chaotic subjectivity.

Opacity gets co-opted into a logic of bigotry

Wachter-Grene 2011 (Kirin, Review: Sexton, Jared.

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of
Multiracialism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. d/l:
muse) //jl

While these are powerful arguments about multiracialism's bend

towards revisionist history, I was left wondering how these astute assessments translate
into contemporary interracial sexual relationships. The fact that Sexton seemingly categorizes the
interracial sex act as always implicitly a product of violence or sexualized racism is troubling. One sharp
one might misinterpret
criticism of this book is that if one is not a careful reader,
Sexton's strong critique of multiracial politics as advocating bigotry
towards multiracial individuals or interracial couples. This is perhaps
due to the occasional opacity of Sexton's language or the difficulty
of the theoretical quandaries themselves. I was left with many questions after
reading Sexton's work, most notably, are all mixed race individuals and all interracial couples, according to
Sexton's argument, always already implicated in a racist multiracial politics even against their wills or
knowledge? Sexton suggests that all "healthy" (i.e., socially recognized) interracial relationships feel the
need to define themselves in opposition to pathological constructions of interracial sexuality (175). Is this a
fair assessment?

Opacity allows for ignoring the pain of black life

Marshall 2012 (Stephen H. [Associate Professor of

political theory in The Departments of American Studies
and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University
of Texas at Austin] The Political Life of Fungibility, d/l:
muse) //jl
By racialization of bare life I want to bring two things into focus:
firstly, the way race facilitates the production and occlusion of
discrepant valuations of human life in the US and throughout the
black diaspora or, as Judith Butler explains, derealizes black life from
prevailing established ontolog[ies].2 Because certain racialized others have fallen
outside the human as it has been naturalized in its western mold, Butler notes, our cultural frames for
And secondly, I
thinking the human set limits on the kind of losses we can avow as loss.
reference blackness as a distinctive precariousness of life
engendered on the one hand by structured and unequal
vulnerabilities to dishonor, state violence, and racial terror and on
the other by the persistence of what Saidiya Hartman describes as
the opacity of black pain.3 Class, gender, and sexuality differentially position the black
body to varying forms of racialized injury. However, as Hartman notes, black suffering is
elusive in the context of a racist optics in which black flesh is
itself identified as the source of opacity, the denial of black
humanity, and the effacement of sentience. George Shulman
employs the racial state of exception as a term to describe how
the elusive suffering and illegible violation of blacks is the predicate
for the subjectivization of sovereign whiteness. To make explicit the political
constitution and existential implications of this relation, I employ the term, racialization of bare life.4
Paradigmatic of this ghastly transnational predicament is public
sanction of or disinterest in blacks acute vulnerabilities to mass
incarceration, homicide, police brutality, HIV infection, infant
mortality, and under-education, among other things. 5 The killing of Trayvon
Martin bears particularly eloquent witness. Martin, an unarmed 17 year old was shot dead at intermediate
range by a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain and dispatched without dignity to the morgue as a
John Doe where he would lay for over 24 hours. Five hours after the shooting, Martins assailant would be
released by the Sanford police department uncharged and under no suspicion. Presumed guilty by his
shooter and the police, Martin would have been added to the staggering list of forgotten victims of violent
death at the hands of law enforcement or their auxiliaries were it not for the heroic discipline, political
savvy, and tireless efforts of his parents Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin and their supporters in print and
electronic media.

PERM: Embrace the aff as a performance of spectacular

opacity. This can refashion master narratives to affirm a
black feminist praxis.

Buckner 2012 (Jocelyn L. [assistant professor of theatre

studies at Chapman University] Spectacular Opacities:
The Hyers Sisters Performances of Respectability and
Resistance1, d/l: muse) //jl
Yet what remains missing from the Hyers Sisters record is a critical contextualization of their work as part
of the movement of resistant performance being developed by African American performers in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this period of postwar freedom, reconstruction, South-to-
North migration, industrial revolution, and trans-Atlantic cultural exchange, African American artists
developed performances that sought to redefine blackness for audiences, create new paradigms of racial
and self-definition, and enact resistance towards the systemic racism and residual subjugation of the
peculiar institution of American slavery. In Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and
Brooks argues for a broad, cross-disciplinary reading
Freedom, 1850-1910,
of black performances of subjectivity through the lens of what she
calls spectacular opacity, a way to think of these acts as opaque,
as dark points of possibility that create figurative sites for the
reconfiguration of black and female bodies on display. A kind of
shrouding, this trope of darkness paradoxically allows for corporeal
unveiling to yoke with the (re)covering and rehistoricizing of the
flesh. Dense and spectacular, the opaque performances of
marginalized cultural figures call attention to the skill of the
performer who, through gestures and speech as well as material
props and [End Page 309] visual technologies, is able to confound and
disrupt conventional constructions of the racialized and gendered
body. [T]his cultural phenomenon emerges at varying times as a
product of the performers will, at other times as a visual obstacle
erupting as a result of the hostile spectators epistemological
resistance to reading alternative racial and gender representations.
(Brooks 8) Brookss study hails a phenomenon of black performance that
is created or read as a politically powerful renegotiation of black
identity. Such events push against centuries of race, class, and
gendered subordination to enable an emersion of empowered black
subjects into the new modern era of American culture. This essay
contributes to previous historical studies of African American performance and furthers discourse on
spectacular opacity by analyzing the Hyers Sisters radical efforts to transcend social
limits of gender, class, and race in their early operatic concerts and three major theatrical
productions: Uncle Toms Cabin performed in a mixed-race cast; Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground
Railroad, a slavery-to-freedom epic written for the sisters by early African American female playwright
Pauline Hopkins; and Urlina the African Princess, the first known African American play set in Africa. As
singers they were heralded as musical prodigies and impressed audiences with their vocal prowess and
command of Western classical traditions. As actors they pushed boundaries of acceptable and expected
roles for black performers by developing works that moved beyond stereotypical caricatures of black life.
As sisters, they seized the familial advantage afforded them by being born into what W. E. B. Du Bois later
called the Talented Tenth of the free African American community, and committed their personal and
professional lives to the cause of racial uplift in the turbulent and transitional years of the Reconstruction
era. Their professional work and their carefully constructed public representations of their personal
respectability placed them squarely within the tradition of nineteenth-century black artists, activists, and
By
scholars seeking to reappropriate and redefine white-constructed images of African Americans.
employing traditionally white, Western aesthetic forms, the Hyers
subverted and refashioned master narratives about blackness,
enacting moments of spectacular opacity in which alternate realities
and possibilities for African Americans were rehearsed, imagined,
and achieved. These positive representations of African American
life and love were strategic acts of resistance against the rampant
racism of late-nineteenth-century America. The Hyers Sisters pioneering productions enabled them to
create early opportunities for themselves and other black artists in a white, male-dominated industry, and
helped lay the groundwork for the growth and development of black theatre and popular entertainment in
the decades to come.
 AT: Pinker
Pinkers analysis is useless- entirely ignores role of
population growth, which accounts for all of the change
he cites
Flynn 11 (Julian Flynn, Financial Times, Angel thesis hangs on
overpopulation, December 7, 2011, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/30bf527c-1cfb-11e1-a134-
00144feabdc0.html#axzz1h1lHx8gS)

Sir, Gideon Rachmans article The long shadow of the 1930s (Comment, November 29) refers to Steven Pinkers new
book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which makes the case that, statistically, humans have become
less violent over the course of history. Mr Pinker deals with percentages of the global population . For
example, his book states that the second world war ranks as only the ninth worst atrocity in history. Because he deals with percentages
of the global population, his thesis absolutely depends on the exponential overpopulation of our species.
The total of 50m-plus second world war dead only seems smaller because of the exponential
growth of the human population. Mr Pinkers lets be grateful for whats gone right message depends entirely
on another issue (rampant overpopulation) which is an extremely serious sword of Damocles hanging over our planet.

Wars increasing
Hadley 11 (Editor of History Today Kathryn, Alarming increase in wars, July,
http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2011/07/alarming-increase-wars)//TR

New research by Professors Mark Harrison from the University of Warwick and Nikolaus Wolf from Humboldt University has
revealed that between 1870 and 2001, the frequency of wars between states increased steadily
by 2% a year on average. Between 1870 and 1913, the frequency of pairwise conflicts (the numbers of pairs of countries involved in
conflicts) increased on average by 6% per year. The frequency of wars increased by 17% per year in the period of the First
and Second World Wars, and by 31% per year during the Cold War. In the 1990s, the frequency of wars
between states rose by 36% per year. Professor Mark Harrison explained how: The number of conflicts has been rising on a
stable trend. Because of two world wars, the pattern is obviously disturbed between 1914 and 1945 but remarkably, after 1945 the
frequency of wars resumed its upward course on pretty much the same path as before 1913. The graph below illustrates this increase
in pairwise conflicts. It only includes wars between states and does not include civil wars. Conflicts range from full-
scale shooting wars and uses of military force to displays of force (sending warships and closing borders,
for example). Although Harrison and Wolfs study does not measure the intensity of violence, it reflects the
readiness of governments to settle disputes by force.

Modernity and Enlightenment rationalism have radically

increased violence and conflicthumanistic advances
have only served to sanitize state violence.

Hart 12
Hart, Ph.D. Former UVA Professor, 2012
(David Bentley, "The Precious Steven Pinker," First Things,
http://www.firstthings.com/issue/2012/12/december)//TR

I sometimes find it hard to believe that Steven Pinker really believes what he believes; surely, I
think, some occult agency in his mind is forcing his conscious intellect to accept premises and
conclusions that it ought to reject as utterly fantastic. I suppose, though, that that is ones normal
reaction to ardent expressions of a faith one does not share; at its worst, it is just a reflex of
supercilious fastidiousness, like feeling only an annoyed consternation at having to step over
someone in the throes of mystical ecstasy in order to retrieve an umbrella from the closet. A
healthier sentiment would be generous and patient curiosity, a desire to learn whether the believer
has in factguided by a rare purity of heartglimpsed truths to which ones own cynicism or
coarseness has blinded one. Not, of course, that Pinker would care for that way of putting the
matter. He detests religion and thinks of himself as a champion of something he blandly calls
reason (that is the most enchantingly guileless aspect of his creed). In his latest book, The
Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, he devotes over seven hundred pages
to arguing the case that modernity, contrary to the common impression, has seen a steep decrease
in every kind of violencedomestic, political, criminal, and martialas a result of a variety of
causes, but principally because of the triumph of Enlightenment ideas. It is a simple narrative,
and at many points a painfully simplistic one, but it is clear and bracing and merits sympathetic
consideration. Whether Pinker himself does the tale justice, however, is debatable. He is
definitely not an adept historian; his view of the pastparticularly of the Middle Ages, which he
tends to treat as a single historical, geographical, and cultural momentis often not merely crude,
but almost cartoonish (of course, he is a professed admirer of Norbert Elias). He even adduces
two edited images from Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch as illustrations of the everyday texture of
life in medieval Europe, without noting that they come from a set of astrological allegories about
planetary influences, from which he has chosen those for Saturn and Mars rather than, say, Venus
and Jupiter. (Think what a collection of Saturnine or Martial pictures he might have gathered
from more recent history.) It is perfectly fair for Pinker to call attention to the many brutal
features of much of medieval life, but one would have more confidence in his evenhandedness if
he acknowledged at least a few of the moral goods that medieval society achieved despite its
material privations. He says nothing of almshouses, free hospitals, municipal physicians,
hospices, the decline of chattel slavery, the Pax Dei and Treuga Dei, and so on. Of the more
admirable cultural, intellectual, legal, spiritual, scientific, and social movements of the High
Middle Ages, he appears to know nothing. And his understanding of early modernity is little
better. His vague remarks on the long-misnamed Wars of Religion are tantalizing intimations of
a fairly large ignorance. Perhaps such complaints miss the point, though. Pinkers is a story not of
continuous moral evolution, but of an irruptive redemptive event. It would not serve his purpose
to admit that, in addition to the gradual development of the material conditions that led to
modernity, there might also have been the persistent pressure of moral ideas and values that
reached back to antique or medieval sources, or that there might have been occasional
institutional adumbrations of modern progress in the Middle Ages, albeit in a religious guise.
He certainly would not want to grant that many of his own moral beliefs are inherited
contingencies of a long cultural history rather thandiscoveries recently made by the application of
disinterested reason. For him, modern cultures moral advances were born from the sudden and
fortuitous advent of the Age of Reason, whichaided by the printing pressproduced a
coherent philosophy called Enlightenment humanism, distilled from the ideas of Hobbes,
Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill. We know what he means:
not the dark side of the Enlightenment and the printing pressscientific racism, state
absolutism, Jacobinism, the rise of murderous ideologies, and so onbut the nice Enlightenment
of perpetual peace, the rights of man, and so on. Well, each to his or her own tribalism, I
suppose. It is pleasant to believe ones society is more enlightened or rational than all others,
and Pinker has every right to try to prove the point. He would be more convincing, though, if only
the central claim of his book were not so entirely dependent upon a statistical fiction. That is to
say, yes, of course modern societies have reduced certain kinds of brutality, cruelty, and injustice.
Modern technology makes it far easier to control crime. We have weapons both too terrifying to
use in open combat and so precise that we can kill at great distances, without great armies, out of
sight and mind. We have succeeded at reforming our own nations internally in ways that make
them ever more comfortable, less threatening, and more complacent. Our prison system is
barbaric, but not overtly sadistic, and our more draconian laws rarely inconvenience the affluent
among us. We have learned to exploit the labor and resources of poorer peoples not by enslaving
them, but merely by making them beneficiaries of globalization. The violence we commit is
more hygienic, subtler, and less inconvenient than that committed by our forebears. Even so, the
numbers do not add up. Pinkers method for assessing the relative ferocity of different centuries is
to calculate the total of violent deaths not as an absolute quantity, but as a percentage of global
population. But statistical comparisons like that are notoriously vacuous. Population sample sizes
can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the
percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls
where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that
exterminates one million of its citizens. And even where the orders of magnitude are not quite so
divergent, comparison on a global scale is useless, especially since over the past century modern
medicine has reduced infant mortality and radically extended life spans nearly everywhere
(meaning, for one thing, there are now far more persons too young or too old to fight). So
Pinkers assertion that a person would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the
Middle Ages than now is empirically meaningless. In the end, what Pinker calls a decline of
violence in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant
increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it: So what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us
about progress or Enlightenmentor about the past, the present, or the future? By all means,
praise the modern world for what is good about it, but spare us the mythology.
 AT: Realism Inevitable/Is Human Nature
Their frame of realism is not inevitable 9/11, berlin wall,
etc all prove focus on states as coherent entities is long
gone, we need to break away from conventional frames to
allow our analysis to keep up with changes in world their
dogmatic adherence to realism only distracts us from
changing global conditions

Busser 6
York Centre for International and Security Studies, PhD Cand. @ McMaster University, 2006
(Mark, The Evolution of Security: Revisiting the Human Nature Debate in International Relations, August,
Online: http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP40-Busser.pdf)

Unfortunately for Bradley Thayer, evolutionary arguments do not provide a simple and
incontestable ontological and epistemological foundations for revitalized realism. Since
arguments like Thayers draw on controversial scientific branches of sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology, which arguably assume the basic features of human nature they
seek to prove, the conclusions for political theory remain almost as scientifically arbitrary
as Morgenthaus assumption of an animus dominandi. In framing the problematic of their exploration, many
of these arguments assume an individualistic and egoistic human nature and question how
political relations might arise out of the mechanical dynamics of self-interest. As Mary
Clarks work demonstrates, this ignores important factors in the evolutionary development
of the human being. Since interpersonal, cultural, political ,and social influences have had a
large role in shaping the evolution of humans and our primate relatives, it is not such a
simple task to explain human nature based on rational actor models and mathematical
calculations. In contrast to the sociobiology and evolutionary psychologys depiction of human nature as biologically
determined, Clark argues that it is a societys construction of a story of human nature that
affects how people will imagine ways to live together, fulfilling basic human needs or not.
Biology is not destiny, she seems to argue, but what we believe about our biology threatens to
become our destiny if we allow it. This highlights the possibility that seemingly universal
traits like competition, aggression and egoism might be contingent on the weight we lend
them and not biologically determined. If we have a choice in the matter, it is possible to begin
conceiving of political possibilities for global social orders that do not depend on a
combative and competitive engagement with Others. In turn, this allows a reconsideration of
the conceptual lens through which to view security . If it is not programmed into our genes to be intolerant,
ethnocentric, and aggressive, then we can find ways to abandon the traditions that have normalized
such behaviours. Following Jim George and David Campbell, perhaps a new conception of
international relationships would serve better than the current paradigm, which is based on
traditional views of an aggressive and competitive human nature. It may be that, as Clark suggests,
conflict can only be mitigated when basic human needs are met. Doing so, it seems, would require a rethinking of how differences are
engaged with, interpreted and reconciled in both international and local societies. If we humans are not biologically destined to draw
lines between ourselves and others, then it is possible for us to escape conceptions of security that necessitate aggression against, or
protection from, outsiders. Perhaps the security long sought after in international relations will come
not from making societies secure from difference, but making difference secure within and
between states.
Their evolutionary arguments have no descriptive power-
they make logical leaps from individual actions to group
behavior and is littered with fallacies

Goodwin 10
(Professor at University of Ottawa, Evolution and Anarchism in International Relations: The Challenge of
Kropotkins Biological Ontology, Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2010 39: 417 )//TR

Thayers justification for applying evolutionary theory to Realism is to provide a verifiable

theoretical framework to reinvigorate the tradition. [67] To explain egoism, Thayer invokes
Dawkins selfish gene theory, which reduces the level of analysis to the gene as a self-
interested replicator.[68] Domination is explained through the biological production of dominance hierarchies in
competitive situations where particular individuals in groups achieve greater access to resources; and, the ubiquity of this model of
social organization in the animal kingdom suggests a generalisable principle of hierarchy that may contribute to an organisms level of
fitness.[69] This, he argues, accounts for human allegiance to the state, ideology and institutions[70].[71] Thayer offers three
characteristics of evolutionary theory that provide a better foundation for realism than the theological or metaphysical arguments
advanced by Niebuhr or Morgenthau: firstly, it meets Hempels criteria for Deductive-Nomological models of science and also holds
true to Poppers principle of falsification, secondly, it is widely accepted by the scientific community as a valid explanation for human
evolution, and thirdly, it supports the offensive realist position that, in the competitive environment of international anarchy, states
naturally seek to dominate one another.[72] These three characteristics of his epistemological foundation for realism can be criticized
within the scope of the argument I have presented above[73]; however, in keeping with the ontological thematic presented above it is
more instructive to highlight that his epistemological claims pre-determine his ontological primary to be at the individualor even
genelevel. It should come as no surprise that, true to his realist theoretical orientation, Thayer freely abstracts his
individualistic ontology up to the state level and can posit that interactions among states
existing in conditions of anarchy lead to conflict. It is in this notion of predetermined behaviour in anarchy
that concerns me most. Anarchy is a widely misconstrued term. It is often analogized with chaos in lay parlance[74], and the
implications from this semantic treatment connote a natural state of conflict. IR theorists, such as Waltz, rarely make the same mistake
of analogizing anarchy with chaos; however, the ontological assumptions they use analyze the phenomenon of anarchy in the
international system come to the same connotative conclusions that anarchy leads to disorder. Ashley argues that the concept of
anarchy has been given foundational truth status in International Relations, despite the nature of its arbitrary construction; the
discourse and ontology of the anarchy problematique is always in the process of being imposed.[75] Yet, it is in line with this
imposed political construction that the dichotomy of inside/outside and domestic/international arises, where it is incumbent upon the
sovereign to maintain order against the naturalized disorder outside of territorial boundaries.[76] Yet, Helen Milner is unconvinced of
the central importance of the concept of anarchy in understanding international politics.[77] Her arguments surround the ambiguity of
the term, and its tendency to reinforce the division between international and domestic politics. This division is analytically unhelpful
on heuristic grounds, insofar as it paints International Relations as a sui generis field where international politics is seen as unique
one is less likely to use the hypotheses, concepts, and questions about politics developed elsewhere.[78] Instead, Milner posits
anarchy to be a lack of perceived legitimacy in a centralized authority which regulate the
relations among political entitiesa definition that can be applied domestically and
internationally. However, Milner also stresses the value of the concept of interdependence in understanding relations among
states. Strategic interdependence, as she argues, serves to secure for an actor what he or she
wants through cooperation with others.[79]There are no preconditions of equality among the actors; thus, it is
conceptually independent from her definition of anarchy. Indeed, power relations operate separately from interdependence and one
cannot determine the extent of [actor] interdependence from the degree of hierarchy/anarchy present in their relationship.[80]
Interdependence is so integral in understanding political relations, however, that Milner notes that the contributors to Cooperation
Under Anarchy implicitly use the notion of strategic interdependence in iterated PD games despite their lack of acknowledgement of
its fundamental nature to the actors represented in their models.[81] While Milner acknowledges the crucial nature of including
notions of interdependence in political analysis, she stops short of problematising the root and logical consequences of
interdependence. Thus, interdependence becomes unquestioned in the same way as the assumptive causal force of anarchy
necessitating conflict. In addition, Milners interpretation of the form interdependence takes, namely the strategic interdependence of
cooperation among actors predicated on their respective individual benefits, takes the individual unit as its core ontological
assumption. However, to probe the root cause of such integral interdependence is to begin to form
an understanding of the imperative nature of sociality and the ontological implications of
this imperative social interaction. Where interdependence is as important to understanding
politics as hierarchical relationships, then ontology becomes the primary question of
political analysis at both the domestic and international levels. However, there has been a stunning silence
of anarchist voices in helping to interpret what anarchy in IR is really about. Anarchism is a social philosophy above all, and anarchy,
as it is conceived of in Anarchism, is typified by free association.[82] In stark contrast, the
anarchy in IR is not free
associationit is humans brought together under mutually incommensurable and
irreconcilable legal and authoritative frameworks known as states . As already noted, in Anarchist
philosophy it is near universally accepted that society precedes the state, but the free associations of society occur on a day-to-day
basis despite the looming presence of the statemorally, economically and militarilyin the lives of humans. This should encourage
us to consider the larger sociological implications that result from coercive legal frameworks at the state level. Namely, it is
through the codification and blanket application of specific modalities of cooperation that
forces individuals to cooperate in a restricted manner . Thus, Anarchism applied to IR begins its critique by
problematising the State. Reading into the ontological assumptions of Kropotkins style of Anarchism, both through his scientific and
political writings, provides us another way to consider how social interactions have taken place in our evolutionary past(s) and how
they might occur today. Adopting this holistic ontology also provides social possibilities. The holistic ontology assumes
that social interaction is both inevitable and necessary; thus, this provides a palette on
which an infinite number of social forms may be tried and tested. It is from our cognizance
of the processes of social forms that we can change them. Based on this ontology , MAT then
encourages us to shift our analytical focus from questions of how to achieve cooperation to
questions of what is the best way to cooperate. This transition from ontology, to
epistemology and ultimately to praxeology occurs sequentially.

Prefer our interpretation it takes into account group

cooperation- good science says youre wrong

Goodwin 11
(Professor at University of Ottawa, Presented at the 2011 Political Studies Association Annual Conference,
Biological Fatalism: The Politics of (De)Naturalising Conflict and(De)Problematising Cooperation)//TR

Theories produced by the scientific enterprise cannot be elevated above reproach this is so because,science, itself is necessarily
fallibist (Wight, 2006). This applies to not only the conclusions of themethodologies applied, but also to their interpretations.
Science generates and is generated by theoretical frameworks , which can be, in turn,
dependent on the cultural dimensions in which scientists find themselves . These theoretical
frameworks are employed to understand the complexities of reality in aparsimonious way. One way to facilitate parsimony and
disseminate scientific theories is the rhetoricaluse of metaphor. Metaphors provide a more digestible, simplified form for public
consumption. However,metaphors may act as a double-edged sword in this respect assisting in the explication of complextheories
(and their subsequent ramifications), but also confining interpretation of the metaphor to thecultural current in which it has been
generated. Darwins law of natural selection , within the grandernarrative of evolution, is not above these rhetorical
shackles. In the case of Darwins theory, Todes (1989) argues that Darwins prose was rich with metaphors,and one of those key
metaphors was the struggle for existence . Title of the third chapter of On theOrigin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life , the struggle for existence was a term used to contextualize the novel
concept of naturalselection, and juxtapose against artificial selection (1989: 8).While Darwin, himself, admitted the
complexity of interrelationships in nature represented by the struggle for existence
metaphor, he tended to diminish the impact of the environment on organisms, and instead
emphasized the relations between them. Indeed, Todes notes that Darwin described the Face of Nature as being a
surface packed with ten thousand sharp wedges when one is pummelled, anotherrelents. This zero-sum view of nature was due to
his perception of the natural world as a superfecundand plenitudinous entangled bank where overpopulation continually weighed
against the amount of resources (10).The Malthusian corollary to this perception of overpopulation was inter-organism
competition,but more specifically, competition between like forms. The words struggle and competition were used synonymously
by Darwin throughout Origin , along with vivid images of nature as war and being thegreat battle for life (11). Darwin hesitated to
elucidate the role of evolution with humans in Origin , but wrote extensively about the struggle for existence among humans in The
Descent of Man . Todes arguesthat this was due to the ideological outlook [he shared with] his class, circle, and family
anideological outlook firmly entrenched in Malthusian-inspired bourgeois world views (13).Russian intellectuals at the time
reacted negatively to this metaphor they saw it as the bold-face introduction of
Malthusianism and the British capitalist penchant for competition into evolutionary
theory.A mong the Russian camps reaction was to give a fragmented account of the struggle for existence as itfunctions in
nature; they concluded that the most Malthusian-inspired conclusions that Darwin drewupon those being overpopulation producing
conflict and the corollary of intraspecific competition tended to be exaggerated (Todes, 1989). The Russian camp rejected the
rhetoric surrounding the strugglefor existence metaphor, the population arithmetic of crude Malthusianism, the emphasis on intra-
speciesconflict. By today s standards, the dynamics of social systems are not given to replicate the Malthusianneo-classical
economic logic of supply vs. demand. The Malthusian assumptions are grounded in aconstant state of equilibrium within a closed
social system of a determinable resource supply.One particular Russian naturalist, Peter Kropotkin, launched the most
trenchant critique of theMalthusian bias in natural selection (1902). This critique centred
on his attempt to repudiate the axiom of competition among the members of the same
species. In place of this naturalised competition, Kropotkinsought to highlight the importance of naturalised cooperation which he
termed Mutual Aid. Mutual Aid Theory Peter Kropotkin, a former Russian prince, was a geographer, naturalist and anarchist. He
renounced hisroyal title after witnessing the disparity of wealth between the aristocrats and peasants of Tsarist Russia.His tumultuous
life was typified by revelatory expeditions to document geological and biologicalphenomena, imprisonment for his political
affiliations and declarations, and banishment from severalcountries (Morris, 2004).His most noted scientific work, Mutual Aid , was
first published as a series of five articles in response to T.H. Huxleys 1888 article in The Nineteenth Century , The Struggle for
Existence in HumanSociety. In that article, Huxley characterised the natural world as being on about the same level as agladiator s
show[where] the stronge st, the swiftest, and the cunningnest live to fight another day[and] no quarter is given (Huxley, 1888).
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution was laterconsolidated into book form for publication in 1902.While Mutual Aid was, itself, a
scientific work, it also had profound political implications in the same way that Huxleys article did. Huxley gave biological support
by way of natural selection to a Hobbesian-inspired conflict-ridden social order ; however, Kropotkin s Mu tual Aid Theory sketched
anegalitarian cooperation-contingent social order. These opposing perspectives of the natural social orderrepresented the classical
liberal and anarchist perspectives, respectively. Each perspective made its ownimplicit and expl icit political justifications based on
these biological insights. In the case of Huxleys re -telling of natural selection, an inherent state of conflict would require authority to
keep warringindividuals in check classical social contract theory. In contr ast to this, Kropotkin s Mutual Aid Theory
required no outside authority to enforce order since competition was the normal state of
affairs for mostliving organisms, especially humans Mutual Aid thus influenced subsequent anarchist social theory
viii ;and, Kr opotkin was well aware of the political implications of his theory: And how false, therefore, is the view of those who
speak of the animal world as if nothing were to be seen in it but lions and hyenasplunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh of their
victims! One might as well imagine that the whole of human life is nothing but a succession of war massacres ( 1902: 44).Much as
the name suggests, Mutual Aid Theory posits that organisms, in the face of harshecological conditions, engage in mutualism, as
opposed to competition, to ensure their survival. Glassman(2000) reduces Kropotkins Mutual Aid Theory into three principles: 1)
organisms struggle against theharsh conditions of their ecology, 2) species that engage in cooperation to overcome the difficulties
posedby their ecologies are successful, and 3) egoism becomes detrimental when cooperation is so crucial tosurvival (392). This
mutualism is based on a deep-seated instinct of solidarity, and Kropotkin dismissedthe idea
that mere emotions drove the practice of mutual aid. He writes: It is a feeling infinitely
wider than love or personal sympathy an instinct that has been slowly developed among
animals and men inthe course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals
and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and
the joys they can find in social life ( 1902: 11).Prior to the formation of his political convictions, Kropotkin was a
successfully practicingscientist and had been on several expeditions to the harsh Siberian wilderness (Todes, 1989: 123). Inaddition,
he wrote more than 50 articles for the Recent Science section of The Nineteenth Century on scientific subjects as widely varied as
the spectral analysis of stars, the experimental morphology of plants, the evolution of the eye, and artificial diamonds (125). On his
expeditions to Siberia, he observed that the sparsely populated forests of eastern Russia offered little support to Malthusian fears of
overpopulation. In reality, it was the harsh climate of Siberia and the reaction of the animals to this that led him to formulate his
theory. Where food resources were scarce, Kropotkin observed migration to occur ratherthan
intraspecific competition. He considered the act of migration itself to be a reflection of the enormous trust that individuals
of a species must have in each other, and this was derived from their inherent sociability (Kropotkin, 1902).

They mistake realism for international relations- its a

confused amalgam of multiple distinct narratives that
arent objective but deeply political- their perceptions of
international relations inevitably break down and fail

Heath 7
(Amelia, Professor at Newcastle University, Re-examining Core Concepts of Classical Realism: E.H. Carr,
Hans Morgenthau and the Realist Agenda, http://turin.sgir.eu/)//TR

The circumstance of ontological security created by the polemics of the Inter-Paradigm Debate in
International Relations
the culmination of the need for group identity and the need for epistemological legitimacy
led to the creation of Kenneth Waltzs structural neo-realism. In a struggle for identity,
rather than reconcile the narrative break that occurred between realists during the New
Great Debate, structural neo-realism merged all realist theorists together in one unified
heading without narrative reconciliation. The consequences of this realist unification without narrative
reconciliation for IR are that the classical/traditional narrative has been repetitively overlooked, causing an inconsistency in the legacy
realism as well as the large-scale misunderstanding and misinterpretation of classical and traditional realists such as E.H. Carr and
Hans Morgenthau. The narrative break between classical/traditional realism and scientific
realism, the reconciliation of which never occurred, both supports and sheds further light
on arguments made by other authors attempting to clarify misconceptions of political
realism in contemporary IR. Richard Ashley (1981) draws from John Herz (1976), by introducing the Habermasian
dialectical notion that differing practical and technical interests drive thinkers to 23 form the various statements that comprise political
realism (Ashley 1981: 208). Ashley acknowledges the obvious discrepancy between thinkers such as Morgenthau and thinkers such as
Waltz. Such interests are only the surface-level of a deep inconsistency noted between writings of classical/traditional authors and
contemporary perceptions of those authors as influenced by neo-realism. An additional criticism of neo-realism is that the important
roles of history and of ideas in the classical tradition have been misrepresented (or, indeed, not represented at all). Ashley (1984), Cox
(1981), and Walker (1987) argue for the reassessment of a historical approach to classical realism. Walker (1987), especially, connects
notions of historicity and historical circumstance with notions of temporality, change, and progress in classical realism. Williams
(2004, 2005) summarizes the consequences of a misconceived classical realism by neo-realism as an
eschewed view of morality, a reduction of freedom to determinacy, an ignorance of domestic
politics, and a denied possibility of progress. 28 Furthermore, Behr (2005, Forthcoming) and Williams (1996) put
philosophical arguments against contemporary perceptions of classical realism into theoretical context by re-examining key elements
of structural neo-realism such as anarchy and state autonomy through the classical realism of Thomas Hobbes. Findings
suggest that neo-realist anarchy and autonomy are predicated on a false notion that state
autonomy automatically ensures anarchy on the international level . 29 In fact, as is an above argument
of this paper, though state autonomy ensures a lack of moral authority at the international level, it does not mean there is a lack of
authority and governance all together. As is argued by Morgenthau and emphasized by Williams (2004), politics is its own, separate
sphere in which authority and governance come in the form of power. The most alarming consequence of the misconception of
classical and traditional realism is that the modern form of realism (neo-realism and its successors) at and as the centre of
International Relations (Der Derian 1995: 4) facilitates the view that neo-realism has come to represent IR itself, a view which also
excludes all alternative viewpoints and conflicting narratives from the discourse. Overcoming this view of neo-realism and truly
understanding IR as a discourse requires an understanding of the role of pouvoir-savoir in IR historical development and theoretical
creation. First, it must be acknowledged that political realism is not a unified approach to international politics that has developed
teleologically throughout history. Realism, before the First World War, did not exist, but was a scattered mass of occasionally
overlapping philosophical and political propositions. E.H. Carr brought these overlapping propositions together in order to examine
the historical role of power in politics. Traditional realists continued Carrs narrative of power, while scientific realists broke apart to
form a new and methodologically improved narrative. Contrary to the neo-realist implication, these two
narratives have never been, and indeed cannot be, reconciled. Political realism is not one
whole viewpoint, or narrative within the IR discourse. In the wake of post-modernism and
the advent of critical approaches to IR it is possible to see that, rather than by teleology, the
creation of structural neo-realism, and the view of political realism as a unified whole, has
been shaped by the power struggles within the discipline. The mutual enwrapping, interaction, and
interdependence of power and knowledge (Gordon 1980: 233) within International Relations has meant that dominant approaches, or
the groups with power, often dictate knowledge, which has manifested itself in non-discursive forms such as political institutions. In
other words, 25 polemics have dictated accepted and dominant narrative viewpoints of reality and, in turn, accepted and dominant
narrative viewpoints of reality have come to shape the institutions and mechanisms by which international politics is conducted.
Examples of this can be seen in structural neo-realist manifestations in American Foreign Policy both economic and political
during and since the Cold War. The US, especially in the later part of the twentieth century, believed in and acted according to its own
hegemony as influenced by such notions of great powers and structural balances from structural neo-realism. A first instance of
this can be seen in the protectionist tendencies of American trade policy, and the ways in which those protectionist tendencies have
shaped international trade agreements in the GATT and, later, the WTO. As US hegemony has shaped the multilateral trade
agreements of the WTO, it has also dictated the terms of international trade and multilateralism has become merely a euphemism for
the consensual international support of the hegemonic states own interests (Sen 2003). 30 Similarly, US perceptions of hegemony and
a protectionist mentality have influenced US-UN relations since the Cold War. It has been noted that the US has been both
ambivalent and often negative toward the UN promotion of values over interests (Malone 2003). The result of such wavering
support of the UN from the US often led to a UN power vacuum, and the dependence of the UN on the US in cases of international
crisis. Perhaps no one person in IR has understood the pouvoir-savoir circumstance better than E.H. Carr, whose Twenty Years Crisis,
as this paper attempts to explain, portrays the role of power in politics as a direct consequence of
circumstance, development and understanding of societal formation throughout history . As
more recent critical, postmodern, and constructivist
 AT: Retrenchment Bad b/c Decreases Heg
Attempting to preserve hegemony backfires---causes
counterbalancing and great power war

Jones 11
Bruce Jones 11, director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University,
director of the Managing Global Order project and a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at The
Brookings Institution, senior external advisor for the World Bank's World Development Report
2011 on Conflict, Security, and Development, consulting professor at the Center for
International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, March 14, 2011, Managing a
Changing World, Foreign Policy, online:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/14/building_the_new_world_order?page=full

On major questions of global economy and security,interests, not ideology or an anti-U.S. leadership strategy , are
driving emerging powers' shifting alliances. Despite efforts to find a West/Rest or
democratic/autocratic divide in international order, such divisions are not dominant thus
far. Cooperation on global finance and counterterrorism in no way guarantees cooperation on energy and climate, or regional security. The United States has been as likely
to find support from China as from Europe on many of the major challenges it confronts. At the Toronto meeting of the G-20, the United States, China, India and Brazil
banded against the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia on questions of stimulus versus fiscal restraint. The U.S. perspective on terrorism has been closer to the Indian
or Russian standpoint than to the European approach. The United States and Europe worked closely with Russia to persuade a reluctant China to join hands on Iran. On
climate change, the United States is no more closely aligned to Japan or Europe than it is to India or China. The Western alliance (but not a democratic alliance) lives on in
the
issues dominated by values debates-human rights, democracy promotion, and to a lesser degree, development. The result is a partial shift in the U.S. position. True,

United States no longer enjoys the status of unrivaled hyper-power that it maintained after the
end of the Cold War, or the status of "leader of the free world" that characterized its position in the western alliance during the Cold War. U.S.
dominance is dulled, but its influence remains substantial . With the change in the
structure of international order, the U.S. position has morphed into something equivalent to the position of
the largest minority shareholder in a modern corporation- a position not of control, but
of substantial influence . Its influence, however, has to be wielded in a new mode . With today's
power distribution, no one actor, and no one set of actors, commands an automatic majority of

"votes." Setting the rules of the game, solving crises and taking advantage of
opportunities requires coalitions among "shareholders." On any given vote among shareholders, the largest
minority shareholder can be outvoted if the rest band together-as the United States found in Copenhagen. But
by the same token, the largest shareholder, even if a minority shareholder, has more options

available to them than any other actor to forge temporary alliances to produce enough of a majority-sometimes a decisive majority-to
win a specific vote. The United States can work with India and African states to win a vote on peacekeeping issues, with China and Brazil to win a decision on financial
regulation, and with Russia and Europe on the management of Iran. No other state has anything like this range of tactical alliances available to them. This extends to
convening power. The largest minority shareholder cannot demand a shareholder meeting; but if they call for one, most other shareholders are likely to agree to attend. For
all of the fact of the prominence of the emerging powers in the G-20 response to the financial crisis, efforts by other states to generate a coordinated response floundered;
only the United State had the authority to convene the G-20 summit. Theoretically, India or China could have convened the Nuclear Security Summit-but it was the United
the United States can no longer get its way just by force of its own
States that did so. This is a complex game, where

position, or lead a stable alliance against a common threat. Crafting decisions requires
complex "voting alliances" that will need to be forged vote by vote, or issue by issue. This requires courting
relationships with a wide range of shareholders and a willingness to return favors of a variety of types. Still, it is a position of substantial influence. The comparative ease
with which the largest minority shareholder can pull together a coalition to reach a blocking majority confers a role that can best be described as "gravitational pull." No
other shareholder can afford to band permanently against you, lest it risk seeing its interests in the "board" vitally damaged. Some shareholders may occasionally be tempted
to play spoiler roles on individual votes, but if they push this too far they will provoke banding behavior by other shareholders protecting their interests-as China learned on
currency issues and Russia learned in its efforts to annex South Ossetia, roundly condemned by the emerging powers as well as the West. When this occurs, the others will

But this comparative advantage cannot be overplayed . If

look first to the largest minority shareholder to lead the way.

the United States attempts to portray its position as that of global hub , or if its strategy
were perceived to be one of a resurrection of dominance , it would likely backfire ,
triggering a deeper banding together of the other powers and middle powers
against the U.S. position . To succeed in wielding influence from its new, influential but less dominant position, the United
States needs a new mindset about strategy.
Our Muzaffar evidence proves that the way the Negative
constructs their impact scenarios is the same logic and
rhetoric used for years to further US neo-imperialism in
the Middle East: this neo-imperialism has resulted in
failed states, increased tensions, overall destabilization
and the formation of terror groups as a last resort to fight
these policies; essentially a geo-political factory of crises
to sustain the necessity of hegemony. Muzaffar explains
the original premise behind the War on Terror was
hegemonic expansion of control over land and resources,
specifically control over oil commodities and a key
strategic point to monitor Central Asia (much like how the
drones are currently being pitched as monitoring points
for the volatile Middle East). All of Bushs advisors had
specifically been planning and orchestrating a grand
scheme to manipulate Middle Eastern politics and
interests, including sabotaging the democratically elected
Hamas in Palestine and trying to replace it with a
leadership that is subservient to Israels interest,
attempting to eliminate an autonomous movement like
Hizbullah in Lebanon with the aim of bolstering a weak
pro-U.S. regime in Beirut, and targeting the independent-
minded government in Damascus.
And- This is already beginning to manifest in anti-
American sentiment within the originally pro-West Yemen,
as Yemeni daily reality turns into the site of an undeclared
US war: this is the cyclical turn of imperialism to produce
the crisis it then saves
Schwedler 9/27 (Jillian, [Professor of Political Science at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, and a member of the Editorial Committee of The Middle East
Research and Information Project, publishers of Middle East
Report] Is the U.S. drone program in Yemen working? 9.27.15
https://lawfareblog.com/us-drone-program-yemen-working //DF)
For al-Qaida, the drone program is a gift from the heavens. Its
recruiting narrative exploits common misperceptions of American
omnipotence, offering an alternative route to justice and
empowerment. Regardless of American perceptions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the
attacks, what Yemeni could now deny that the United States is waging
an undeclared war on Yemen? Most recently, this narrative of direct U.S.
intervention has been further substantiated by U.S. material and
intelligence support for the Saudi-led military campaign aimed at the
return to power of the unpopular and exiled-President Abed Rabbo Mansour
Hadi. Photographs of spent U.S.-made cluster bombs are widely
circulated. Nor have drone attacks ceased; alongside the often
indiscriminate Saudi-led bombing, American drones continue their
campaign of targeted assassination. One might think that the Saudi
attacks would not help al-Qaida, but it is contributing to al-Qaidas
growth in Yemen. The indiscriminate targeting of the Saudi-led
campaign undermines any sense of security, let alone Yemeni
sovereignty. And AQAP-controlled areas like the port of Mukalla are
not being targeted by Saudi or Gulf troops at all. The United States aims to take
up the job of targeting AQAP while the Saudi-led (and U.S.-backed) forces focus on defeating the Houthis
and restoring Hadi to power. But the overall situation is one in which those
multiple interventions in Yemen are creating an environment in
which al-Qaida is beginning to appeal in ways it never had before .
For these reasons, the U.S. use of drones to kill even carefully
identified AQAP leaders in Yemen is counterproductive: it gives
resonance to the claims of the very group it seeks to destroy. It
provides evidence that al-Qaidas claims and strategies are justified
and that Yemenis cannot count on the state to protect them from
threats foreign and domestic. U.S. officials have argued that the drone program has not
been used as a recruiting device for al-Qaida. But it is hard to ignore the evidence to the
contrary, from counterinsurgency experts who have worked for the U.S.
government to Yemeni voices like Farea Muslimi . Its not just that
drone strikes make al-Qaida recruiting easier, true as that probably
is, but that they broaden the social space in which al-Qaida can
function. America does not need to win the hearts and minds of Yemenis in the service of some
grand U.S. project in the region. But if America wants to weaken al-Qaida in
Yemen, it needs at a minimum to stop pursuing policies that are
bound to enrage and embitter Yemenis who might otherwise be
neutral. There is an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look
like a nail. The U.S. military let alone its drones is not the only tool on
which the United States can rely. But when the measure of success is
as narrow as the killing of a specific person, the tool gets used with
increasing frequency. Indeed, drone strikes have significantly expanded under the Obama
administration. It is crucial to see the bigger picture, the one in which
long-time Yemeni friends tell me of growing anti-U.S. sentiment
where there was previously very little. Public opinion toward
America has clearly deteriorated over the past decade, and to
reverse it may take much longer. But the use of drones to kill people
deemed enemies of the United States, along with the Saudi-led war
against the Houthis, is expanding the spaces in which al-Qaida is
able to function.

Stability through heg is a lie- the only empirics prove less

hegemony led to more peace

Fettweis 11 (Christopher J., 9/26/11, [Department of

Political Science, Tulane University], Free Riding or
Restraint? Examining European Grand Strategy,
Comparative Strategy, 30:316332, EBSCO //DF)
 there is no evidence to support a direct
It is perhaps worth noting that
relationship between the relative level of U.S. activism and
international stability. In fact, the limited data we do have suggest the
opposite may be true. During the 1990s, the United States cut back
on its defense spending fairly substantially. By 1998, the United States was
spending $100 billion less on defense in real terms than it had in 1990.51 To internationalists, defense
hawks and believers in hegemonic stability, this irresponsible peace dividend endangered both national
and global security. No serious analyst of American military capabilities, argued Kristol and Kagan,
doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet Americas responsibilities to itself and
if the pacific trends were not based upon
to world peace.52 On the other hand,
U.S. hegemony but a strengthening norm against interstate war, one
would not have expected an increase in global instability and
violence. The verdict from the past two decades is fairly plain: The
world grew more peaceful while the United States cut its forces . No
state seemed to believe that its security was endangered by a less-
capable United States military, or at least none took any action that would suggest such a
belief. No militaries were enhanced to address power vacuums, no
security dilemmas drove insecurity or arms races, and no regional
balancing occurred once the stabilizing presence of the U.S. military
was diminished. The rest of the world acted as if the threat of
international war was not a pressing concern, despite the reduction
in U.S. capabilities. Most of all, the United States and its allies were
no less safe. The incidence and magnitude of global conflict declined while the United States cut its
military spending under President Clinton, and kept declining as the Bush Administration ramped the
No complex statistical analysis should be necessary to
spending back up.
reach the conclusion that the two are unrelated. Military spending figures by
themselves are insufficient to disprove a connection between overall U.S. actions and international
stability. Once again, one could presumably argue that spending is not the only or even the best indication
of hegemony, and that it is instead U.S. foreign political and security commitments that maintain stability.
Since neither was significantly altered during this period, instability should not have been expected.
Alternately, advocates of hegemonic stability could believe that relative
rather than absolute spending is decisive in bringing peace . Although the
United States cut back on its spending during the 1990s, its relative advantage never wavered .
However, even if it is true that either U.S. commitments or relative
spending account for global pacific trends, then at the very least
stability can evidently be maintained at drastically lower levels of
both. In other words, even if one can be allowed to argue in the alternative
for a moment and suppose that there is in fact a level of
engagement below which the United States cannot drop without
increasing international disorder, a rational grand strategist would
still recommend cutting back on engagement and spending until that
level is determined. Grand strategic decisions are never final; continual adjustments can and
must be made as time goes on. Basic logic suggests that the United States
ought to spend the minimum amount of its blood and treasure while
seeking the maximum return on its investment. And if the current era of stability
is as stable as many believe it to be, no increase in conflict would ever occur
irrespective of U.S. spending, which would save untold trillions for an increasingly debt-
ridden nation. It is also perhaps worth noting that if opposite trends had unfolded, if other states had
reacted to news of cuts in U.S. defense spending with more aggressive or insecure behavior, then
If increases in
internationalists would surely argue that their expectations had been fulfilled.
conflict would have been interpreted as proof of the wisdom of
internationalist strategies, then logical consistency demands that
the lack thereof should at least pose a problem. As it stands, the only
evidence we have regarding the likely systemic reaction to a more
restrained United States suggests that the current peaceful trends
are unrelated to U.S. military spending. Evidently the rest of the world can operate
quite effectively without the presence of a global policeman. Those who think otherwise base their view on
faith alone.

Unipolarity is structured to incentivize conflict and bolster

dominance

Monteiro 12
Nuno P. Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity is Not
Peaceful, International Security, Winter 2012, Vol. 36, No. 3, p. 9-40

From the perspective of the overall peacefulness of the international system, then, no U.S.
grand strategy is, as in the Goldilocks tale, just right.116 In fact, each strategic option available to the
unipole produces significant conflict. Whereas offensive and defensive dominance will entangle it in wars against recalcitrant minor powers, disengagement
will produce regional wars among minor and major powers. Regardless of U.S. strategy, conflict will abound. Indeed, if my argument is correct, the significant level of
conflict the world has experienced over the last two decades will continue for as long
as U.S. power remains preponderant . From the narrower perspective of the unipoles
ability to avoid being involved in wars, however, disengagement is the best strategy. A
unipolar structure provides no incentives for conflict involving a disengaged
unipole . Disengagement would extricate the unipoles forces from wars against
recalcitrant minor powers and decrease systemic pressures for nuclear proliferation . There is,
however, a downside. Disengagement would lead to heightened conflict beyond the unipoles region and increase regional pressures for nuclear proliferation. As regards the unipoles grand strategy, then, the
choice is between a strategy of dominance, which leads to involvement in numerous conflicts, and a strategy of disengagement, which allows conflict between others to fester. In a sense, then,

strategies of defensive and offensive dominance are self-defeating . They create incentives
for recalcitrant minor powers to bolster their capabilities and present the United States with a
tough choice: allowing them to succeed or resorting to war in order to thwart them. This
will either drag U.S. forces into numerous conflicts or result in an increasing number of
major powers . In any case, U.S. ability to convert power into favorable outcomes peacefully will
be constrained.117 This last point highlights one of the crucial issues where Wohlforth and I
differthe benefits of the unipoles power preponderance. Whereas Wohlforth believes that the
power preponderance of the United States will lead all states in the system to bandwagon with the unipole, I
predict that states engaged in security competition with the unipoles allies and states for
whom the status quo otherwise has lesser value will not accommodate the unipole. To the contrary,
these minor powers will become recalcitrant despite U.S. power preponderance ,
displaying the limited pacifying effects of U.S. power . What, then, is the value of
unipolarity for the unipole? What can a unipole do that a great power in bipolarity or

multipolarity cannot? in the security realm unipolarity does not

My argument hints at the possibility thatat least

give the unipole greater influence over international outcomes .118 If unipolarity
provides structural incentives for nuclear proliferation, it may , as Robert Jervis has hinted, have within it
the seeds if not of its own destruction , then at least of its modification.119 For Jervis, [t]his raises the question of what would remain of a unipolar system in a
proliferated world. The American ability to coerce others would decrease but so would its need to defend friendly powers that would now have their own deterrents. The world would still be unipolar by most
measures and considerations, but many countries would be able to protect themselves, perhaps even against the superpower. . . . In any event, the polarity of the system may become less important.120 At
the same time, nothing in my argument determines the decline of U.S. power. The level of conflict entailed by the strategies of defensive dominance, offensive dominance, and disengagement may be
acceptable to the unipole and have only a marginal effect on its ability to maintain its preeminent position. Whether a unipole will be economically or militarily overstretched is an empirical question that
depends on the magnitude of the disparity in power between it and major powers and the magnitude of the conflicts in which it gets involved. Neither of these factors can be addressed a priori, and so a theory

my argument points to a paradox of

of unipolarity must acknowledge the possibility of frequent conflict in a nonetheless durable unipolar system. Finally,

power preponderance.121 By putting other states in extreme self-help, a systemic

imbalance of power requires the unipole to act in ways that minimize the threat it poses .
Only by exercising great restraint can it avoid being involved in wars. If the unipole fails
to exercise restraint , other states will develop their capabilities, including nuclear
weapons restraining it all the same .122 Paradoxically, then, more relative power does not
necessarily lead to greater influence and a better ability to convert capabilities into
favorable outcomes peacefully. In effect, unparalleled relative power requires unequaled
self-restraint .
 AT: Retrenchment Bad b/c Increases Heg
All of their evidence is in context of a single-action normal
means decrease in military presence. The 1AC instead
understand the underlying meta-narrative of global power
posturing that acts to critique soft power US hegemony as
well, which answers the main claim in their link evidence
that we will simply ignore other projections of US Heg
Attempting to preserve military presence backfires---
causes counterbalancing and great power war

Jones 11
Bruce Jones 11, director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University,
director of the Managing Global Order project and a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at The
Brookings Institution, senior external advisor for the World Bank's World Development Report
2011 on Conflict, Security, and Development, consulting professor at the Center for
International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, March 14, 2011, Managing a
Changing World, Foreign Policy, online:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/14/building_the_new_world_order?page=full

On major questions of global economy and security,interests, not ideology or an anti-U.S. leadership strategy , are
driving emerging powers' shifting alliances. Despite efforts to find a West/Rest or
democratic/autocratic divide in international order, such divisions are not dominant thus
far. Cooperation on global finance and counterterrorism in no way guarantees cooperation on energy and climate, or regional security. The United States has been as likely to
find support from China as from Europe on many of the major challenges it confronts. At the Toronto meeting of the G-20, the United States, China, India and Brazil banded
against the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia on questions of stimulus versus fiscal restraint. The U.S. perspective on terrorism has been closer to the Indian or Russian
standpoint than to the European approach. The United States and Europe worked closely with Russia to persuade a reluctant China to join hands on Iran. On climate change, the
United States is no more closely aligned to Japan or Europe than it is to India or China. The Western alliance (but not a democratic alliance) lives on in issues dominated by values
the United States no longer
debates-human rights, democracy promotion, and to a lesser degree, development. The result is a partial shift in the U.S. position. True,

enjoys the status of unrivaled hyper-power that it maintained after the end of the Cold War ,
or the status of "leader of the free world" that characterized its position in the western alliance during the Cold War. U.S. dominance is dulled, but

its influence remains substantial . With the change in the structure of international order,
the U.S. position has morphed into something equivalent to the position of the largest minority shareholder in
a modern corporation- a position not of control, but of substantial influence . Its influence,
however, has to be wielded in a new mode. With today's power distribution, no one actor, and no one set of
actors, commands an automatic majority of "votes." Setting the rules of the game, solving
crises and taking advantage of opportunities requires coalitions among "shareholders." On any
given vote among shareholders, the largest minority shareholder can be outvoted if the rest band together- as

the United States found in Copenhagen. But by the same token, the largest shareholder, even if a minority shareholder,

has more options available to them than any other actor to forge temporary alliances to produce enough of a majority-
sometimes a decisive majority-to win a specific vote. The United States can work with India and African states to win a vote on peacekeeping issues, with China and Brazil to win
a decision on financial regulation, and with Russia and Europe on the management of Iran. No other state has anything like this range of tactical alliances available to them. This
extends to convening power. The largest minority shareholder cannot demand a shareholder meeting; but if they call for one, most other shareholders are likely to agree to attend.
For all of the fact of the prominence of the emerging powers in the G-20 response to the financial crisis, efforts by other states to generate a coordinated response floundered; only
the United State had the authority to convene the G-20 summit. Theoretically, India or China could have convened the Nuclear Security Summit-but it was the United States that
the United States can no longer get its way just by force of its own position,
did so. This is a complex game, where

or lead a stable alliance against a common threat. Crafting decisions requires complex
"voting alliances" that will need to be forged vote by vote, or issue by issue. This requires courting relationships with a wide
range of shareholders and a willingness to return favors of a variety of types. Still, it is a position of substantial influence. The comparative ease with which the largest minority
shareholder can pull together a coalition to reach a blocking majority confers a role that can best be described as "gravitational pull." No other shareholder can afford to band
permanently against you, lest it risk seeing its interests in the "board" vitally damaged. Some shareholders may occasionally be tempted to play spoiler roles on individual votes,
but if they push this too far they will provoke banding behavior by other shareholders protecting their interests-as China learned on currency issues and Russia learned in its efforts
to annex South Ossetia, roundly condemned by the emerging powers as well as the West. When this occurs, the others will look first to the largest minority shareholder to lead the
way. But this comparative advantage cannot be overplayed . If the United States attempts to
portray its position as that of global hub , or if its strategy were perceived to be one of a
resurrection of dominance , it would likely backfire , triggering a deeper banding together of
the other powers and middle powers against the U.S. position . To succeed in wielding influence from its new, influential
but less dominant position, the United States needs a new mindset about strategy .

American primacy is waning now- stubbornly trying to

hold on by not pulling back military presence sparks
backlash

Quinn 11
Adam, Lecturer in International Studies at the University of Birmingham, July 2011, The Art of
Declining Politely: Obamas Prudent Presidency and the Waning of American Power,
International Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 4, p. 803-824

As for the administrations involvement in the Arab Spring, and latterly military intervention from the air in
Libya, these episodes also serve better to illustrate Obamas tendency towards restraint and

limitation than to showcase bold ambition. Both its record of public statements during the unfolding of the
Egyptian revolution and inside accounts after the event suggest that the administrations strategy was to ride
with caution a wave of events largely beyond its own control. The United States thus edged over a period
of days from expressing confidence in Mubarak to seeking a months-long quasi-constitutional transition to eventually facilitating his
abrupt defenestration, as events on the ground changed the balance of probabilities as to the ultimate outcome. In eschewing
either rigid public support for Mubarak, as some regional allies would have preferred, or early and vocal
backing for the protesters, Obama was successful in what was surely the primary objective: to avoid
rendering Americas interests hostage to a gamble on either the success or the failure of the
protests. 91 Given Egypts strategic importance, such dithering, as contemporary critics often termed it, might justifiably be
praised as a sensible reluctance to run out ahead of events. 92 In its approach to Libya, the administration
seems similarly to have been guided more by the movement of events on the ground than by
any overarching plan, and to have retained a default instinct of reluctance throughout. 93 The decision to intervene directly
with air power was made only after it became clear that anti-Qadhafi rebels were in imminent danger of total defeat in their last
redoubt of Benghazi, after which bloody reprisals by the government against disloyal citizens could be expected. In a major
presidential address to the American people regarding operations in Libya, a chief priority was to reassure them as to the limits of the
operation. The President insisted that his decisions had been consistent with the pledge that I made to the American people at the
outset that Americas role would be limited; that we would not put ground troops into Libya; that we would focus our unique
capabilities on the front end of the operation and that we would transfer responsibility to our allies and partners. Once the first wave
of bombing was complete, he explained, the United States would retreat to a supporting role, with the transfer of responsibility to
others ensuring that the risk and cost of this operationto our military and to American taxpayerswill be reduced significantly.
Although it was right and necessary for the US to intervene , he said, there would be no
question of using American resources on the ground to achieve regime change or nation-
building . To be blunt, he observed, we went down that road in Iraq That is not something we
can afford to repeat in Libya. His vision of leadership was one whereby the US reserved the
right to use unilateral military force to defend our people, our homeland, our allies and our core interests, but in
cases where our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and our values are the burden of
action should not be Americas alone. Real leadership, he argued, creates the conditions and
coalitions for others to step up as well; to work with allies and partners so that they bear their share of the burden and
pay their share of the costs. 94 On the very same day that Obama outlined his vision for American and western leadership in the
defence of liberal values at Westminster in May 2011, he also made remarks at a press conference with Prime Minister David
Cameron that underlined the limits of what America would contribute to the campaign in Libya, making it apparent that the high-
flown ideals of Westminster Hall would be closely circumscribed in their implementation in practice. 95 It was explications such as
these of the meaning of American leadership in the new era that inspired the unfortunate phrase
leading from behind. 96 Thus the chief message emanating from the Libyan intervention was
not, in fact, broad endorsement of liberal intervention as a general principle. Rather, one of the clearest signals
from the President was that nothing resembling the resourceintensive operation in Iraq (or perhaps, by implication, Afghanistan) could
or should ever be attempted again. Captain of a shrinking ship As noted in the opening passages of this article, the narratives
of Americas decline and Obamas restraint are distinct but also crucially connected . Facing this
incipient period of decline, Americas leaders may walk one of two paths .
Either the nation can come to terms with the reality of the process that is under way and seek
to finesse it in the smoothest way possible. Or it can rage against the dying of the
light , refusing to accept the waning of its primacy . President Obamas
approach, defined by restraint and awareness of limits , makes him ideologically and
temperamentally well suited to the former course in a way that, to cite one example, his
predecessor was not. He is, in short, a good president to inaugurate an era of managed
decline . Those who vocally demand that the President act more boldly are not merely criticizing him; in
suggesting that he is weak and that a tougher policy is needed, they implicitly suppose that the resources will be
available to support such a course. In doing so they set their faces against the reality of the
coming American decline . 97 If the United States can embrace the spirit of managed decline, then
this will clear the way for a judicious retrenchment , trimming ambitions in line with the
fact that the nation can no longer act on the global stage with the wide latitude once
afforded by its superior power. As part of such a project, it can, as those who seek to qualify the decline thesis have
suggested, use the significant resources still at its disposal to smooth the edges of its loss of
relative power, preserving influence to the maximum extent possible through whatever legacy
of norms and institutions is bequeathed by its primacy. The alternative course
involves the initiation or escalation of conflictual scenarios for which the
United States increasingly lacks the resources to cater: provocation of a military conclusion to the
impasse with Iran ; deliberate escalation of strategic rivalry with China in East Asia;
commitment to continuing the campaign in Afghanistan for another decade; a costly
effort to consistently apply principles of military interventionism, regime change and democracy
promotion in response to events in North Africa . President Obama does not by any
means represent a radical break with the traditions of American foreign policy in the modern era. Examination of his major foreign
policy pronouncements reveals that he remains within the mainstream of the American discourse on foreign policy. In his Nobel Peace
Prize acceptance speech in December 2009 he made it clear, not for the first time, that he is no pacifist, spelling out his view that the
instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace, and that the United States of America has helped underwrite global
security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. 98 In his Cairo speech in June the same
year, even as he sought distance from his predecessor with the proclamation that no system of government can or should be imposed
by one nation on any other, he also endorsed with only slight qualification the liberal universalist view of civil liberties as
transcendent human rights. I have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things, he declared. The ability to speak
your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government
that is transparent and doesnt steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas. 99 His
Westminster speech repeated these sentiments. Evidently this is not a president who wishes to break signally
with the mainstream, either by advocating a radical shrinking of Americas military
strength as a good in itself or by disavowing liberal universalist global visions, as some genuine
dissidents from the prevailing foreign policy discourse would wish. 100 No doubt sensibly, given the likely political reaction at home,
it is inconceivable that he would explicitly declare his strategy to be one of managed American decline. Nevertheless, this is
a president who, within the confines of the mainstream, embraces caution and restraint to
the greatest extent that one could hope for without an epochal paradigm shift in the intellectual
framework of American foreign policy-making. 101 In contemplating the diminished and diminishing weight of the United States
upon the scales of global power, it is important not to conflate the question of what will be with that of what we might prefer. It may
well be, as critics of the decline thesis sometimes observe, that the prospect of increased global power for a state such as China should
not, on reflection, fill any westerner with glee, whatever reservations one may have held regarding US primacy. It is also important not
to be unduly deterministic in projecting the consequences of American decline. It may be a process that unfolds
gradually and peacefully, resulting in a new order that functions with peace and stability
even in the absence of American primacy. Alternatively, it may result in
conflict, if the U nited S tates clashes with rising powers as it refuses to
relinquish the prerogatives of the hegemon , or continues to be drawn into
wars with middle powers or on the periphery in spite of its shrinking capacity to afford them. Which
outcome occurs will depend on more than the choices of America alone. But the likelihood that
the United States can preserve its prosperity and influence and see its hegemony leave a positive
legacy rather than go down thrashing its limbs about destructively will be greatly increased
if it has political leaders disposed to minimize conflict and consider American power a
scarce resourcein short, leaders who can master the art of declining politely. At present it seems it
is fortunate enough to have a president who fits the bill .
 AT: Soft Power/Non-Aggressive Presence Good
The denunciation of hard power in favor of diplomatic
measures is the revival of Fukuyamas repressive
hypothesis, which justified the winning hearts and
minds approach of Vietnam and is a veiled attempt to
subdue local politics and power in favor of absolute
American hegemony
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism in the Age of
Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 16-19 //TR)

As the representation of such an all-encompassing imperial gaze, Fukuyamas book, despite its prematurity,
constitute the culminationthe end (I want to stress the metaphorics of vision
can be seen to

and timelessness silently at work in this most crucial of white metaphors) of a massive
polyvalent American historical project of cultural representation
dedicated to the obliteration of the dislocating spectral memory of
Vietnam in behalf of reclaiming the imperial authority of (American)
liberal capitalist democracy. Indeed, the book can be seen as the
theorization of that retrospective and recollective ideological project
of recuperation: as, that is, a global effort to relegitimize the
dominant but historically crisis-riven liberal capitalist culture of
America. It can be seen, in other words, as an ideological strategy intended to
re-endow liberal American capitalist culture with the authority of law
by invoking History against what is normally understood as practical
history: by providing actually existing democracy with an ontological
ground that always subordinates the merely historical and
material specificities of economic and politic power to its privileged
ideality. This always visible hierarchical binary opposition between
polities grounded in fundamental principles that win hearts and
minds (e.g., the liberal democracy of the United States), and regimes that resort to
overt force (e.g., the fascism of Nazi Germany and the communism of the Soviet Union), is
obviously fundamental to Fukuyamas duplicitous argument. To understand the true
weaknesses of the Soviet State, Fukuyama reiterates, the economic problem has to be put in the context of a much larger [and more
fundamental] crisis, that of the legitimacy of the system as a whole. Economic failure was only one of a number of failures in the Soviet
system, that had the effect of catalyzing rejection of the belief system and exposing the weakness of the underlying structure. The most
fundamental failure of totalitarianism was its failure to control thought. Soviet citizens, as it turned out, had all along retained an ability to
This argument for a legitimate legitimacy
think for themselves (EH, 29; my emphasis).

that is grounded in an underlying, that is, ontological, truth and

against an illegitimate legitimacy that is achieved by the overt use
of power should recall what Foucault, by way of his analysis of the ocularcentrism of the
discursive practices of modern humanist societies, exposed as the ruse of the repressive
hypothesis, which assumes truth to be not internal but external to
power and thus its essential adversary: the truth will set you free.
This, according to Foucault, is the hypothesis invented by the liberal
bourgeois reformers of the Enlightenment, most notably, the English philosopher
Jeremy Bentham, to obscure the complicity of (their) knowledge with
power.21 Foucault limited the parameters of his analysis of this self-defining and enabling distinction of Enlightenment liberalism to the
exposure of the latter as the disciplinary society (the regime of truth). But, as the concurrent emergence of the disciplinary society and
European, especially British and French, colonialism suggests, it is not difficult to extend its applicability, as Edward Said had done, to the
Enlightenments imperial project. For it is precisely this logic that everywhere informs the discourse and practice first of post-Enlightenment
British colonialismits virtually systematic invocation of the brutality of the imperialism of the Turks, the Spanish, the Portuguese, or the
Belgians (as in Defoes Robinson Crusoe, Conrads Heart of Darkness, and H. Ryder Haggards King Solomons Mineand later, as I will show at
length in chapter 6, of American colonialismits systematic invocation of the French and especially the Spanish, as in James Fenimore
Coopers Leatherstocking novels, William Gilmore Simms The Yemassee, Francis Parkmans The Conspiracy of Pontiac, and George Bancrofts
History of the United States) to define what their colonialism is not. As Conrads spokesman, Marlowe, puts this perennial post-Enlightenment
justificatory logic in Heart of Darkness: Mind none of us [Marlowe and his British countrymen] would feel exactly like this. What saves us is
efficiencythe devotion to efficiency. But these chaps [the Romans in the past and the Belgians in the present] were not much account really.
They were no colonists, their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you
wanted brute force. . . . It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blindas is very proper for
those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or
slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back
of it, not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the ideasomething you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a
it is precisely this duplicitous logic of the repressive
sacrifice.22 And

hypothesis, pushed to its nuanced extreme, that, as in the case of Fukuyamas

argument, contemporary liberal democratic societies, especially the
United States, employ to justify their colonialist interventions in Third
World countries. The fundamental representation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam bears witness to this. Even before the
demise of French control in Indochina with the fall of Dien Bien Phu (May 7, 1954), Americathe presidency, the Congress, the Pentagon, the
culture industrypredictably justified its intervention by insistently distinguishing its motives as radically different from those informing the
decadent colonialism of Old World France. As I will show as length in chapter 3, the fraudulence of this benign American exceptionalist
justification was proleptically exposed if not acknowledged by the American publiclong ago by Graham Greenes portrayal of the young,
idealist American Alden Pyle in his novel The Quiet American (1955). Pyle, it will be recalled, comes to Vietnam inscribed by the writing of York
Harding, an American Asian expert an Orientalist as Edward Said would put itwhose discourse about the Orient is informed not only by
the domino theory and the strategy of the Third Force, but also by the profound disdain for Old World colonialism that has characterized
American culture since its origins in the Puritans genocidal exceptionalist errand in the wilderness. And, in the name of his cultures
assumed moral and racial superiority and its certainty of winning the hearts and minds of these backward Asiaticsthis Cold War
American Adam, armed with Hardings The Advance of Red China, the implacable Word or, as Said calls this dangerously quixotic vision, the
textual attitude,23 leaves a trail of innocent blood in his inexorably undeviating wake.
 AT: US Isnt Racist (lol)
The US is an state of racial exceptionalism

Henry Louis Gates Jr. 2011 Black in Latin America

(Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University
Professor at Harvard university, as well as director of the
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research)
Pages 12-13

For a very long time, whenever I heard of the word race, only images of
black people in the United States came to mind. As silly as it might sound now, to me,
then, race was a coded word for black people, and for their relations with white people in this country. I think that this
is probably some sort of African American exceptionalism for people
my age, people who came of age in the Civil Rights Movement of the late fifties and
sixties. Even today, in our era of multiculturalism, I still find it necessary sometimes to remember that race
is not just a black thing, that race (by which most of us mean ethnicity) signifies a lot
of different kinds of people, representing a full range of ethnicities, in
a lot of different places, and that African Americans in this country dont have a
patent on the term or the social conditions that have resulted either
from slavery or the vexed history of racial relations followed slavery in the United States. I should
say that African Americans dont have a patent especially on slavery, as I much later came to realize,
thought the New World. When I was growing up, I simply assumed that the slave experience in the United
States between 1619 and the Civil War. And I think that many Americans still
assume this. But it turns out that the slave ancestors centof all the Africans
imported to the Western Hemisphere to serve as slaves. Over eleven
million Africans survives the Middle Passage and disembarked in the New World;
and of these, incredibly, only about 450,000 Africans came to the United
States. The real African American experience, based on numbers
alone, then, unfolded in places south of our long southern border,
south of Key West, south of Texas, South of California, in the Caribbean islands and
throughout Latin America. And no place in our hemisphere received more Africans than
Brazil did.
US foreign policy locates countries along a white/black
binary

Henry Louis Gates Jr. 2011 Black in Latin America

(Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University
Professor at Harvard university, as well as director of the
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research)
Pages 10-11

In most of these societies, a great deal of miscegenation and genetic

admixture occurred between masters and their slaves , very early on in the
history of slavery there. Several of these countries sponsored official immigration policies of whitening, aiming to dilute
the numbers of its citizens who were black or darker shades of brown by encouraging Europeans to migrate there .
And speaking of skin color, each of these countries had (and continues to have) many
categories of color and skin tone, ranging from as few as 12 in the Dominican
Republic and 16 in Mexico to 134 in Brazil , making our use of octoroon and quadroon and
mulatto pale by comparison. Latin American color categories can seem to an
American as if they are on steroids. I realized as I encountered people who still employ these
categories in everyday discussions about race in their society that it is extremely difficult for
those of us in United States to see the use of these categories as what they
are, the social deconstruction of the binary opposition between black
and white, outside of the filter of the one-drop rule, which we Americans have inherited from racist laws
designated to retain the offspring of a white man and black female slave as property of the slave owners. Far too
many of us as African Americans see the use of these terms as an attempt to
pass for anything other than black, rather than as historically and socially
specific terms that people of color have invented and continue to employ
to describe a complex reality larger than the terms black, white, and
mulatto allow for. After extended periods of whitening, many of these same
societies then began periods of browning, as I think of them, celebrating and embracing
their transcultural or multicultural roots, declaring themselves unique precisely
because of the extent of racial admixture among their citizens.

TheUnitedStateshasbecomeacontactzonewhereBlackandLatino/alives
existwiththelegalexpendabilitythatmarksbodiesforviolenceraciallyof
ethnoraciallyalongahistoricrelationshiptoBlackness

Marquez,2013(JohnD.AssistantProfessorofAfricanAmericanandLatino/aStudies.HeReceivedaPh.D.in
EthnicStudiesattheUniversityofCalifornia,SanDiegoBlackBrownSolidarityRacialPoliticsintheNewGulf
South<3233>JRC)

Thischapterhastwocentralpurposes.ThefirstistointroducetheHoustonareaasacontactzone, atermIborrow

fromMaryLouisePratttodescribeaspacethatisdemographically,geographicallyandhistorically

uniqueforthekindsofinteractionsbetweenblackandLatino/alives thatIammapping.Thechapters
secondpurposeistointroducetwoconceptualmodelsIhavedevelopedtomakesenseoftheseinteractionandtodescribetheirbroaderpolitical
significance.Thosemodelsafttheracialstateatexpendabilityandfoundationalblackness. TheformerisamodelIintroducetosuggesthow
expressionofblackLatino/asolidarityquiteoftenemergefromoutsidetherealmof
resourcecompetition,thatis,astheresultofasharedsusceptibilitytoobliterationwith
legalimpunitythathasmanifestedinthelatetwentiethandearlytwentyfirstcenturies
particularlyintheformofstatesanctionedpolicebrutalityaconditionIexplainas
irreducibletoandyetassociatedwithamethodofeconomicexclusionorexploitation.Such
expendabilityistheresultofhowblacknessandlatinidadhavebeenproducedaseither
racial(blackness)orethnoracialLatinidadSignifiersofdeficiencyandcriminalitywithin
theassemblageorganizationandgoverningofbodiesthatconstitutetheSouthasaracial/
colonialformation.TheseconditionshavecreatedanexusforblackandLatino/a
Subjectivitiestoamalgamateresultinginasharedconsciousnessofracialpowerandan
impetusforgreaterpoliticalcooperation.Iintroducethetermfoundationalblacknessto
underscorethesignificanceofantiblackracismandantiblackviolencetothisracial
formation.ThetermsuggesthowAfricanAmericanhistoryorthenormalizationofantiblack
violenceintheregionasanessentialComponentofitslawenforcementapparatusesand
racial/colonialdynamics,hassignificantbothinconcreteactsofviolenceandinthe
symbolicjustificationandglorificationofsuchviolencetothewaystheSouthsgrowing
Latino/apopulationhasexperiencedtheracialstateofexpendability .Thetermfoundational
blacknessalsosuggeststhewayscollectivememoriesofblackantiracismintheGulf
South,thatis,anoppositionalculturederivedfromAfricanAmericanhistoryand
responsivenesstoexpendability,havebeenabasisforhowLatinos/ashavedevelopedtheir
ownmethodsofsurvivalandresistanceovertime.Insum,arichhistoryofblackactivismandexpressiveculturesinthe
HoustonareahashadasignificantinfluenceonthewaysLatino/aresistancetoracismhasbeenformulatedandwaged.Thisinfluencehasoftenbeen
explicitandalsoimplicitasasubliminaleffectonhowmodesofLatino/aresistancehavebeenimaginedandperformedinpublicandpoliticaldomains.
Foundationalblackness,Iargue,hasbeenmostevidentasoflate,inmomentssuchastheLuisTorrescaseof2002 in
BaytownthroughwhichastrongexpressionofblackLatino/asolidarityemergedasthe foundationforanactivistawakening.Suchmoments
demonstratethecentralityofAfricanAmericanhistorytotheformationofLatino/a
subjectivitiesinthistimeandplace,aninfluencewhosesignificanceisbeingdeepenedasaresultofthemultilayeredeffectsofneoliberalism
andglobalization.
Reformism perpetuates a liberal economy of false
representation of the subaltern where the symbolic
ethical and discursive colonial formation is left in tact

Marquez,2013(JohnD.AssistantProfessorofAfricanAmericanandLatino/aStudies.HeReceivedaPh.D.in
EthnicStudiesattheUniversityofCalifornia,SanDiegoBlackBrownSolidarityRacialPoliticsintheNewGulf
South<>JRC)

Subalternstudies scholars have been critiquing this condition for some time
now conveying that a gaze on organizations and political figures
that aimed to reform liberalism and capitalism blatantly on behalf
on behalf subaltern groups has further contributed to the further
marginalization of the subaltern within post-colonial context .Insum,the
symbolic and structural architectures of colonial formations have
been preserved by the very idea of belated inclusion into institution
or process that oppressors recognized and define as representation
into the political, belated inclusion thus created a new method
through which the subaltern would be produced and perpetually
deficient now quite ready to initiate a meaningful challenge for
equality, not yet capable of political efficacy, as achieving a
progressive political consciousness only when it mimics the ethics
and discourse of the very society responsible for its initial
marginalization or displacement.ThecivilrightserafitswithinthiscritiqueGayatrySpivaksquestionCanthe
subalternspeak?hasbecomeeminentforethnicstudiesscholars.Thesubalternstudiesprojectbecomesevenmoreusefulwhencoupledwitha
decolonialcritique,a
project to unsettle the truth sanctioning protocols of
Europe and to map out a more diverse representation of what
constitutes the domain of politics, a representation of political
possibilities grounded and harbored in the subjectivities of the
masses and the dynamic ways they survive, adjust to, and resist
marginalization in their day to day lives.RobinD.G.Kelleycapturesthisdecolonialessenceswhenhe
explains,(unfortunately,toooftenourstandardsforevaluatingsocialmovementspivotsaroundwhetherornottheysucceededinrealizingtheirvision
ratherthanonthemeritsorpowerofthevisionsthemselves).Kelleysinterventionsuggeststhatacts
of resistance in and
of themselves and regardless of their efficacy or longevity can be
perceived as successful now how they win equal access but how
they help transform an understanding of the origin of inequality and
the language through which debates about such inequalities are
communicated.Social transformation in this regard is something that
cannot transpire in an immediate shift of power through which the
subaltern forms organizations that reform liberalism and capitalism
and then rushes to integrate institutions to which they have been
excluded. Rather, transformation occurs in a steady, sustained
remaking of ethics from the ground up, a building process that
unsettles the normative discourse that, if left without critique, and
seen as immutable, will only produce the subaltern as never quite
ready, as always deficient.
Black & Latino/a hybridity destabilizes the colonial
representational hegemony of white anti-black settler
colonialism

John D. Marquez, 2013 Black-Brown Solidarity Racial Politics in the New Gulf South
(Assistant Professor of African American and Latino/a Studies. He Received a Ph.D. in Ethnic
Studies. at the University of California, San Diego). Pages 18-19

Decolonial knowledge is a system of representation or counterhegemonic discourse

in emergence. It is dynamic, improvisational, and produced by
detecting, exposing, and subsequently naming the sustained horrors
of white supremacy in the United States. Decolonial knowledge represents a space of
emergence and untapped potential. It represents a response to Fanons driving question of In reality, who am I?- a
question that derives from the alienating effects of settler-colonial formations, that is, from the ways such formations
depend upon condemning subjections and concurrent imaginative fixities that dislocate the subaltern from himself or
herself.Self-determination, the capacity to define who we are, how our
subjectivities spill over the compartments designed by the state to
harbor or segregate them, how we envision and speak about relations of power based upon our own
sets of complex memories and experiences , does not represent resistance per se. But it
does call attention to conditions from which new forms of resistance
can and will emerge. Hybrid subjectivities are a component of
decolonization in how they unsettle and destabilize the protocols
through which social truths, categories, and processes and
sanctioned and thus through which settler-colonial formations are
disciplined and controlled. This book is then a narrative of decolonization that highlights how shared
and often-traumatic memories of discrimination have provided this impetus for black and Latino/a imaginations and
Hip-hop culture,
subjectivities to amalgamate and mutate in the production of decolonial critiques of racism.
grassroots activism, and even youth gang culture have often
provided the space for such mutations, resulting in new expressions
of racial knowledge and politics that complicate conventional
conceptual models for assessing the social meaning of race. These are
specific types of oppression that I feel are particularly generative of these mutations. While they may not fit neatly within
debates about colonialism or postcolonialism, the examples of hybrid black and Latino/a
subjectivity that I accentuate are the product of an interdependent cultural,
political, and economic oppression that Foucault famously has described as the
productive capacity of contemporary biopower. However, the lived experience and
cultural-political expression of these positioning that I describe as a fusion of black and Latino/a
subjectivities speak to a trans-individual subjectification that
constantly overruns the gasps of such biopower.
Afro-Latina body politic

Zamora2013(OmarisZunilda,MastersLettheWatersFlow:(Trans)locatingAfroLatina
FeministThought,UniversityofTexasAustin,<>)//JRC

The stage has risen for us to be heard, but now let us collect our bodies in a
space to share our individual experiences in which we theorize from our flesh;
in which we construct an Afro-Latina feminist epistemology that embraces
self- knowing through understanding our trans subjectivities. The
empowerment of the Afro-Latina woman circulates through the body. It is
from this point of departure that knowledges are founded and passed from
one woman to another forging solidarities and establishing an Afro-Latina
feminist thought. When we take up a fluid positionality as an afro-diasporic
reading practice, an epistemology produced by the body emerges. Afro-Latino
identity, as a fluid identity, is composed of many experiences that emerge
from the intersticesit is a lived and expressed identity from within trans
spaces. The movement between spaces is constant and is at the center of
this identity. It is from this trans place that one can approach an Afro-Latina
feminist thought. And it is here where I want to arrive: to propose that these
different trans moments and experiences are central to the fluidity of Afro-
Latina womens being. She is found within and without many spaces
articulating a subjectivity that attempts to complete itself from this constant
movement, not from that which is stagnant, or static. It is an identity that
moves within transnational spaces not just when migrating, but also at the
moment of return as it articulates a phenomenology of the body in transition.
As Lara describes: ...our bodies are also found in transition from place to
placebetween islands, between homes, between the past and the present,
between dreams and the waking world(45). Through these transnational and
transitional experiences, there are knowledges that are left behind, others
that are created and solidarities that are established.As Ana Irma Rivera
Lassn posits, a transversality that recognizes the multiplicity of our identities
is needed; one that does not fall into conflation or essentialisms: As a part of
our transversal analysis, we must recognize the multiplicity of identities that
form part of our identity as women. I am all the identities at the same time; I
am the intersection of all of them. We are all people with a nationality, race,
ethnicity, sexual orientation and other all together. We do not leave any of
our identities behind when we participate in an activity. However, that is
exactly what analyses that do not recognize the transversality of identities try
to do: they emphasize some identities at the expense of others. (73) The
centralization of the body and ritual constructs certain knowledges through
invoking the sacred. It is important to emphasize the role of the sacred and
the spiritual as routes of trance in which certain knowledges are acquired.
Ultimately, to try to read Afro-Latina womens bodies within a Chicano/Latino
and Black feminist framework is to recognize that this body is at times in
transgression. Lara describes this more in-depth when she argues that, As
Afro-Latinas in the world, we are constantly negotiating others assumptions
about where our bodies and our memories overlap, where our
Blackness/negritud begins and our Latina-ness ends... Afro-Latina identities
and bodies transgress essential categorization. (31) The Afro-Latino body in
its diasporic element is in violation with the essentialisms in Chicano/Latino
and Black feminist thought as it has already been presented in this paper. Her
body transgresses the conflation and the universal and from there,
knowledges and epistemologies that establish subjectivity are constructed.
This is to think of trans spaces as fluid spaces where knowledges of
resistance are created from the body and towards a discourse of liberation.
The three pillars of white supremacy are (1) anti-
blackness, (2) genocide & (3) orientalism

JohnD.Marquez,2013BlackBrownSolidarityRacialPoliticsintheNewGulfSouth(AssistantProfessorof
AfricanAmericanandLatino/aStudies.HeReceivedaPh.D.inEthnicStudies.attheUniversityofCalifornia,San
Diego).

racialstateofexpendability asaconcepttomarkthebaseeffectofraciality,thecapacityforobliteration
the
Ipropose

withlegalimpunity,andthatIsituatedirectlywithintheborderlandsanditshistory. ThissectionbuildsuponGoldbergs(1993,41)call(inresponseto
Gilroyscritiqueofgeneralizations)forageneralbutopenendedtheoryorwhathedescribesasatheoreticalmethodthatallowsforustocriticallyconsider(i)amoregeneral

architectureofracialdominationthatissituationwithincritiquesofEuropeanmodernity,and(ii)alterationsanddiscontinuities thathaveresultedin
racebeingpoliticizedinvariantwaysaccordingtotimeandspace.TheUnitedStatesisnotaEuropeannationsuch
asthosethatFoucaulttheorized.Itis,however,ananchorofthefirstworldand/ortheglobalnorthalongwithEurope.TheUnitedStatesoriginatedinpart,asacolonyof

England.However,itwasnotthekindofcolonialformationinthethirdworldand/orglobalsouththatGilroyandMbembediscussed. TheUnitedStatesis
asettlercolonystatemoreworthofcomparisonwithAustraliaandIsraelinhowithasbeenimposedandsustaineduponanativepopulationthroughviolence.
Thissettlercolonialism,accordingtoSmith(2010),isamajorreasonforhow/whywhitesupremacyhas
beensocentraltoitsformation andwhyracialviolencehasbeensopervasiveinUShistory. Whitesupremacyinthe
UnitedStates, she argues, has been structured by three primary logics [or pillars](i)slaveability/antiblack
racism, which anchors capitalism, (ii)genocide,whichanchorscolonilaims, and (iii)orientalism,which
anchorswar(2).Acriticalreadingofborderlandshistorysuggeststhatthereareoverlappingdimensionsbetweenlogic(ii)andlogic(iii)ofSmithsschemathatare
structuringboardermilitarizationanditsconsequences.Regardinglogic (iii),theborderwasestablishedasanactofimperialaggressionorconquestagainstapopulation
(Mexicanos)thatwasOrientalizedasaforeignotherthatobstructedthenationsexpansionormanifestdestiny.Regardinglogic(ii),theforeignother,waslargely,apartofthe
nativepopulationofthatregionandthusexperiencedthekindofgenocidalconditionsthatallindigenouspeoplehavebeenexposedtoinUShistoryandthathasbeenfoundational
tothe experience ofall nonWhitegroups.Whilesubalternpopulationsofmanyregionsofthe gonlasouthhaveengagedinsuccessful anticolonialcampaignsthat have
reconfiguredtheirplightwithinamorerecentandpostcolonialparadox),thesettlerhasremainedintheUnitedStatesandhasdesignedacomplexnetworkofmilitarizedviolence

Therehasbeenverylittle,ifanyalterationofthestructuralcomponentsofthe
that ensure that.

existingracialorder. Such components have been merely disguised by postracial discourse . Thestatesanctionedviolence
towardgroupslikeBlackandLatinosandthatcharacterizedprevioushistoricalerashas
remainedquiteprolificandhasbeenmanifestinabarbariccontinuumacrossUShistory.
TheUnitedStates, smithargues,mustalwaysbeatwar(1)Theviolenceinherenttothesettler
colonyisitdefiningattributeandis,hence irreconcilable.Itishowitssovereigntyislegitimated.AsWolfe(2006,338)
argues,settlercolonialismdestroystoreplaceand invasionisastructurenotanevent.ThesecharacteristicsofUSsovereignty,Iargue,
areuniequelypronouncedinU.S.Mexicoborderlands.
Black and Latino/a solidarity create new ethnicities that
make it harder for colonial powers to manage our
subjectivities these new ethnicities also transcend the
dichotomous black/white understanding of the academy.

JohnD.Marquez,2013BlackBrownSolidarityRacialPoliticsintheNewGulfSouth(AssistantProfessorof
AfricanAmericanandLatino/aStudies.HeReceivedaPh.D.inEthnicStudies.attheUniversityofCalifornia,San
Diego).

Within those visions and politicalstrategiesliefusionsofsubjectivity andoverlappingofsubject

positionsthatcallattentiontothesimilarspacethatblacksandLatinos/ashaveoccupiedintheracialhierarchy,orwhatMichaelOmiandHowardWinantmightdescribe
astheracialformation,oftheHoustonarea. Thesefusionsilluminatetheinfluenceofblackhistoryandcultureonthesubjectivitiesofnonblackyetalsononwhitepeoples.This
influencesisimportantconsideringthatAfricanAmericansnowcompromiseashrinkingpercentageofU.S.polity,whiletheLatino/apopulationcontinuestoincreasethrough
immigrationandbirthrates.ItisimportanttonotethatimmigrationfromtheCaribbean,mainlyJamaicaandHaiti,andfromAfrica,primarilyEthiopiaandNigeria,hasbeenthe

majorimpetusbehindblackpopulationgrowthintheUnitedStatesoverthepasttwodevase,These more recenttransnationalrealitiestiedto

lateglobalcapitalismnecessitatethatwe,nowmorethanever,lookbeyondtheblackwhitebinarywhen
assessing the social meaning of race in the United States, as thebinary often limitsourfocustorelationshipsbetween

AfricanAmericanandwhitesinsingularlocales.Imapoutanewterrainhere,underscoringtheexpandedpoliticalsignificanceofAfricanAmerican
historybeyondAfericanAmericansandprovidingaserioustheoreticalscrutinyoftheconditionsthathavemadethathistorysoinfluentialindebatesaboutrace,aninfluencethat

Ifocusonthefusionsofblack
hasoftenresultedinthehistoriesofLatinos/as,AsianAmericans,andNativeAmericansbeingneglected.Latly,

andLatino/asubjectivitiesthatcomplicate howthesubjectivitiesofthosetwogroupstendtobeanalyzedandpoliticized.
Bothinscholarlyandmediadiscourse,thesesubjectivitiesaregenerallyviewedasaproductofmajorityminorityandinterminorityrelationships,whilerelationshipsbetween

relationshipsforgedbydynamicsthatstranscendandtravelacrossnational
minoritygroupsandthose

bordersaregivenlessattention.ThelimitedscaleofinquiryfrequentdiscountswhatAveryGordonhasdescribedas thecomplexpersonhoodof
the oppressed. With that term Gordon seeks to complicate the popular perception of the oppressed as mere artifacts of
victimizationbyaccentuatinghowtheoppressedfabricatecomplexnarrativesofcoping,survival,and
resistancethatreflectspatialandchronologicalspecificities.Insum,theoppressed orhistoricallydisadvantages retaintheabilityto
shapehowtheyseeandareseenbytherestofthesocialworlddespitehowothersmay
perceivethemtobe.Thishappens throughamultiformnarrativesandpoliticalimaginariestheyenacttorespondtomultiformexperiencesofoppression.
Gordonstermcomplexpersonhood,therepresentsacontrasttoconditionthatHomiBhabhahasreferedtoasimaginativefixity.Complexpersonhoodcallsattentiontoan
arrayofeffectproducedbyoppressiveconditions.Bhabha,ontheotherhanddefinesimaginativefixityasadebilitatingrepresentationandcontrollingimageofthesubaltern

similartotheconceptofidentitythat isdependentontheconceptoffixityasadebilitatingrepresentationandcontrollingimageofthesubalternsimilartotheconceptof
.
identitythatisdependentontheconceptoffixityintheideologicalconstructionofotherness AsitappliestomyanalysisofblackandLatino/asubjectivity,animaginative

fixitydiscountsorevendisregardsthe ways that multiform cultural performance ofblacknessand theunificationofblackandLatino/a
politicsbecomesthedominantcatalystsforasubjectivitythattransformsblacknessfroma
markerofracialoppressiontoaninclusiveformationthatdecisivelytranscendstheracial
boundariesofitsoriginaldenotation.Intheworkofthesescholars,theabilitiesoftheindividualsassignedtosubalterngroupstodrawfroman
array of knowledges, experiences, and epistemologies in the constitution of their subjectivities make the individuals less

manageablebycolonialpowers. Similartointerventionsinthefieldofqueertheory, hybridity thuscreates newvisionsofandfor

social change and even an alternative ethics that resists the normative discourse controlled and

manipulatedbythestateandenablestheoppressedtocopewithandoftenresistoppression.Hall,forexample, describesthesefusions
asnewethnicitiesthatarereshapingourunderstandingofracialandethnicpoliticsacrossthe
globalNorthinparticularandwithinthecontextoftheconditionsassociatedwithneoliberalism.
Dont tell us what to do - The oppressed must learn and
grow on their own

Marquez, 2013 (John D. Assistant Professor of African

American and Latino/a Studies. He Received a Ph.D. in
Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego
-Black-Brown Solidarity Racial Politics in the New Gulf
South <>JRC)
Scholars dictating methodologies to the subaltern perpetuates a narrative of inferiority - that
arent at the onto-epistemic location of the subaltern should not According to the logic within
Behnkcns and Foleys analyses and considering the pervasive nature of racism , all
antiracist movements in the United States, regardless of what
activists or forms of activism characterized them, can be declared
to be failures, as ineffective, or as failing to generate a kind of
wisdom, comprehensive solidarity, and courage among all oppressed
peoples that would result in monumental social transformation. Even
if blacks and Latinos/as could work together comprehensively and within organizations,
could this have reversed centuries of oppression within a few decades? There has never been
an inclusive political solidarity within either population, much less between them. Support for
or resistance to any political cause can vary even within the individual. What kind of political
efficacy are the authors of the black-Latin o/a conflict discourse in search of? Are they not
imposing un- realistic expectations on groups they subsequently recognize as historically
and often violently oppressed, traumatized, and marginalized? Scholars of social
movements routinely gaze upon the subaltern presumptively, with
an expectation regarding how the scholars believe the subaltern
should respond to oppression. When oppressed peoples, the objects
of the re- search, do not respond to oppression in this way, those
responses become the empirical evidence within what is often
perceived as the latest innovation or unexplored terrain within
social movement research. Such revelations more over, are implied
as a set of instructions from which the oppressed can learn and
grow, an implication that also presumes that the oppressed cannot
learn and grow in such ways on their own . My first involvement with
scholarly research was as an object/subject in the 198os, as a character in
social scientific reports regarding the pathology of urban and working-class
families on governmental assistance, which was a misrepresentation of my
family, what we value how we live. Even since I became an academic in the
2005 my family has been targeted for ethnographic research that
misrepresents our dynamism and complexity, reducing us to mere
victims of an oppressive criminal justice system, psychologically
damaged and politically paralyzed, persons who have internalized
inferiority and have thus engaged in acts of violent self-destruction.
This ethnography was ironically, conducted by a colleague of mine and was
done discreetly. Being a character in my own colleagues narrative regarding,
the oppressed while also being his academic peer offers an intriguing lens for
thinking about the postcolonial condition writ large, that is. of the effects
and affects of subaltern voices being belatedly included into
academe and ultimately at the need for paradigms like critical
ethnic studies to provide a space for the subaltern to engage in a
meaningful praxis of self-determination.
 AT: Util
Brutal Utilitarian logic devalues entire populations in the
name of economic advancementyou should reject this
colonialist logic
Edwards 11 [Nelta Edwards, associate professor in the Department of
Sociology at the University of Alaska-Anchorage, Nuclear Colonialism and
the Social Construction of Landscape in Alaska, Environmental Justice 4.2
(2011): 109-114,
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/env.2010.0023 // myost]

When nuclear superpowers describe population as sparse to justify nuclear testing,

they employ a utilitarian logic in which harm for the few is justified by
protection of the many. On the face of it, this seems to make sensethe greatest good for the
greatest number. However, this sort of logic is generally used by those who are not being
asked to, or forced to, sacrifice their lives or livelihood; that is, the argument is made by
the powerful instead of the powerless, the colonial power rather than its
subjects.25 This logic diminishes the value of the lives of the people who live near
nuclear test sites, as if by virtue of the fact that they are few in number, their
lives are less important. Alaska Native people understand this logic. As one elder Inupiaq woman
said, I guess that at that time in 1962 that there were not that many people living in Point Hopethey
just wanted to attack because theres not many people there. But she counters the immorality of the
logic by continuing, They thought we were guinea pigs. We are not. We are human beings like you. I have
a heart like you.26 Community members used the words guinea pigs, specimens, and being
When colonial
treated like a plant to describe their treatment as objects by colonial powers.
powers construct the land as empty, it discursively erases the people who
live there, making it impossible for the colonial powers to consider the interests of
the existing inhabitants. Colonial powers, replete with a sense of entitlement and racism, overlook
nonwhite people, ignoring them and their way of life. An Inupiaq man reminds others at a community
meeting that his people were not then and are not now, expendable: Now lets see you, you dont get me
wrong, ask the white people, take note of this: we are human, as much as you are. Its just a color
colonial culture prevented those in power from even seeing
difference.27 It is as if
the people who lived there as real people, who have hopes and desires and who
have a right to say what happens on their land . An elder introduces herself at a
community meeting by saying, My name is Alice Webber. I have lived here all of my life and worked here
for my village. I am also a signer of the Project ChariotNo. I said NO. Everyone said no and yet they turn
around and leave [the tracer experiment materials] there. Although Point Hope community members very
clearly expressed their disapproval of Project Chariot, their sentiments were ignored by colonial powers.
After the cancellation of Project Chariot in the 1960s, colonial powers conducted the tracer experiments
without the permission of the local people and defying their express wishes. The assumed superiority of
the colonial power, fueled by self-interest, caused them to disregard the people who lived near nuclear test
sites. This colonial hubris is revealed by an Inupiaq woman who wonders what would happen if Inupiat
people treated colonial peoples in a like manner, Thats why I think, I wonder how it would be to go down
to Washington [DC], set some dynamite around the Capitol, to see whether it will sink or not.28 In a later
meeting, another Inupiaq woman speculates, If it were the other way around and Point Hope people put
nuclear waste [break in tape] I know they would take us to court right away and solve it right away. If it
were the other way around, what would they have done to us?29 By reversing the roles, putting Inupiat
people in the position of harming colonial people, these women cleverly make the power imbalance and
When the nuclear superpowers decided that
absurdity of the situation obvious.
people in the Pacific should sacrifice their lives, land, and livelihood for the good
of mankind, the good of mankind meant to be the military and economic
interests of world superpowers. 30 In the American Southwest, the United States
decided that nuclear bomb testing and mining should take place on Indian land,
making Indian people sacrifice their lands and their way of being in the name of
American imperialism.31 This circumstance, where nonwhite people are made to bear
the ecological burden of industrial societies, goes to the heart of the environmental
justice struggle. An Inupiaq woman expresses incredulity, anger, and hurt at such treatment. They risked
our lives, our childrens lives. My god, you know, what are we, nothing? Why did the government want to
harm us, just because of <their> curiosity? Just because they wondered how radiation would affect us? We
never did any harm to them, we never did. Why did they want to harm us, just because of the land,
because they wanted it? 32 The AEC did want to use the land for testing. Superpower militaries have a
history of using native land for military testing and practice. A study of American formerly used defense
sites (FUDS) quantified the burden of U.S. militarism on Native Americans. The study found that the more
acres owned by Native Americans, the greater the number of extremely dangerous sites in that area and
that Native Americans experience a disproportionate exposure to the most dangerous unexploded
ordnance. Importantly, these findings underestimate the impact of military pollution on Native Americans
because they are only able to look at former sites and not sites currently in use. In addition, this analysis
leaves out the counties with the most pollution because the Army Corps of Engineers has yet to complete
the assessment of these sites. The term, treadmill of destruction, describes the harm done on Native
American land due to militarism and coercive state policies.33

Ignoring systemic impacts allows deadly, faceless,

objective violence to continue; only our framework solves
Zizek 8
[Slavoj, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology @ Univ. of Ljubljana,
Violence, p. 1-2]
If there is a unifying thesis that runs through the bric-a-brac of reflections on violence that follow, it is that
the obvious signals of
a similar paradox holds true for violence. At the forefront of our minds,
violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But
we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of
this directly visible "subjective" violence, violence performed by a clearly
identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background
which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence
that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance. This is
the starting point, perhaps even the axiom, of the present book: subjective violence is just
the most visible portion of a triumvirate that also includes two objective kinds of violence.
First, there is a "symbolic" violence embodied in language and its forms, what Heidegger would call "our
house of being." As we shall see later, this violence is not only at work in the obvious-and extensively
studied-cases of incitement and of the relations of social domination reproduced in our habitual speech
forms: there is a more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such, to its
there is what I call "systemic" violence,
imposition of a certain universe of meaning. Second,
orthe often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our
economic and political systems. The catch is that subjective and objective
violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint : subjective
violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent
zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the "normal," peaceful
state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to
this "normal" state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it
sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive
something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the
notorious "dark matter" of physics, the counterpart to an all-too visible subjective violence. It may be
invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what
otherwise seem to be "irrational" explosions of subjective violence.

Their focus on war as an event ignores that more people

die in times of peace than times of war, and their
prioritization of war engrains racism, sexism, and
discrimination

Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy and Womens Studies,

1996 Chris Cuomo - Professor of Philosophy and Women's
Studies, and Director of the Institute for Women's Studies
at the Univerity of Georgia 1996 War Is Not Just an
Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday
Violence Published in Hypatia 11.4, pp. 30-46

Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare

and military practices are woven into the very fabric of life in twenty-first
century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses. For any
feminism that aims to resist oppression and create alternative social
and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are problematic
because they distract attention from the need for sustained
resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and
oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives.
Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief
that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of
war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the
safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities
of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism
is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates
forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis
control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real"
violence finally occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly
threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways
that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven
attention to declarations of war might actually keep resisters
complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war
as necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws
attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is
happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military
institutions and other militaristic agents of the state. Moving away from crisis-driven
politics and ontologies concerning war and military violence also
enables consideration of relationships among seemingly disparate
phenomena, and therefore can shape more nuanced theoretical and
practical forms of resistance. For example, investigating the ways in
which war is part of a presence allows consideration of the relationships
among the events of war and the following: how militarism is a foundational trope in the social and political
imagination; how the pervasive presence and symbolism of soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of
gender; the ways in which threats of state-sponsored violence are a
sometimes invisible/sometimes bold agent of racism , nationalism, and
corporate interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and
nations are currently in the midst of excruciatingly violent
circumstances. It also provides a lens for considering the
relationships among the various kinds of violence that get labeled
"war." Given current American obsessions with nationalism, guns, and militias, and growing hunger for
the death penalty, prisons, and a more powerful police state, one cannot underestimate
the need for philosophical and political attention to connections
among phenomena like the "war on drugs," the "war on crime," and other state-funded
militaristic campaigns..

Racism makes war and genocide a permanent condition of

society allowing for violence, torture, death and
imperialism
Mendieta, 02 SUNY at Stony Brook, (Eduardo, To make live and to let die Foucault on Racism, Meeting of the
Foucault Circle, APA Central Division Meeting Chicago, April 25th , 2002
http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/emendieta/articles/foucault.pdf)

This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For the emergence of
biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the inscription within the very logic of the modern state the
logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I am quoting: the conditions for the acceptability of
putting to death in a society of normalization. Where there is a society of normalization, where there is a
power that is, in all of its surface and in first instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a
condition to be able to put to death someone, in order to be able to put to death others .
The homicidal [meurtrire] function of the state, to the degree that the state functions on the modality of bio-power, can only
be assured by racism (Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture The Political Technology of
Individuals which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures the power of the state after the 18 th century, a power
which is enacted through the police, and is enacted over the population, is a power over living beings, and as such it is a
biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, since the population is nothing more than what the state
takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary.
So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics. (Foucault 2000, 416). Racism, is the thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the
total state. They are two sides of one same political technology, one same political rationality: the management of life, the life
of a population, the tending to the continuum of life of a people. And with the inscription of racism within the state of
biopower, the long history of war that Foucault has been telling in these dazzling lectures
has made a new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials colonizers,
which turned into a war of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned
into the war of a race, a biological unit, against its polluters and threats. Racism is the
means by which bourgeois political power, biopower, re-kindles the fires of war within
civil society. Racism normalizes and medicalizes war. Racism makes war the
permanent condition of society, while at the same time masking its weapons of death
and torture. As I wrote somewhere else, racism banalizes genocide by making quotidian the
lynching of suspect threats to the health of the social body. Racism makes the killing of
the other, of others, an everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war
of society against its enemies. To protect society entails we be ready to kill its threats,
its foes, and if we understand society as a unity of life, as a continuum of the living,
then these threat and foes are biological in nature.

REJECTION OF RACISM IS A PRECONDITION FOR HUMAN

AND MORAL ORDER WHICH OUTWEIGHS UTILITY--
INJUSTICE CAUSES VIOLENCE.
Memmi 2000 (Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, transl. Steve
Martinot, p. 164, GAL)

However, it remains true that one's moral conduct only emerges from a choice; one has to want it. It is a choice among other
choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to
conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism
is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a
legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her
subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little
religious language, racism is "the truly capital sin."fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of
humanity's spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It
is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or
strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such
unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things
considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and
death.
Sacrificial util manifests itself in foreign policy the
perpetual search to destroy our enemies inevitably
results in the destruction of all life.
Beres, prof. of ILaw at Purdue, 1999 (Louis Rene, International Journal on World Peace, No. 3, Vol. 16, 9/1)

The State that commits itself to mass butchery does not intend to do evil . Rather, according to
Hegel's description in the Philosophy of Right, "the State is the actuality of the ethical Idea." It commits itself to death
for the sake of life, prodding killing with conviction and pure heart. A sanctified killer, the State that
accepts Realpolitik generates an incessant search for victims. Though mired in blood, the search is tranquil
and self-assured, born of the knowledge that the State's deeds are neither infamous nor
shameful, but heroic. 65 He Continues. . . There are great ironies involved. Although the corrosive calculus
of geopolitics has now made possible the deliberate killing of all life, populations all over
the planet turn increasingly to States for security. It is the dreadful ingenuity of States that
makes possible death in the billions, but it is oin the [*24] expressions of that ingenuity that people seek safety.
Indeed, as the threat of nuclear annihilation looms even after the Cold War , 71 the citizens of
conflicting States reaffirm their segmented loyalties, moved by the persistent unreason
that is, after all, the most indelible badge of modern humankind.

Utilitarian calculations open space for unlimited instances

of public intervention search for maximal happiness
results in morally monstrous policies where all of histories
greatest atrocities can be justified
Richard Posner, Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Lecturer at University of
Chicago Law School, 79 (Utilitarianism, economics, and legal theory, The Journal of Legal Studies,
Vol.8, No. 1 (Jan., 1979))

Another difficulty with utilitarianism is the lack of a method for calculat- ing the effect of a decision
or policy on the total happiness of the relevant population.41 Even if attention is confined to the
human population, there is no reliable technique for measuring a change in the level of satisfaction of
one individual relative to a change in the level of satisfaction of another. Some utilitarians have faith
in the eventual discovery of a psychological metric that will enable happiness to be measured and
compared across per- sons (and animals?),42 but in the two centuries that have elapsed since Bentham
announced the felicific calculus no progress toward the discovery of such a metric has been made.
Paretian welfare economics is advanced by some as the solution to the problem of measuring
satisfactions. The basic Paretian argument is that a voluntary market transaction-e.g., A offers, and B
accepts, $5 for B's bag of oranges, or A proposes marriage, and again B accepts A's offer-must make
both parties better off, and so increase the level of welfare or happiness in the society, for if both A
and B were not made better off by the transaction at least one of them would refuse to consent to it.
This approach does not, however, meet the utilitarian's need for a dependable metric even if we accept
(as I am inclined to do, despite arguments, which I cannot hope to address here, that advertising or
other features of a market economy lead people to buy things they don't really want) that a market
transaction in- creases the happiness of the parties over what it was immediately before the transaction
took place. The transaction (or, more plausibly, a series of like transactions) may affect nonparties: by
increasing the demand for oranges it may cause the price of oranges to rise to other consumers as
well, and the higher price may make those other consumers quite miserable. Moreover, the analysis
begs two critical questions: whether the goods exchanged were initially distributed so as to maximize
happiness (were the people with money those who derive the most happiness from the things money
can buy?) and whether a system of free markets creates more happiness than alternative systems of
resource allocation do or could. The Paretian criterion could of course be defined in such a way that
no transaction was deemed Pareto optimal unless it raised the level of happiness in the society.
Perhaps this definition is implicit in the usual formulation of the criterion: a transaction is Pareto
optimal if it makes at least one person better off and no one worse off. But rigorously applied, this test
is unwork- able because the total effects of a transaction on human happiness, content- ment, or
satisfaction are rarely ascertainable. I conclude that Paretian analy- sis does not solve the utilitarians'
problem of measuring happiness. Difficulty in deriving specific policies or guidelines from ethical
premises is not, of course, unique to utilitarianism; it is characteristic of ethical discus- sion generally.
Rawls's work, as we shall see, strikingly illustrates this point. And among contemporary Kantian legal
rights theorists, one has only to compare Fried and Epstein, who, starting from seemingly identical
premises regarding human respect and autonomy, derive quite different policy impli- cations.43 If
Dworkin is a "genuine" Kantian, and not simply a utilitarian of the egalitarian school,44 the point is
made even more dramatically. How- ever, the fact that utilitarianism is no more indefinite than
competing theo- ries of moral obligation may not reconcile one to utilitarianism, especially one
who happens to favor limited government. Suppose, for example, that Bentham and many other
utilitarians are right that lacking any real knowl- edge of the responsiveness of different individuals'
happiness to income we should assume that every one is pretty much alike in that respect. Then we
need only make one additional, and as it happens plausible, assumption- that of the diminishing
marginal utility of money income-to obtain a utilitarian basis for a goal of seeking to equalize
incomes. For, on these assumptions, it is easily shown that an equal distribution of income and wealth
will produce more happiness than any other distribution,45 unless the costs of achieving and
maintaining such a distribution equal or exceed the benefits in greater happiness. The qualification is
of course critical, but it places the burden of proof on the opponent of income equalization in an area
where proof is notoriously difficult to come by. The example of income equality illustrates a
broader point. If the imprac- ticality of the felicific calculus is taken to justify the utilitarian's
use of guesswork, the possibilities for plausible public intervention become vir- tually unlimited.
As a trivial example, from the observation that animals are capable of suffering, it is but a few steps to
advocating the prohibition of sport fishing.46 The problem of indefiniteness blends insensibly into a
related objection to utilitarian thought: what one might term the perils of instrumentalism. Rights in a
utilitarian system are strictly instrumental goods. The only final good is the happiness of the group as
a whole. If it is maximized by allowing people to own property and marry as they choose and change
jobs and so on, then rights to these things will be given to them, but if happiness could be increased
by treating people more like sheep, then rights are out the window. People do not seem to be happier
in totalitarian than in democratic states, but if they were, the consistent utilitarian would have to
support to- talitarianism. Utilitarianism thus seems to base rights of great importance on no firmer
ground than an empirical hunch that they promote "happiness." That hunch cannot be verified by any
tools we have or are likely to acquire-though some people will find one bit of evidence or another
(e.g., the Berlin Wall) persuasive in buttressing it. Even within the general framework of the liberal
state, utilitarians who are not shy about making bold empirical guesses concerning the
distribution of happiness can produce rather monstrous policy recommendations. An example is
Bentham's pro- posal for eliminating begging by enslaving beggars.47 "Moral monstrousness" is in fact
a major problem of utilitarianism. Two types of monstrousness may be distinguished. One stems from
the utilita- rian's refusal to make moral distinctions among types of pleasure. Suppose that A spends
his leisure time pulling wings off flies, while B spends his feeding pigeons, and that because A has a
greater capacity for pleasure he derives more happiness from his leisure time than B does from his.
Putting aside the unhappiness of the fly-which, if we could measure happiness, would probably be
found trivial-the consistent utilitarian would have to judge A a better man than B, because A's activity
adds more to the sum of happiness than B's. The other type of moral monstrousness associated with
utilitarianism arises from the utilitarian's readiness to sacrifice the innocent individual on the altar of
social need. Alan Donagan gives the following example: it might well be the case that more good and
less evil would result from your painlessly and undetectedly murdering your malicious, old and
unhappy grandfather than from your forbearing to do so: he would be freed from his wretched
existence; his children would be rejoiced by their inheritances and would no longer suffer from his
mischief; and you might anticipate the reward promised to those who do good in secret. Nobody
seriously doubts that a position with such a consequence is mon- strous.48 Donagan is correct, I
believe, that a consistent utilitarian would have to reckon the murderer a good man. The utilitarian
could, of course, point out that a practice of murdering obnoxious grandfathers would probably reduce
happiness. Knowledge of the practice would make grandfathers very un- happy, yet in the long run
probably not benefit heirs because the practice would deter people from accumulating estates. But any
utilitarian objections to creating an exception to the law of murder for killers of obnoxious grand-
fathers have no force at the level of personal morality once it is stipulated that the murder will go
undetected. Yet to call the murderer in Donagan's example a "good man" does unacceptable violence
to conventional moral notions. Monstrousness is a less serious problem of utilitarianism at the level of
social than of personal choice. It is one thing to pick an innocent person at random and kill him to
achieve some social end and another to establish an institutional structure-criminal punishment, for
example-which makes it inevitable that some innocent people will suffer. No punishment system
could be devised that reduced the probability of erroneous conviction to zero. Yet even at the level of
social choice, utilitarianism can lead occasion- ally to monstrous results. Suppose there were a group
of people who were at once so few relative to the rest of the society, so miserable, and so hated that
their extermination would increase the total happiness of the society. The consistent utilitarian would
find it hard to denounce extermination in these circumstances although he would be entitled to note
the anxiety costs that might be imposed on people who feared they would be exterminated next. As
another example, the initial and relatively mild anti-Semitic measures taken by Hitler's government
against German Jews conceivably increased the total happiness of the German (and world?)
population even though some non- Jews may have feared a precedent for other identifiable minority
groups to which they belonged. Conceivably, these initial anti-Semitic measures were morally
desirable from a utilitarian standpoint.49 If monstrousness is a peril of utilitarianism, moral
squeamishness, or fanaticism, is a peril of Kantian theorists. Bernard Williams poses the case of
"Jim," the guest of an officer in a backward country who is about to have a group of political prisoners
shot.50 The officer tells Jim that if Jim will shoot one of the prisoners, he will release the others. The
extreme Kantian would say that Jim has no obligation to shoot a prisoner because there is a crucial
difference between doing evil and failing to prevent evil. This is Williams's position. I regard the
asserted distinction as precious in the example. If Jim declines the officer's invitation, all the prisoners
will die; if he accepts it, all but one will be saved. There is no trade-off. No one will be better off if
Jim declines the invitation; all but one will be worse off.

Utilitarian logic has no boundaries it ends in either

trying to find the mean happiness where everyone is
equally miserable or the greatest sum of happiness where
it becomes beneficial to flood the world with lots of
people
Richard Posner, Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Lecturer at University of
Chicago Law School, 79 (Utilitarianism, economics, and legal theory, The Journal of Legal Studies,
Vol.8, No. 1 (Jan., 1979))

A better answer, I believe, is simply to say that we don't care about animal utilities save as they enter
into human utility functions, and leave it at that. This Johnsonian answer will not, however, solve the
boundary problem of utilitarianism with respect to foreigners. Should American policy be to
maximize the happiness of Americans, with foreigners' happiness given a zero weight? Or is a more
ecumenical perspective required? And how about the unborn? To include them in the population
whose happiness is to be maximized may yield different policies on abortions, adoptions,
homosexual- ity, savings, and other issues than if only the currently living count in the happiness
census. Whether to include foreigners or the unborn is not an issue that utilitarianism can resolve
directly, yet again it seems that if maximizing utility is to be taken seriously the broadest possible
conception of the rele- vant population is indicated. The problem of foreigners and the unborn is
related to the old dispute among utilitarians over whether the utilitarian goal should be to maximize
average or total happiness. If the poorer half of the population of Bangladesh were killed, the standard
of living of the remaining half, and for all one knows their subjective happiness as well, would rise
because of the higher ratio of people to land and other natural resources. However, the total happiness
might well be less. Similarly, a high birth rate may cause a reduction in the standard of living of a
crowded country and, along with it, in the average happiness of the country, but this loss may be more
than offset by the satisfactions, even if somewhat meager, of the added population. There is no clear
basis in utilitarian theory for choosing between average and total happiness, but the latter is more
consistent with a simple insistence on utility as the maximand. In summary, the logic of utilitarianism
seems to argue for pushing the boundary as far out as possible, for making the ethical goal the
maximization of the total amount of happiness or satisfaction in the universe. Since this goal seems
attainable only by making lots of people miserable (those of us who would have to make room
for all the foreigners, sheep, etc.), utilitarians are constantly seeking ways of contracting the
boundary. But to do so they must go outside of utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism doesnt truly care about life. It is based on

bias assumptions of what life is worth and justifies
genocide if desires believe it is required.
James S. Fishkin, Associate Professor of Political Science, Yale University,
COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW, January, 1984, p. 265.

Perhaps Hare is tight that it is difficult to imagine an individual Nazi whose

preferences are so intense in favor of the Holocaust that they outweigh, in a
strict utilitarian calculation, all the misery they would require. But the utilitarian
vulnerability to this kind of case does not require such a horrendous
individual utility monster. The problem cannot be dispatched so easily
because the desires of numerous individuals must be taken into account. If
there are enough Nazis with hatred of even moderate intensity, a strict
utilitarian calculation about total preference satisfaction in the society may
conceivably support horrendous or tyrannous policies directed against the
Jews or other minority groups -- once the numbers and intensities on both sides are
summed up throughout the society.

Utilitarianism allows totalitarianism and war.

Kateb, prof. of politics at Princeton University, 1992 (George, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and
Democratic Culture, Cornell University Press, p. 11)

I do not mean to take seriously the idea that utilitarianism is a satisfactory replacement
for the theory of rights. The well-being (or mere preferences) of the majority cannot override the
rightful claims of individuals. In a time when the theory of rights is global it is noteworthy that some moral
philosophers disparage the theory of rights. The political experience of this century should be enough to make them hesitate: it is not
It also could be fairly easy for some
clear that, say, some version of utilitarianism could not justify totalitarian evil.
utilitarians to justify any war and any dictatorship, and very easy to justify any kind of
ruthlessness even in societies that pay some attention to rights. There is no end to the
immoral permissions that one or another type of utilitarianism grants. Everything is
permitted, if the calculation is right.

Utilitarianism justifies doing evil in the name of

preventing evil justifies any atrocity for the greater
good.
Norman, prof. of moral philosophy at the University of Kentucky, 1995 (Richard, Ethics,
Killing, and War, p. 207)

Since the waging of war almost invariably involves the deliberate taking of life on a
massive scale, it will be immensely difficult to justify. I have argued that utilitarian
justifications are not good enough. We cannot justify the taking of life simply by saying
that the refusal to take life is likely to lead to worse consequences. An adequate notion of
moral responsibility implies that other people's responsibility for evil does not necessarily
justify us is doing evil ourselves in order to prevent them. We cannot sacrifice some of
our people for the others and claim that we are justified by a utilitarian calculus of lives.
 AT: Util Solves Rights
Util fails to protect moral rights it silences rights claims
when not grounded in law.
Byrnes, JD University of Arizona College of Law, 1999 (Erin, Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Unmasking
White Privelege to Expose the Fallacy of White Innocense: Using a Theory of Moral Correlativity to Make the Case for Affirmative
Action Programs in Education, Arizona Law Review, 41 Ariz. L. Rev. 535, lexis)

Utilitarianism conceives of rights as being cognizable only when they are legally
recognized. 236 To the utilitarian, there is no such thing as a moral right because it is not
socially recognized. 237 The utilitarian rejection of moral rights can be fatal to affirmative action. Rights in utilitarian rhetoric are synonymous with the idea
of a valid claim to act. 238 Put differently, one can be said to hold a valid claim when, and only when, that

claim is grounded in a legally or socially recognized right. This normative theory of rights further posits that the exercise
of rights is not dependent upon a duty incumbent upon others to acknowledge or respect that right. 239 This is clearly problematic when applied to calls for affirmative action.

Instead of conceiving of rights as corresponding with a duty, the utilitarian thinks of

rights in terms of "immunity rights," which have a corresponding concept of a
"disability." 240 This too is a foreboding concept because affirmative action programs often involve affirmative guarantees, versus a simple right to be free from
discrimination. An example of an immunity right is the right to free speech. The right to free speech exists independently of an obligation upon others not to interfere with an
individual's right to exercise free speech. 241 The corresponding disability operates upon Congress. The disability prohibits Congress from enacting certain laws abridging the
individual's right to free speech, but does not extend so far as to require the passage of legislation which would affirmatively protect or guarantee the immunity right. 242 The
immunity right, then, is one that merely involves a freedom from outside interference, a sort of negative right, as opposed to being a right that is affirmatively protected through the
imposition of an obligation upon others to honor the right. The distinction made between moral and legal rights, encompassing the distinction between a disability and a duty, is

Utilitarianism squarely rejects the recognition of moral rights because

central to the utilitarian argument.

moral rights must be understood in terms of a corresponding beneficial obligation. 243 A

moral conception of rights dictates that a right is held by an individual "if and only if one
is supposed to benefit from another person's compliance with a coercive...rule." 244
Utilitarianism must necessarily reject a conception of rights grounded in morality because
the utilitarian doctrine is diametrically opposed to the notion that rights correspond with
duties. [*563] Furthermore, utilitarianism renounces moral rights precisely because they
exist independent of social recognition or enforcement. 245 Moral rights "are independent of particular circumstances and
do not depend on any special conditions," 246 like legal affirmation. Thus, moral rights cannot be accepted by the utilitarian because they lack the normative grounding

Utilitarians, therefore, assume that there is a clear delineation between

fundamental to utilitarian theory.

moral rights and the pursuit for overall human welfare, the central tenet of utilitarian
doctrine.

Utilitarianism fundamentally fails to protect individual

rights greatest good claims simply conflict.
Byrnes, JD University of Arizona College of Law, 1999 (Erin, Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Unmasking
White Privelege to Expose the Fallacy of White Innocense: Using a Theory of Moral Correlativity to Make the Case for Affirmative
Action Programs in Education, Arizona Law Review, 41 Ariz. L. Rev. 535, lexis)

Moral rights are objectionable not only because they lack social recognition but also because they necessarily imply a correlation between rights and duties. Again,

utilitarianism's specific rejection of the tie between rights and duties renders recognition
of white privilege nearly impossible. Without this recognition, there can be no
meaningful solution. 247 If accepted, moral rights would provide the grounds for the appraisal of law and other social institutions, a system of appraisal
antithetical to utilitarianism's rubric of assessment. Moral rights carry with them the expectation that institutions will be erected with an eye towards respect and furtherance of

Utilitarianism,
such rights. 248 Such a proposition would certainly require more than just striving towards color-blindness were it applied to affirmative action.

however, requires that institutions and rights be evaluated solely with respect to the
promotion of human welfare, welfare being the satisfaction of overall citizen desires. 249 The
assumption, implicit in the foregoing argument, is that moral rights neither fit perfectly nor converge with legal rights. 250 This may not necessarily be the case. David Lyons'
"theory of moral rights exclusion" discusses the way in which utilitarians conceive of moral rights working at odds with the utilitarian goal. 251 Lyons' theory describes the way in
which a moral right, at some point, gains enough currency to warrant individual exercise of that right. According to Lyons, when a moral right has reached this point, it has
achieved the "argumentative threshold" and gains normative force. 252 The potential for this occurrence is precisely what leads to the utilitarian rejection of moral rights. Rejection
is predicated on the fact that once the argumentative threshold is reached, a presumption is created against interference upon the individual exercise [*564] of the right. 253
Under a system which recognized moral rights, but still organized itself according to the
utilitarian goal of achieving human welfare (which is happiness), individual rights would
purportedly run headlong into the pursuit of welfare. 254 Though the pursuit of welfare would be deemed morally relevant
and would justify a course of action on welfare's behalf, in a scenario where that course of action constituted a mere

"minimal increment of utility," it would be incapable of overcoming the argumentative

threshold of rights. 255 Thus, the argument is that the recognition of moral rights is diametrically
opposed to utilitarianism because in a moral rights regime, rights act as a limitation upon
the utilitarian goal of fulfilling as many individual desires as possible.
 AT: Were Different

The claim to be different and care about the

disadvantaged is a history of failed promises

Ibrahim 2008- Associate Professor, Faculty of Education,

University of Ottawa- 2k8- Awad; Takin Hip Hop to a
Whole Nother Level- Global Linguistic Flows- p. 242-
246Yet,

Invoking this idea of sampling as a new way of doing something

thats been with us for a long time, as a place where you
recontextualize the previous expression of others, and where there is no
such thing as an immaculate perception, Pennycook (p. 149) draws our attention to how rap is
redefining the idea of literacy, authorship, ownership, knowledge,
originality and creativity. Because of its highly sophisticated linguistic use
and communicative patterns, rap for Pennycook represents a
significant tool for language awareness and the experience of beauty
and pleasure are displayed through language, thus making language
available to scrutiny (p. 146). Because of biting, reenactment, and the mobilization of a
Confucian-style form of imitation and respect, Penny- cook concludes, Hip Hop Pedagogy has entered
a post-authorial era (p. 149). What Pennycook, Fisher, Alim, and Newman point to is a New Literacy,
new approaches to Hip Hop Pedagogy where rhyme, rhythm, dialect, performance, and diff erence are all
salient elements in Hip Hop Culture and Rap. Th ese ap- proaches are built around the phonocentric
traditionbeing concerned with fostering non-powerful
diversity and allowing
knowledges, cultures and voices of the disadvantaged to be heard
(p. 144)and the spoken word becomes an organic extension and a
powerful expression of deep intellectual rigor , thus Takin Hip Hop to a Whole
Nother Level 245 requiring and at the same time performing a natural outgrowth of reading and
writing, as Fisher has put it. Th ird, Higgins off ers a wonderful way to think about Hip Hop as a global
space of/for intercultural communication. Pennycook and Mitchell also make the case for the dialogic
nature between the local and the global and Alims notion of Hip Hop Nation Language gives it a
cartography and structure. In Sarkars chapter, we see the colonizer and the colonized rubbing
shoulders. For me, this argument is summed up best by Higgins in the opening quote of this chapter. As
Bloomaert put it (cited in Higgins), the Kihuni (a form of Global Hip Hop Na- tion Language mixed with
Swahili) off ers the wahuni (i.e., gangsta) in Tanzania a linguistic repertoire that allows them to get out
of Dar es Salaam culturally, to culturally relocate their local environment in a global semiotics of class,
status, blackness, marginalization. Th is is also the case with Omoniyi, Lin, Tsujmura and Davis, and
Roth-Gordon, where Hip Hop moves youth from moja (Swahili for one) to pamoja (togetherness).
Fourth, we know that students do not come to our classrooms as
generic disembodied individuals . On the contrary, the racial and
gender identities formed outside the classroom are crucial in the
learning process. Specifically, I showed elsewhere that Hip Hop is and can be on-
and-off -school site where learning can and indeed does take place
(Ibrahim, 2003; see also Alim, 2007). If this is so, then we are confronted with a
pedagogy where learning may mean investing into hybrid cultural
and linguistic practices that are not valued by the dominant culture
or outside the main text. The Fisher, Alim, and Newman programs are hopeful notes in
 Hip Hop is
how this New Literacy can be introduced as a subject of investigation. Fift h and finally,
an invented semiotic language, an aesthetic form that is historically
specific. As such, it is neither immune to social ills such as
homophobia and sexism nor is it above critique. When Brother Nas declared, Hip
Hop Is Dead, for me, he is not dissin Hip Hop, he is asking us to lovingly kill that which is undesirable
within Hip Hop. We kill it by critiquing it and in its stead we lovingly create that which is desirable. That
way we speak about a Hip Hop pamoja that engages seriously Daara J of Senegal, Dragon Ash of Japan,
with KRS-One of New York, and the list is long to be
Wire MC of Australia, MC Yan of Hong Kong
we saw a language of concrete
exhausted. In the Fisher, Alim, and Newman programs,
possibilities that saw Hip Hop as a site of multiplicity and hope : (1) A
hope that those who do not see themselves represented in the curriculum, those who cannot relate
those who are wittingly or unwittingly kept silent, may
to the main text,
find a subject matter they can relate to and identify with; a subject
matter that brings their experience to the forefront so it can be
valued and critically engaged. The Urban Arts Academy has to be cited as an exemplary
site of how students desilence themselves when they find a mattering
map that engages them. Here, students became an organic part of
the curriculum design process. That is, they became knowledge
producers ; 246 Awad Ibrahim and where they invested their desire and self was turned into a
curriculum site worthy of study. (2) A hope that educators will not be stuck in the notion that they do not
(3) A hope that we as
know much about Hip Hop, and hence it is better kept dormant.
adults, academics, teachers, and pedagogues are able to use our
third ear; because the consequence of not envisioning Hip Hop as a
subject of investigation, Weaver, Dimitriadis, and Daspit (2001) have argued, has
been *deafening in that [a]s youth have become attuned to the
world of Hip Hop, most adults [particularly academics] have lost the
ability to understand the artistic power of Hip Hop, thereby losing a
major route to understanding the concerns, fears, hopes, and
dreams of youth (p. 10). (4) A hope that teachers will engage the diff erent mattering maps
where students invest their identities, learning, and desires. In my research, as well as Newman and
ask, whose identity are we assuming if we do not engage
Alim, one must
Hip Hop and rap in our classroom activities? By ignoring the
cultural and social forms that are authorized by youth and
simultaneously empower or disempower them educators risk
complicitly silencing and negating their students, Giroux and Simon (1989a)
contend. This is unwittingly accomplished by refusing to recognize the importance of those sites and
social practices outside of school that actively shape student experiences and through which students oft
en defi ne and construct their sense of identity, politics, and culture (p. 3) .
Ultimately, the
issue at stake is for students to become their own subject and locate
themselves in time and history and at the same time critically
interrogate the adequacy of that location. If all is rhythm; the entire destiny of
man [sic] is one celestial rhythm, as the German poet Hlderlin has put it, it is time to unleash youth
creativity, set them free to form their own voice and knowledge, to use their lyrical tongue (Newman,
this volume), to ask their own questions and become their own person. It is time to begin the improvised
script, set the stage and take the pedagogy of pleasure and jouissance very seri- ously. Only then can life
be off da hook: taken as is not as some think it should be. Word upstraight outta Compton, straight
outta Global Zulu NationHip Hops in da house.
Country Modules
 Yemen (Also FIRE turns to Terror scenarios)
Drone strikes are destroying Yemen- slaughtering
civilians, targeted killing based on vague and unverifiable
information, and a destabilization of daily life- even
though most of the country stands against AQAP
Schwedler 9/27 (Jillian, [Professor of Political Science at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, and a member of the Editorial Committee of The Middle East
Research and Information Project, publishers of Middle East
Report] Is the U.S. drone program in Yemen working? 9.27.15
https://lawfareblog.com/us-drone-program-yemen-working //DF)
The United States began to use drones in Yemen in 2002 to kill
individuals affiliated with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its
predecessor organizations and disrupt its operations there and
abroad. Since then, over 200 strikes have killed over a thousand
Yemenis, tens of children, and at least a handful of U.S. citizens
one of whom was a deliberate target. The program has drawn
widespread condemnation from human rights organizations and
some UN bodies, yet it remains in place because the administrations
of George W. Bush and Barack Obama view it as a success, as both have publicly
stated. Criticism of the program often takes the form of debates about which legal regime is relevant
to judging a states use of targeted killings, which critics call extra-judicial executions or simply
assassinations. While dissent has been strongest in academic and human rights communities, some
scholars have echoed the arguments made by states that the imperatives of self-defense permit states to
carry out such killings as legitimate acts of war. The Lawfare consensus seems in favor of these strikes. I
share the views of the moral and legal dissenters and hesitate to move beyond those debates because I
dont want to suggest that I accept the programs legality. But I do want to engage those who do view the
program as working after all, if the U.S. administration did not believe it was working, it wouldnt need to
by what metrics should we consider judging its
justify it legally. But
success? Perhaps the most obvious metric is whether AQAP leaders
are actually being killed and, even more, whether their deaths
substantially disrupted the groups activities in Yemen or its ability
to pursue objectives outside of Yemen. For advocates of this metric, the program has
been successful in the short term individuals killed even if the longer-term impact is less clear because
Yet the success in taking out AQAPs
new leaders seem to step in with regularity.
leadership is overstated. The numbers of AQAP members and
supporters officially reported as killed are questionable, and
probably grossly exaggerated. This is because the U.S.
administration considers all adult males in the vicinity of the strikes
to be combatants, not civilians, unless their civilian status can be
established subsequently. Full investigations are neither desirable
nor pragmatic for the U.S. government particularly now that Yemen
is the site of a civil and regional war. Even more troubling is that at
times the U.S. may not even be certain of its primary targets. It
frequently uses language that is so conditional that there seems to
be more than a bit of guessing about the identities of those being
targeted. But I would like to focus on different metric: the longer-
term impact of the drone strikes on the legitimacy and
attractiveness of al-Qaidas message in Yemen and its ability to
recruit among Yemenis themselves. Drone strikes are widely
reported in local media and online and are a regular topic of
discussion at weekly qat chewing sessions across the country. Cell
phone calls spike after drone strikes, which are also widely reported
on Twitter and Facebook. The strikes are wildly unpopular, with
attitudes toward the United States increasingly negative. An Arab
Barometer survey carried out in 2007 found that 73.5 percent of
Yemenis believed that U.S. involvement in the region justified
attacks on Americans everywhere. The narrative that the West, and
especially the United States, fears the Muslim world is powerful and
pervasive in the region. The U.S. intervenes regularly in regional
politics and is a steadfast ally of Israel. It supports Saudi Arabia and
numerous other authoritarian regimes that allow it to establish
permanent U.S. military bases on Arab land. It cares more about oil
and Israel than it does about the hundreds of millions in the region
suffering under repressive regimes and lacking the most basic
human securities. These ideas about the American role in Middle
East affairs many of them true are among those in wide
circulation in the region. Al-Qaida has since 1998 advanced the argument that Muslims need
to take up arms against the United States and its allied regimes in the region. Yet al-Qaidas
message largely fell on deaf ears in Yemen for many years. Yes, it did
attract some followers, mostly those disappointed to have missed the chance to fight as mujahidin in
al-Qaidas narrative of attacking the foreign enemy at
Afghanistan. But
home did not resonate widely. The movement remained isolated for
many years, garnering only limited sympathy from the local
communities in which they sought refuge. The dual effect of U.S. acceleration in
drone strikes since 2010 and of their continued use during the transitional period that was intended to
usher in more accountable governance has shown Yemenis how consistently their leaders will cede
sovereignty and citizens security to the United States. While Yemenis may recognize
that AQAP does target the United States, the hundreds of drone
strikes are viewed as an excessive response. The weak sovereignty
of the Yemeni state is then treated as the problem that has
allowed AQAP to expand, even as state sovereignty has been
directly undermined by U.S. policy both under President Ali
Abdullah Salih and during the transition. American security is
placed above Yemeni security, with Yemeni sovereignty violated
repeatedly in service of that cause. Regardless of what those in Washington view as
valid and legitimate responses to terrorist threats, the reality for Yemenis is that the
United States uses drone strikes regularly to run roughshod over
Yemeni sovereignty in an effort to stop a handful of attacks most
of them failed against U.S. targets. The fact that corrupt Yemeni
leaders consent to the attacks makes little difference to public
opinion.

The US has a history of imperialist ambitions with Yemen,

manifesting in economic sanctions and pressure from US-
backed powers in the region
Schwedler 9/27 (Jillian, [Professor of Political Science at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, and a member of the Editorial Committee of The Middle East
Research and Information Project, publishers of Middle East
Report] Is the U.S. drone program in Yemen working? 9.27.15
https://lawfareblog.com/us-drone-program-yemen-working //DF)
The United States cut aid to Yemen in 1990 when the newly united
Yemeni state, which had just rotated into the Arab seat on the UN
Security Council, failed to vote for a U.S.-led coalition to reverse the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Yemen suffered a tremendous economic
blow, as the United States joined Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in
unilaterally severing aid to what was then and still is the poorest
Arab nation. But with the rise of jihadi activism on the Arabian
Peninsula over the next decade, and particularly after the bombing
of USS Cole in 2000, Salih welcomed the return of U.S. aid to Yemen.
This included a strong security dimension as the United States
began tracking those suspected of involvement in the Cole attacks
and other al-Qaida activities. Conspicuous caravans of FBI agents
became a topic of local conversations, so the return of a U.S.
presence in Yemen was also more visible than it had been
previously. Salih claimed to have had advance knowledge of every drone
strike. Saudi Arabia has meddled in Yemen at least since the fall of
the northern Mutawakkilite monarchy in the late 1960s. The Saudi
intervention that began with air strikes in March of this year and
escalated to ground troops is thus only the latest and most
egregious of the kingdoms efforts to affect Yemen politics. This
background is necessary to understand that if Yemen is a failed
state, despite scholarly protestations otherwise, it is at least in
part due to decades of external actors violating Yemeni sovereignty
with near impunity. The drone program, like the Saudi-led war, is
merely a recent and overt example.

This is already beginning to manifest in anti-American

sentiment within the country, as Yemeni daily reality
turns into the site of an undeclared US war: this is the
cyclical turn of imperialism to produce the crisis it then
saves
Schwedler 9/27 (Jillian, [Professor of Political Science at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, and a member of the Editorial Committee of The Middle East
Research and Information Project, publishers of Middle East
Report] Is the U.S. drone program in Yemen working? 9.27.15
https://lawfareblog.com/us-drone-program-yemen-working //DF)
For al-Qaida, the drone program is a gift from the heavens. Its
recruiting narrative exploits common misperceptions of American
omnipotence, offering an alternative route to justice and
empowerment. Regardless of American perceptions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the
attacks, what Yemeni could now deny that the United States is waging
an undeclared war on Yemen? Most recently, this narrative of direct U.S.
intervention has been further substantiated by U.S. material and
intelligence support for the Saudi-led military campaign aimed at the
return to power of the unpopular and exiled-President Abed Rabbo Mansour
Hadi. Photographs of spent U.S.-made cluster bombs are widely
circulated. Nor have drone attacks ceased; alongside the often
indiscriminate Saudi-led bombing, American drones continue their
campaign of targeted assassination. One might think that the Saudi
attacks would not help al-Qaida, but it is contributing to al-Qaidas
growth in Yemen. The indiscriminate targeting of the Saudi-led
campaign undermines any sense of security, let alone Yemeni
sovereignty. And AQAP-controlled areas like the port of Mukalla are
not being targeted by Saudi or Gulf troops at all. The United States aims to take
up the job of targeting AQAP while the Saudi-led (and U.S.-backed) forces focus on defeating the Houthis
and restoring Hadi to power. But the overall situation is one in which those
multiple interventions in Yemen are creating an environment in
which al-Qaida is beginning to appeal in ways it never had before.
For these reasons, the U.S. use of drones to kill even carefully
identified AQAP leaders in Yemen is counterproductive: it gives
resonance to the claims of the very group it seeks to destroy. It
provides evidence that al-Qaidas claims and strategies are justified
and that Yemenis cannot count on the state to protect them from
threats foreign and domestic. U.S. officials have argued that the drone program has not
been used as a recruiting device for al-Qaida. But it is hard to ignore the evidence to the
contrary, from counterinsurgency experts who have worked for the U.S.
government to Yemeni voices like Farea Muslimi. Its not just that
drone strikes make al-Qaida recruiting easier, true as that probably
is, but that they broaden the social space in which al-Qaida can
function. America does not need to win the hearts and minds of Yemenis in the service of some
grand U.S. project in the region. But if America wants to weaken al-Qaida in
Yemen, it needs at a minimum to stop pursuing policies that are
bound to enrage and embitter Yemenis who might otherwise be
neutral. There is an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look
like a nail. The U.S. military let alone its drones is not the only tool on
which the United States can rely. But when the measure of success is
as narrow as the killing of a specific person, the tool gets used with
increasing frequency. Indeed, drone strikes have significantly expanded under the Obama
administration. It is crucial to see the bigger picture, the one in which
long-time Yemeni friends tell me of growing anti-U.S. sentiment
where there was previously very little. Public opinion toward
America has clearly deteriorated over the past decade, and to
reverse it may take much longer. But the use of drones to kill people
deemed enemies of the United States, along with the Saudi-led war
against the Houthis, is expanding the spaces in which al-Qaida is
able to function.
S! Modules
 Anti-Americanism From Below

Anti-Americanism from below can create an opposition to

military that can alter foreign policy

Sexton 2006 (Jared [Associate Professor, African American

Studies School of Humanities at UC Irvine] Race, Nation,
and Empire in a Blackened World, Radical History
Review, Spring, 2006, Issue 95) //jl p. 254

There is, of course, passing mention of an endemic and organic

anti-Americanism from below (2), rooted in the resistance and
revolt of slaves and the staunch military opposition of indigenous
peoples, and there is discussion as well of the new social
movements. However, the anthology focuses relentlessly on the
operations of U.S. foreign policy and the range of critical reactions it
has largely motivated: from the hedging and reluctance of
entrenched political and economic elites to the collective resistance,
mass opposition, or open rebellion of peasants and workers to full-
scale military belligerence; responses emanating from across the
political spectrum and involving an assortment of interests political,
economic, social, cultural, and psychical. The signal contribution of
the collection is, of course, its capacity to intervene on a perennially
simplified public discourse not only by providing a host of learned,
historically grounded and politically minded treatments of anti-
Americanism across great swaths of time and territory but also by
opening out a wealth of archival resources, past and potential. Aside
from featuring more than a few revealing and erudite chapters (prominent are those by Greg Grandin and
Mary Louis Pratt on Latin America, by Timothy Mitchell on the Middle East, by Mary Nolan and Kristin Ross
on Europe, by Hyun Ok Park on Asia, and by Andrew Ross on the United States), Anti-Americanism would
be worth reading for its collective documentation and condensed bibliographic notes alone. If debates
about the U.S. empire proceeded from this scholarly horizon (and its common reading list), the quality of
The
exchange would be improved infinitely, at least from the vantage of civil societys proper subjects.
limits of civil society in the United States, and increasingly on the
global scale as well, are established by the profundity of ones
critique, or more precisely, by ones willingness to uphold in the final
instance a certain pledge of allegiance. As the coeditor Andrew Ross
writes: The domestic profile of anti-Americanism, like its overseas
counterparts, serves several functions. One of these is to regulate
the limits of dissent and ensure that political debate is contained
within the borders of civic nationalism, unswayed by the example of
regional neighbors or by overseas influence. The Left has its own
version of excommunication, where moralists seek to patrol the
perimeters of opinion that they judge to be digestible to the public
(292).
 Demilitarizing Discourses on Africa

African countries are calling for the US to demilitarize

their paternalistic discourses toward Africa on security

Zeleza 2013 (Paul Tiyambe [is the Presidential Professor

of African American Studies and History and the dean of
the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola
Marymount University in Los Angeles] Obama's Africa
Policy: The Limits of Symbolic Power, d/l: project
muse) //jl
The report, titled "U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa," identified what it called four interdependent
and mutually reinforcing objectives. First, to strengthen democratic institutions by promoting accountable,
transparent, and responsive governance, bolstering positive models, and promoting and protecting human
rights, civil society, and independent media. Second, to spur economic growth, trade, and investment by
promoting an enabling environment and encouraging U.S. companies to invest, promoting regional
integration, and expanding African capacity to effectively access and benefit from global markets. Third, to
advance peace and security by countering Al Queda and other terrorist groups, advancing regional security
cooperation and security sector reform, preventing conflict, and supporting initiatives to promote peace
and security. Fourth, to promote opportunity and development by addressing constraints to growth and
poverty reduction, promoting [End Page 167] food security, transforming Africa's public health, increasing
opportunities for women and youth, and promoting resilience to climate change, low-emissions growth,
and sustainable development. "Across all objectives," the report promised, "we
will: deepen our engagement with Africa's young leaders; seek to
empower marginalized populations and women; address the unique
needs of fragile and postconflict states; and work closely with the
U.N. and other multilateral actors to achieve our objectives on the
continent." For their part, African leaders, scholars, and opinion
makers called for changes in the style and substance of U.S.-Africa
relations, to fundamentally transform these relations by making
them more mutually beneficial in the areas of security, democracy,
development, and the restructuring of global institutions (see Kornegay
2008; Akukwe 2009; Prendergast & Norris 2009; LeMelle & Stulman 2009). While the tone of
the Bush administration had been particularly troubling, they
deplored the long-standing paternalistic attitudes of U.S.
policymakers and hoped for change. On the security question, the
United States was called upon to abandon or temper the growing
militarization of an Africa policy spawned by the misguided "war on
terror" and concretized by the formation of the Africa Command (AFRICOM),
which was widely opposed by African states and civil society groups.
The U.S. was urged to promote and effectively coordinate with
regional African peacemaking initiatives, rather than pursuing
misguided unilateral or bilateral interventions, as had often been
the case. As for democratization, which African countries had been undergoing in fits and starts since
the end of the 1980sand which indeed goes back to the struggles for independencethere were
expectations that the United States would increasingly adopt the policy of backing rather than blocking
progressive democratic regimes, experiments, and struggles on the continent by pursuing and maintaining
The United States
sustained engagement with Africa's democratic states and social movements.
has a despicable record of coddling autocracies and electoral
malpractices when it suits its short-term and shortsighted interests
of rhetorical commitment to democracy and human rights that is
often not pursued in practice. With reference to development, it was pointed out that the
United States had undermined the continent's efforts for sustainable development through the imposition,
from the early 1980s, of the Washington Consensus, a ruthless ideological regime of neoliberalism that
undid much of Africa's postin-dependence development momentum. There was hope that the financial
crisis that triggered the Great Recession and ushered in Keynesian interventions in the U.S. and other
Western countries, long advocated by African states to avert their prolonged recessions of the "lost
decades" of the 1980s and 1990s, would finally bury neoliberal orthodoxy. Also problematic, indeed
culpable, in the eyes of progressive African leaders and scholars were U.S. trade policies, including the
tariffs imposed against manufactured exports of African and other developing countries and the
agricultural subsidies that distort global trade and weaken the competitiveness of African producers. For
example, massive state subsidies for U.S. cotton farmers [End Page 168] severely damaged the prospects
Finally, it was anticipated that a
and livelihoods of West African cotton growers.1
Democratic administration led by a cosmopolitan African American
would abandon the aggressive unilateralist policies of the
insufferably cocky Bush administration. And more crucially, that
demands from Africa and the global South for the restructuring of
institutions of global political and economic governance from the U.N.
Security Council to that unholy trinity, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World
Trade Organizationwould
receive a more sympathetic hearing. In this
regard, the U.S. was prevailed upon to take leadership in
environmental matters befitting its role as the world's biggest
polluter and consumer of global resources by, among other things,
supporting international protocols and funding existing agreements
for climate adaptation and mitigation among the developing
countries and negotiating new and more robust arrangements to
combat global warming and other environmental threats. Clearly,
some of the rhetoric in the Obama administration's policy toward
Africa echoed Africa's age-old pursuits of sustainable development,
democratization, human security, and incorporation into the world
system as a vital player, not a perpetual pawn. But beyond the
rhetoric, there was little substantive change in U.S. Africa policy. The
Obama administration's Africa, like the Africa of its predecessors, referred primarily to sub-Saharan Africa.
North Africa was subsumed into the Middle East. Indeed, the Obama administration's Africa policies hardly
differed from those of previous administrations in any significant way.
 Disidentification

We must now disidentify with the state to radically reject

its power to wage war

Rodrguez 2009 (Dylan [University of California

Riverside, California, USA] The Terms of Engagement:
Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition, Critical Sociology
36(1) 151-173) //jl

Our historical moment suggests the need for a principled political

rupturing of existing techniques and strategies that fetishize and
fixate on the negotiation, massaging, and management of the worst
outcomes of domestic warfare. One political move long overdue is
toward grass roots pedagogies of radical dis-identification with the
state, in the trajectory of an anti-nationalism or anti-patriotism, that
reorients a progressive identification with the creative possibilities
of insurgency (this is to consider insurgency as a politics that pushes beyond the defensive
maneuvering of resistance). While there are rare groups in existence that
offer this kind of nourishing political space (from the L.A.-based Youth Justice
Coalition to the national organization INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence), they are often
forced to expend far too much energy challenging both the
parochialisms of the hegemonic non-profit apparatus and the
sometimes narrow politics of the progressive US left. Conclusion: Abolition
and Radical Political Vision The abolition of domestic warfare, not unlike
precedent (and ongoing) struggles to abolish colonialism, slavery,
and programmatic genocide, necessitates a rigorous theoretical and
pragmatic approach to a counter- and anti-state radicalism that
attempts to fracture the foundations of the existing US social form.
This political shift requires a sustained labor of radical vision, and in
the most crucial ways is actually anchored to progressive notions
of life, freedom, community, and collective/personal security (including
safety from racist policing/criminalization and themost localized brutalities of neoliberal or global
Not long from now, generations will emerge from the organic
capitalism).
accumulation of rage, suffering, social alienation, and (we hope)
politically principled rebellion against this living apocalypse and
pose to us some rudimentary questions of radical accountability : How
were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and
openly racist technologies of state violence that effectively socially neutralized and frequently liquidated
entire nearby populations of our people, given that ours are the very same populations that have
historically struggled to survive and overthrow such classical structures of dominance as colonialism,
frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other genocides? In a somewhat more intimate sense, how could we
live with ourselves in this domestic state of emergency, and why did we seem to generally forfeit the
creative possibilities of radically challenging, dislodging, and transforming the ideological and institutional
premises of this condition of domestic warfare in favor of shortterm, winnable policy reforms? (For
example, why did we choose to formulate and tolerate a progressive political language that reinforced
dominant racist notions of criminality in the process of trying to discredit the legal basis of Three Strikes
law?) What were the fundamental concerns of our progressive organizations and movements during this
time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable opposition to the
white supremacist states terms of engagement (that is, warfare)? This radical accountability reflects a
variation on anticolonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanons memorable statement to his own peers,
 Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it
comrades, and nemeses:
or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries
preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious
agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the
current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we must
shed the habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning
incomprehension at their silence or passiveness. (Fanon 2004 [1963]: 146)
Lest we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often
induced by such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, we ought to
clarify the premises of the social mission that our generation of
USA-based progressive organizing has undertaken.
 Looking at Structural Racism
We must investigate international relations theory from a
position of structural racism and not individualized
prejudice

Aziz 3/1/2003 (Nikhil [was Assistant Professor of Political

Science at Illinois State University before joining Political
Research Associates in July 2000] Rac[e]ing Abroad:
Exploring Racism in/and U.S. Foreign Policy, d/l:
http://www.politicalresearch.org/2003/03/01/raceing-
abroad-exploring-racism-inand-u-s-foreign-
policy/#sthash.oxsy0vZJ.dpuf) //jl

Looking at racism in/and U.S. foreign policyparticularly after the

end of official segregationrequires an understanding of structural
racism. This is important because individual prejudice in the foreign
policy making of any one particular U.S. president only takes us so
far. After all, not every U.S. president is racist in an individual sense. And, in any case, focusing on
individual acts of racism require proof of the actors intent to
discriminate on the basis of race, which is difficult to establish
because presidential decisions are often embedded in overarching
policies or cloaked as national interest. Further, an emphasis on
individuals alone limits accountability,48 because even if the
individuals racism is recognized and addressed, the racist nature of
the system s/he is part of is not. It is clear to many of us on the Left that to really
understand the role of racism in domestic U.S. politics and policy we need to understand structural racism
U.S. foreign policy and the international role
and its role within the United States.
of the United States must similarly be examined within the context
of structural racism, especially because it is domestic politics and
national interest that determines a nations foreign policy for the
most part. And, because a country that is racist in terms of its
internal structure simply cannot have a foreign policy that is not
racist. Structural racism is understood as the complex ways in which
historical oppression, culture, ideology, political economy, public
policy and institutional practices interact to produce forms of racial
sorting that reproduce and reinforce a hierarchy of color that
privileges whiteness and marginalizes [other skin colors]. 49 As the
Transnational Racial Justice Initiatives report on White privilege and U.S. policy states, it maintains a
system that accrues to whites (or European Americans) greater wealth, resources, more access and higher
quality access to justice, services, capitalvirtually every form of benefits to be reaped from US society
white privilege has resulted in
than other racial groups. Conversely,
impoverishment and injustice for the vast majority of those
belonging to racial minorities.50 This is clearly understandable within the domestic U.S.
context with regard to the continued oppression of people of color. But how does structural racism and
Especially given that Whites are a
White privilege play out on the international field?
minority globally, and that most countries in the world have non-
White majority populations with their own institutional and
structural oppressions that subordinate women, ethnic or religious
minorities, indigenous peoples, lower castes, etc. One way of
understanding this is to visualize South African apartheid on a global
level. Global apartheid, stated briefly, is a system of international
white minority rule. Race determines access to basic human rights;
wealth and power are accumulated and structured by race and
place; structural racism is found in global economic processes,
political institutions and cultural assumptions; and international
double standards are practiced that assume inferior rights to be
appropriate for certain others, defined by origin, race, gender, or
geography. Global apartheid is more than a metaphor. It is a more
accurate moniker for the corporate globalization that is now
rightfully protested at every international meeting. Global apartheid
has evolved as a consequence of an international economic system
built upon the slave trade, slavery and colonialism, and upon
centuries of racism and racial discrimination. Global apartheid has
national and local consequences throughout the world. 51 While this is
similar to South African apartheid, it is not dissimilar to structural racism in the
United States. Global apartheid, however, is more than economic racism.
While more people would be willing to accept that the current
international economic order systematically impoverishes people of
color worldwide, less are likely to understand that the current
international political order disenfranchises them. After all, in the current
system, all countries are sovereign and have a vote in the United Nations General Assembly. But as is self-
evident, sovereignty is situational. It is one thing if you are the United States or China. Quite another if you
are Iraq or Afghanistan. Four of the five permanent veto-wielding U.N. Security Council members and it is
the Security Council more than the General Assembly that really matters on many substantial issues such
as warare White majority nations. How that came to be, in the aftermath of WWII with the 5 major
victorious Allies being the engines behind the creation of the new international system, is incidental. The
fact is, that 4 out of 5 are White majority countries, all of who have been imperial/colonial powers that
invaded and colonized non-White majority countries.52 PRA has consistently argued that subsuming all
oppressionsnot just racism but sexism, homophobia, etc.under the framework of White supremacy is
These different oppressions, while certainly
not sound analytically or strategically.
linked in the way they work and affect the oppressed, need to be
named for what they are and challenged as such. Further, that while
they all need to be challenged, overcoming them can only be
through building a united front of substantive and sustainable cross-
issue coalitions. None of this is in doubt. However, much as White
supremacy/privilege/racism is a reality inside the United States and
is linked to structural racism, it is also true globally on a different
level. Non-White countries (and thus peoples) are independent and
sovereign in the international system just as much as non-White
Americans are equal citizens in the United States. In theory, and
legally, the latter certainly are. Yet, to argue that they are equal in
every respect given structural racism in the United States would be
foolish. It is the same in terms of the world as a whole. Because
racism has been mostly whitewashed in both the conduct and
analyses of U.S. foreign policy, it needs to be clearly identified. In much
the same way that Cynthia Enloe and other feminists have identified the oppression of sexism in U.S.
it needs to be unambiguously
foreign policy and international politics.53 Further,
stated that structural racism at home (within the United States) and
internationally (global apartheid) has the same effect on people of
color within the United States in one instance and outside it in the
othereconomic dislocation and political disarticulation. The AWOL which,
as argued earlier, is chiefly about maintaining U.S. economic, political, and military privilege and
superiority globally, has the unstated effect of maintaining White American privilege globally. As Tim Wise
stated, White
privilege and entitlement are at the root of foreign
policy in this country.54 How is this so? Domestically, maintaining the
AWOL translates as perpetuating the current economic and political
system within the United Statesa system that systematically and
disproportionately disadvantages people of color and the poor
through economic dislocation and political disenfranchisement. 55 Who
benefits? Mostly White Americans, and wealthy Americans who are overwhelmingly White.
Internationally, defending the AWOL by extension benefits the same
mostly White Americans and wealthy Americans who are
overwhelmingly White. In both cases, those whom it harms are
mainly people of color, and the poor regardless of race. People of
color are disproportionately poor whether in the United States or in
the larger world. And people with privilege are not about to begin
dismantling a system that works for them.
Framework
Interpretation
 2AC
Counter-interpretation: We should use the debate space
as a way to uncover the violent ontologies and
epistemologies dominating both the political and the
academy in the context of decreasing military presence
Scope D/A: According to McClintock, within uncovering
these circuits of power, we need to think through events
on an individual, local sense as well. Hegemonys forced
focus on nations obscures the magnitude of violence that
occurred within these areas- we come to view lives as
parts of the nation instead of individual lives. This is what
McClintock calls imperialism manifesting from within,
reconfiguring violence and ordinary bodies into distant
clinical specters. However, to recognize this specters is to
cut against the grain of US exceptionalism- it forces a
recognition of atrocities the US committed, which
interrupts the myth the US is a global protector acting for
the good while recognizing individual agency.
Agency d/a- Jose Medina says that the 1ACs anti-
disciplinarity is a form of guerilla pluralism to inject
multiple narratives against the hegemonic interpretation.
The goal of this is to create epistemic friction- not seeking
unity with existing power structures but rather working to
create disruption. In this specific case, the 1ACs refusal
to strategically essentialize the law for a specific policy
against military presence is because that option seeks a
unity with current power structures and necessarily
sacrifices some of the objective of anti-disciplinarity; by
engaging in our revealing and antidisciplinarity without
turning to this fixed acts, we use epistemic friction
provoke conflict, seek to point out gaps and clashing
perspectives, focuses on tension and constantly re-
investigating how our knowledge is produced. The 1AC
thus isnt a single speech act that solves all problems but
rather is a constantly producing form of scholarship that
is a process rather than a product.
Imperial Forgetting D/A: Our Street evidence says it is this
ability to forget the horrors of the nation at home and the
act of giving the nation a pass on those genocidal crimes
that fosters a brutal imperialistic drive to violently spread
outward: their limits that prevent discussions of the way
this manifests contribute to this genocide analytic within
the academy, which Rodriguez says we must constantly
produce knowledge against as radical intellectuals. Thats
why we must forefront these issues through the 1AC

Contingency D/A: Injecting contingency into politics is

necessary to resisting racism and colonialism the
narrative of a coherent nation is used to suppress and
psychologically confine colonized peoples

Pease 1997
Donald, Avalon Foundation Professor of English at Dartmouth College, National Narratives,
Postnational Narration, Modern Fiction Studies 43.1 (1997) 1-23

Postcolonial and Postnational Narration As

we have already seen, national narratives established their
narrativity at the site where the state concealed the sovereign power in between itself and
the "national people." Recharacterizing this display of state power as the national people's desire to recover a lost origin,
national narratives have enchained a series of events as the unfolding of this collectively
shared desire. But as the demarcations of its limits, postnational narrations have struggled to make visible
the incoherence, contingency, and transitoriness of the national narratives and to reveal this
paradoxical space (see Bhabha, "DissemiNation"). These acts of narration have neither ratified the sovereign power of the
state nor effected the inclusion of stateless persons within preexisting [End Page 7] narratives. They have instead materialized the
postnational as the internal boundary insisting at the site where stateless individuals have not yet consented to state power and the state
has not yet integrated the stateless into its national order. Performed at this site internal to the state yet external to the national
narrative through which stateless persons are encouraged to perform their (narrative) consent to state power, these acts of narration
take place as the double apartness (and extensive in-betweenness) of state power and peoples apart from the state. National
narratives' power as instruments of psychic governance is best evidenced perhaps in the
panic that has accompanied the desymbolization and subversion of nationalist narratives at
this postnational site. Surrogate abjection and unanimous violence have accompanied the wholesale delinkages of "national
peoples" from the imagined communities in which they had previously "experienced" their imagined wholeness. The loss of national
narrativity as an imaginative cushion has released the unmitigated force of the state's repressive apparatus as a collectively shared
experience (see Zizek). To explain the panic that has emerged with the loss of national narrativity, the postnational might
be understood as having opened up the gap within national narratives--in between state power and
how to make sense of it--that national narrativity had covered over. This disruption has violated the
belief in their timelessness that national narratives had previously solicited . It has also revealed the
relation between the nation and its subjects as indistinguishable from the brute show of state force. The resulting lack of distinction
between subjectivity and subjection has effected a state of panic that cannot adequately be understood in terms of the two-tiered
psychic model invoked earlier to explain state fantasies. The dual relation between the manifest and the latent cannot account for the
return not of the "repressed" but of the foreclosed "knowledge" of state power in whose disavowal the national order was structured.
The collective actings-out released in this panic state have included fantasized scenarios (some
of which have materialized as historical fact) wherein the state has initiated the colonization of "national
people." Persons who had been abjected from within the national order have performed the
"knowledges" that the national narratives had foreclosed . And the "national people" have "experienced" the
return [End Page 8] of the foreclosed as the death of the entire national order (see Pease, "Negative Interpellations"). These
scenarios, in fantasizing a connection between this postnational site and the postcolonial moment in which it has emerged, have
symptomatically disclosed "internal colonialism" as a disavowed element in the constitution
of the national narrative. In its repetition in another register (and another geographical space) of the state subjection that
the national narrativity had officially disavowed, the discourse of colonialism activated, in its relation to
national narratives, the logic of supplementarity invoked earlier to explain how
nationalisms constructed their illusion of universality. Colonialism enabled the "national peoples'' whose
lifeworlds the nation-state had narrativized to reexperience their own subjection to the state in the form of the imaginative dominion
over the lifeworlds of colonies elsewhere. While it might at first sight seem answerable to the logic of displacement, however, this
"experience" of the non-knowledge of state subjection in fact condensed a series of psycho-social activities and semantic registers. In
canceling their knowledge of state subjection through the practice of colonialism, the subjects of this non-knowledge linked its
disavowal with the repetition of subjection elsewhere and foreclosed recognition of both disavowal and repetition through the
abjection of colonialism as a form of knowledge. The national people who involved the discourse of colonialism in their disavowal of
state subjection conjoined the national narrative wherein they had established their national identity and covered over the site of state
subjection with a colonialist praxis. But the national people did not--as had been their practice in their relations to racialized others
within the national order--abject the colonized. In their colonial relations, the national people instead (re)performed the subjection that
(they could not acknowledge) the state had exercised in the national order. Then, in order to maintain their ignorance,
they abjected the discourse of colonialism (recasting it as a subjugated knowledge) in which the
knowledge of state power was borne and thereby effectively disavowed as well the
knowledge of national narrativity's cover story . Colonial narratives, that is to say, doubly
encoded their subjects--as subjected to the power of the colonial state but also as the social
effects of national narratives abjected knowledge . Postcolonialist narratives could not, as a
consequence of this double code, represent [End Page 9] colonial subjects' emancipation
from the colonial state within emergent national narratives. Those subjects were, as we have seen, the bearers
of the knowledge (of state power) in whose disavowal national narratives were constituted. As the bearers of the knowledge of the
power of the state, postcolonial subjects have instantiated a place of betweenness, an unsurpassable interstitiality, that can neither be
assimilated by national narratives nor remain absolutely opposed to nationalism. As figures who had been abjected by the practice
(colonialism) whereby national peoples acceded to the non-knowledge of the state's permanent externality to their national narratives,
postcolonial peoples could not be narrativized in its terms. Unlike the national narratives' people, postcolonial people
recognized state force (rather than the integral nation) as the "real" historical agency of
nationalization. But with colonialist abjection as their pre-national status, postcolonials could not remain utterly opposed to
nationalism either. Because postcolonial subjects knew, beyond the possibility of disavowal, of the state practices
(abjecting/subjection) that national orders had foreclosed in order to cohere, they could neither become assimilated within
preconstituted categories of any national order nor withdraw their demand for a non-exclusivist nationalism (a nationalism, in other
words, that was not one). Postcolonial peoples might, as a consequence, be described as having "subjectivized" this nonintegratable
knowledge. In Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha has usefully complicated this description of the
relation between national narratives and the discourse of colonialism by describing them as
doubles whose relation is not calculable as a similitude. In the following passage, Bhabha designates
the colonial state apparatus as the disavowed agent of national narrativity and
postcoloniality as the limit internal to (post)national narration: It is precisely in reading
between these borderlines of the nation-space that we can see how the "people" come to be
constructed within a range of discourses as a double narrative movement . . . . In the production of
the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious,
recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society [End
Page 10] becomes the site of writing the nation. ("DissemiNation" 297) Bhabha's reading establishes an intimate distance in between
national narratives and the colonial state apparatus and proposes that the rhetorical strategies postcolonials had developed in their
resistance to the colonial state be understood as effective resources in the enunciative sites proper to the performance of postnational
narration. What Bhabha names the "pedagogical" in this passage has a double referent--to the subjects structured within national
narratives as well as to those subject to the colonial state. In subjugating persons and events to its preconstituted categories, the
colonial state did not innovate but simply reproduced, Bhabha suggests, those "continuist," "accumulative" "pedagogical" movements
we already discovered supporting national narrativity (whose "subjects" can be numbered among the colonial pedagogues). The
"repetitious and recursive strategy" of the "people's" acts of (postcolonial) narration performatively opens up that split space in
between the colonial (national) narrative and the people that also (recursively) reveals the site of the postnational. In his construal of
them as doubles, Bhabha effects a slippage in his identification of postcolonial and postnational peoples that refuses the description of
the "national people" as self-identical, identifying them as victims as well as agents of the conjoined practices of abjection and
subjection. When the "people" under Bhabha's dispensation assume the national narratives' preconstituted subject positions, their
enunciations always split into that paradoxical site where the "part" played by the state in integrating the nation comes apart from a
subject who cannot make that "event" a part of the whole "statement" s/he is enunciating. The enunciative moment itself splits into a
non-traversible liminality in between two incommensurable subject positions. The "pedagogical" subject who, in enunciating the
preexisting statements of the national narrative, discovers in the state's act integrative of the nation an event for which there are no
preconstituted categories with which to enunciate it, on the one hand, and on the other, the "performative" subject who, in enunciating
postnational narrations that lack any preexisting place within the narrative order apart from the self-fading act of enunciating them as
such, can only reiterate what the national narrative always is lacking. The subversive strategies whereby
postcolonial narrations delink [End Page 11] insurgent nationalisms from the colonial state
have also enabled, as we might conclude from Bhabha's pedagogical narration, a retroactive reading of national
narratives capable of resituating postcolonial "knowledge" in the place of its former
abjection and of thereby exposing the subject of the national narrative as the effect of the
paradoxical logic--of the whole plus or minus one--I earlier described as the signifier of
postnationality. In their oppositional stance directed against imperial nationalism, postcolonial intellectuals have
deployed a counter-hegemonic literary hybrid--antinational nationalism--as a strategic weapon in
the struggle against cultural imperialism. When linked with postcolonialism, the various literary nationalisms that
have emerged in the wake of colonialism--no matter how nationalistic their forms of address--share a postnational orientation that has
redirected this released power against the state (see Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought). The external border in between
the colonial state and their postcolonial (anti)nationalism might , as a consequence of the historical fact of
their equiprimordiality, be understood to inhere as a (postnational) limit internal to the psyches of
the "peoples" structured in national narrativity.

Spectacularization D/A: American politics is dead the

extreme right controls mainstream discourse through
spectacularization of pain narratives. Our focus on the
way institutional and political culture that makes racism,
corporatization and violence inevitable is key to draw
alternative paths

Giroux 11 (Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at
McMaster University, 1 June 2011, Zombie Politics, Democracy, and the Threat of
Authoritarianism - Part I, http://www.truth-out.org/zombie-politics-democracy-and-threat-
authoritarianism-part-i/1306932037)//TR

In the world of popular culture, zombies seem to be everywhere, as evidenced by the relentless slew of
books, movies, video games, and comics. From the haunting Night of the Living Dead to the comic movie Zombieland, the figure of
the zombie has captured and touched something unique in the contemporary imagination. But the dark and terrifying image of the
zombie with missing body parts, oozing body fluids, and an appetite for fresh, living, human brains does more than feed the mass-
marketing machines that prey on the spectacle of the violent, grotesque, and ethically comatose. There is more at work in
this wave of fascination with the grotesquely walking hyper-dead than a Hollywood
appropriation of the dark recesses and unrestrained urges of the human mind. The zombie phenomenon is now
on display nightly on television alongside endless examples of destruction unfolding in real-time.
Such a cultural fascination with proliferating images of the living hyper-dead and
unrelenting human catastrophes that extend from a global economic meltdown to the
earthquake in Haiti to the ecological disaster caused by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico
signals a shift away from the hope that accompanies the living to a politics of cynicism and
despair . The macabre double movement between the dead that walk[2] and those who
are alive but are dying and suffering cannot be understood outside of the casino capitalism
that now shapes every aspect of society in its own image. A casino capitalist zombie politics
views competition as a form of social combat, celebrates war as an extension of politics, and
legitimates a ruthless Social Darwinism in which particular individuals and groups are
considered simply redundant, disposablenothing more than human waste left to stew in their own misfortune
easy prey for the zombies who have a ravenous appetite for chaos and revel in apocalyptic
visions filled with destruction, decay, abandoned houses, burned-out cars, gutted
landscapes, and trashed gas stations. The twenty-first-century zombies no longer emerge
from the grave; they now inhabit the rich environs of Wall Street and roam the halls of the gilded
monuments of greed such as Goldman Sachs. As an editorial in The New York Times points out, the new zombies of free-market
fundamentalism turned the financial system into a casino. Like gambling, the transactions mostly just shifted paper money around the
globe. Unlike gambling, they packed an enormous capacity for collective and economic destruction
hobbling banks that made bad bets, freezing credit and economic activity. Societynot
the bankersbore the
cost.[3] In this way, the zombie the immoral, sub-Nietzschean, id-driven other who is
hyper-dead but still alive as an avatar of death and cruelty provides an apt metaphor
for a new kind of authoritarianism that has a grip on contemporary politics in the United
States .[4] This is an authoritarianism in which mindless self-gratification becomes the
sanctioned norm and public issues collapse into the realm of privatized anger and rage. The
rule of the market offers the hyper-dead an opportunity to exercise unprecedented power in American society, reconstructing civic and
political culture almost entirely in the service of a politics that fuels the friend/enemy divide, even as democracy becomes the scandal
of casino capitalismits ultimate humiliation. But the new zombies are not only wandering around in the banks, investment

houses, and death chambers of high finance, they have an ever-increasing presence in the highest reaches
of government and in the forefront of mainstream media . The growing numbers of zombies in the
mainstream media have huge financial backing from the corporate elite and represent the
new face of the culture of cruelty and hatred in the second Gilded Age. Any mention of the social
state, putting limits on casino capitalism, and regulating corporate zombies puts Sarah
Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and other talking heads into a state of high rage. They
disparage any discourse that embraces social justice, social responsibility, and human rights. Appealing
to real American values such as family, God, and Guns, they are in the forefront of a
zombie politics that opposes any legislation or policy designed to lessen human suffering
and promote economic and social progress. As Arun Gupta points out, they are insistent in their opposition to civil
rights, school desegregation, womens rights, labor organizing, the minimum wage, Social Security, LGBT rights, welfare, immigrant
rights, public education, reproductive rights, Medicare, [and] Medicaid.[5] The walking hyper-dead even oppose
providing the extension of unemployment benefits to millions of Americans who are out of work, food, and
hope. They spectacularize hatred and trade in lies and misinformation. They make populist
appeals to the people while legitimating the power of the rich. They appeal to common sense
as a way of devaluing a culture of questioning and critical exchange. Unrelenting in their
role as archetypes of the hyper-dead, they are misanthropes trading in fear, hatred, and
hyper-nationalism. The human suffering produced by the walking hyper-dead can also be
seen in the nativist apoplexy resulting in the racist anti-immigration laws passed in Arizona,
the attempts to ban ethnic studies in public schools, the rise of the punishing state, the social
dumping of millions of people of color into prisons, and the attempts of Tea Party fanatics
and politicians who want to take back America from President Barack Obamadescribed in the
new lexicon of right-wing political illiteracy as both an alleged socialist and the new Hitler .
Newt Gingrich joins Glenn Beck and other members of the elite squad of the hyper-dead in arguing that Obama is just another version
of Joseph Stalin. For Gingrich and the rest of the zombie ideologues, any discourse that
advocates for social protections, easing human suffering, or imagining a better future is
dismissed by being compared to the horrors of the Nazi holocaust. Dystopian discourse and
End Times morbidity rule the collective consciousness of this group. The death panels
envisaged by Sarah Palin are not going to emerge from Obamas health care reform plan but from
the toolkits the zombie politicians and talking heads open up every time they are given the opportunity to speak.
The death threats, vandalism, and crowds shouting homophobic slurs at openly gay U.S. House
Representative Barney Frank already speak to a fixation with images of death, violence, and war
that now grips the country. Sarah Palins infamous call to a gathering of her followers to
reload in opposition to President Obamas policiessoon followed in a nationally televised press conference with a request for
the American people to embrace Arizonas new xenophobic lawsmakes her one of the most prominent of the political zombies. Not
only has she made less-than-vague endorsements of violence in many of her public speeches, she has cheerfully embraced the new
face of white supremacy in her recent unapologetic endorsement of racial profiling, stating in a widely reported speech that Its time
for Americans across this great country to stand up and say, Were all Arizonians now.[6] The current descent into
racism, ignorance, corruption, and mob idiocy makes clear the degree to which politics has
become a sport for zombies rather than engaged and thoughtful citizens .[7] The hyper-dead
celebrate talk radio haters such as Rush Limbaugh, whose fanaticism appears to pass without
criticism in the mainstream media. Limbaugh echoes the fanatics who whipped up racial
hatred in Weimar Germany, the ideological zombies who dissolved the line between reason
and distortion-laden propaganda. How else to explain his claim that environmentalist terrorists might have caused the
ecological disaster in the gulf?[8] The ethically frozen zombies that dominate screen culture believe
that only an appeal to self-interest motivates peoplea convenient counterpart to a culture of cruelty that
rebukes, if not disdains, any appeal to the virtues of a moral and just society. They smile at their audiences while
collapsing the distinction between opinions and reasoned arguments. They report on Tea Party rallies
while feeding the misplaced ideological frenzy that motivates such gatherings but then refuse to comment on rallies all over the
country that do not trade in violence or spectacle. They report uncritically on Islam bashers, such as the
radical right-wing radio host Michael Savage, as if his ultra-extremist racist views are a
legitimate part of the American mainstream. In the age of zombie politics, there is too little
public outrage or informed public anger over the pushing of millions of people out of their
homes and jobs, the defunding of schools, and the rising tide of homeless families and destitute
communities. Instead of organized, massive protests against casino capitalism, the American
public is treated to an endless and arrogant display of wealth, greed, and power. Armies of
zombies tune in to gossip-laden entertainment, game, and reality TV shows, transfixed by
the empty lure of celebrity culture. The roaming hordes of celebrity zombie intellectuals work hard to fuel a sense of
misguided fear and indignation toward democratic politics, the social state, and immigrantsall of which is spewed out in bitter
words and comes terribly close to inciting violence. Zombies love death-dealing institutions, which accounts
for why they rarely criticize the bloated military budget and the rise of the punishing state and its expanding
prison system. They smile with patriotic glee, anxious to further the demands of empire as
automated drones kill innocent civiliansconveniently dismissed as collateral damage
and the torture state rolls inexorably along in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in other hidden and
unknown sites. The slaughter that inevitably follows catastrophe is not new, but the current
politics of death has reached new heights and threatens to transform a weak democracy
into a full-fledged authoritarian state. A Turn to the Dark Side of Politics The American media, large segments of
the public, and many educators widely believe that authoritarianism is alien to the political landscape of American society.
Authoritarianism is generally associated with tyranny and governments that exercise power in violation of the rule of law. A
commonly held perception of the American public is that authoritarianism is always
elsewhere. It can be found in other allegedly less developed/civilized countries, such as contemporary China or Iran, or it
belongs to a fixed moment in modern history, often associated with the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism in its different forms
in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union under Stalin. Even as the United States became more disposed to
modes of tyrannical power under the second Bush administrationdemonstrated, for example, by the
existence of secret CIA prisons, warrantless spying on Americans, and state-sanctioned kidnaping mainstream liberals,
intellectuals, journalists, and media pundits argued that any suggestion that the United States was
becoming an authoritarian society was simply preposterous. For instance, the journalist James Traub
repeated the dominant view that whatever problems the United States faced under the Bush administration had nothing to do with a
growing authoritarianism or its more extreme form, totalitarianism.[9] On the contrary, according to this position, America was simply
beholden to a temporary seizure of power by some extremists, who represented a form of political exceptionalism and an annoying
growth on the body politic. In other words, as repugnant as many of Bushs domestic and foreign policies might have been, they
neither threatened nor compromised in any substantial way Americas claim to being a democratic society. Against the notion that the
Bush administration had pushed the United States close to the brink of authoritarianism, some pundits have argued that
this dark moment in Americas history, while uncharacteristic of a substantive democracy, had to be
understood as temporary perversion of American law and democratic ideals that would end when
George W. Bush concluded his second term in the White House. In this view, the regime of George W. Bush and its demonstrated
contempt for democracy was explained away as the outgrowth of a random act of politics a corrupt election and the bad-faith act of
a conservative court in 2000 or a poorly run election campaign in 2004 by an uncinematic and boring Democratic candidate.
According to this narrative, the Bush-Cheney regime exhibited such extreme modes of governance in its embrace of an imperial
presidency, its violation of domestic and international laws, and its disdain for human rights and democratic values that it was hard to
view such antidemocratic policies as part of a pervasive shift toward a hidden order of authoritarian politics, which historically has
existed at the margins of American society. It would be difficult to label such a government other than as
shockingly and uniquely extremist, given a political legacy that included the rise of the
security and torture state; the creation of legal illegalities in which civil liberties were trampled; the launching of an unjust
war in Iraq legitimated through official lies; the passing of legislative policies that drained the federal surplus by giving away more
than a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the rich; the enactment of a shameful policy of preemptive war; the endorsement of an inflated
military budget at the expense of much-needed social programs; the selling off of as many government functions as possible to
corporate interests; the resurrection of an imperial presidency; an incessant attack against unions; support for a muzzled and
increasingly corporate-controlled media; the government production of fake news reports to gain consent for regressive policies; the
use of an Orwellian vocabulary for disguising monstrous acts such as torture (enhanced interrogation techniques); the furtherance of
a racist campaign of legal harassment and incarceration of Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants; the advancement of a prison binge
through a repressive policy of criminalization; the establishment of an unregulated and ultimately devastating form of casino
capitalism; the arrogant celebration and support for the interests and values of big business at the expense of citizens and the common
good; and the dismantling of social services and social safety nets as part of a larger
campaign of ushering in the corporate state and the reign of finance capital ? Authoritarianism With
a Friendly Face In the minds of the American public, the dominant media, and the accommodating pundits and intellectuals, there
is no sense of how authoritarianism in its soft and hard forms can manifest itself as
anything other than horrible images of concentration camps, goose-stepping storm troopers,
rigid modes of censorship, and chilling spectacles of extremist government repression and
violence. That is, there is little understanding of how new modes of authoritarian ideology ,
policy, values, and social relations might manifest themselves in degrees and gradations so as to
create the conditions for a distinctly undemocratic and increasingly cruel and oppressive
social order. As the late Susan Sontag suggested in another context, there is a willful ignorance of how emerging registers of
power and governance dissolve politics into pathology.[10] It is generally believed that in a constitutional democracy, power is in
the hands of the people, and that the long legacy of democratic ideals in America, however imperfect, is enough to prevent democracy
from being subverted or lost. And yet the lessons of history provide clear examples of how the emergence of reactionary politics, the
increasing power of the military, and the power of big business subverted democracy in Argentina, Chile, Germany, and Italy. In spite
of these histories, there is no room in the public imagination to entertain what has become the unthinkablethat such an order in its
contemporary form might be more nuanced, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with
manipulative modes of consentwhat one might call a mode of authoritarianism with a distinctly American character. [11]
Historical conjunctures produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they all share a
hatred for democracy, dissent, and civil liberties. It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly
categorizes a country as either authoritarian or democratic, which leaves no room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both
systems. American politics today suggests a more updated if not a different form of
authoritarianism . In this context, it is worth remembering what Huey Long said in response to the question of whether
America could ever become fascist: Yes, but we will call it anti-fascist.[12] Longs reply suggests that fascism is not an
ideological apparatus frozen in a particular historical period but a complex and often
shifting theoretical and political register for understanding how democracy can be
subverted, if not destroyed, from within. This notion of soft or friendly fascism was articulated in 1985 in Bertram
Grosss book Friendly Fascism, in which he argued that if fascism came to the United States it would not
embody the same characteristics associated with fascist forms in the historical past. There
would be no Nuremberg rallies, doctrines of racial superiority, government-sanctioned book burnings,
death camps, genocidal purges, or the abrogation of the U.S. Constitution. In short, fascism would not take the
form of an ideological grid from the past simply downloaded onto another country under
different historical conditions. Gross believed that fascism was an ongoing danger and had the ability to become relevant under new
conditions, taking on familiar forms of thought that resonate with nativist traditions, experiences, and political relations.[13] Similarly,
in his Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton argued that the texture of American fascism would not mimic
traditional European forms but would be
rooted in the language, symbols, and culture of everyday life.
He writes: No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and
Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. These
symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus
tests for detecting the internal enemy.[14] It is worth noting that Umberto Eco, in his discussion of eternal fascism, also argued that
any updated version of fascism would not openly assume the mantle of historical fascism; rather, new forms of authoritarianism would
appropriate some of its elements, making it virtually unrecognizable from its traditional forms. Like Gross and Paxton, Eco contended
that fascism, if it comes to America, will have a different guise, although it will be no less destructive of democracy. He wrote: Ur-
Fascism [Eternal Fascism] is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be much easier for us if there appeared on the world
scene somebody saying, I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares. Life is not that
simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its
new instancesevery day, in every part of the world.[15] The renowned political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy Incorporated,
updates these views and argues persuasively that the United States has produced its own unique form of
authoritarianism, which he calls inverted totalitarianism.[16] Wolin claims that under traditional forms
of totalitarianism, there are usually founding texts such as Mein Kampf, rule by a personal demagogue such as Adolf Hitler, political
change enacted by a revolutionary movement such as the Bolsheviks, the constitution rewritten or discarded, the political states firm
control over corporate interests, and an idealized and all-encompassing ideology used to create a unified and totalizing understanding
of society. At the same time, the government uses all the power of its cultural and repressive state apparatuses to fashion followers in
its own ideological image and collective identity. In the United States, Wolin argues that an emerging authoritarianism appears to take
on a very different form.[17] Instead of a charismatic leader, the government is now governed
through the anonymous and largely remote hand of corporate power and finance capital.
Political sovereignty is largely replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reins
of governance. The dire consequence, as David Harvey points out, is that raw money power wielded by the few
undermines all semblances of democratic governance. The pharmaceutical companies, health insurance and
hospital lobbies, for example, spent more than $133 million in the first three months of 2009 to make sure they got their way on health
care reform in the United States.[18] The more money influences politics the more corrupt the political
culture becomes. Under such circumstances, holding office is largely dependent on having huge
amounts of capital at ones disposal, while laws and policies at all levels of government are mostly fashioned by
lobbyists representing big business corporations and commanding financial institutions. Moreover, as the politics of health care reform
indicate, such lobbying, as corrupt and unethical as it may be, is not carried out in the open and displayed by insurance and drug
companies as a badge of honora kind of open testimonial to the disrespect for democratic governance and a celebration of their
power. The subversion of democratic governance in the United States by corporate interests is captured succinctly by Chris Hedges in
his observation that Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that
dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit
employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on
political campaigns, influenc[e] peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging
of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of
millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their
predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies
have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding
and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.[19] Rather than being forced to
adhere to a particular state ideology, the general public in the United States is largely
depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education , and other
cultural apparatuses. The
deadening of public values, civic consciousness, and critical citizenship is
also the result of the work of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological
and financial interests,[20] dominant media that are largely center-right, and a market-driven public pedagogy that reduces
the obligations of citizenship to the endless consumption and discarding of commodities. In addition, a pedagogy of social and
political amnesia works through celebrity culture and its counterpart in corporate-driven news, television, radio, and entertainment to
produce a culture of stupidity, censorship, and diversionary spectacles. Depoliticizing Freedom and Agency Agency is now
defined by a neoliberal concept of freedom, a notion that is largely organized according to the
narrow notions of individual self-interest and limited to the freedom from constraints. Central to this
concept is the freedom to pursue ones self-interests independently of larger social concer ns.
For individuals in a consumer society, this often means the freedom to shop, own guns, and define rights
without regard to the consequences for others or the larger social order. When applied to economic institutions,
this notion of freedom often translates into a call for removing government regulation over the market and economic institutions. This
notion of a deregulated and privatized freedom is decoupled from the common good and any understanding of individual and social
responsibility. It is an unlimited notion of freedom that both refuses to recognize the importance
of social costs and social consequences and has no language for an ethic that calls us beyond ourselves, that engages
our responsibility to others. Within this discourse of hyper-individualized freedom, individuals are not only liberated from the
constraints imposed by the dense network of social bonds, but are also stripped of the protection which had been matter-of-factly
offered in the past by that dense network of social bonds. [21] Freedom exclusively tied to personal and
political rights without also enabling access to economic resources becomes morally empty
and politically dysfunctional . The much-heralded notion of choice associated with personal and
political freedom is hardly assured when individuals lack the economic resources, knowledge, and
social supports to make such choices and freedoms operative and meaningful . As Zygmunt
Bauman points out, The right to vote (and so, obliquely and at least in theory, the right to influence the composition of the ruler and
the shape of the rules that bind the ruled) could be meaningfully exercised only by those who possess sufficient economic and
cultural resources to be safe from the voluntary or involuntary servitude that cuts off any possible autonomy of choice (and/or its
delegation) at the root....[Choice] stripped of economic resources and political power hardly assure[s] personal freedoms to the
dispossessed, who have no claim on the resources without which personal freedom can neither be won nor in practice enjoyed.[22]
Paul Bigioni has argued that this flawed notion of freedom played a central role in the emerging fascist dictatorships of the early
twentieth century. He writes: It was the liberals of that era who clamored for unfettered personal and economic freedom, no matter
what the cost to society. Such untrammeled freedom is not suitable to civilized humans. It is the freedom of the jungle. In other words,
the strong have more of it than the weak. It is a notion of freedom that is inherently violent, because it is enjoyed at the expense of
others. Such a notion of freedom legitimizes each and every increase in the wealth and power of those who are already powerful,
regardless of the misery that will be suffered by others as a result. The use of the state to limit such freedom was denounced by the
laissez-faire liberals of the early 20th century. The use of the state to protect such freedom was fascism. Just as monopoly is the ruin
of the free market, fascism is the ultimate degradation of liberal capitalism.[23] This stripped-down notion of market-based freedom
that now dominates American society cancels out any viable notion of individual and social agency. This market-driven notion of
freedom emphasizes choice as an economic function defined largely as the right to buy things while at the same time cancelling out
any active understanding of freedom and choice as the right to make rational choices concerning the very structure of power and
governance in a society. In embracing a passive attitude toward freedom in which power is viewed as a necessary evil, a
conservative notion of freedom reduces politics to the empty ritual of voting and is
incapable of understanding freedom as a form of collective, productive power that enables a
notion of political agency and freedom that affirms the equal opportunity of all to exercise political power in order to participate in
shaping the most important decisions affecting their lives.[24] This merging of the market-based understanding of freedom as the
freedom to consume and the conservative-based view of freedom as a restriction from all constraints refuses to recognize that the
conditions for substantive freedom do not lie in personal and political rights alone; on the contrary, real choices and freedom include
the individual and collective ability to actively intervene in and shape both the nature of politics and the myriad forces bearing down
on everyday lifea notion of freedom that can only be viable when social rights and economic resources are available to individuals.
Of course, this notion of freedom and choice is often dismissed either as a vestige of socialism or simply drowned out in a culture that
collapses all social considerations and notions of solidarity into the often cruel and swindle-based discourse of instant gratification and
individual gain. Under such conditions, democracy is managed through the empty ritual of elections; citizens are largely rendered
passive observers as a result of giving undue influence to corporate power in shaping all of the essential elements of political
governance and decision making; and manufactured appeals to fear and personal safety legitimate both the suspension of civil liberties
and the expanding powers of an imperial presidency and the policing functions of a militaristic state. I believe that the
formative culture necessary to create modes of education, thought, dialogue, critique, and
critical agency the necessary conditions of any aspiring democracy is largely
destroyed through the pacification of intellectuals and the elimination of public spheres
capable of creating such a culture . Elements of a depoliticizing and commodifying culture
become clear in the shameless propaganda produced by the so-called embedded
journalists, while a corporate-dominated popular culture largely operates through multiple technologies, screen cultures, and
video games that trade endlessly in images of violence, spectacles of consumption, and stultifying modes of (il)literacy. Funded
by right-wing ideological, corporate, and militaristic interests, an army of anti-public
intellectuals groomed in right-wing think tanks and foundations, such as the American Enterprise
Institute and Manhattan Institute, dominate the traditional media, police the universities for any vestige
of critical thought and dissent, and endlessly spread their message of privatization, deregulation,
and commercialization, exercising a powerful influence in the dismantling of all public spheres not dominated by private
and commodifying interests. These experts in legitimation, to use Antonio Gramscis prescient
phrase, peddle civic ignorance just as they renounce any vestige of public accountability for
big business, giant media conglomerates, and financial mega corporations. How else to explain that nearly twenty percent of the
American people believe incorrectly that Obama is a Muslim! Under the new authoritarianism, the corporate
state and the punishing state merge as economics drives politics , and repression is
increasingly used to contain all those individuals and groups caught in an expanding web of
destabilizing inequality and powerlessness that touches everything from the need for basic health care,
food, and shelter to the promise of a decent education. As the social state is hollowed out under pressure from free-market advocates,
right-wing politicians, and conservative ideologues, the United States has increasingly turned its back on any semblance of social
justice, civic responsibility, and democracy itself. This might explain the influential journalist Thomas Friedmans shameless
endorsement of military adventurism in the New York Times article in which he argues that The hidden hand of the market will never
work without a hidden fistMcDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And
the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valleys technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and
Marine Corps.[25] Freedom in this discourse is inextricably wedded to state and military violence and is a far cry from any
semblance of a claim to democracy.
Critical Thinking/Deliberation
 2AC
Calcification D/A: The Negatives embracement of politics
as a way to learn portable skills begins from a flawed
approach that gets trapped within an academic culture
that pre-disposes war as an inevitable result and
theorizes the enemy ever-present on the border.
McClintock uses three examples to demonstrate the
military-academic-political complex: Prior to 9/11, General
Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army, bemoaned the
enemy deficit: Its no use having an army that did
nothing but train, he said. Theres got to be a certain
appetite for what the hell we exist for. In 1997 a group of
neocons at the Project for the New American Century
produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to
make such an invasion palatable would require a
catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl
Harbor. The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution,
both to the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy,
offering the military unimaginable license to expand its
reach. General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit
that the attacks were an immense boon: There is a huge
silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. .
. . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have
the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our
homeland, which gives it some oomph. [This is also
already in the Education block]
We S!- create the best conditions for critical thinking- our
epistemology allows us to uncover hidden circuits of
power and allows individual actors to embrace their
agency. Creating discontinuities within the official
narrative allows this thinking to be positively mobilized-
Medina proves. The debates against official regimes in
Chile and Argentina proved acting from individual change
both enables resistant against imperial abstraction of
violence and proves better decision are made without this
hegemonic epistemology
Cross Cultural Exchange D/A- Our alternative framework is
key to reflexive and meaningful discussion both inside
and outside communal norms, best for deliberation
Hicks 2
Darrin Hicks is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Denver in Denver,
Colorado. The Promise(s) of Deliberative Democracy Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5.2 (2002) 223-
260 Project Muse

The very possibility of argumentation, it seems, trades upon the existence of some
substantively constituted common ground, even if merely an agreement on the procedural
norms regulating critical discussion. As we have seen throughout this review, however, the possibility of such a
rational consensus on either substantive or procedural grounds remains a problematic, if not an impossible, assumption. So, Yameng
Liu argues, the field of argumentation studies in particular and the rhetorical discipline in general have shied away from developing
normative theoretical models of argumentation between culturally heterogonous and ideologically incompatible agents. 87 Yet
cross-cultural argumentation between ideologically opposed agents does occur and it is not
always futile. By looking toward these encounters, in particular the debate between the East
and West over human rights, Liu finds that argument across cultural and ideological
divides does not necessarily require the preexistence of common ground ; rather, the
methods and norms of what he terms "cross-arguing," which unlike dialogical models
presupposes an adversarial and even a mutually hostile relationship amongst members,
constitutes the grounds necessary for continued negotiation and the construction of new
conceptual frameworks. Specifically, Liu found that in the debates over human rights, non-Western advocates
became adroit at using the terms and methods of Western discourse. They became experts
at formulating their positions within Western conceptual frames and, moreover, were able
to exploit the internal contradictions of Western human rights discourses as a means of both
showing how their positions were warranted within the Western tradition and how U.S. domestic policy could be consistently critiqued
with its own conceptual tools. Non-Western advocates found that [b]y strategically aligning themselves with
some Western positions and perspectives against others, they would be able to blur the line
between Self and Other, or between the protagonist and the antagonist in a cross-communal debate, making it more
complicated and difficult for their opponents to maintain their focus on the target of their criticism or to sustain their argumentative
offensive. 88 [End Page 254] Consistently faced with this tactic, Western diplomats and critics found themselves
in a strategically awkward position. They could either refuse to engage their non-Western
interlocutorsa tactic used by some public commentators like William Safireor they could respond in kind by
justifying Western positions on human rights in non-Western terms, a tactic endorsed by William
Alford, Daniel Bell, and Amartya Sen. 89 Thus, Western advocates too were able to find counter-traditions
within non-Western discourses to justify liberal values and to show the long history of internal debate and division
constituting non-Western discourses too often unproblematically assumed to be monolithic. Liu suggests that a novel mode of
cross-cultural and cross-ideological argument emerges from this encounter: Rather than
trying in vain to meet in a neutral battleground for a direct argumentative confrontation
before a common audience, the two opposing parties in this paradigm would venture in the
others' territory and seek to win the battle by provoking a civil war behind the opponents' line. In other words, the two
contending sides would each try to justify its position in the other party's terms , and to turn the inter-communal
issue that divides them into an intra-communal conflict between two factions of the opponent's side. The mutual infiltration,
appropriation, and persuasion such a mode entails allow cross-cultural interlocutors to bypass the
necessary lack of substantive common ground that would otherwise prevent them from engaging
each other. They prevent them from bogging down in a deadlock over whose justificatory system to apply. They, moreover,
guarantee that arguments framed in two radically different languages are not just intelligible, but
meaningful and persuasive, to their respectively targeted audiences. 90 Cross-arguing, because it reveals the multivocal and
contradictory nature of each party's traditions of political justificationand I am tempted to add each society's political conception of
justiceand calls on each party to "intervene in the domestic affairs of the other," contributes to a process where the borders between
self and other, internal and external, and us and them are increasingly blurred. Cross-arguing thus leads to "a reconfiguration of the
internal forces and interests constitutive of the addressee's domestic cultural formation in response to, or in reaction against, the
interests and desires that inform the addresser's arguments, causing the formation to become a little more other-oriented or a little less
self-contained each time such a reconfiguration occurs." 91 In other words, cross-arguing makes it increasingly
difficult to sustain an image of the other as the enemy; instead, we see the other as an adversary to
be competed with, but not destroyed. 92 Further, this competitive desire will engender the need to
understand what was once seen as alien and to reconstruct argumentation as a contest in which
each side attempts to create an ever-wider frame of reference , a more inclusive conceptual
scheme, so that they can be the ones to define the terms of the emergent context of mutual rights [End Page 255] and obligations.
Yet because cross-arguing is a game without end every configuration or scheme will be sure to be contested and revised. I see in cross-
arguing one way of reformulating public reason as an interactive and emergent ideal to be built by
participants in deliberative forums. It has the unique advantage of not presupposing a counterfactual set of
ethical dispositions that, as we have seen, may be used to turn political reasonableness into a
method for silencing radical dissent. Nor does it trade the normative force of the ideal in for moral compromises, though
it too is capable of engendering the invention of collaborative arrangements for addressing ongoing social problems. Cross-
arguing, as a model of democratic disagreement, highlights the transformative potential of public debate and
deliberation. It is precisely the transformative potential immanent in political controversy, the potential to make
incommensurability the engine of innovation, and the potential for agonistic debate to transform self-interested participants into
public-spirited actors that makes it so valuable for theories of deliberative democracy.

Instrumentalist Disad- The Negatives definition of

deliberation is a false binary- it privileges political
discourse failing to perceive the indissoluble relay
between language and politics driving Americas errand
into the wilderness recreating sociopolitical violence

Spanos08 (William, Professor at Binghamton University, Global

American:
The Devastation of Language Under the Dictatorship of the Public
Realm,ProjectMuse)//PG
It is not my purpose in this essay to argue that, in invoking Eichmann long after he was executed for his
crimes against the Israeli people, Hannah Arendt was specifically identifying the thinking he demonstrated
at his trialthe thought-defying thought that coordinated the logistic machinery feeding millions of
innocent human beings into the mass death-producing gas factorieswith the official and public thinking
that has characterized America in the wake of World War II. What I want to suggest, rather, is that the
language (and thought) that has come increasingly to characterize
the official and public discourse of America after its publicists (the
dominant democratic/capitalist culture) came to call that time the
American Century bears an ominously striking resemblance to
Arendts diagnosis of Eichmanns language (and thought ). This
becomes especially evident at those historical moments when, as in the
cases of the Vietnam War and the second Iraq War, Americas march
toward global hegemony was resisted (and threatened) by subaltern
cultures. There is, of course, a marked difference between the two that needs to be kept in mind. But
this difference, as I will argue more fully later on, is essentially a matter of degree, not of kind. The
same (metaphysical) ontologythe same (binarist) representation of
beingthat subsumed German totalitarian thinking subsumes
American democratic thinking; the difference is that the former constituted the fulfillment
of the binarist logical economy of that metaphysics and the systemic harnessing of its truthits picture
of the worldtopraxis , whereas the latter still remains in a state of
unfulfillment. Nor am I suggesting that the analogy I am proposing is utterly foreign to the
oppositional intellectual milieu in America. Though the relay between the instrumentalist
official and public discourse and the dehumanized political practices
of violence have been fundamental to oppositional discourses , especially
since the Vietnam War, it has nevertheless been by and large symptomatic .
This was not only the case during the Vietnam War, when the
oppositional constituencies focused their critique on the
dehumanized public language of the body count (or on the official language
of the war of attrition). It has also been the case throughout the long and continuing aftermath of the
Vietnam War under the impetus of the various perspectives of poststructuralist theory. [End Page 179] (For
convenience, I will distinguish broadly and, I admit, reductively between those who have followed the
directives of de-struction [Martin Heidegger], deconstruction [Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Jean-Franois
Lyotard], and psychoanalytic criticism [Jacques Lacan], which over-determine the sites of ontology [being],
epistemology [the subject], and language [representation], on the one hand, and those following the
directives of genealogical or New Historicist criticism [Michel Foucault], Neo-Marxism [Antonio Gramsci,
Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton], cultural criticism [Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall]
postcolonialism [Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Edward W. Said, Ranajit Guha], feminism [Simone de
Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Gayatri Spivak, who over-determine the sites of sociopolitics], and the more hybrid
New Americanist criticism [Sacvan Bercovitch, Donald Pease, John Carlos Rowe, Russ Castronuovo, Amy
Throughout the Cold War era, especially since the Vietnam
Kaplan].)
War, these American oppositional discourses have intuited this
complicity between the deeply backgrounded, privileged
instrumentalist language (thinking) of America and the
dehumanized violence the U.S. has perpetrated in the name of its
deeply backgrounded exceptionalist mission in the wilderness of
the modern world. But they have not, I submit, overtly called this complicity by its right name.
This is, no doubt, partly because of a failure of nervea shrinking back from that to which their disclosive
discourses have brought them face to face. 5 But this failure is also partly because these
oppositional discourses have tended to remain disciplinary some
focused on language and the others, in an antithetical way, on
politicsand thus have failed to [End Page 180] perceive the indissoluble
relay between the two in the very process of making it. My argument in this
essay, to repeat, is that the official and public American discourse to which I
have been referring is precariously similar to that of Arendts
representative German functionary, Adolph Eichmann, in its deadly
instrumentalist superficialityits blindness and indifference to the
sociopolitical violence against other humans (the German peoples Others)
which it enables and justifies, that is to say, the banality of the evil
it perpetrates. I cannot, of course, invoke in this limited space the history of this American
discourse that would validate and authorize this argument. Following Arendts directive
her representation of Eichmann as the type of the German everyman
of the Nazi eraI will, instead, retrieve and reconstellate into the
present a few synecdochical instances of this discursive history .
Previously symptomatically analyzed by others in terms of the
dehumanized and dehumanizing tenor of their language, these
instances, typical of the fate of unaccommodatable contradictions to
the official discourse, have by now been obliterated from the
American historical memory. They will, I hope, at a least suggest the viability of my
argument
Dialogue/Decision-Making
 2AC
Institutionality D/A: we cultivate the best forms of
decisionmaking: We understand not only how the political
process works but specifically how institutional bias
works to subvert more progressive politics, and we learn
methods to break this down, which are key to access good
research that creates good decision-making skills.
Their framing of debate as a free market of ideas
ignores their complicity in constraining the way decisions
and discussions are actualized killing true dissent.

Jackman 94
UC Davis sociology professor, 1994
(Mary, The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations, pg 64-68)//TR

The institutionalization of expropriative arrangements yields multiple advantages to the

dominant group. Most fundamentally, the institutions stabilize and routinze the supply of
benefits from one group to another. They stack the deck so that the path of least resistance
for individuals on either side is to accept the fait acccompli. For example, institutionalized arrangements
between employer and employee preempt any risk of constant negotiations about who should get the profits from the enterprise or
who should set the length of the workday. Similarly, the institution of marriage regulates behavior between men and women and
removes the possibility of reiterated negotiations about how sexual access should be decided or how the products of sexual union
should be nurtured. For subordinates, institutions limit the opportunities for, and raise the costs of,
noncompliance. As the individual subordinates social and material survival is conditioned by her ability to accommodate
herself to the daily demands of social institutions, adaptive behaviors become molded into everyday habits,
dimming each persons vision of social alternatives and hedging in her choices . And any
failure to comply with institutional directives would be a provocation to the edifice of
organized life not merely a simple act between two individuals this means that subordinates
are less likely to engage in non compliance lightly as the personal investment that would be required grows heavier.
This is advantageous for the dominant group in itself, but it yields the further advantage of
shifting the locus of control away from the individuals in the dominant group to the institutions they
have historically erected. This means that benefits are delivered to individual members of the
dominant group routinely, without any need for individually initiated acts of assertion. The
institutions operate as an experiential buffer, blurring the direct, expropriative basis of the inequalities between groups both from those
who receive the benefits and from those who supply them. These factors have profound consequences for the
kind of ideology that the dominant group espouses and for the reception that it gets from
subordinates. The institutionalization of inequality releases the individual members of the
dominant group from any sense of personal complicity. As they seek to interpret the happy situation in which
they find themselves, they have no reason to feel personally defensive-after all, they have personally taken no steps to extract from
others the benefits that regularly come their way. Instead, the ideas that prevail are the product of pressures coming out of the
institutional arrangements. Individuals pick up those ideas piecemeal without any effort. Unfettered by any need to
construct their own personal motivation scheme for discrimination, the individual members
of the dominant group instead succumb to the relentless institutional pressures as they grope to
interpret the world in which they live. Because the members of the dominant group are released by
institutions from the rude necessity of having to exact subordinates compliance singlehandedly,
they are able to espouse and promulgate ideas that are institutionally convenient with uncontrived sincerity.
Ideologies that are promoted with sincerity are more compelling. This in itself gives the
dominant group advantage in persuading subordinates that all is right with the world, but
subordinates are rendered more vulnerable to such appeals because their perceptions too
are constrained by the existing institutional arrangements . The dominant group thus avoids the wearying
and hazardous journey into the explicit assertion of power by making the inequalities into a societal habit, ingrained into the way of
life. Weber has described the process well: An order which is adhered to from motives of pure expediency is generally much less
stable than one upheld on a purely customary basis through the fact that the corresponding behavior has become habitual. The latter is
much the most common type of subjective attitude. But even this type of order is in turn much less stable than an order which enjoys
the prestige of being considered binding, or, as it may be expressed, of legitimacy. (Weber [1947] 1964, 125). Bachrach and Baratz
maintain the authority is not simply power institutionalized, that compliance in response to authority is based on an entirely different
consideration-a shared set of values. They argue, for example, that most people obey the laws of a
society not because they fear the sanctions that are threatened but because they adhere to a
set of values that places a high stock on the necessity of a legal system to preserve an orderly
and peaceful society. Bachrach and Baratz overstate the case-the ability of the legal system to command compliance would be
severely tested were it stripped of its ability to inflict sanctions and compelled to rely entirely on shared values to generate
compliance. But their argument contains an important insight into the ideological dynamics of intergroup inequality. Institutions
can legitimize and stabilize inequality by removing compliance from the self-conscious
realm. The authority of an institution rests implicitly on its ability to use force , that is, to inflict
punishment on those who resist it. However, the advantage of authority over the explicit assertion of power is that the
threat remains implicit, submerged beneath an elaborate ideological edifice. Instead of being engaged proactively in
the direct use of threats, the power differential between groups is deployed more effectively
in molding the institutions and accompanying values that constitute a way of life.
Compliance is more readily given if subordinates have been induced to adopt the same
values as the dominant group. Lukes has put it well: To put the matter sharply, A may exercise power over B by getting
him to do what he does not want to do, but he also exercise power over him by influencing, shaping or determining his very wants . .
.It s it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping
their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because
they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable or because they value it as divinely
ordained and beneficial? (Lukes 1974, 23-24). In this context, even the use of force, should the dominant group be pressed to it,
assumes a safer meaning than it does in explicit power relations. The application of sanctions against the
occasional straggler can be interpreted self-righteously by both dominant and subordinate
groups as a just punishment for transgression of the social order, not as the cold assertion of one groups
will over another. Instead of placing the dominant groups position at risk, such a use of sanctions thus reinforces the morality of the
entire social order. The benefits that the dominant group derives from that social order are
pleasantly obscured beneath a value system that has been made a consensual property.
Several observers have pointed to the subtlety with which power works to constrain the
institutional and moral framework within which political judgments are made. Schattschneider
(19 talked of the use of institutions to generate a mobilization of bias; Bachrach and Baratz (197) discuss the
process of non-decision-making and decision-shaping; Lindblom (1977) uses the
concept of constrained volitions. Although the specific emphases of those arguments vary,
for our purposes they all identify a common phenomenon-the implicit use of power to
prevent or contain conflict rather than the explicit exercise of power to subdue it. Rather than engaging in
battle with subordinates who challenge the status quo, dominant groups prefer to constrain
the vision of subordinates sufficiently to preclude the emergence of a serious challenge. The
surest strategy for social control is to confine the agenda within which a challenge might
take place. Empiricists may complain that the process thus entailed is not empirically observable. Merelman (1969, for example,
objected that Bachrach and Baratzs non-decision is by definition a non event that has no grounding in the empirically observed
exchanges of everyday political life. But it is precisely because of its invisibility in the day-to-day arena
that the institutionalization of bias is so profound. By defining the bounds of reasonable
discourse, institutionalized power limits the kinds of political exchanges that may take place
without sullying the awareness of any of the participants. By contrast, it is the very
conspicuousness of the explicit exercise of power that reduces it to such a clumsy basis for
durable social control.
Cloaking D/A: Your portable skills are not politically
effective for minority populations- your civic education
merely cements and paves over the exclusive nature of
institutions.
Grier and Cobbs, (Black Rage, p149-50) 1968

the factors that make academic achievement difficult for dark

Such are

students institutional opposition to a learned black

: loving but untrusting parents, discouraged teachers,

community When a student surfaces

, and a state of war that has both historical roots and a contemporary reality. in spite of these barriers

as an academician, the passage through these dark places has left

its mark. He steps onstage to put his skill to work in a nation and an
economy which has blocked his progress at every step and which yet
offers him serious obstacles. The systemic discrimination against
black academicians and intellectuals is a dreary tale well told by
many voices The paths beyond scholarly excellence may lead
. Let us add only this:

to positions of power in government, in industry, or in the

administrative hierarchy of major educational institutions the black . But

who has breached so many barriers to achieve academic status

man

must realize that further doors are open to all save him
at this writing . His is a blind alley. His

achievements are circumscribed by the same impediments of

discrimination as are those o less gifted If education truly freed f his brother.

the brother from this peculiarly American latter-day bondage, the

transition from black to white might actually be approached by
means of the refinement of skills But there is no prospect of this . and no one
realizes it more keenly than the black intellectual.

Tacit Consent D/A: decisionmaking should not be the first

priority- this is the kind of scholarship that forces actors
to make decisions based upon faulty hastily assumed
facts and plays into the paranoia of intensity. Creating
discontinuities within the official narrative interrupts
these kinds of decisions- Medina proves. The debates
against official regimes in Chile and Argentina proved
acting from individual change both enables resistant
against imperial abstraction of violence and proves better
decision are made without this hegemonic epistemology
Telos D/A: their dialogue presences politics as a fixed,
end-oriented process that forces a monologic
interpretation. Only the Affs rupture of telos logic can
achieve revolutionary forms of dialogue in debate
West 99 (Cornel, Professional Baller, The Cornel West Reader, Published
by Basic Civitas Books, pg. xxvii-xxviii)
My conception of what it means to be modern is shot through with a sense of the
dialogical-the free encounter of mind, soul and body that relates to others in
order to be unsettled, unnerved and unhoused. This experience of dialogue-
the I-Though relation with the uncontrolled other-may result in a dizziness, vertigo or
shudder that unhinges us from our moorings or yanks us from our anchors.
This loss of our footing and gain of our freedom compel us to acknowledge
that the very meaning of being modern may be the lack of any meaning, that
our quest for such meaning may be the very meaning itselfwithout ever
arriving at any fixed meanings. In short, the hermeneutical circle in which we
find ourselves, as historical beings in search of meaning for ourselves is
virtuous, not vicious, because we never transcend or complete the circle. Like
Sisyphus, we go endlessly up and down with noble aims and aspirations, but no ultimate harmony
or achieved wholeness. My Chekhovian Christian conception of what it means to be modern
focuses on the night side of modernity, the underside of our contemporary predicament. Therefore I
highlight the forms of self-making and self-creating of those whose suffering if often rendered invisible by
the Enlightenment discourse on the light of natural reason and the Romantic preoccupation with
imaginative transformations of critical intelligence and to imagine forms of transformation far beyond
Romantic versions of imaginative transformations. Therefore my critiques of modernity extend,
refine and expand modern consciousness and practice. Yet my Chekhovian Christian
perspective of what it means to be modern cuts even deeper. It gives up on the very possibility
of arriving at a definitive, definiteor dogmaticend point of modernity.
Instead, it stresses the very means by which and procedures through which we
pursue our aims. In short, it highlights the dialogical process and democratic
practices through which we pursue the very ends we cherish.
Education
 2AC
Scholarship D/A: The Negatives embracement of politics
as a way to learn portable skills begins from a flawed
approach that gets trapped within an academic culture
that pre-disposes war as an inevitable result and
theorizes the enemy ever-present on the border.
McClintock uses three examples to demonstrate the
military-academic-political complex: Prior to 9/11, General
Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army, bemoaned the
enemy deficit: Its no use having an army that did
nothing but train, he said. Theres got to be a certain
appetite for what the hell we exist for. In 1997 a group of
neocons at the Project for the New American Century
produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to
make such an invasion palatable would require a
catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl
Harbor. The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution,
both to the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy,
offering the military unimaginable license to expand its
reach. General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit
that the attacks were an immense boon: There is a huge
silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. .
. . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have
the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our
homeland, which gives it some oomph.
Creativity D/A: Jose Medina says that the 1ACs anti-
disciplinarity is a form of guerilla pluralism to inject
multiple narratives against the hegemonic interpretation.
The goal of this is to create epistemic friction- not seeking
unity with existing power structures but rather working to
create disruption. In this specific case, the 1ACs refusal
to strategically essentialize the law for a specific policy
against military presence is because that option seeks a
unity with current power structures and necessarily
sacrifices some of the objective of anti-disciplinarity; by
engaging in our revealing and antidisciplinarity without
turning to this fixed acts, we use epistemic friction
provoke conflict, seek to point out gaps and clashing
perspectives, focuses on tension and constantly re-
investigating how our knowledge is produced. The 1AC
thus isnt a single speech act that solves all problems but
rather is a constantly producing form of scholarship that
is a process rather than a product- solves for the
Scholarship D/A above
Clinical Sanitation D/A: Their form of top-down political
orientation abstracts the incredible violence within
imperial powers by abstracting the world and peoples
lives to the national level, preventing empathy with
individuals. This is what allows us to rationalize and then
forget horrific events in the name of extending imperial
domination.
This devalues the life of those not in decisionmaking
circles to nothing. We have to change our perspective to
forefront violence rendered invisible

Mignolo 7
(Walter, Argentinean semiotician and prof at Duke, The De-Colonial Option and the Meaning
of Identity in Politics online)

The rhetoric of modernity (from the Christian mission since the sixteenth century, to the secular Civilizing mission, to
development and modernization after WWII) occludedunder its triumphant rhetoric of salvation and
the good life for allthe perpetuation of the logic of coloniality, that is, of massive appropriation of
land (and today of natural resources), massive exploitation of labor (from open slavery from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century, to disguised slavery, up to the twenty first century), and the dispensability of human lives from
the massive killing of people in the Inca and Aztec domains to the twenty million plus people from Saint Petersburg to the
Ukraine during WWII killed in the so called Eastern Front Unfortunately, not all the massive killings have been recorded
with the same value and the same visibility. The unspoken criteria for the value of human
lives is an obvious sign (from a de-colonial interpretation) of the hidden imperial identity politics: that is,
the value of human lives to which the life of the enunciator belongs becomes the measuring
stick to evaluate other human lives who do not have the intellectual option and institutional
power to tell the story and to classify events according to a ranking of human lives; that is,
according to a racist classification.5

Political Education D/A: They dont even get their politics

right: Their prescription of fiat and unilateral
policymaking is inaccurate and teaches us tools and
structures that dont exist
CLAUDE 88 (Inis, Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia, States and
the Global System, pages 18-20)//TR

This view of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of sovereignty, which calls up
the image of the monarch, presiding over his kingdom. Sovereignty emphasizes the
singularity of the state, its monopoly of authority, its unity of command and its capacity to
speak with one voice. Thus, France wills, Iran demands, China intends, New Zealand
promises and the Soviet Union insists. One all too easily conjures up the
picture of a single-minded and purposeful state that decides exactly
what it wants to achieve, adopts coherent policies intelligently adapted to its
objectives, knows what it is doing, does what it intends and always has its act together.
This view of the state is reinforced by political scientists emphasis
upon the concept of policy and upon the thesis that governments derive policy from
calculations of national interest. We thus take it for granted that states act
internationally in accordance with rationally conceived and consciously
constructedschemes of action, and we implicitly refuse to consider the
possibility that alternatives to policy-directed behaviour may have
importancealternatives such as random, reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist
behaviour. Our rationalistic assumption that states do what they have planned to do tends to inhibit the
discovery that states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do, or
what they have the opportunity to do, or what they have usually
done, or what other states are doing, or whatever the line of least
resistance would seem to suggest. Academic preoccupation with the
making of policy is accompanied by academic neglect of the
execution of policy. We seem to assume that once the state has calculated its
interest and contrived a policy to further that interest, the carrying out of policy is
the virtually automatic result of the routine functioning of the
bureaucratic mechanism of the state. I am inclined to call this
the Genesis theory of public administration, taking as my text the passage: And
God said, Let there be light: and there was light. I suspect that, in
the realm of government, policy execution rarely follows so promptly
and inexorably from policy statement. Alternatively, one may dub it the Pooh-Bah/Ko-
Ko theory, honouring those denizens of William S. Gilberts Japan who took the position that when the
Mikado ordered that something e done it was as good as done and might as well be declared to have been
done. In the real world, that which a state decides to do is not as good
as done; it may, in fact, never be done. And what states do, they may never have decided
to do. Governments are not automatic machines, grinding out
decisions and converting decisions into actions . They are
agglomerations of human beings, like the rest of us inclined to be fallible, lazy, forgetful,
indecisive, resistant to discipline and authority, and likely to fail to get the word or to heed it. As in
other large organizations, left and right governmental hands are frequently ignorant of each
others activities, official spokesmen contradict each other, ministries work at cross purposes,
and the creaking machinery of government often gives the impression that no one is really in
charge. I hope that no one will attribute my jaundiced view of government merely to the fact that I am an
Americanone, that is, whose personal experience is limited to a governmental system that is notoriously
complex, disjointed, erratic, cumbersome and unpredictable. The United States does not, I suspect, have
the least effective government or the most bumbling and incompetent bureaucracy in all the world. Here
and there, now and then, governments do, of course perform prodigious feats of organization and
administration: an extraordinary war effort, a flight to the moon, a successful hostage-rescue
states have to make do with governments that are not
operation.More often,
notably clear about their purposes or coordinated and disciplined in
their operations. This means that, in international relations, states are sometimes less dangerous,
and sometimes less reliable, than one might think. Neither their threats nor their promises are to be taken
we students of international
with absolute seriousness. Above all, it means that
politics must be cautious in attributing purposefulness and
responsibility to governments. To say the that the United States was informed about an
event is not to establish that the president acted in the light of that knowledge; he may never have heard
about it. To say that a Soviet pilot shot down an airliner is not to prove that the Kremlin has adopted the
policy of destroying all intruders into Soviet airspace; one wants to know how and by whom the decision to
fire was made. To observe that the representative of Zimbabwe voted in favour of a particular resolution in
the United Nations General Assembly is not necessarily to discover the nature of Zimbabwes policy on the
affected matter; Zimbabwe may have no policy on that matter, and it may be that no one in the national
capital has ever heard of the issue. We can hardly dispense with the convenient notion that Pakistan
claims, Cuba promises, and Italy insists, and we cannot well abandon the formal position that governments
speak for and act on behalf of their states, but it is essential that we bear constantly in mind the reality
governments are never fully in charge and never achieve the
that
unity, purposefulness and discipline that theory attributes to them
and that they sometimes claim.

Ressentiment D/A: Roleplaying causes passivity and

tyrannical decisionmaking processes

Antonio 95 (Robert J Antonio is Professor at Kentucky University (PhD Notre Dame) and specializes in social theory,
macroscopic sociology, and economy and society. His writings have focused on Marx, the Frankfurt School, Weber, Dewey,
Habermas, and others in the classical and continental tradition., Nietzsche's Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History
American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Jul., 1995), pp. 1-43)//TR

The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12 He considered "roles" as "external,"
"surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close personal identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement. While
modern theorists saw dif- ferentiated roles and professions as a matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons
(especially male professionals) in specialized occupations overidentify with their positions and engage in gross fabrica-
tions to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of oth- ers, asking themselves, "How ought I feel about
this?" They are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have
trouble being anything but actors-"The role has actually become the character." This highly subjectified social self or
simulator suffers devas- tating inauthenticity. The powerful authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's
already self-indulgent "inwardness." Integ- rity, decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure are
undone by paralyzing overconcern about possible causes, meanings, and consequences of acts and
unending internal dialogue about what others might think, expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp.
83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate "masks" reduces
persons to hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and
superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you genuine? Or only an actor? 12 A representative or that
which is represented? . . . [Or] no more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that it is hard to tell the
social selves "prefer the copies to the originals" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986,
copy from the genuine article;
inwardness and aleatory scripts
p. 136; 1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their
foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of actor cannot plan for the long term or
participate in enduring net- works of interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a
"stone" in the societal "edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules in the arid subjectivized landscape.
Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest
news of the stock market; one lives as if one always 'might miss out on something. ''Rather do anything than
nothing': this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture. . . . Living in a constant chase after gain compels
people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others."
Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous
circumstances that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity). The most medio- cre people believe they
can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like Socra- tes,
and praised their ability to redirect ressentiment creatively and to render the "sick" harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated
versions. Lacking the "born physician's" capacities, these impostors am- plify the worst inclinations of the
herd; they are "violent, envious, ex- ploitative, scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to cir-
cumstances. " Social selves are fodder for the "great man of the masses." Nietzsche held that "the less one knows how to command,
the more ur- gently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely- a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor,
dogma, or party conscience. The deadly combination of desperate conforming and overreaching and
untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for a new type of tyrant (Nietzsche 1986, pp. 137, 168; 1974, pp.
117-18, 213, 288-89, 303-4).
Fairness
 2AC
Objectivity D/A: Claims of fairness and predictability come
from positions of white power meant to exclude non-white
knowledge, action and legitimacy

Delgado 92
Law Prof at U. of Colorado, 1992 [Richard, Shadowboxing: An Essay On Power, In Cornell Law
Review, May]//TR

We have cleverly built power's view of the appropriate standard of conduct into the very
term fair. Thus, the stronger party is able to have his/her way and see her/himself as
principled at the same time. Imagine, for example, a man's likely reaction to the suggestion that subjective considerations
-- a woman's mood, her sense of pressure or intimidation, how she felt about the man, her unexpressed fear of reprisals if she did not
go ahead-- ought to play a part in determining whether the man is guilty of rape. Most men find this suggestion offensive; it requires
them to do something they are not accustomed to doing. "Why," they say, "I'd have to be a mind reader before I could have sex with
anybody?" "Who knows, anyway, what internal inhibitions the woman might have been harboring?" And "what if the woman simply
changed her mind later and charged me with rape?" What we never notice is that women can "read" men's minds perfectly well. The
male perspective is right out there in the world, plain as day, inscribed in culture, song, and myth -- in all the prevailing narratives.
These narratives tell us that men want and are entitled [*820] to sex, that it is a prime function of women to give it to them, and that
unless something unusual happens, the act of sex is ordinary and blameless. We believe these things because that is the way we have
constructed women, men, and "normal" sexual intercourse. Yet society and law accept only this latter message (or something like it),
and not the former, more nuanced ones, to mean refusal. Why? The "objective" approach is not inherently
better or more fair. Rather, it is accepted because it embodies the sense of the stronger
party, who centuries ago found himself in a position to dictate what permission meant.
Allowing ourselves to be drawn into reflexive, predictable arguments about administrability,
fairness, stability, and ease of determination points us away from what [*821] really counts:
the way in which stronger parties have managed to inscribe their views and interests into
"external" culture, so that we are now enamored with that way of judging action. First, we read our values and preferences
into the culture; then we pretend to consult that culture meekly and humbly in order to judge our own acts.
Limits/Ground
 2AC
We give them good ground- we defend a decrease of
military presence and talk about the implications of
policies for increased military presence and if they win
military presence good we will lose
Structural Dissent D/A: Their limits are neither objective
nor good- The US is intrinsically a white supremacist state
that emphasize a disembodied white subject position-
their framework that assumes equal access and influence
replicates this same dangerous position which normalizes
colonialism and racism under the guise of simulation

Reid-Brinkley 8
[Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Rhetoric PhD & Prof @ Pitt, and the most competitively successful black woman in
CEDA history, THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS
NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE]

Mitchell observes that the stance of the policymaker in debate comes with a sense of
detachment associated with the spectator posture.115 In other words, its participants are able to
engage in debates where they are able to distance themselves from the events that are the
subjects of debates. Debaters can throw around terms like torture, terrorism, genocide and
nuclear war without blinking. Debate simulations can only serve to distance the debaters
from real world participation in the political contexts they debate about . As William Shanahan
remarks: the topic established a relationship through interpellation that inhered
irrespective of what the particular political affinities of the debaters were. The relationship was both
political and ethical, and needed to be debated as such. When we blithely call for United States Federal
Government policymaking, we are not immune to the colonialist legacy that establishes our
place on this continent. We cannot wish away the horrific atrocities perpetrated everyday in
our name simply by refusing to acknowledge these implications (emphasis in original).116 The
objective stance of the policymaker is an impersonal or imperialist persona. The
policymaker relies upon acceptable forms of evidence, engaging in logical discussion,
producing rational thoughts. As Shanahan, and the Louisville debaters note, such a stance is integrally
linked to the normative, historical and contemporary practices of power that produce and
maintain varying networks of oppression. In other words, the discursive practices of policy-
oriented debate are developed within, through and from systems of power and privilege.
Thus, these practices are critically implicated in the maintenance of hegemony. So, rather than
seeing themselves as government or state actors, Jones and Green choose to perform themselves in debate, violating the more
objective stance of the policymaker and require their opponents to do the same.
Imperial Forgetting D/A: Our Street evidence says it is this
ability to forget the horrors of the nation at home and the
act of giving the nation a pass on those genocidal crimes
that fosters a brutal imperialistic drive to violently spread
outward: their limits that prevent discussions of the way
this manifests contribute to this genocide analytic within
the academy, which Rodriguez says we must constantly
produce knowledge against as radical intellectuals.
Hermeneutic Circle D/A: Limits are also what keep us
constrained in the epistemology of paranoia; operating
within realism is skewed to necessitate militaristic
response
Burke 2007 (Anthony, Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in
the University of New South Wales, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, theory
& event 10.2, //TR)

My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against
86
excessive optimism. Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational
instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my
analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive
flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican
states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the
conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against
everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues,
I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being
itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to
himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of
revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be
denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the
call of a more primal truth.'87What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing
the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed
not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by
an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire
space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary
modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention,
geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely
from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but
from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in
powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe,
policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and
humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the
chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of
action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that
reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available
choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the
mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain
militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective,
dysfunctional or chaotic.
SSD
 2AC
Switch side debate creates liberal subjects that seek to
reproduce oppression, leading to global disaster and
nihilism
Spanos 4 (William, From an email to Joe Miller publicly available
at:http://www.cross-x.com/vb/showthread.php?t=945110&highlight=Spanos+Email)

Dear Joe MIller,Yes, the statement about the American debate circuit you refer to was made by me, though
some years ago. I strongly believed then --and still do, even though a certain uneasiness about
debate in both the high schools and
"objectivity" has crept into the "philosophy of debate" -- that
colleges in this country is assumed to take place nowhere, even though
the issues that are debated are profoundly historical , which
means that positions are always represented from the
perspective of power, and a matter of life and death. I find it grotesque that in the
debate world, it doesn't matter which position you take on an
issue -- say, the United States' unilateral wars of preemption -- as long as you "score
points". The world we live in is a world entirely dominated by
an "exceptionalist" America which has perennially claimed that
it has been chosen by God or History to fulfill his/its "errand in
the wilderness." That claim is powerful because American
economic and military power lies behind it. And any alternative
position in such a world is virtually powerless. Given this
inexorable historical reality, to assume, as the protocols of debate do, that all
positions are equal is to efface the imbalances of power that
are the fundamental condition of history and to annul the Moral
authority inhering in the position of the oppressed. This is why I have
said that the appropriation of my interested work on education and empire to this transcendental debate
It is militant
world constitute a travesty of my intentions. My scholarship is not "disinterested."
and intended to ameliorate as much as possible the pain and
suffering of those who have been oppressed by the
"democratic" institutions that have power precisely by way of
showing that their language if "truth," far from being
"disinterested" or "objective" as it is always claimed, is
informed by the will to power over all manner of "others ." This is
also why I told my interlocutor that he and those in the debate world who felt like him
should call into question the traditional "objective" debate
protocols and the instrumentalist language they privilege in
favor of a concept of debate and of language in which life and
death mattered. I am very much aware that the arrogant neocons who
now saturate the government of the Bush administration -- judges,
pentagon planners, state department officials, etc. learned their "disinterested"
argumentative skills in the high school and college debate
societies and that, accordingly, they have become masters at disarming
the just causes of the oppressed. This kind leadership will
reproduce itself (along with the invisible oppression it
perpetrates) as long as the training ground and the debate
protocols from which it emerges remains in tact. A revolution
in the debate world must occur. It must force that unworldly
world down into the historical arena where positions make a
difference. To invoke the late Edward Said, only such a revolution will be
capable of "deterring democracy" (in Noam Chomsky's ironic phrase), of instigating the
secular critical consciousness that is, in my mind, the sine qua
non for avoiding the immanent global disaster towards which
the blind arrogance of Bush Administration and his neocon
policy makers is leading.

The violent ontologies and epitsemologies that dominate

politics and the academy prevent alternate viewpoint-
sequencing the Aff first to rupture these is key to a switch
side that avoids Spanos critique
Imperial Forgetting D/A: Our Street evidence says it is this
ability to forget the horrors of the nation at home and the
act of giving the nation a pass on those genocidal crimes
that fosters a brutal imperialistic drive to violently spread
outward: their limits that prevent discussions of the way
this manifests contribute to this genocide analytic within
the academy, which Rodriguez says we must constantly
produce knowledge against as radical intellectuals. Thats
why we must forefront these issues through the 1AC
Liberalism D/A: Their call for equivalent, switchable
positions is a manifestation of the liberal capitalist drive,
always seeking to appropriate and destroy that which
falls beyond the margins of acceptability

Spanos 11(William, Professor at Binghamton,

http://www.kdebate.com/spanos.html, Interview by Chris
Spurlock//TR)
Following up on what I've just said, inquiry, whether it takes the form of knowledge production or debate,
cannot be disinterested. "Disinterested" inquiry is an orientation towards the truth that has been exposed
as a myth by the poststructuralist revolution from Martin Heidegger through Michel Foucault to Giorgio
Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Judith Bulter. Inquiry is necessarily interested precisely in the sense that it
takes place in the world. The word "interest" come from the Latin (not Greek) inter esse, which means
that we, as human beings, are "beings in-the-midst" (as opposed to beings, such as angels, who look down
from a distance on or "observe" phenomena from above). As Heidegger said, following Kierkegaard,
we, as human beings, have been "thrown into the world" and thus
exist *inter esse*, "in-the-midst-of- being." We are,
therefore, interested, that is, we relate to or engage
phenomena with care precisely because everything we
encounter *inter esse* is transient, uncertain,
problematic, a matter of questioning, To understand
human being as inter esse is thus to acknowledge that
we are radically free. This is not as easy as the word "freedom" implies under the aegis
of American democracy. The freedom that comes with being-in-the-midst is a difficult, even agonizing
freedom. We can't rely on some higher cause, whether God or a framed system (such as democratic
capitalism), to choose for us. We must choose for ourselves, Being in the midst, being interested, means,
as Sartre put it long ago, being "condemned to be free." But that is the price one has to pay to become
free from the degradation of servitude and for the exquisite joy of being fully human. Dis-interested
inquiry separates or, better, alienates the inquirer form this inter esse. As I said earlier, it reduces the
mysterious force of being-in-the-midst to an absolutely knowable (quantifiable) thing. Put alternatively,
in privileging the observing or panoptic or spatialzing
eye-- the eye that, seeing everything in time an space at
once, reduces being's dynamics" in a "world picture" -- it
privileges the answer over the question. To be interested
then means to beware of those who demand answers --or
finality -and victory. They invariably turn out to be
murderous brutes. [he continues] Althusser's analysis of the "problematic" is too
complicated to be explained in a few words. (Anyone interested will find his extended explanation in his
introduction --"From Capital* to Marx's Philosophy" -- to his and Etienne Balibar's book *Reading
Capital*. It will suffice here to say that we in the modern West have been
*inscribed* by our culture --"ideological state
apparatuses (educational institutions, media, and so on)-- by a system of
knowledge production that goes by the name of
"disinterested inquiry," but in reality the "truth" at which it arrives is a construct, a
fiction, and thus ideological. And this is precisely because, in distancing itself from
earthly being --the transience of time --this system of
knowledge production privileges the panoptic eye in the
pursuit of knowledge. This is what Althusser means by the "problematic": a
frame that allows the perceiver to see only what it wants
to see. Everything that is outside the frame doesn't exist
to the perceiver. He /she is blind to it. It's nothing or, at the site of
humanity, it's nobody. Put alternatively, the problematic -- this frame, as the very word
itself suggests, *spatializes* or *reifies* time -- reduces what is a living,
problematic force and not a thing into a picture or thing
so that it can be comprehended (taken hold of, managed), appropriated,
administered, and exploited by the disinterested inquirer . All that I've
just said should suggest what I meant when, long ago, in response to someone in the debate world who
seemed puzzled by the strong reservations I expressed on being informed that the debate community in
the U.S. was appropriating my work on Heidegger, higher education, and American imperialism. I said
traditional form of the debate, that is,
then -- and I repeat here to you -- that the
the hegemonic frame that rigidly determines its protocols-- is unworldly in an
ideological way. It willfully separates the debaters from the world as it actually is-- by which
I mean as it has been produced by the dominant democratic I capitalist culture --and it displaces
them to a free-floating zone, a no place, as it were, where all things, nor
matter how different the authority they command in the real world, are equal. But in *this* real
world produced by the combination of Protestant Christianity and democratic capitalism things -- and
therefore their value --are never equal. They are framed into a system of
binaries-Identity/ difference, Civilization/barbarism I Men/woman, Whites/blacks, Sedentary/
nomadic, Occidental/ oriental, Chosen I preterit (passed over), Self-reliance I dependent (communal),
Democracy I communism, Protestant Christian I Muslim, and so on -- in which the first term
is not only privileged over the second term, but, in thus being privileged, is also
empowered to demonize the second. Insofar as the debate world
frames argument as if every position has equal authority (the debater can take either side) it
obscures and eventually effaces awareness of the
degrading imbalance of power in the real world and the
terrible injustices it perpetrates. Thus framed, debate gives the false
impression that it is a truly democratic institution, whereas in reality it is complicitous with the
dehumanized and dehumanizing system of power that produced it. It is no accident, in my mind, that this
fraudulent form of debate goes back to the founding of the U.S. as a capitalist republic and that it has
produced what I call the "political class" to indicate not only the basic sameness between the Democratic
and Republican parties but also its fundamental indifference to the plight of those who don't count in a
system where what counts is determined by those who are the heirs of this quantitative system of
binaries.
ATs
 AT: Agonism
Agonism doesn't go far enough--The creation and
acceptance of common ethico-political principles
TRANSFORMS the very nature of conflict making
adversarial discussion compatible with PLURALISM,
LIBERTY, and EQUALITY thus forcing the EXCLUSION of
those who do not share the ETHICO-POLITICAL VALUES.

Olson 8
(Associate professor of politics and international affairs, Northern Arizona University, 2008
Joel; Friends and Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of
Democratic Theory; PG: 7-8)//TR

The challenge for Mouffe, then, is to develop a politics that creates this common symbolic
space and thereby enables legitimate dissent among friends (1999a, 5). Enemies have nothing in
common. Their only recourse is combat. Yet combat is not inevitable because enemies are not immutable. Mouffe argues that who
counts as a friend and who counts as an enemy, as well as the relations between them,
are socially constructed (4950). Thus, it is possible to renegotiate tensions between them in ways
that do not lead to the kind of mortal combat that Schmitt foresees . The creation and
acceptance of common ethicopolitical principles by the contending parties transforms the
very nature of conflict and makes a friends/ enemies conception of politics compatible with
pluralism, liberty, and equality. The adversary is in a certain sense an enemy, but a legitimate enemy with whom there
exists a common ground. Adversaries fight against each other, but they do not put into question the
legitimacy of their respective positions. They share a common allegiance to the ethico-
political principles of liberal democracy. However, they disagree about their meanings and their forms of
implementation, and such a disagreement is not one that could be resolved through rational argument. Hence the antagonistic element
in the relationship. Conceived in such a way, liberal-democratic politics can be seen as a consistent and never fully achieved enterprise
to diffuse the antagonistic potential present in human relations. (4) Rather than eliminate conflict, the task of
agonal democratic theory is to create a common ethicopolitical framework within which
conflict can take place. This approach to politics represents somewhat of a departure from Mouffes earlier work. In her
influential Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), cowritten with Ernesto Laclau, Mouffe argues that politics is the construction of a
common will out of disparate interests and identities in a struggle for hegemony, by which she means the struggle between dominant
and subordinate groups to rule by defining the common sense of a society (Gramsci 1971). This articulation of antagonisms into
a hegemonic bloc, Laclau and Mouffe maintain, is the aim of a radical democratic politics. As Jules Townshend (2004) notes,
however, Mouffes recent work has not much engaged the concept of hegemony. Instead, it has focused on agonism. As a result, there
is an unacknowledged tension in Mouffes political theory between hegemony and agonism, for the two seek somewhat different
things. Hegemony implies dividing the political into two hostile camps in a struggle for supremacy between two different sorts of
common sense. Agonism seeks to prevent intractable conflict by creating a common symbolic space within which adversaries
can engage each other as friendly enemies rather than as implacable foes. Agonism contains conflict within a
common ethico-political framework; hegemony overthrows one framework and replaces it with another. This tension
is not completely irresolvable. Laclaus (2005) recent work, for example, suggests that an agonistic politics necessarily involves a
struggle for hegemony.5 Mouffe, however, by and large has not viewed agonism this way. For example, one of the few places where
her recent work does address the relationship between hegemony and agonism is in On the Political (2005a). There she repeats the
argument from Hegemony and Socialist Strategy that politics is a struggle between interests and identities for hegemony. Yet
throughout the book she constrains hegemonic conflict to those struggles that take place within a common ethico-political framework
rather than over the nature and content of the liberal framework itself (2005a, 3233, passim). Mouffe does not entirely
ignore conflicts over the framework of politics, yet when she does consider them , like Gutmann
and Thompson she inevitably regards them as a threat to democracy. She alludes to the
breakup of the former Yugoslavia along ethnic lines, terrorism after 9/11, and the actions of
the religious right in the United States as examples of when antagonism fails to turn into
agonism and friends/enemies conflict becomes destructive .6 The way to deal with such
conflict, she argues, is to exclude from the public sphere those who do not share the ethico-
political values of liberty and equality for all. A radical and plural democracy requires
discriminating between demands which are to be accepted as part of the agonistic debate
and those which are to be excluded. A democratic society cannot treat those who put its
basic institutions into question as legitimate adversaries (2005a, 120)
 AT: Armstrong/Rules are Good
Its how you play the game that controls if its playful or
coercive and destructive, we control the narrative of your
rules as discriminatory, racist, and utterly violent means
your author concludes aff

Armstrong Their Author

(Paul B., Dean and Professor of Literature at Brown University, New Literary History, 31: 211
223, The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Isers Aesthetic Theory)

As a rule-governed but open-ended activity, play provides a model for deploying power in a nonrepressive
manner that makes creativity and innovation possible not in spite of disciplinary constraints but because of
Not all power is playful, of course, and some restrictions are
them.
more coercive than enabling. But thinking about the power of constraints on the model of
rules governing play helps to explain the paradox that restrictions can be productive rather than merely
repressive. Seeing constraints as structures for establishing a play-space and as guides for practices of
exchange within it envisions power not necessarily and always as a force to be resisted in the interests of
freedom; it allows imagining the potential for power to become a constructive social energy that can
animate games of to-and-fro exchange between participants whose possibilities for self-discovery and self-
the one or the other
expansion are enhanced by the limits shaping their interactions. Whether
of these possibilities prevails in any particular situation is not
intrinsic to the structure of power; it depends, rather, on how games
are played.
 AT: Mouffe
Mouffe doesn't go far enough--The creation and
acceptance of common ethico-political principles
TRANSFORMS the very nature of conflict making
adversarial discussion compatible with PLURALISM,
LIBERTY, and EQUALITY thus forcing the EXCLUSION of
those who do not share the ETHICO-POLITICAL VALUES.

Olson 8
(Associate professor of politics and international affairs, Northern Arizona University, 2008
Joel; Friends and Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of
Democratic Theory; PG: 7-8)//TR

The challenge for Mouffe, then, is to develop a politics that creates this common symbolic
space and thereby enables legitimate dissent among friends (1999a, 5). Enemies have nothing in
common. Their only recourse is combat. Yet combat is not inevitable because enemies are not immutable. Mouffe argues that who
counts as a friend and who counts as an enemy, as well as the relations between them,
are socially constructed (4950). Thus, it is possible to renegotiate tensions between them in ways
that do not lead to the kind of mortal combat that Schmitt foresees . The creation and
acceptance of common ethicopolitical principles by the contending parties transforms the
very nature of conflict and makes a friends/ enemies conception of politics compatible with
pluralism, liberty, and equality. The adversary is in a certain sense an enemy, but a legitimate enemy with whom there
exists a common ground. Adversaries fight against each other, but they do not put into question the
legitimacy of their respective positions. They share a common allegiance to the ethico-
political principles of liberal democracy. However, they disagree about their meanings and their forms of
implementation, and such a disagreement is not one that could be resolved through rational argument. Hence the antagonistic element
in the relationship. Conceived in such a way, liberal-democratic politics can be seen as a consistent and never fully achieved enterprise
to diffuse the antagonistic potential present in human relations. (4) Rather than eliminate conflict, the task of
agonal democratic theory is to create a common ethicopolitical framework within which
conflict can take place. This approach to politics represents somewhat of a departure from Mouffes earlier work. In her
influential Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), cowritten with Ernesto Laclau, Mouffe argues that politics is the construction of a
common will out of disparate interests and identities in a struggle for hegemony, by which she means the struggle between dominant
and subordinate groups to rule by defining the common sense of a society (Gramsci 1971). This articulation of antagonisms into
a hegemonic bloc, Laclau and Mouffe maintain, is the aim of a radical democratic politics. As Jules Townshend (2004) notes,
however, Mouffes recent work has not much engaged the concept of hegemony. Instead, it has focused on agonism. As a result, there
is an unacknowledged tension in Mouffes political theory between hegemony and agonism, for the two seek somewhat different
things. Hegemony implies dividing the political into two hostile camps in a struggle for supremacy between two different sorts of
common sense. Agonism seeks to prevent intractable conflict by creating a common symbolic space within which adversaries
can engage each other as friendly enemies rather than as implacable foes. Agonism contains conflict within a
common ethico-political framework; hegemony overthrows one framework and replaces it with another. This tension
is not completely irresolvable. Laclaus (2005) recent work, for example, suggests that an agonistic politics necessarily involves a
struggle for hegemony.5 Mouffe, however, by and large has not viewed agonism this way. For example, one of the few places where
her recent work does address the relationship between hegemony and agonism is in On the Political (2005a). There she repeats the
argument from Hegemony and Socialist Strategy that politics is a struggle between interests and identities for hegemony. Yet
throughout the book she constrains hegemonic conflict to those struggles that take place within a common ethico-political framework
rather than over the nature and content of the liberal framework itself (2005a, 3233, passim). Mouffe does not entirely
ignore conflicts over the framework of politics, yet when she does consider them , like Gutmann
and Thompson she inevitably regards them as a threat to democracy. She alludes to the
breakup of the former Yugoslavia along ethnic lines, terrorism after 9/11, and the actions of
the religious right in the United States as examples of when antagonism fails to turn into
agonism and friends/enemies conflict becomes destructive .6 The way to deal with such
conflict, she argues, is to exclude from the public sphere those who do not share the ethico-
political values of liberty and equality for all. A radical and plural democracy requires
discriminating between demands which are to be accepted as part of the agonistic debate
and those which are to be excluded. A democratic society cannot treat those who put its
basic institutions into question as legitimate adversaries (2005a, 120)
 AT: Need Policy to change Policy
History is on our side the rise of post-positivism in the
late 1940s proves that epistemological critique is tied to
and shapes political changes in the world

Kurki 11
(Milja, International Politics department at Aberystwyth University UK (The Limitations of the
Critical Edge: Reflections on Critical and Philosophical IR Scholarship Today, Millenium: Journal
of International Studies, July 2011)//TR

Philosophical reflection is about gaining understanding of how knowledge is generated and

structured and what its relationship is to its producer, their social context and society at large. It is about
understanding the role and structure of scientific or social knowledge: how it is constructed; what objects exist in its purview; and why
and how we do (or do not) come to know our objects in specific ways. This might seem a rather abstract interest; and indeed, for
many, meta-theoretical or philosophy of science research remains a rather abstract theoretical sub-
field narrowly engaged in detailed debates on epistemology, causation or prediction. Philosophically informed IR
research can, however, be much more than this. Indeed, for many of its promulgators, philosophical research has arguably
been a very politically and socially important, as well as potentially influential, field of study. While most philosophically inclined
analysts acknowledge that meta-theory is not everything in IR, most argue it is of crucial significance in the
discipline.8 This is because it shapes in crucial ways how we come to understand the world, evaluate
claims about it and, indeed, interact with it. Depending on whether we are a positivist or a post-structuralist, we seek
different kinds of data, ask different kinds of questions and come to engage with actors differently in
international politics (which is also conceived of in different ways).9 To use Patrick Jacksons language: philosophical wagers
matter. Philosophical research is not only of significance in IR scholarship, of course. It is worth remembering that some of the most
well-known philosophers of science had at the heart of their inquiries questions of values and politics. Thus, Popper and
Kuhn, for example, were socially and politically driven philosophers of science; and sought through their
philosophical frameworks to influence the interaction of scientific practice and societal power
structures.11 The same stands for logical positivists in the social sciences. Biersteker describes this well: European and American
scholars embraced logical positivist, scientific behavioralism in the post-war era in part as a reaction
against fascism, militarism, and communism. They were reacting against totalizing ideologies and sought a less overtly politicized
philosophical basis for their research. Their liberalism stressed toleration for everything except totalizing ideologies,
and their logical positivist scientific approaches provided what they viewed as a less politicized methodology
for the conduct of social research.12 Murphys detailed study of the rise of behaviouralist peace studies
confirms the same; the rise, in a specific context, of a specific type of meta-theoretical argumentation, which
is deployed to a social and, in fact, political effect in order to criticise recent social dynamics and to
change the world in a preferable direction.13 There is, even when it is sidestepped by scientists or philosophers
themselves (as in the case of behaviouralists), a politics to the philosophy of science, in the sense that meta-theoretical
concerns are tied up with concrete social and political debates and struggles and specific
normative and political visions of both science and society , even if in indirect ways.14 This political edge
of philosophical debate has not been absent in IR scholarship, and arguably it was precisely the political role of philosophies of
science that critical international theory was invented to deal with. It is important to bear in mind that when meta-theory emerged as
an important sphere of study within IR theorising in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was moved to the centre ground of IR research
by a selection of key critical thinkers who politicised this area. Cox, Ashley, Ashley and Walker, Hoffman, Linklater and Steve Smith,
for example, argued vehemently in favour of the necessity for IR to consider its philosophy of science underpinnings because of the
political effects that epistemological and ontological decisions IR theorists make have on their concrete research and resultant policy
proposals. Indeed, in a famous line, Steve Smith called his epistemological work the most political of his career.
 AT: FW Is Conditional
Conditionality is merely cultural tourism whiteness
allows the privileged tourist to vacation in the identity of
the exotic other secure in the promise of a return to
safety and comfort at the end of the adventure- thats a
parasitic form of politics

Nakamura 2k, Lisa Ph.D., Graduate Center, City University of New York (English), "Race
In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet", 2000
Tourism is a particularly apt metaphor to describe the activity of racial
identity appropriation, or "passing" in cyberspace. The activity of "surfing," (an
activity already associated with tourism in the mind of most Americans) the
Internet not only reinforces the idea that cyberspace is not only a place where travel and mobility are
featured attractions, but also figures it as a form of travel which is inherently recreational, exotic, and
exciting, like surfing. The choice to enact oneself as a samurai warrior in LambdaMOO constitutes
a form of identity tourism which allows a player to appropriate an Asian racial
identity without any of the risks associated with being a racial minority in
real life. While this might seem to offer a promising venue for non-Asian characters to see through the
eyes of the Other by performing themselves as Asian through on-line textual interaction, the fact that the
personae chosen are overwhelmingly Asian stereotypes blocks this possibility by reinforcing these
stereotypes. This theatrical fantasy of passing as a form of identity tourism has
deep roots in colonial fiction, such as Kipling's Kim and T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of
Wisdom, and Sir Richard Burton's writings. The Irish orphan and spy Kim, who uses disguise to pass as
Hindu, Muslim, and other varieties of Indian natives, experiences the pleasures and dangers of cross
cultural performance. Said's insightful reading of the nature of Kim's adventures in cross cultural
passing contrasts the possibilities for play and pleasure for white travelers
in an imperialistic world controlled by the European empire with the relatively
constrained plot resolutions offered that same boy back home. "For what one cannot do in
one's own Western environment, where to try to live out the grand dream of a successful
quest is only to keep coming up against one's own mediocrity and the world's corruption and
degradation, one can do abroad. Isn't it possible in India to do everything, be anything, go
anywhere with impunity?" (42). To practitioners of identity tourism as I have described it
above, LambdaMOO represents an phantasmatic imperial space, much like Kipling's Anglo-
India, which supplies a stage upon which the "grand dream of a successful
quest" can be enacted. Since the incorporation of the computer into the white collar workplace
the line which divides work from play has become increasingly fluid. It is difficult for employers and indeed,
for employees, to always differentiate between doing "research" on the Internet and "playing": exchanging
email, checking library catalogues, interacting with friends and colleagues through synchronous media like
"talk" sessions, and videoconferencing offer enhanced opportunities for gossip, jokes, and other
distractions under the guise of work.3 Time spent on the Internet is a hiatus from "rl" (or real life, as it is
called by most participants in virtual social spaces like LambdaMOO), and when that time is spent in a role
playing space such as Lambda, devoted only to social interaction and the creation and maintenance of a
convincingly "real" milieu modeled after an "internation al community," that hiatus becomes a full fledged
vacation. The fact that Lambda offers players the ability to write their own descriptions, as well as the fact
that players often utilize this programming feature to write stereotyped Asian personae for themselves,
reveal that attractions lie not only in being able to "go" to exotic spaces, 4 but to co-opt the exotic and
attach it to oneself. The appropriation of racial identity becomes a form of
recreation, a vacation from fixed identities and locales . This vacation offers
the satisfaction of a desire to fix the boundaries of cultural identity and
exploit them for recreational purposes. As Said puts it, the tourist who passes
as the marginalized Other during his travels partakes of a fantasy of social
control, one which depends upon and fixes the familiar contours of racial
power relations.
 1AR Antonio + Reid Brinkley Extension
View From Nowhere- Their political simulation presumes a
white straight able bodied male who has political access
and control, rather than the real differences in
institutional access and treatment. Our Reid-Brinkley
evidence explains that this abstracted voice doesnt
speak to the pressing political concerns and political voice
of black people, its an exclusive framing that
EMPIRICALLY DESTROYS DEBATE- DECREASES BLACK
RECRUITMENT AND CREATES BARRIERS TO BLACK
RETENTION. KILLS DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION AND
MAKES DEBATE AN ECHO CHAMBER FOR WHITENESS

Yancy 05 George Yancy is a Distinguished Professor at Duquesne University, Journal of

Speculative Philosophy, 19.4 (2005) 215-241

I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge
connected to my "raced" body. Hence, I write from a place of lived embodied experience, a site
of exposure. In philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to "expose" is a weak argument , a
fallacy, or someone's "inferior" reasoning power. The embodied self is bracketed and
deemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth. It is
best, or so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white philosopher/author
presumes to speak for all of "us" without the slightest mention of his or her "raced"
identity. Self-consciously writing as a white male philosopher, Crispin Sartwell observes: Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is
the "whiteness" of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wieldspower here
only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting or [End Page 215] apparent transcendence of the mundane and

(1998, 6) To
theorize the Black body one
the particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in the "comprehension" of a range of materials.

must "turn to the [Black] body as the radix for interpreting racial experience" (Johnson
[1993, 600]).1 It is important to note that this particular strategy also functions as a lens
through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's "racial"
experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the "raced" white
body. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the social
performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper, my
objective is to describe and theorize situations where the Black body's subjectivity,
its lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white imaginary, resulting in what
I refer to as "the phenomenological return of the Black body. These instantiations
are embedded within and evolve out of the complex social and historical interstices
of whites' efforts at self-construction through complex acts of erasure vis--vis Black
people. These acts of self-construction, however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power.
As James Snead has noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate
ideology of [white] elevation or [Black] demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead
1994, 4).
Ts
Definitions
 AT: Presence is Troops
This definition is from 2001 while the drone campaign and
secret bases have only started earliest 2011- their author
couldnt have predicted change in warfare
Ks
All- Generic
 Perms
Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary
differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or

oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking

Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question

of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
which is to say,
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.
Perm: do both as a means of establishing a paradox
Perm Solves a mix of critical reflection and calculative
thought opens a paradox that solves the alternative

McWhorter, 92 Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeast Missouri State

University (Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth, ed. by Ladelle McWhorter)//GUYno
change

Heidegger's work is a call to reflect, to think in some way other than

calculatively, technologically, pragmatically. Once we begin to move with
and into Heidegger's call and begin to see our trying to seize
control and solve problems as itself a problematic approach, if
we still believe that thinking's only real purpose is to function as a
prelude to action, we who attempt to think will twist within the
agonizing grip of paradox, feeling nothing but frustration, unable to conceive
of ourselves as anything but paralyzed. However, as so many peoples before us have
known, paradox IS not only a trap; it is also a scattering point and
passageway. Paradox invites examination of its own constitution
(hence of the patterns of thinking within which it occurs) and thereby breaks a
way of thinking open, revealing the configurations of power that
propel it and hold it on track. And thus it makes possible the
dissipation of that power and the deflection of thinking into new
paths and new possibilities.

Perm: Affirm both simultaneously: Perm is always in flux,

asymmetrically becoming, a radical third way that
disrupts the binarity of the 1AC and K
Deleuze 08 (Gilles, [Prolific Continental Philosopher and
Clinical Pyschologist], Dialogues II, Pgs. 130-132) //DF
The status of the other type of lines seems to be completely different. The segments here are not the same, proceeding by thresholds,
constituting becomings, blocs of becoming, marking continuums of intensity, combinations of fluxes. The abstract machines here are not
the same, they are mutating and not overcoding, marking their mutations at each threshold and each combination. The plane is not the
same_plane of consistence or of immanence which tears from forms particles between which there are now only relationships a( speed and
slowness, and tears from subjects affects which now only carry out individuations by 'hecceity'. The binary machines no longer engage with
this real, not because the dominant segment would change (a particular class, a particular sex ... ), nor because mixtures like bisexuality or
molecular lines make fluxes of
class- mixing would be imposed: on the contrary, because the
deterritorialization shoot between the segments, fluxes which no
longer belong to one or to the other, but which constitute an
asymmetrical becoming of the two, molecular sexuality which is no longer that of a man or of a woman,
molecular masses which no longer have the outline of a class, molecular races like little lines which no longer respond to the great molar
. It is certainly no longer a matter of a synthesis of the two, of a
oppositions
synthesis of 1 and 2, but of a third which always comes from
elsewhere and disturbs the binarity of the two, not so much inserting
itself in their opposition as in their complementarity. It is not a matter
of adding a new segment on to the preceding segments on the line (a third sex, a third class, a third age), but of tracing
another line in the middle of the segmentary line, in the middle of the
segments, which carries them off according to the variable speeds and slownesses in a movement of flight or of flux. To continue
the use of geographical terms: imagine that between the West and the East a certain segmentarity is introduced, opposed in a binary
machine, arranged in the State apparatuses, overcoded by an abstract machine as the sketch of a World Order. It is then from North to
South that the destabilization takes place, as Giscard d'Estaing said gloomily, and a stream erodes a path, even if it is a shallow stream,
which brings everything into play and diverts the plane of organization. A Corsican here, elsewhere a Palestinian, a plane hijacker, a tribal
upsurge, a feminist movement, a Green ecologist, a Russian dissident there will always be someone to rise up to the south. Imagine the
Greeks and the Trojans as two opposed segments, face to face: but look, the Amazons arrive, they begin by overthrowing the Trojans, so that
the Greeks cry, 'The Amazons are with us', but they turn against the Greeks, attacking them from behind with the violence of a torrent. This
is how Kleist's Penthesilea begins. The great ruptures, the great oppositions, are always negotiable; but not the little crack, the
imperceptible ruptures which come from the south. We say 'south' without attaching any importance to this. We talk of the south in order to
mark a direction which is different from that of the line of segments. But everyone has his south - it doesn't matter where it is -that is, his
line of slope or flight. Nations, classes, sexes have their south. Godard: what counts is not merely the two opposed camps on the great line
where they confront each other, but also the frontier, through which everything passes and shoots on a broken molecular line of a different
orientation. May 1968 was an explosion of such a molecular line, an irruption of the Amazons, a frontier which traced in unexpected line,
drawing along the segments like torn-off blocs which have lost their bearings.
Ableism
 2AC
Sequencing D/A: Hegemonic paranoia must be revealed
and critiqued to clear the space for their K in the first
place- McClintock says that paranoia becomes so strong
because of the way we fail to question the base of our
reasoning, which is geared towards seeking conflict and
displaying military might. This paranoia would swamp the
alt- *alt specific stuf*
Link turn- Pugliesse identifies biopolitics as the driver of
reduction to and focus on biological objecthood, breaking
down a being into its constituent parts to analyze and
deem if it falls within acceptable standards. Particularly
true in context of militarism, as the US military has
specific patterns of life by which it normalizes bodies
and sanitizes the clinical extermination of all non-
acceptable bodies
Turn- Jose Medina says that 1ACs anti-disciplinarity is a
form of guerilla pluralism to inject multiple narratives
against the hegemonic interpretation, meaning we can
incorporate their alt into the 1AC narrative. The goal of
this is to create epistemic friction- not seeking unity with
existing power structures but rather working to create
disruption; by engaging in our revealing and
antidisciplinarity without turning to this fixed acts, we use
epistemic friction provoke conflict, seek to point out gaps
and clashing perspectives, constantly re-investigating
how our knowledge is produced. The 1AC thus isnt a
single speech act that solves all problems but rather is a
constantly producing form of scholarship that is a process
rather than a product.
Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary
differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.
Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or
oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking

Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question

of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
which is to say,
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.

Specifically true for ableism: Permutation solves best

since ableism can only be questioned alongside
intersecting oppressions and race.

Wolbring 2014 (Gregor [Associate Professor, Department

of Community Health Sciences, Community Rehabilitation
and Disability Studies] Ability Privilege, Journal of
Critical Animal Studies, Vol 12, Is 2) //jl

Ability privilege describes the advantages enjoyed by those who

exhibit certain abilities and the unwillingness of these individuals to
relinquish the advantage linked to the abilities especially with the
reason that these are earned or birth given (natural) abilities.
Privileges linked to various groups (e.g. male, race, class, gender)
are discussed in the literature. I submit that ability privilege, a
dynamic pervasive in society, ought to be discussed. The lens of
ability privilege allows for analyzing the dynamic of what ability
advantages are seen as earned vs. unearned not only across
traditional social groups (e.g. race, class, gender) but also between
the social group dualistic of the ability-have and ability-not-have
which allows one to look at ability privileges as they play themselves
out in human-human, human-nature and human-animal
relationships. Ethics ought to give us guidance how to act. I submit that the concept of ability
privilege, and which ability privileges we envision as earned or unearned is worthy of ethical deliberations.
I cover in this paper ability privileges related to disabled people, human-nature and human-animal
relationship, the ability of competitiveness and consumerism, and I highlight emerging new forms of ability
privileges made possible through science and technology advancements and the role of ethics.

Their appeal for the ballot undermines the project of their

argument since recognition of disability does nothing to
change the power relationship since their appeal is still
made to the dominant modes of privilege

Donoghue, 2k3
(Christopher, Fordham University, Challenging the authority of the
medical definition of disability: an analysis of the resistance to the
social constructionist paradigm, Disability & Society 18.2)

In an effort to debunk the entrenched authority of the medical model, a

social constructionist paradigm has been adopted by many disability theorists and
activists. They have suggested that society normally creates a negative social identity for people with disabilities (Gergen, 1985; Fine
& Asch, 1988; Scotch, 1988; Brzuzy, 1997). Through
the construction of this identity, which
is typically characterised by deviant or abnormal behaviour, the non-
disabled majority is granted a legitimate means to exclude and isolate
people with disabilities. As removed members of society, their contributions are often discredited and their
successes are treated as aberrations. Likewise, the expectations of people with disabilities are chronically low, and there is an ever-
present suggestion that their lives are not necessarily worth living. This identity has been argued to derive from the medical model,
which defines a disability as a deficiency that restricts ones ability to perform normal life activities. By adopting the social
constructionist viewpoint, theorists and activists have contended that society has created disability by choosing not to remove
structural constraints that would enable more people to participate and gain access to social resources. The social
constructionist approach was an effective ideological rejoinder to the
established medical model. Yet the question of how to convince the non-disabled majority that society has
disabled certain individuals has not been adequately resolved. The activists attempted to adopt the social constructionist theory
as a basis for a minority group model of disability. They would use this model to support a plea for
action to people with disabilities as a mechanism to overcome the
oppression being inflicted upon them by the non-disabled majority. While it
is clear that such a transformation of the definition of disability among academics and disability activists has clearly taken hold, the
disability movement appears to have achieved only limited success in
changing the views of the non-disabled majority. By accepting the reward of civil rights
protection without insisting that the medical model be publicly dismantled, the hopes of the disability activists to change the views of
the broader public may have been sacrificed. The willingness to make this concession may have stemmed from the
belief
among social constructionist theorists that society will change its
perception of disability if it is merely demonstrated that the prior
notion has been made unjustly. From a structural point of view, it would seem to take
much more to convince a dominant group in society that it needs to
redistribute power and access to its treasured resources. The more
desirable arrangement to the non-disabled majority is one that
maintains the superiority of people with normal abilities. As a result,
the disabled are typically described as dysfunctional and are often
perceived to be incapable of understanding the world in the same way
that normal people do. Although social constructionists argue that such judgements
regarding how people should be able to think or act are subjective notions that stem from dominant social ideologies, they may be said
to underestimate the extent to which those ideologies are created and
legitimated by the non-disabled majority because they best serve their
interests.

Critical Disability Studies has been a source of fracturing

within anti-ableist movements. Research and notions of
authentic speakers and subjects has rendered
internalized colonialism where the movement itself
becomes restrictive and violent. Only refusing to produce
knowledge in the academy can it avoid the cooptation to
destroy disabled communities in their fight against able-
bodied privilege- means perm do both and perm do the aff
and all non-competitive parts of the alternative

Humphrey, 2000
(Jill C. Faculty of applied social science @ the Open University,
Researching disability politics, or, some problems with the social
model in practice, Disability & Society 15.1)

ABSTRACT This article arises from a research project involving the disabled members group in UNISON, and problematises the
social model which explicitly undergirds the discourses and practices of this group. In abstract terms, there
are
dangers that the social model can be interpreted in a way which
privileges some impaired identities over others, sanctions a separatist
ghetto which cannot reach out to other groups of disabled and
disadvantaged people, and weaves a tangled web around researchers
who adhere to the emancipatory paradigm. In concrete terms, these dangers
are explored with reference to the stories of impaired people who
believe that they are excluded from the disabled members group, the
predicaments of ex-disabled and differently-disabled people in relation
to the movement, and the culture of suspicion surrounding academics,
particularly the `non-disabled researcher as would-be ally. It is argued that, whilst
such identities and issues might appear to be `marginal ones in the sense of occurring at the boundary of disabled communities,
disability politics and disability studies, they should not be `marginalised by disabled activists and academics, and indeed that they
pose challenges to our collective identities, social movements, theoretical models and research paradigms which need to be addressed.
Introduction The social model arose as a reaction against the medical model of disability, which reduced disability to impairment so
that disability was located within the body or mind of the individual, whilst the power to de ne, control and treat disabled people was
located within the medical and paramedical professions (Oliver, 1996). Under the bio-medical re gime, material deprivation and
political disenfranchisement continued unabated, whilst institutional discrimination and social stigmatisation were exacerbated by
segregation (Barnes 1991). In this context, the social model harbours a number of virtues in rede ning disability in terms of a
disabling environment, repositioning disabled people as citizens with rights, and reconfiguring the responsibilities for creating,
sustaining and overcoming disablism. Indeed, when the social model is confronted with the resurrection of the medical model in its
bio-medical, psychological, psychiatric and sociological guises, then it needs to be vigorously defended (Shakespeare & Watson,
1997). However, this does not mean that the social model is flawless, in either its design or its implementation. More precisely, if it is
interpreted in a way which undermines the very communities, politics and studies it was supposed to enhance, it is incumbent upon us
to inquire `What s going on? What s going wrong? A fruitful starting point and indeed one which already contains an answer to the
above questions, is to recognise that there are two main versions of the social model, which are necessarily interrelated, but which will
lead into opposing directions if we are not careful. In academic texts, the social model begins with an appreciation of the individual
and collective experiences of disabled people (e.g. Swain et al., 1993). It goes on to elaborate the nature of a disabling society in terms
of the physical environment, the political economy, the welfare state and sedimented stereotypes (e.g. Barnes et al., 1999). Finally, it
endorses a critical or emancipatory paradigm of research (e.g. Barnes & Mercer 1997a) . This analysis lends itself to a recognition of
the array of diverse experiences of disabling barriers; a realistic appraisal of the need for broader political coalitions to combat
entrenched structural inequalitie s and cultural oppressions; and an openness about the potential for non-disabled people to contribute
In activist discourses, the emphasis is upon the fact
to critical theory and research.
that it is non-disabled people who have engineered the physical
environment, dominated the political economy, managed welfare
services, controlled research agendas, recycled pejorative labels and
images, and translated these into eugenics policies. This analysis lends
itself to a dichotomy between non-disabled and disabled people which
becomes coterminous with the dichotomy between oppressors and
oppressed; and this tightens the boundaries around the disabled
identity, the disabled people s movement and disability research.
Whilst this hermeneutic closure is designed to ward off incursions and,
therefore, oppressions from non-disabled people, it may also have
some unfortunate consequences. I would like to illustrate these consequences by drawing upon a
research project involving the four self-organised groups (SOGs) for women, black people, disabled members, and lesbian and gay
members in UNISON (see Humphrey, 1998, 1999). Material drawn directly from conversations and observations in the disabled
members group is supplemented by interview transcripts with members of the lesbian and gay group, my own personal experiences of
and re ections upon disability and discrimination, and recent developments in various social movements and critical research texts.
The rest of the article depicts three problematic consequences of the social model in practice and redirects them back to the social
model as critical questions which need to be addressed by its proponents. First, there
are questions of
disability identity where a kind of `purism has been cultivated from the
inside of the disability community. Here, it can be demonstrated that
some people with certain types of impairments have not been
welcomed into the disabled members group in UNISON, which means that
the disability community is not yet inclusive, and that its membership
has been skewed in a particular direction. Second, there are questions of
disability politics where a kind of `separatism has been instituted. Whilst
the UNISON constitution allows for separatism to be supplemented by both coalitions and transformations, these have been slow to
materialise in practice, and the dearth of such checks and balances in the wider disabled peoples movement implies that
the danger of developing a specific kind of disability ghetto is more
acute. Third, there are questions of disability research where a kind of `provisionalism is suspended over the role of researchers.
The most obvious dilemmas arise for the non-disabled researcher as would-be ally, but it is becoming clear that disabled academics
can also be placed in a dilemmatic position, and it is doubtful whether any researcher can practise their craft to their own standards of
excellence when operating under the provisos placed upon them by political campaigners.
THE HUMAN-SUBJECT OPERATOR EXTENDS THE POWER OF
U.S. EXCEPTIONALISM AND SETTLER COLONIALISM VIA
INSTRUMENTALIZAITONS OF THE LAW. THE LAW, THE
DRONE AND THE HUMAN-SUBJECT-OPERATOR ARE
PROSTHETICALLY CONJOINED TO INFLECT VIOLENCE ONTO
THE OBJECT-INSURGENT. THE 1AC ANALYZES LAW AS
PROSTHETIC IN ORDER TO HIGHLIGHT THE IMPAIRED
NATURES OF U.S. SOVERIGNTY AND THE INHERENT
STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD CONSTRUCTED BY A
TELEOLOGY TOWARDS THE PERCEPTION OF AN ABLE-
BODIED FIGURE--- MANDATING AN EXTENSION OF U.S.
EMPIRE.

PUGLIESE, Joseph 2013 (State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical
Caesurae of Torture, Black
Sites, Drones. Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research Director of the Department of
Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University)

If, as I argued above, a parenthetical logic of tele-techno mediations

functions to suspend the casual relation between the doer and deed,
then in this section of the chapter I want to argue that, in this
techno-legal economy of war-at a distance, something entirely
opposite is simultaneously operating. This something entirely opposite is what I want
to term the prosthetics of law. As Kieran Tranter has noted in his rubric for a symposium on law and
At
technology, the predominant theory of law in the orthodox scholarship is instrumental and sovereign.
a fundamental level law is conceived as a process, a machine that
can be deployed. In proceeding to conceptualize law as a prosthetic,
I want to interrogate this instrumentalist view of law as machine
that is fundamentally separate from its human agent who, as
sovereign subjects, merely deploys it instrumentally in order to
achieve their desired goals. A prosthetics of law, on the contrary, is
concerned with conceptualizing the human agent as always-already
inscribed by the technics of law. If, as Derrida argues, the question of the prosthesis is
concerned with the phantom member, then the drone must be viewed as a type of phantom member
grafted through the operations of the laws of war on to the sensor operators located in their remote ground
control In deploying the figure of the prosthetics and its
stations.
phantom member, I am invoking, by definition, the category of
disability, specifically, of an impaired body that needs to be
supplemented by a techno-conceptual crutch, that is, a militarized,
phallogocentric phantom member. I am, in other words, inscribing my analysis with
the domain of what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder term narrative prosthesis. Narrative prosthesis,
Mitchell and Snyder write, is meant to indicate that disability has been used throughout history as a
crutch upon which literary narrative lean for their representational power, disruptive potentially, and
analytical insight. Although Mitchell and Snyder focus largely on literary narratives in their examination of
narrative prosthesis, their thesis can be productively transported to other genres and domains of
knowledge.Precisely as the figure of prosthesis enables, in what
follows, the articulation of analytical insights into the complex
operations of drones and law, I risk the danger of effacing the
materiality of the disabled body by focusing exclusively on the
metaphoric or tropological dimensions of prosthesis and disabled
bodies in terms of the violent effects of technologies of war.

ADDITIONALLY, THE DRONE AND THE HUMAN-SUBJECT-

OPERATER ARE CONNECTED PROSTHETICALLY, WHERE
TECHNOLOGY OR TECHNE IS ALREADY ORIGINALLY IN
PLACE IN THE BODY OF THE SUBJECT. A PARANTHETICAL
LOGIC DISASSOCIATES THE DOER FROM THE DEED, AND
THE MACHINE AND OPERATOR ARE TACTICALLY CONJOINED
IN THE ACT OF SURVIELLANING, TARGETING AND KILLING
RACIALIZED OTHER.

PUGLIESE, Joseph 2013 (State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical
Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones. Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research
Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at
Macquarie University)

In the drone/human relation, it is not clear who makes and who is

made in the relation between human and machine. The graft of the
prosthetics blurs this boundary. Moreover, I the context of the digitized codes that
interlink humans and drones in their operational schema, It is not clear what is mind and what
is body in machines that resolve into coding practices. The prosthetics of this new
type of war, and its ensemble of human agents grafted to their
drone technologies via screens, joysticks and satellite links,
perfectly embodies the figure of the cyborg as the abject other to
Haraways utopian trope. In keeping with the cyborg logic of the
prosthetic, this is no proper body in contradistinction to the
machine; rather, couched in Derridean terms, this prosthetic structure is not something we
add to the proper body but it is already our experience of what is most proper to us, it is
already the possibility of the prosthetic thus technology or techne is already
originally in place in our own body, in what is most proper to us. This
Derridian meditation on the infrastructural dimensions of the
prosthetic effectively enables the critical interrogation of the
categorical separation of the drone from its human agent. Belying its
negative and reductive nomenclature, the drone cannot be reduced
to a mindless machine of purely robotic acts; rather, the drone-as-
prosthetic articulates a prosthetics of origin, to use Derridas titular term,
that conjoins it inseparably, through grafting, to its embodied
agents of cognition, reflection and intent. Cyborg war, in this
schema, instrumentalizes bodies into lethal machines via a
prosthetic structure that operates in tandem with a parenthetical
logic of disassociation between the doer and deed: machine/human,
doer/deed are at once tactically conjoined in the act of surveillance,
targeting and killing and, simultaneously, disjoined from the ethical
consequences of these same acts. The interstice that opens up between
this parenthetical and prosthetic relation must be seen in terms of a critical
fault line that compels examination. This fault line marks the radical
asymmetries of power operative in the use of these drone killing
technologies and their ethical ramifications. For the US, the use of
the drones is justified because it means that its soldiers are not
places in potentially fatal ground operations of war: no flesh and
blood are lost, merely machines. A violent asymmetry governed by imperial relations of
power inscribes the radically different positions of drone pilot and drone target. For the targets of this
drone war, it is flesh and blood that are shed, without the possibility of traditional combat counter-
retaliation: drones kill silently, firing their missiles from a two-mile distance. With nothing to lose but
machines, the US is not in a position to wage war without the usual weighing up of the human cost. The US
military, in fact, terms its drones as attritable: This means a commander can afford to lose one through
attrition. Qualms have been expressed by military personnel such as this unnamed Iraq combat veteran
who helped design much of the militarys doctrine for using unmanned drones: Theres something
important about putting your own sons and daughters at risk when you choose to wage war as a nation.
The parenthetical
We risk losing that flesh-and-blood investment if we go too far down this road.
logic of drone war brackets off the ethical questions concering the
waging of war while also suspending the flesh-and-blood risks
entailed by those fighting in the field. P.W. Singer terms these new
warriors cubicle warriors ensconced in air-conditioned offices
outfitted with computers, joysticks and ergonomic furniture. For a new
generation, going to war doesnt mean shipping off to some dank foxhole in a foreign land to dodge
bullets. Instead, it is a daily commute in your Toyota Camry to sit behind a computer screen and drag a
mouse. Cubicle warriors are cyborg warriors prosthetically grafted, through satellite feeds, to their drones
and yet effectively quarantined, through the parantehtical bracketing that is enabled by their cubicle
In this
location and screen technologies, from the risk and violence of the battlefield. He continues
schema, the drone is an entity that operates autonomously, and
thus independently of its operators, and simultaneously it is
instrumentally grafted to its human controller who will continue to
make decisions regarding its operations. Law as prosthetic works to
problematize instrumentalist conceptualizations of law that are
predicate on a dichotomy between human agents and technology.
Law as prosthetic is predicated on the understanding that law, as
technology, is always-already embodied, and that the dichotomy
between human subject and technology/techne is, in effect,
untenable. In contradistinction to a conceptualization of the body as
a purely natural datum (with technology as its polar opposite), I proceed
to conceptualize the body as an entity that can only achieve its
cultural intelligibility as body because it is always-already inscribed
by a series of discursive and technological mediations. As I have
discussed elsewhere, I understand the body as indissociably tied to
technology and not as something that stands in contradistinction to
it. Drawing on the work of Derrida, I refuse the binary: body/technology or natural/synthetic.
In his theorization of the relation between body and technology, Derrida articulates the
inextricable tie between the natural (physis) and the synthetic (techne). He emphasizes that
this relation is not an opposition; from the very first there is instrumentalization [des lorigine
il y a de linsrumentalisation] a prosthetic strategy of repetition inhabits the very moment of
life. Not only, then, is technics not in opposition of life, it also haunts
it from the very beginning. From the very beginning, then, the body
is always-already intextuated and instrumentalized by series of
technologies. At the most elementary level, this process of technical
inscription, through the technology of language, is essential in
rendering the body culturally intelligible. At yet another level, the
body is inscribed from the very beginning (at birth) by a series of laws
that proceed to determine its legal identity, its gender, its maternity
and paternity, and so on. Law, in other words, is never something
that comes after the body; rather, law is always-already inscribed on
the body, precisely as techne from the very first. As I discussed in Chapter
5, this configuration of body and technology is succinctly articulated in the term somatechnics.
The prostetic inscription of the body must be seen, indeed, to
constitute the very conditions of possibility for the conceptual
marking of the body as human: The prosethesis, notes Bernad Steigler, is not a
mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of the body qua human In arguing
then, for an understanding of law as always-already a technics of embodiment, I want to
proeed to conceptualize the pilots and sensor operators who control the drones
from their faraway locations in Nevada or Virginia as embodied
prostheses of the laws of war grafted onto their respective
technologiesboth in ready-to-hand terms (joysticks and push-buttons) and in
teletechno mediated forms via satellite uplinks to and from the airborne drones . In this
schema, the drones must be seen prosthetically as the phantom
members of the pilots and sensor operators. Operative here is a
relation of indissociable articulation between seemingly separate
partsthe human agent and the technological equipmentthat is
simultaneously predicated on technically augmenting the power and
reach of the human agent through the figure of prostheticity .
Prostheticity, writes Stiegler is a putting outside-the self that is also a putting-out-of-range-
of-onself. As I discuss below, the putting-out-of-range-of-oneself through the prosthetics of the
drone is what enables the violent asymmetry that inscribes the conduct of drone warfare, with
the drone operators safely ensconced in their ergonomic cubicles in the US while they rain
down bombs on their suspect targets. In his work on the logics of the prosthesis, David Wills
temrs this process of articulation, the contrivance of this transferential interface, prosthesis.
The transferential interface operative between humans and
technology, a somatechnics of law and its agents and targets,
enables a prosthetic system of relationality that defies categorical
separation of different entities and firues. A pareregonal schema
unfols here that blurs the lines between what is outside (the drone) and
what is inside (the drone pilot in their GCS). Another name for this
parergonal relation, Derrida remarks, is the prosthesis.
Afro-Pessimism
 2AC
Sequencing D/A: Hegemonic paranoia must be revealed
and critiqued to clear the space for their K in the first
place- McClintock says that paranoia becomes so strong
because of the way we fail to question the base of our
reasoning, which is geared towards seeking conflict and
displaying military might. This paranoia would swamp the
alt- *alt specific stuf*
Link turn- the Aff is key to understanding the way
hegemonic paranoia uses tools like the heat-seeking
drone camera to reduce targets to non-human collections
of biological processes. The necessary dehumanization is
the zero point of anti-black violence: the position from
which anti-black violence can be committed onto black
bodies. Much like the way non-white people were
stigmatized as having no souls, or different heads, or
many other essentialized biological features, this
abstraction from the quintessential picture of human
prevents empathetic engagement
Turn- Jose Medina says that 1ACs anti-disciplinarity is a
form of guerilla pluralism to inject multiple narratives
against the hegemonic interpretation, meaning we can
incorporate their alt into the 1AC narrative. The goal of
this is to create epistemic friction- not seeking unity with
existing power structures but rather working to create
disruption; by engaging in our revealing and
antidisciplinarity without turning to this fixed acts, we use
epistemic friction provoke conflict, seek to point out gaps
and clashing perspectives, constantly re-investigating
how our knowledge is produced. The 1AC thus isnt a
single speech act that solves all problems but rather is a
constantly producing form of scholarship that is a process
rather than a product.
Victimization DA- Afropessimisms dogmatism reduces
blackness to incapacity and the black is thus forced to
embody such abjectionthe result is a recreation of the
violence of universality by actively refusing to define
blackness as contingent
Marriott 12
[David Mariott, Black Cultural Studies, Years Work Crit Cult Theory (2012) 20 (1): 37-66]
However, this is also not the entire story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show. For example, in Chapter One (The Structure of
Antagonisms), written as a theoretical introduction, and which opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of why ontology cannot
understand the being of the Black, Wilderson is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond
analogy, it also refigures the whole of being: the essence of being for the White and non-Black position is non-
niggerness, consequently, [b]eing can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as
niggerness (p. 37). It is not hard when reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at
work here, and one that manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic : throughout Red,
White, and Black, despite variations in tone and emphasis, there is always the desire to have black lived
experience named as the worst , and the politics of such a desire inevitably collapses into a
kind of sentimental moralism : for the claim that Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and
unadulterated form means merely that the black has to embody this abjection without reserve (p.
38). This logicand the denial of any kind of ontological integrity to the Black/Slave due to its
endless traversal by force does seem to reduce ontology to logic , namely, a logic of non-
recuperability moves through the following points: (1) Black non-being is not capable of symbolic resistance and, as such,
falls outside of any language of authenticity or reparation; (2) for such a subject, which Wilderson persists in calling death, the
symbolic remains foreclosed (p. 43); (3) as such, Blackness is the record of an occlusion which remains ever present: White (Human)
capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity (p. 45); (4) and, as an example of
the institutions or discourses involving violence, antagonisms and parasitism, Wilderson describes White (or non-
Black) film theory and cultural studies as incapable of understanding the suffering of the
Blackthe Slave (they cannot do so because they are erroneously wedded to humanism and to the psychoanalysis of Jacques
Lacan, which Wilderson takes as two examples of what the Afro-pessimist should avoid) (p. 56); as a corrective,
Wilderson calls for a new language of abstraction, and one centrally concerned with
exposing the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and Humans (p. 68). Reading seems to stop
here, at a critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson wants to say that Lacans notion of the originary (imaginary) alienation of the
subject is still wedded to relationality as implied by the contrast between empty and full speech, and so apparently cannot grasp the
trauma of absolute Otherness that is the Blacks relation to Whites, because psychoanalysis cannot fathom the structural, or
absolute, violence of Black life (pp. 74; 75). Whereas Lacan was aware of how language precedes and exceeds us, he did not have
Fanons awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks (p. 76). The violence of such abjectionor incapacityis
therefore that it cannot be communicated or avowed, and is always already delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77).
Whence the suspicion of an ontology reduced to a logic (of abjection). Leaving aside the fact that it is quite mistaken to limit Lacans
notion of full speech to the search for communication (the unconscious cannot be confined to parole), it is clear that, according
to Wildersons own logic, his description of the Black is working, via analogy, to Lacans
notion of the real but, in his insistence on the Black as an absolute outside Wilderson can
only duly reify this void at the heart of universality . The Black is beyond the limit of
contingencybut it is worth saying immediately that this beyond is indeed a foreclosure that defines
a violence whose traces can only be thought violently (that is, analogically), and whose nonbeing
returns as the theme for Wildersons political thinking of a non-recuperable abjection. The
Black is nonbeing and, as such, is more real and primary than being per se: given how much is at stake,
this insistence on a racial metaphysics of injury implies a fundamental irreconcilability
between Blacks and Humans (there is really no debate to be had here: irreconcilability is the condition and possibility of
what it means to be Black).

Afro-pessimisms positing of the black subject as existing

in a state of total objectification suffocates black
transgression and resistance, preventing us from thinking
the individual dimension of politics in any coherent way
and thus robbing us of the ability to cultivate everyday
energy towards revolutionary struggle in the interim
between this round and burning it all down
Allen 11
[Jafari S., Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University,
Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba, p. 82-83]
For black folks, resistance always takes place in a field already constrained by the lingering question of
black abjection with respect to subjecthood. Frank Wilderson in his fine polemic Gramscis Black Marx:
Whither the Slave in Civil Society? (2003) argues that blacks impose a radical incoherence upon the
assumptive logic of a subject constructed through its relation to labor exploitation. Wildersons thesis that
the Black subject reveals Marxisms inability to think White supremacy as the base (n.p.) resonated with
Cedrick Robinsons Black Marxism (2000), which carefully details historical and philosophical
(dis)articulations of black(ness and) Marxism. Wilderson points out that if we follow Antonio Gramscis
expansion of Marx, depending on civil society as the site of struggle (i.e., war of position) we reify racial
Where I have to
terror, since for black subjects civil society is the site of recurrent racial terror.
depart from Wilderson is in his contention that the black subject is thus in a
position of total objectification in contradistinction to human possibility,
however slim, required for a war of position (2003: n.p.; emphasis mine). Wilderson finds the black
subject in a structurally impossible position. I must argue, following bell hooks use of Paolo Freire,
however, that we cannot enter the struggle as objects in order to later become subjects (1989: 29). Part
Unlike
of my friendly disagreement with Wilderson is ontological, or, I readily admit, spiritual.
positions that deny notions of a deep psychic self, I want to affirm the
inherence of inalienable innate human dignity, and what I might gloss here as
spirit, which is offended not only by force but by any extrinsic practice that
threatens the individuals sense of personhood . On another score, Wildersons
stress on objective contradictions, impersonal structures and processes
that work behind mens backs, as Stuart Hall describes the conventional culture and
discourses of the left, disable[s] us from confronting the subjective dimension in
politics in any coherent way (Hall, Morley, and Chen 1996: 226). Thus, in some ways
Wilderson takes us back to the old Marx that Gramsci, Hall, and others
attempted to rethink apropos of our new times, even as he points out the limits of
Gramsci to contend with these social and historical facts of blackness. This orientation
leaves no air for black transgression or resistance outside of the final
solution. In the interim, however, what will condition, reeducate and raise
consciousness towards revolution?

Their argument isnt afropessimism, but absolutist

despairtheir facile antihumanism doesnt chart us a path
towards the end of the world, but instead limits us to
total resignation
Marriott 12
[David Mariott, Black Cultural Studies, Years Work Crit Cult Theory (2012) 20 (1): 37-66]
In the concluding pages of Darker Than Blue, Gilroy restates why he finds the ongoing attachment to the idea of race in the US so
very unsatisfactory in comparison, say, to the anti-racism of Frantz Fanon: [Fanons] audacious commitment to an
alternative conception of humanity reconstituted outside race [...] is something that does
not endear Fanons work to todays practitioners of the facile antihumanism and ethnic
absolutism so characteristic of life on US college campuses , where class-based homogeneity
combines smoothly with deference to racial and ethic particularity and with resignation to
the world as it appears . Fanon disappoints that scholastic constituency by refusing to see
culture as an insurmountable obstacle between groups, even if they have been racialized. He does not
accept the strategic award of an essential innocence to the oppressed and the wretched
of the earth. Their past and present sufferings confer no special nobility upon them and are not invested with redemptive insights.
Suffering is just suffering , and Fanon has no patience with those who would invoke the
armour of incorrigibility around national liberation struggles or minority cultures . (pp. 1578,
my emphasis) Whatever one might think of the cogency of these remarks (if only because the notion of a non-racial life is predicated
on the idea that the human can somehow reside outside of race, a humanism that would always then be constitutively compromised
by the racism at its frontier), the
question of whether US culture can ever escape racial antagonism is
the primary focus of Frank B. Wilderson IIIs powerful Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US
Antagonisms, as part of a more general reading of US film culture. And indeed Fanons anti-philosophical
philosophical critique of racial ontology (historically blacks were seen as part of existence but not, as yet, part of
human being, a not-yet that forces Fanon to rethink the teleological form of the human as already and essentially violent in its
separation from the state of nature from which it has come) forms a major part of Wildersons conception of
anti-blackness as the major structural antagonism of US history and culture. It is against the
conception that racism could ever be simply contingent to black experience that Wilderson
protests, reflecting on the fact that racial slavery has no parallel to other forms of suffering,
and perhaps most strikingly social death is the constitutive essence of black existence in the
US. In brief, slavery remains so originary, in the sense of what he calls its accumulation and fungibility (terms
borrowed from Saidiya Hartman), it not only has no analogy to other forms of antagonism Wildersons
examples are the Holocaust and Native American genocide there is simply no process of getting over it, of
recovering from the loss (as wound, or trauma): as such, slavery remains the ultimate structure of
antagonism in the US. Whether at a personal level or at the level of historical process, if black slavery is foundational to
modern Humanism, then any teleological appeal to a humanism beyond racism is doomed from the start (p. 22). The problem
with Wildersons argument, however, is that it remains of a piece with the manichean
imperatives that beset it , and which by definition are structurally uppermost, which means
that he can only confirm those imperatives as absolutes rather than chart a dialectical path
beyond them , insofar as, structurally speaking, there is no outside to black social death and
alienation, or no outside to this outside, and all that thought can do is mirror its own
enslavement by race. This is not so much afro-pessimism a term coined by Wildersonas thought
wedded to its own despair .

Focusing upon the traumatic elements of black

subjectivity denies the agency present within black
attempts at thwarting white supremacy and domination
Walker 12 Graduate of Psychosocial studies (Tracey, Graduate of
Psychosocial Studies at Birbeck University of London, Graduate Journal of
Social Science July 2012, Vol. 9, Issue 2, " The Future of Slavery: From Cultural
Trauma to Ethical Remembrance" pg. 165-167,
http://gjss.org/images/stories/volumes/9/2/Walker%20Article.pdf)

To argue that there is more to the popular conception of slaves as

victims who experienced social death within the abusive regime of transatlantic
slavery is not to say that these subjectivities did not exist. When considering
the institution of slavery we can quite confidently rely on the assumption that it did indeed destroy the
Brown (2009) however, has
self-hood and the lives of millions of Africans. Scholar Vincent
criticised Orlando Pattersons (1982) seminal book Slavery and Social Death for
positioning the slave as a subject without agency and maintains that
those who managed to dislocate from the nightmare of plantation
life were not in fact the living dead, but the mothers of gasping new societies (Brown
2009, 1241). The Jamaican Maroons were one such disparate group of Africans who managed to band
together and flee the Jamaican plantations in order to create a new mode of living under their own rule.
These runaways were in fact ferocious fighters and master strategists, building towns and military bases
which enabled them to fight and successfully win the war against the British army after 200 years of battle
(Gotlieb 2000,16). In addition, the story of the Windward Jamaican Maroons disrupts the phallocentricism
inherent within the story of the slave hero by the very revelation that their leader, Queen Nanny was a
woman (Gotlieb 2000). As a leader, she was often ignored by early white historians who dismissed her as
an old hagg or obeah woman (possessor of evil magic powers) (Gotlieb 2000, xvi). Yet, despite these
negative descriptors, Nanny presents an interesting image of an African woman in the time of slavery who
cultivated an exceptional army and used psychological as well as military force against the English despite
not owning sophisticated weapons (Gotlieb 2000). As an oral tale, her story speaks to post-slavery
generations through its representation of a figure whose gender defying acts challenged the patriarchal
fantasies of the Eurocentric imaginary and as such the study of her experiences might change the lives of
people living under paternalistic, racist, classist and gender based oppression (Gotlieb 2000, 84). The
label of social
death is rejected here on the grounds that it is a narrative
which is positioned from the vantage point of a European hegemonic
ideology. Against the social symbolic and its gaze, black slaves were indeed regarded as non-humans
since their lives were stunted, diminished and deemed less valuable in comparison to the Europeans.
However, Fanons (1967) assertion that not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation
to the white man (Fanon 1967, 110) helps us to understand that this classification can only have meaning
relative to the symbolic which represents the alive ness of whiteness against the backdrop of the dead
black slave (Dyer 1997). Butler (2005) makes it clear that the death one suffers relative to the social
symbolic is imbued with the fantasy that having constructed the Other and interpellated her into life, one
now holds the sovereignty of determining the subjects right to live or die: this death, if it is a death, is
only the death of a certain kind of subject, one that was never possible to begin with, the death of the
fantasy of impossible mastery, and so a loss of what one never had, in other words it is a necessary grief
although the concept of social death
(Butler 2005, 65). The point to make here is that
has proved useful for theorists to describe the metaphysical
experience of those who live antagonistically in relation to the social
symbolic, it is nevertheless a colonial narrative within which the
slaves are confined to a one dimensional story of terror. In keeping with
Gilroys (1993b) argument that the memory of slavery must be constructed from the slaves point of view,
we might instead concentrate, not on the way in which the slaves are figured within the European social
We might therefore
imaginary, but on how they negotiated their own ideas about self and identity.
find some value in studying a group like the Maroons who not only managed
to create an autonomous world outside of the hegemonic discourse
which negated them, but also, due to their unique circumstances, were forced to
create new modes of communication which would include a myriad of African cultures,
languages and creeds (Gottlieb 2000). This creative and resistive energy of slave
subjectivity not only disrupts the colonial paradigm of socially dead
slaves, but also implies the ethical tropes of creation, renewal and
mutual recognition. In contrast, the passive slave proved to feature heavily in the 2007
bicentenary commemorations causing journalist Toyin Agbetu to interrupt the official speeches and exclaim
that it had turned into a discourse of freedom engineered mostly by whites with stories of black agency
excluded8. Youngs argument that one of the damaging side effects of the focus on white peoples role in
abolition is that Africans are represented as being passive in the face of oppression, appears to echo the
behaviour in the UK today given that a recent research poll reveals that the black vote turnout is
significantly lower than for the white majority electorate and that forty percent of second generation
immigrants believe that voting doesnt matter.9 Yet, Gilroy (1993a) argues that this political passivity
may not simply be a self fulfilling prophecy, but might allude to the lived contradiction of being black and
English which affects ones confidence about whether opinions will be validated in a society that, at its
Without considering
core, still holds on to the fantasy of European superiority (Gilroy 1993a).
the slaves capacity for survival and their fundamental role in
overthrowing the European regime of slavery, we limit the usevalue
of the memory and risk becoming overly attached to singular slave
subjectivities seeped in death and passivity. The Maroons story
however, enables slave consciousness to rise above the mire of
slaverys abject victims and establishes an ethical relation with our
ancestors who lived and survived in the time of slavery.

Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary

differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)
The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does, a worldly criticism that
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or

oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking

Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question

of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
which is to say,
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.
 AT: Black Women Liberation Strategies
African American womens discussion of strategies of
liberation universalize and conflate the experiences of
afro-diasporic women, create empty scholarship that
never speaks to them

Zamora2013(OmarisZunilda,MastersLettheWatersFlow:(Trans)locatingAfroLatina
FeministThought,UniversityofTexasAustin,<>)//JRC

In contrast to Chicano feminist thought, Black feminism has taken Black

womens bodies into account in regard to the processes of
colonization and decolonization. However, within this school of
thought there has been an ongoing trend of universalizing the black
womens experience. Through the Combahee River Collective Statement
published by pioneers of the Black feminist movement, Black feminism
introduces itself as the one that will speak for others. It states: As
Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political
movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions
that all women of color face (210). During this time, Black feminists
established the movement as symbol of solidarity between black
women and other third world women. And while those solidarities
are crucial and foundational in the movement towards women of
color agency, the problem here is one of conflation. It is not that Black
women are left out, but that it conflates third world womens
experiences as well as presents blackness ambiguously since it does
not give us an understanding of who is included in this Black
identity. The Combahee River Collective argued, We are dispossessed
psychologically and on every other level, and yet we feel the necessity to
struggle to change the condition of all Black women (215). But when we
recognize that this collective was composed of strictly African-
American women from the U.S., we can ask ourselves: How is
blackness being used? Is it a cultural political identity or an
essentialist one that is a referring to a specific experience? From this,
we gather that the Collective, as well as with Angela Davis in Women, Race
and Class, the African-American womans experience is established as the
experience from which the oppression of all Black women and other women
of color can be resisted. Here, the foundational philosophy of Black
feminism falls into the traps of not recognizing differences even
within the Black community. In other words, to recognize that Black
women are not just African-American, but also Afro-Caribbean, Afro-
Latina as well as other Black womens identities that are also within
the African diaspora. As Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberle Crenshawtwo
contemporary Black feministshighlight: In a context where many believe
that to talk of race fosters racism, equality allegedly lies in treating everyone
the same. Yet as Kimberle Crenshaw (1997) points out, it is fairly
obvious that treating different things the same can generate as
much inequality as treating the same things differently. (26) As they
have pointed out, not recognizing differences is to re-establish other
discourses of oppression even within a movement toward social
justice. This is to say that the essentialization of blackness is a static
characteristic of Black feminist thought that has caused the creation
of an empty space where an afro-diasporic element should highlight
and emphasize the fluidity, movement and queerness of black
womens identities.
Agamben
 2AC
Link turn- the Aff is key to understanding the way
hegemonic paranoia uses tools like the heat-seeking
drone camera to reduce targets to non-human collections
of biological processes. The necessary dehumanization is
the zero point of biolpolitical violence: the position from
which, for the preservation of life, violence can be
committed. Much like the way non-white people were
stigmatized as having no souls, or different heads, or
many other essentialized biological features, this
abstraction from the quintessential picture of human
prevents empathetic engagement and reduces others to
barbarians at the border, constituting the legitimacy of
the biopolitical regime.
No impact and perm do both people can assert agency in
the face of state control ignoring this disempowers the
alt

Casarino and Negri 4

Cesare professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota
AND Antonio Negri, author of numerous volumes of philosophy and political theory. Its a
Powerful Life: A Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy Cultural Critique 57. 2004

AN: I believe Giorgio is writing a sequel to Homo Sacer, and I feel that this new work will be resolutive for his thoughtin the sense
that he will be forced in it to resolve and find a way out of the ambiguity that has qualified his understanding of naked life so far. He
already attempted something of the sort in his recent book on Saint Paul, but I think this attempt largely failed: as usual, this book
is extremely learned and elegant; it remains, however, somewhat trapped within Pauline exegesis, rather than
constituting a full-fledged attempt to reconstruct naked life as a potentiality for exodus, to rethink naked
life fundamentally in terms of exodus. I believe that the concept of naked life is not an impossible, unfeasible one.
I believe it is possible to push the image of power to the point at which a defenseless human being [un povero Cristo] is crushed, to
conceive of that extreme point at which power tries to [End Page 173] eliminate that ultimate resistance that is the sheer attempt to
keep oneself alive. From a logical standpoint, it is possible to think all this: the naked bodies of the people in the camps, for example,
can lead one precisely in this direction. But this is also the point at which this concept turns into ideology: to
conceive of the relation between power and life in such a way actually ends up bolstering and
reinforcing ideology. Agamben, in effect, is saying that such is the nature of power: in the final instance,
power reduces each and every human being to such a state of powerlessness. But this is absolutely not
true! On the contrary: the historical process takes place and is produced thanks to a continuous
constitution and construction, which undoubtedly confronts the limit over and over againbut this is an
extraordinarily rich limit, in which desires expand, and in which life becomes increasingly fuller. Of course it
is possible to conceive of the limit as absolute powerlessness, especially when it has been actually enacted and enforced in such a way
so many times. And yet, isn't such a conception of the limit precisely what the limit looks like from the standpoint of constituted
power as well as from the standpoint of those who have already been totally annihilated by such a powerwhich is, of course, one
and the same standpoint? Isn't this the story about power that power itself would like us to believe in and reiterate? Isn't it far
more politically useful to conceive of this limit from the standpoint of those who are not yet or not
completely crushed by power, from the standpoint of those still struggling to overcome such a limit,
from the standpoint of the process of constitution, from the standpoint of power [potenza]? I am worried about the fact
that the concept of naked life as it is conceived by Agamben might be taken up by political movements
and in political debates: I find this prospect quite troubling, which is why I felt the need to attack this concept in my recent
essay. Ultimately, I feel that nowadays the logic of traditional eugenics is attempting to saturate and capture
the whole of human realityeven at the level of its materiality, that is, through genetic engineeringand the ultimate
result of such a process of saturation and capture is a capsized production of subjectivity within
which ideological undercurrents continuously try to subtract or neutralize our resistance . [End Page 174]

Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary

differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or

oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking

Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question

of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
which is to say,
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.
 Anthro
Sequencing D/A: Hegemonic paranoia must be revealed
and critiqued to clear the space for their K in the first
place- McClintock says that paranoia becomes so strong
because of the way we fail to question the base of our
reasoning, which is geared towards seeking conflict and
displaying military might. This paranoia would swamp the
alt- *alt specific stuf*
Link turn- Pugliesse identifies biopolitics as the driver of
reduction to and focus on biological objecthood, breaking
down a being into its constituent parts to analyze and
deem if it falls within acceptable standards. Particularly
true in context of militarism, as the US military has
specific patterns of life by which it normalizes bodies
and sanitizes the clinical extermination of all non-
acceptable bodies- this position assumes the non-human
is inherently undesirable

[Insert black = non-human card]

Perm do both:
Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary
differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or

oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking

Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question

of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY
And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
which is to say,
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.

4 net bens
1. Critical Animal Studies is a commodified product of
white western elitists within academia. Under the
guise of rigorous objective knowledge, the K
reinforces a colonial relation between researcher
and object of study

Steven Best 12
Steven; Former professor and Founder of Critical Animal Studies- The Rise (and Fall) of Critical Animal Studies [1]- online
-// Lenny Wheres My Phone Herrera

In the last three decades, animal studies has grown exponentially in the global academy. The "animal turn" has moved
throughout humanities, the fine arts, and social sciences; it has crossed into psychology, philosophy, anthropology, political science,
and sociology; and it has made its mark in literature, history, cultural studies, geography, feminism, and queer theory. Alongside the
explosion of articles, books, and conferences, there are hundreds of animal studies courses taught in dozens of universities and
colleges worldwide, from the UK and Canada to the Germany and the US to Poland and Israel and New Zealand to Australia. Without
question, animal studies will grow in popularity and evolve in dynamic ways. Within a few years, one can expect Animal Studies
programs and departments to become as widespread as Women's Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano/a Studies, Disability
Studies, and Queer Studies. The rapid surge in animal studies programs, moving it from the margins to the mainstream, is both
laudable and lamentable. For as animal studies is a potential force of enlightenment and progressive change in public attitudes and
academic proponents can only advance it within
policies toward nonhuman animals, its
tight institutional constraints and intensive normalizing regimes that
frequently demand conformity, neutrality, disengaged detachment, and activism
within narrowly accepted limits. The growth, acceptance, and success of animal studies in the sterile
corporate environment of academia, in other words, typically demands pacifying the scholar-professor and gutting the
subversive implications of anti-speciesism and challenging the human/animal dualism that underpins the
violent tyranny of humans over other animals. The academy domesticates the systemic

critical power of the animal standpoint which provides vital and unique critical insights into the
origins of war, slavery, hierarchical domination, and a vast spectrum of psychological, moral, social, and ecological crises (see
below); the stultifying structure of higher education defuses the potential volatility of critical knowledges in general, including those
which might work to expose the true horror of the animal holocaust and international animal slave trade, which exploits, tortures, and
murders burgeoning billions of victims, as the academic-industrial complex itself, in its highly profitable vivisection sectors, claims
butchers over one hundred million animals a year for medical research. Homo academicus that typically competitive, cutthroat,
ambitious, vain, arrogant, pompous, one-dimensional, desiccated, apolitical, sycophantic, opportunist, narcissistic career-obsessed
primate -- has rushed en masse from the staid paradigms, boring traditions, and mummified classics to chase the hot, trendy,
fashionable novelty of animal studies in the hopes of jump-starting a new career or revivifying a moribund research life. Because
animal studies is so broad, vague, open, and amorphous a field, it offers something for everyone. Yet the similarities of the animal
in
studies paradigm with conventional humanist, positivist, or analytic frameworks are more significant than the differences. For
animal studies, as well, there are no expectations of coherence between
research and ethics or theory and practice, such that personal and academic integrity in animal studies hardly
demand normative and political commitments to veganism, animal liberation, and social transformation. Mainstream, animal
studies (MAS) has been neutralized, stripped of political relevance, co-opted, and contained
by the hegemonic norms of the academic-industrial complex . As a potentially
subversive and radical discourse taking shape within the prisonhouse of dead scholars
walking, animal studies has unavoidably succumbed to the fate of all
other critical paradigms and identity politics studies programs by introjecting
institutionalized discursive rules, bowing to peer- pressure and
bureaucratic surveillance, and conforming to the codes of detachment
and abstraction; fecund with insight and potential, animal studies has
become another specialized, technical, abstruse product and
commodity of todays knowledge factories that specialize in producing
data pertinent to profit and social control imperatives but irrelevant to
the crises of the day. Animal studies has been confined within the cage of theory-for-theorys sake, severed from
practical and activist concerns, and sundered from the pressing demands of global social and ecological crisis. The Faustian pact that
academics sign with bureaucratic overlords demands fidelity to scholarship as its own end, pseudo-
objectivity and drone-like detachment, existential and theoretical
abstraction, inscrutable jargon, and the pompous profundity of the illuminati. The scholar-activist and engaged intellectual
with dirty hands, is viewed with contempt, shunned as threatening, and ridiculed as a dilettante. Hardly showered with awards and
accolades, those who violate this tacit terrorism and speak against the tacit codes of complicity incur endless slights, condescension,
alienation, and penalties ranging from reduced pay to non-promotion or even termination. Critical academics deconstruct every
boundary, dualism, and opposition except the bifurcation between theory and practice and the Ivy Curtain dividing universities from
the communities. The recipe for the "success" of animal studies is also the formula for its failure. For in order to allay fears, disarm
skepticism, establish the human-animal studies as a respectable and rigorous research paradigm, institutionalized power systems, and
the obliging knowledge- producing work force, process animal studies through the standard filters of positivism, scientism, statistics,
quantification, methodologies, theorems, and philosophical obfuscation. The potential virtues and contributions of animal studies
include challenges to humanist ideologies and speciesist philosophies; illuminating histories of the co-evolution of animals and
humans; revelations of the complexity of animal consciousness, social life, behaviour, and agency; and stimulating insights into our
own animality, and the genesis of dominator cultures, debilitating mindsets, and an array of dysfunctional relations and institutions
generating social pathologies and crises. MAS can help spawn a new ethic of inclusiveness, interconnectedness, and community
critical potential of animal
uniting human and nonhuman animals and the earth as a whole. But too often the
studies is thwarted by the complicity of academics in their own
domestication, in the proclivity to posture as serious researchers, to cloak mundane observations and banal discoveries
in pretentious jargon and execrable abstractions, and to entomb themselves in seminars and assiduously avoid the streets. The
production and performance of the scholarly self whose professionalism would be tainted through involvement in social movements
and struggles conveniently excuses academics from their overriding duties in the political sphere, for they are citizens before scholars,
and social beings over private individuals. The professional mask, the insular nature of academia, and the reified language affords the
professoriate a numb detachment from a world screaming in pain and dying system by system. The functionarys disinterested

the feigning of neutrality only serves the

demeanor pleases academic bureaucrats, as it
interests of social elites, corporate exploiters , environmental rapists, and the animal holocaust
industry.
 2. Whiteness Disad- commodification is expansion of
white supremacy and political crackdown on
indigenous and minority communities. Their
research reifies western humanism by proscribing
that the conclusions of white privileged academics
is the optimal way for people to live in relation to
the worldEvaluate the competing positions in
terms of who best resists white
supremacist/colonialist formations in our research.

Cone 2k
(James H., Briggs Distinguished Professor at Union Theological Seminary and the author of many books on black
theology of liberation, including Martin and Malcolm and America. WHOSE EARTH IS IT ANYWAY?, 2000,
http://www.crosscurrents.org/cone.htm)

The logic that led to slavery and segregation in the Americas, colonization and Apartheid in
Africa, and the rule of white supremacy throughout the world is the same one that leads
to the exploitation of animals and the ravaging of nature. It is a
mechanistic and instrumental logic that defines everything and everybody
in terms of their contribution to the development and defense of white
world supremacy. People who fight against white racism but fail to connect it to the degradation of the earth are anti-
ecological -- whether they know it or not. People who struggle against environmental degradation but
do not incorporate in it a disciplined and sustained fight against white supremacy are
racists -- whether they acknowledge it or not. The fight for justice cannot be segregated but must be integrated with the fight for
life in all its forms. Until recently, the ecological crisis has not been a major theme in the liberation movements in the African
Racial and
American community. "Blacks don't care about the environment" is a typical comment by white ecologists.
economic justice has been at best only a marginal concern in the mainstream
environmental movement. "White people care more about the endangered whale and the
spotted owl than they do about the survival of young blacks in our nation's cities " is a
well-founded belief in the African American community . Justice fighters for
blacks and the defenders of the earth have tended to ignore each other in their public
discourse and practice. Their separation from each other is unfortunate
because they are fighting the same enemy -- human beings'
domination of each other and nature. The leaders in the mainstream environmental movement are
mostly middle- and upper class whites who are unprepared culturally and intellectually to dialogue with angry blacks. The leaders in
the African American community are leery of talking about anything with whites that will distract from the menacing reality of racism.
What both groups fail to realize is how much they need each other in the struggle for "justice, peace and the integrity of creation." (2)
In this essay, I want to challenge the black freedom movement to take a critical look at itself through the lens of the ecological
movement and also challenge the ecological movement to critique itself through a radical and ongoing engagement of racism in
American history and culture. Hopefully, we can break the silence and promote genuine solidarity between the two groups and thereby
No threat has been more
enhance the quality of life for the whole inhabited earth -- humankind and otherkind.
deadly and persistent for black and Indigenous peoples than the rule of
white supremacy in the modern world.
 3. The K alone fails and fosters racism since it
operates in a public space where liberal appeals
through whiteness actually prevents the possibility
for animal liberation. The AFF is the essential first
step toward making the alt work. Only establishing
a racial justice framework creates the space for a
functional animal rights/ anti-anthropocentrism
movement.

Anthony J. NOCELLA, 2012- - professor of Urban Education

in the Hamline University's School of Education - Journal
for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2012
(ISSN1948-352X) 142 - INTERVENTION - Challenging
Whiteness in the Animal Advocacy Movement
To the white persons question, How do we get more People of Color involved in the animal advocacy
movement? I can only reply that fighting for human animal rights is fighting for
nonhuman animal rights. There are many actions we might take to make the world more just for all
concerned: Start a community garden and develop with the community an affordable, healthy
cooperative grocery store; when protesting against a McDonalds or a slaughterhouse, ask employees
what you can do to assist them once you shut down their place of employment and they become
homeless. Workers at slaughterhouses and fast food restaurants are often
poor or living just above the poverty line; they struggle to keep the electricity on and
must visit their family members in prison while going to school, taking care of their siblings and dealing
with police profiling and minimum wage jobs at the very McDonalds or slaughterhouse that
Are we helping these individuals to get new
animal advocates seek to dismantle.
jobs, or are we simply calling them evil murderers of nonhuman
animals? Are we demanding that the state offer healthy food tax breaks or financial assistance to
buy healthy food, or are we just demanding that the oppressed go to a cooperative health food store and
buy expensive food? And what if they have physical disabilities that make it difficult or
impossible to leave their homes and beds so that they do not have a choice of the foods they are served?
How are animal advocates in solidarity with these individuals? The field of critical animal studies
engages with these questions and argues that animal advocacy as a social justice issue. Further,
critical animal studies complicates the goal of animal advocacy by positioning the
movement as an anti-domination and oppressive social justice movement rooted in anarchist
theory. When white people ask oppressed Persons of Color to change
their socio-political and economic behaviors, they are practicing
domination. Rather than addressing racism and assuming that it does not have
anything to do with animal advocacy, they reinforce their dominant role in
society. In the U.S., to be vegan in an urban community may mean expecting youth to walk through a number of gang territories and pay bus fair multiple times to get to a grocery store
that sells fruits and vegetables because most of the corner stores in urban communities instead sell mostly liquor and highly processed foods. Therefore, to engage with other social justice movements and
struggles, it would be better to speak of animal justice rather than animal liberation. This is similar to the critiques by radical environmental justice activists of the white dominated environmental movement that is
more concerned with wilderness instead of how human being also suffer from environmental racism and exploitation (Bullard, 2005). The environmental movement has a history of excluding People of Color
and women, and has even argued that immigration is an ecological problem (Best and Nocella, 2004). Furthermore, very few activist groups direct people to examine systems of domination, such as
capitalism and the military industrial complex, instead focusing on similarities between human and nonhuman exploitation while often failing to acknowledge that the experience of oppression is
different for everyone. If we want the world to go vegan, we have to end racism and other human oppressions, which prevents mass segments of society to go vegan. or else we prevent every human
from joining an anti-speciesist human-based movement for animal advocacy. Not that we cannot strive for them at the same time , but if you want the whole world to go vegan, the only way to go about this is to
provide access to affordable healthy local vegan food market, while also educating community members on the benefits of a vegan plant based diet. Therefore, we must secure justice for all in order to create a

we must stop talking and writing about so-called alliance politics and
vegan global justice movement. This means that

solidarity and get involved in struggles to end racism , poverty, sexism, ableism,
and heterosexism, while also working for animal justice. Not simply joining a protest
her or there, but to give as much time and energy as you do to animal justice. If this does not happen,
animal advocacy will continue to be a movement of wealthy people
who shop at Whole Foods, green washing the world and criticizing people who are poor and
incarcerated for not going vegan. Before activists ask why People of Color rarely join the animal advocacy
movement, they should first ask themselves: What am I doing to stop racism, beyond not joining the
If you are not doing anything beyond talking or writing
KKK or using racial slurs?
about these issues, you are doing very little and, at worst,
you are reinforcing white
hegemony, poverty, patriarchy, ableism, homophobia, and speciesism.

4. Strict speciesism creates phylumism recognizing

humanitys unique gambit key to resolve violence
Staudenmeir 5 (Peter Staudenmeir, human rights advocate and philospher, THE
AMBIGUITIES OF ANIMAL RIGHTS, January 1, 2005, http://www.social-
ecology.org/2005/01/ambiguities-of-animal-rights/)

Relying on a dubious analogy to institutionalized forms of social domination and hierarchy, animal rights advocates argue that drawing an
ethically significant distinction between human beings and non-human animals is a form of
speciesism, a mere prejudice that illegitimately privileges members of ones own species over members of other species. According to this theory, animals that display a certain level of relative
physiological and psychological complexity usually vertebrates, that is, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have the same basic moral status as humans. A central nervous

system is, at bottom, what confers moral considerability; in some versions of the theory, only creatures with the capacity to experience pain
have any moral status whatsoever. These animals are often designated as sentient. Thus on the animal rights view, to draw a line between

human beings and other sentient creatures is arbitrary and unwarranted, in the same way that classical racism and
sexism unjustly deemed women and people of color to be undeserving of moral equality. The next logical step in expanding the circle of ethical concern is to overcome speciesism and grant equal consideration to the

interests of all sentient beings, human and non-human.5 These arguments are seductive but spurious . The central analogy
to the civil rights movement and the womens movement is trivializing and ahistorical. Both
of those social movements were initiated and driven by members of the dispossessed and excluded
groups themselves, not by benevolent men or white people acting on their behalf . Both movements

were built precisely around the idea of reclaiming and reasserting a shared humanity in the face of a
society that had deprived it and denied it. No civil rights activist or feminist ever argued, Were sentient beings too! They argued, Were fully human too! Animal liberation

doctrine, far from extending this humanist impulse, directly undermines it . Moreover, the animal
rights stance forgets a crucial fact about ethical action. There is indeed a critically
important distinction between moral agents (beings who can engage in ethical deliberation, entertain alternative moral choices, and act according to their best judgement) and all other
morally considerable beings. Moral agents are uniquely capable of formulating , articulating, and defending

a conception of their own interests. No other morally considerable beings are capable of this; in order for their interests to be taken into account in ethical deliberation,
these interests must be imputed and interpreted by some moral agent. As far as we know, mentally competent adult human beings are the only moral agents there are.6 This decisive

distinction is fundamental to ethics itself. To act ethically means, among other things, to respect the principle that persuasion and consent are preferable to
coercion and manipulation. This principle cannot be directly applied to human interactions with animals.

Animals cannot be persuaded and cannot give consent. In order to accord proper consideration to an animals well-being,

moral agents must make some determination of what that animals interests are. This is not
only unnecessary in the case of other moral agents, it is morally prohibited under normal
conditions. To grasp the significance of this difference, consider the following. I live with several people and a number of cats, toward whom I have various ethical responsibilities. If I am
convinced that one of my human housemates needs to take some kind of medicine, it is not
acceptable for me to force feed it to her, assuming she isnt deranged. Instead, I can try to persuade her, through
rational deliberation and ethical argument, that it would be best if she took the medicine. But if I think that one of the cats needs to take some

kind of medicine, I may well have no choice but to force feed it to him or trick him into eating it.7 In
other words, taking the interests of animals seriously and treating them as morally considerable beings requires a very different sort of ethical action from the sort that is typically appropriate with other people. The

an equally serious failing of

failure to account for this salient feature of moral conduct is one reason why so many proponents of animal rights are hostile to humanist values. But

animal rights thinking is its obliviousness to ecological values . Recall that on the animal rights view, it is only
individual creatures endowed with sentience that deserve moral consideration. Trees, plants, lakes,
rivers, forests, ecosystems, and even most creatures that zoologists classify as animals, have no interests, well-being, or worth of their own, except inasmuch as

they promote the interests of sentient beings. Animal rights advocates have simply traded
in speciesism for phylumism .8 Thus even on its own terms, as an attempt to expand the circle of moral
consideration beyond the human realm to the natural world, animal rights falls severely
short. But the problem is not merely one of inadequate scope. The individual rights
approach, with its concomitant view of interests, suffering, and welfare, cannot be reconciled with an ecological perspective .
The well-being of a complex functioning ecological community, with its soils, rocks, waters, micro-organisms, and animal and plant
denizens, cannot be reduced to the well-being of those denizens as individuals. The dynamic relationships among the

constituent members are as important as the disparate interests of each member of the ensemble. To focus on the interests of singular animals (and on the

small minority of sentient ones at that), and to posit a general duty not to harm these interests or cause suffering, is to miss this ecological dimension

entirely.9 Conflicting interests are part of what accounts for the magnificent variety and
complexity of the natural world; the notion of granting equal consideration to all such
interests is incoherent in evolutionary as well as ecological terms . This would remain the case even in a completely vegetarian
society populated solely by organic subsistence farmers; food cultivation of any sort means the systematic deprivation of habitat and sustenance for some animals and requires the continuous frustration of their

Extending the individual rights paradigm to sentient animals simply obscures this
interests.

fundamental facet of terrestrial existence.10 Animal rights thus degrades, rather than develops, the humanist impulse
embodied in liberatory social movements, and its basic philosophical thrust is directly contrary to

the project of elaborating an ecological ethics. As a moral theory, it leaves much to be desired. But what of its political affiliations and its practical
implications? Here as well skepticism is in order.

Prefer our evidence since a focus on species liberation

doesnt necessarily solve for issues of race, but an anti-
racist mode of engagement necessarily solves for species
through its enabling of intersectional thought

Harper 2013 (Breeze [PdD UC Davis] Vegan

Consciousness and the Commodity Chain: On the
Neoliberal, Afrocentric, and Decolonial Politics of
Cruelty-Free , d/l:
http://sistahvegan.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/harperpdf
telfordupdates.pdf) //jl
Shortly after Singer published Animal Liberation (1975), Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco would create the
now widely known pro-vegan/vegetarian organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in
1980 (Iacobbo 2004; 2006). Most of their small membership had been students from George Washington
University and members of the 12 Vegetarian Society of D.C. Thoughthere are many other well-
known animal liberation organizations throughout the United
States7, it is PETA that is a household name in connection to "animal rights" and
"veganism/vegetarianism" (Julius 2012). Since its inception, and explored in chapter two, PETA
has been accused of employing racially insensitive tactics to sell the message of animal rights to the
mainstream population (Deckha 2008; Harris 2009). There are feminist and critical animal studies scholars
who do not consider Newkirk's approach to animal liberation as the feminist ideal (Danis 2007; Deckha
2008; Glasser and Bron 2008). It wouldn't be until 1990, that the canon of critical vegan feminism would
engagement with animal
emerge (Adams 1990). Up until the 1990s, critical feminist
rights and veganism/vegetarianism in the West had been silent in
the mainstream vegan discourse. Sexual Politics of Meat (Adams 1990) was one of the
first books to employ "feminist ethics of care" logic for abstaining from animal and animal by-products
consumption. "Just as feminist theory needs to be informed by vegetarian insights, animal rights theory
requires an incorporation of feminist principle. Meat is a symbol for what is not seen but is always there-
patriarchal control of animals" (Adams 1990:16). Most of post-1980s scholarship about feminist-
vegan/vegetarian critical theory focused on the faults of 'patriarchy' and/or 'male-stream' thought within
However, rarely, if ever did these authors consider how
animal ethics.
racial formation affected their own scholarship and world-view about
food and animal ethics. This is indicative of a dominant white and
middle-class feminist standpoint. Such a dominant standpoint has
historically engaged in feminism with the assumption that everyone
is white, middle-class, and from the global North (Frankenberg 1993; Collins
2000). However, there are omnivorous ecofeminists that argue vegan feminism creates the myth that
women are "naturally" suited for supporting veganism because they are not "natural" predators (hunters)
like males are (Plumwood 2000). Such a theory stems 13 from a perceived world history of food access
being connected to women as 'gatherers' and men as 'hunters.' However, some scholars argue that it can
be rather essentialist to imply that women are non-predatory and were never 'natural' hunters while men
were the opposite (George 1994; Plumwood 2000). Sacred Woman serves to show that what is absent from
the canon of vegan feminist ethics-of-care is a better understanding of how "gender" and "patriarchy" are
not universal notions; furthermore they are complicated by the racial dynamics that whiteness produces.
Missing from the scholarly literature on pro-vegan philosophies of the
1960s-1990s are epistemologies that challenge how whiteness configures
vegan methodology and rationale. One doesn't really see such contributions until nearly
20 years after The Sexual Politics of Meat was published. In 2009, Harris examines PETA's
"Animal Liberation" 2005 campaign, which compared the animal
farming industry to Black slavery in the USA. She tries to explain
why, even though she is pro-vegan animal rights proponent, it is
inappropriate for PETA to use institutionalized racism as a
comparison to the treatment of livestock animals in the USA (Harris
2009). Such a position for a vegetarian and animal rights philosopher
clashes against slightly earlier works by pro-vegan animal rights
defense scholars who claim that Black slavery and the Jewish
Holocaust are comparable to speciesism (Spiegel 1996; Patterson 2002). In 2010,
Journal of Critical Animal Studies published one of the first issues that would focus on veganism from a
Such recent contributions have
critical race perspective (Harper 2010b; Serrato 2010).
expanded the scholarship on food and ethical consumption by
creating academic and literary spaces to discuss race in a way that
critical food and critical animal studies scholarship basically have
ignored. Indeed, though such contributions are slowly being
published in the academy, non-white vegans have, and are,
producing epistemologies that barely hit the 14 radars of popular
media and scholarly literature that are represented in the pro-vegan
organizations and academic literature. African American vegan and holistic health
activist, Queen Afua, published Sacred Woman: A Guide to Healing the Feminine Body, Mind, and Spirit in
2000. Neither an engagement with white male centered animal rights nor the traditional Western feminist
ethics of care tradition, Sacred Woman speaks directly to the collective Black female experiences in the
USA (Afua 2000). In 2009, African-American vegan chef, Bryant Terry, published Vegan Soul Kitchen, a
cookbook to reclaim soul food. Terry hoped his healthier vegan soul food would combat Black health
disparities (2009). In 2010, I published the edited volume Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak
on Food, Identity, Health and Society (Harper 2010). It was the first book of its kind to
capture the experience of Black female vegans in the USA. In my introduction, I
explain that in a country in which racialized-sexualized hierarchies of power are the norm, Black
women will collectively approach vegan philosophy in a way that is
significantly different from the standard white middle-class vegan
(Harper 2010). That same year, Tracye McQuirters By Any Greens Necessary vegan guidebook was
published, specifically acknowledging the politics of what it means to be a Black female in the USA (2010).
Black American vegan activist DJ Cavem Moetavation, released
In 2010,
hip-hop vegan album Teacher's Lounge. The album fuses critical
issues of structural racism and poverty, with hip-hop philosophy and
pedagogies, to produce an alternative vegan epistemology in
response to the mainstream. Similarly, Supa Nova Slom released his book The Remedy
(2010) to specifically address the "ill" health and food status of brown and Black hip-hop generation. Even
though they are not books, online sites such as Decolonial Food for Thought, Vegans of Color (2012), and
Food Empowerment Project (2011) are deeply critical pro-vegan websites that guide people 15 through
veganism while engaging with the fact that racism, Eurocentrism, white supremacy, neoliberalism, and
colonialism have all deeply affected the lived experiences of most people living in the global North. The
above-mentioned literature, websites, and musical media all arise from lived experiences and document a
However, what is
particular cultural expression just like the work of Singer, Adams, and Donovan.
noteworthy is that they mostly exist outside of the mainstream
academic canon. This is because they disrupt the fundamental
tenets of the traditional canon in pro-vegan and animal liberation
studies which assumes that everyone has a white, middle class, and
global North relationship with food and animals (Deckha 2012; Nocella 2012).
This new race-conscious canon of veganism acknowledges that
veganism cannot be post-racial. For this canon, decolonial politics
and resistance against the value system of Eurocentric whiteness
are fundamentally rooted in, if not central to, their food and
nutritional activism. In addition, these alternative vegan scholars and activists reflect a more democratized access to
food and health knowledge. That means this knowledge is more easily accessible via the medium of music, nonacademic writing, and online
social media tools. The next section will provide my chosen methodologies to engage in critical race material analysis of the three vegan food
guides. Methodologies Racial Formation and Critical Studies of Race This dissertation will be drawing from the canon of racial studies that
understand race to be a social construction with political, geographical, and economic consequences. I will not be drawing from the canon that
traditionally thought race to be biological (Tucker 2002). Nor will I be drawing from the modern theories that came out of the Chicago School of
sociology. These 16 theories promoted the idea that racial assimilation would achieve equality for non-whites (Omi and Winant 1994). Critical
Race Studies of the 1970s emerged from many, but I will focus on the dominant influence of two critical thinkers: DuBois and Frantz Fanon.
The sociology of race during DuBois's era was still very much produced through a white male supremacist lens, but DuBois began to question
the fundamentals of racial study itself. During the early part of the twentieth century, DuBois began studying the studier (white male
sociologists) and the objectivity they espoused as authority to speak about the racial problems. At the heart of Du Boiss critical race
theory, then, was a critical theorya critique of theory itself. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois formulated the problem succinctly as a failure
on the part of the theorists to study the problems of racialized people instead of reducing such peoples to the problems themselves. (Gordon
1999: 24) In the mid twentieth century, Frantz Fanon (2004 and 2008) helped to lay the foundation for critical race discourse within an era of
global decolonization. Taking a Freudian psychoanalytical approach to anti-colonialism and decolonization, Fanon addressed the collective
emotional and mental processes of colonized peoples of African descent living in white colonies. Fanons constant reference to trauma and
This Fanonian
psychological scarring is one of the most provocative and innovative aspects of his scholarship (2004 and 2008).

strain of thought significantly influenced the direction of creating a

post-structural approach to the phenomenon of race for the later
half of the twentieth century. Post-structuralists understand that one cannot study
phenomenon in a vacuum. Instead, one must interrogate how discursive structures and processes
construct and constitute particular phenomenon. Such an analytical approach to phenomenon of race
CRT
would lead to the establishment of Critical Race Theory (referred to as CRT). 17 In the 1980s,
scholarship contested the American myth that the American legal
system, state, and national policies treat all of its citizens fairly and
without racial discrimination (Williams 1991; Bell 1992 ; Crenshaw 1995; Delgado 1995;
Bell 1996). CRT asserts that race still does matter, despite a post-Civil Rights era. Racism is so
deeply embedded in the fabric of American society that it is made
invisible in a society that professes meritocracy and colorblindness
(Chapman 2010). Most notably, CRT argues that the law is not neutral and that it serves to maintain the
interests of neoliberal whiteness (Bell 1996; Lipsitz 2006). In 1986, introduced to the canon of CRT was the
theory of racial formation, which is a Sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created,
inhabited, transformed, and destroyed[R]acial formation is a process of historically situated projects in
which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized. Next we link racial formation to
the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled. (Omi and Winant 1994:56)
Racial formation theory creates a better understanding of racism as
well as other inequalities such as classism, sexism, and nationalism
that are linked. Social structure and cultural representation are both
implicit in racial formation and inextricably connected. Racial
projects do the ideological work of making these links. A racial
project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or
explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and
redistribute resources along particular racial lines (Omi and Winant 1994:56)
Integral to this dissertation is how resources are extracted and
unevenly distributed along particular racial line, and within the food
commodity chain. How are they commoditized, and how do racial projects, such as neoliberal
whiteness, configure who has the privilege to consume vegan commodities
and who must be exploited to harvest and produce them?
The critique is obsessed with the politics of purity that
creates fascism
Staudenmeir 5 (Peter Staudenmeir, human rights advocate and philospher, THE
AMBIGUITIES OF ANIMAL RIGHTS, January 1, 2005, http://www.social-
ecology.org/2005/01/ambiguities-of-animal-rights/)

The unexamined cultural prejudices embedded deep within animal rights thinking carry political
implications that are unavoidably elitist . A consistent animal rights stance, after all, would
require many aboriginal peoples to abandon their sustainable livelihoods and lifeways
completely. Animal rights has no reasonable alternative to offer to communities like the
Inuit, whose very existence in their ecological niche is predicated on hunting animals. An animal rights viewpoint can only look down
disdainfully on those peasant societies in Latin America and elsewhere that depend on small-scale animal husbandry as an integral part of their diet, as well as pastoralists in Africa and Asia who rely centrally upon

These are not matters of taste but of

animals to maintain traditional subsistence economies that long predate the colonial imposition of capitalism.

sustainability and survival. Forsaking such practices makes no ecological or social sense, and would be tantamount
to eliminating these distinctive societies themselves, all for the sake of assimilation to
standards of morality and nutrition propounded by middle-class westerners convinced of
their own rectitude. Too many animal rights proponents forget that their belief system is
essentially a European-derived construct, and neglect the practical repercussions of
universalizing it into an unqualified principle of human moral conduct as such.13 Nowhere is this combination of parochialism
and condescension more apparent than in the animus against hunting. Many animal rights
enthusiasts cannot conceive of hunting as anything other than a brutal and senseless activity
undertaken for contemptible reasons. Heedless of their own prejudices, they take hunting for an expression of speciesist prejudice. What animal rights theorists malign as sport hunting often provides a significant

Even indigenous communities engaged in

seasonal supplement to the diets of rural populations who lack the luxuries of tempeh and seitan.

conspicuously low-impact traditional hunting have been harassed and vilified by animal rights activists. The
campaign against seal hunting in the 1980s, for example, prominently targeted Inuit practices.14 In the late 1990s, the Makah people of Neah Bay in the northwestern United States tried to re-establish their
communal whale hunt, harvesting exactly one gray whale in 1999. The Makah hunt was non-commercial, for subsistence purposes, and fastidiously humane; they chose a whale species that is not endangered and
went to considerable lengths to accommodate anti-whaling sentiment. Nevertheless, when the Makah attempted to embark on their first expedition in 1998, they were physically confronted by the Sea Shepherd
Society and other animal protection organizations, who occupied Neah Bay for several months. For these groups, animal rights took precedence over human rights. Many of these animal advocates embellished their
pro-whale rhetoric with hoary racist stereotypes about native people and allied themselves with unreconstructed apologists for colonial domination and dispossession.15 Such examples are far from rare. In fact,
animal rights sentiment has frequently served as an entry point for rightwing positions into left movements. Because much of the left has generally been reluctant to think clearly and critically about nature, about
biological politics, and about ethical complexity, this unsettling affinity between animal rights and rightwing politics an affinity which has a lengthy historical pedigree remains a serious concern. While hardly

most militant proponents of animal liberation also espousing

typical of the current as a whole, it is not unusual to find the

staunch opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and other purportedly unnatural

phenomena. The Hardline tendency, which in the 1990s spread from North America to Central Europe, is perhaps the most striking example.16 But the connections to reactionary politics extend
substantially further. The recent Russian youth group Moving Together, an ultranationalist and sexually repressive organization, has made animal protection one of the central planks in its platform, while the Swiss
Association Against Animal Factories wallows in antisemitic propaganda. In Denmark, the only party with a designated portfolio for animal concerns is the anti-immigrant Danish Peoples Party, while the far-right
British National Party boasts of its commitment to animal rights. The contemporary neofascist scene in Europe and North America has shown an abiding interest in the theme as well; over the last decade many

this widespread overlap between

National Revolutionaries and Third Positionists have become actively involved in animal rights campaigns.17 Although

animal liberation politics and the xenophobic and authoritarian right may seem
incongruous, it has played a prominent role in the history of fascism since the early
twentieth century. Many fascist theoreticians prided themselves on their movements
steadfast rejection of anthropocentrism, and the German variant of fascism in particular frequently tended toward an animal rights position. Nazi
biology textbooks insisted that there exist no physical or psychological characteristics
which would justify a differentiation of mankind from the animal world.18 Hitler himself
was zealously committed to animal welfare causes, and was a vegetarian and opponent of vivisection. His lieutenant Goebbels declared: The Fuhrer is a
convinced vegetarian, on principle. His arguments cannot be refuted on any serious basis. They are totally unanswerable.19 Other leading Nazis, like Rudolf Hess, were even stricter in their vegetarianism, and the
party promoted raw fruits and nuts as the ideal diet, much like the most scrupulous vegans today. Himmler excoriated hunting and required the top ranks of the SS to follow a vegetarian regimen, while Goering

more important are the animal rights policies

banned animal experimentation. The list of pro-animal predilections on the part of top Nazis is long, but

implemented by the Nazi state and the underlying ideology that justified them. Within a few months of taking
power, the Nazis passed animal rights laws that were unprecedented in scale and that explicitly affirmed the moral status of animals

independent of any human interest. These decrees stressed the duty to avoid causing pain to animals and established extremely detailed and concrete guidelines for
interactions with animals. According to a leading scholar of Nazi animal legislation, the Animal Protection Law of 1933 was probably the strictest in the world.20 A 1939 compendium of Nazi animal protection
statutes proclaimed that the German people have always had a great love for animals and have always been conscious of our strong ethical obligations toward them. The Nazi laws insisted on the right which
animals inherently possess to be protected in and of themselves. 21 These were not mere philosophical postulates; the ordinances closely regulated the permissible treatment of domestic and wild animals and

The official reasoning behind these decrees was

designated a variety of protected species while restricting commercial and scientific use of animals.

remarkably similar to latter-day animal rights arguments. To the German, animals are not merely creatures in the organic sense, but
creatures who lead their own lives and who are endowed with perceptive facilities, who feel pain and experience joy, observed Goering in 1933 while announcing a new anti-vivisection law. 22 While contemporary
animal liberation activists would certainly do well to acquaint themselves with this ominous record of past and present collusion by animal advocates with fascists, the point of reviewing these facts is not to suggest a

the historical pattern is unmistakable and demands

necessary or inevitable connection between animal rights and fascism.23 But

explanation. What helps to account for this consistent intersection of apparently contrary worldviews is a
common preoccupation with purity. The presumption that true virtue requires repudiating
ostensibly unclean practices such as meat eating furnishes much of the heartfelt vehemence behind animal rights discourse. When disconnected from an articulated critical social
perspective and a comprehensive ecological sensibility, this abstentionist version of puritan politics can easily slide into a

distorted vision of ethnic, sexual, or ideological purity. A closely related trope is the recurrent insistence within animal rights thinking on a
unitary approach to moral questions. Rightly rejecting the inherited dualism of humanity and non-human nature,

animal rights philosophers wrongly collapse the two into one undifferentiated whole, thus
substituting monism for dualism (and neglecting most of the natural world in the process). But regressive dreams of purity and
oneness carry no emancipatory potential; their political ramifications range from trite to
dangerous . In the wrong hands, a simplistic critique of speciesism yields liberation for neither people
nor animals, but merely the same rancid antihumanism that has always turned radical
hopes into their reactionary opposite.

Labeling the omission of nonhuman animals as

anthropocentric is inaccurate and destroys legitimate
movements

Lewis 92 (Martin, [Professor of Environment at the School

of the Environment and the Center for International
Studies at Duke University]. Green Delusions, 1992 p17-
18) //mc
Nature for Natures SakeAnd Humanity for Humanitys It is widely accepted that
environmental thinkers can be divided into two camps: those who favor the preservation
of nature for natures sake, and those who wish only to maintain the environment as the
necessary habitat of humankind (see Pepper 1989; ORiordan 1989; W Fox 1990). In the
first group stand the green radicals, while the second supposedly consists of
environmental reformers, also labeled shallow ecologists. Radicals often pull no
punches in assailing the members of the latter camp for their
anthropocentrism, managerialism, and gutless accommodationismto some,
shallow ecology is just a more efficient form of exploitation and oppression (quoted
in Nash 1989:202). While this dichotomy may accurately depict some of the major
approaches of the past, it is remarkably unhelpful for devising the kind of
framework required for a truly effective environmental movement. It
incorrectly assumes that those who adopt an anti-anthropocentric view (that is, one
that accords intrinsic worth to nonhuman beings) will also embrace the larger political
programs of radical environmentalism. Similarly, it portrays those who favor
reforms within the political and economic structures of representative
democracies as thereby excluding all nonhumans from the realm of moral
consideration. Yet no convincing reasons are ever provided to show
why these beliefs should necessarily be aligned in such a manner.
(For an instructive discussion of the pitfalls of the anthropocentric versus
nonanthropocentric dichotomy, see Norton 1987, chapter ir.)

The focus on the human/animal divide misses the mark.

Rather, we must look at the thingification of nature
Smith 2014 (Andrea [ is Associate Professor of Media and
Cultural Studies at UC Riverside.] Humanity Through
Work, Borderlands, VOLUME 13 NUMBER 1, 2014, d/l:
https://www.academia.edu/8221926/Humanity_Through_W
ork) //jl

The divide then that is created in part through work presumes that
nature has the status of being a thing. Consequently, any analysis
of raciality must concern itself not only with the human/animal
divide but the thingification of nature itself. For indigenous peoples
to be removed from their land bases, land first has to be thingified.
As Dian Million notes, our typical paradigm for articulating indigenous
struggles as a land-based struggle may itself be a result of this
colonial discourse. That is, under our current legal system, the only
way indigenous peoples can intervene when there is colonial
encroachment on indigenous lands is to argue, its not your land; its
our land. One cannot argue that land should not be owned by
anyone. But as I have discussed elsewhere, many Native scholars and activists argue that land should
not be a commodity that can be owned and controlled by one group of people (Smith 2012). Rather, all
Consequently, the
peoples must exist in relationship with all of creation and care for it.
principles of indigenous nationhood that emerge from these
relationships are principles of inclusivity, mutual respect, and
interrelationality with all other nations. However, contends Million, the term land
itself does not speak to the manner in which indigenous peoples have relationships with all of creation, the
entirety of the biosphere. Thus,the term land itself truncates what these
relations signify in order to facilitate the commodification of a piece
of creation that is separated from the rest of the biosphere (Personal
conversation, November 17, 2012). While Native peoples are thingified as a
natural resource, they are simultaneously promised the possibility
of humanity if they mature out of their status as children. And yet as will
be discussed in the next section, they never effectively mature into full humanity
under settler colonialism.

Perm: do both as a means of establishing a paradox

Perm Solves a mix of critical reflection and calculative
thought opens a paradox that solves the alternative

McWhorter, 92 (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeast Missouri State

University (Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth, ed. by Ladelle McWhorter)//GUYWe do
not support the ableist language within this card

Heidegger's work is a call to reflect, to think in some way other than

calculatively, technologically, pragmatically. Once we begin to move with and
into Heidegger's call and begin to see our trying to seize control
and solve problems as itself a problematic approach, if we still
believe that thinking's only real purpose is to function as a prelude
to action, we who attempt to think will twist within the agonizing
grip of paradox, feeling nothing but frustration, unable to conceive of ourselves as anything but
paralyzed. However, as so many peoples before us have known, paradox IS not only a trap;
it is also a scattering point and passageway. Paradox invites
examination of its own constitution (hence of the patterns of thinking within which it
occurs) and thereby breaks a way of thinking open, revealing the
configurations of power that propel it and hold it on track. And thus
it makes possible the dissipation of that power and the deflection of
thinking into new paths and new possibilities.

Perm: Affirm both simultaneously: Perm is always in flux,

asymmetrically becoming, a radical third way that
disrupts the binarity of the 1AC and K
Deleuze 08 (Gilles, [Prolific Continental Philosopher and
Clinical Pyschologist], Dialogues II, Pgs. 130-132) //DF
The status of the other type of lines seems to be completely different. The segments here are not the
same, proceeding by thresholds, constituting becomings, blocs of becoming, marking continuums of
intensity, combinations of fluxes. The abstract machines here are not the same, they are mutating and not
overcoding, marking their mutations at each threshold and each combination. The plane is not the
same_plane of consistence or of immanence which tears from forms particles between which there are
now only relationships a( speed and slowness, and tears from subjects affects which now only carry out
individuations by 'hecceity'. The binary machines no longer engage with this real, not because the
dominant segment would change (a particular class, a particular sex ... ), nor because mixtures like
molecular lines make
bisexuality or class- mixing would be imposed: on the contrary, because the
fluxes of deterritorialization shoot between the segments, fluxes which no
longer belong to one or to the other, but which constitute an asymmetrical
becoming of the two, molecular sexuality which is no longer that of a man or of a woman,
molecular masses which no longer have the outline of a class, molecular races like little lines which no
longer respond to the great molar oppositions.
It is certainly no longer a matter of a
synthesis of the two, of a synthesis of 1 and 2, but of a third which always
comes from elsewhere and disturbs the binarity of the two, not so much
inserting itself in their opposition as in their complementarity. It is not a matter
of adding a new segment on to the preceding segments on the line (a third sex, a third class, a third age),
but of tracing another line in the middle of the segmentary line, in the middle
of the segments, which carries them off according to the variable speeds and slownesses in a
movement of flight or of flux. To continue the use of geographical terms: imagine that between the West
and the East a certain segmentarity is introduced, opposed in a binary machine, arranged in the State
apparatuses, overcoded by an abstract machine as the sketch of a World Order. It is then from North to
South that the destabilization takes place, as Giscard d'Estaing said gloomily, and a stream erodes a path,
even if it is a shallow stream, which brings everything into play and diverts the plane of organization. A
Corsican here, elsewhere a Palestinian, a plane hijacker, a tribal upsurge, a feminist movement, a Green
ecologist, a Russian dissident there will always be someone to rise up to the south. Imagine the Greeks
and the Trojans as two opposed segments, face to face: but look, the Amazons arrive, they begin by
overthrowing the Trojans, so that the Greeks cry, 'The Amazons are with us', but they turn against the
Greeks, attacking them from behind with the violence of a torrent. This is how Kleist's Penthesilea begins.
The great ruptures, the great oppositions, are always negotiable; but not the little crack, the imperceptible
ruptures which come from the south. We say 'south' without attaching any importance to this. We talk of
the south in order to mark a direction which is different from that of the line of segments. But everyone
has his south - it doesn't matter where it is -that is, his line of slope or flight. Nations, classes, sexes have
their south. Godard: what counts is not merely the two opposed camps on the great line where they
confront each other, but also the frontier, through which everything passes and shoots on a broken
molecular line of a different orientation. May 1968 was an explosion of such a molecular line, an irruption
of the Amazons, a frontier which traced in unexpected line, drawing along the segments like torn-off blocs
which have lost their bearings.
 Anthro-Pess
Sequencing D/A: Hegemonic paranoia must be revealed
and critiqued to clear the space for their K in the first
place- McClintock says that paranoia becomes so strong
because of the way we fail to question the base of our
reasoning, which is geared towards seeking conflict and
displaying military might. This paranoia would swamp the
alt- *alt specific stuf*
Link turn- the Aff is key to understanding the way
hegemonic paranoia uses tools like the heat-seeking
drone camera to reduce targets to non-human collections
of biological processes. The necessary dehumanization is
the zero point of anti-black violence: the position from
which anti-black violence can be committed onto black
bodies. Much like the way non-white people were
stigmatized as having no souls, or different heads, or
many other essentialized biological features, this
abstraction from the quintessential picture of human
prevents empathetic engagement
The biopolitical machine operates by using the
human/non-human distinction to produce bare life and
destroy those it deems unworthy of living
Agamben 04 (Giorgio, Italian Continental Philosopher and current
Professor at Accademia di Archiettura Mendrisio, The open: Man and
animal, Stanford University Press, pg. 36-28)//ds

What distinguishes man from animal is language, but this is not a natural given already inherent in the
psychophysical structure of man; it is, rather, a historical production which, as such, can be properly
assigned neither to man nor to animal. If this element is taken away, the difference between man and
animal vanishes, unless we imagine a nonspeaking manHomo alalus, precisely who would function as a
bridge that passes from the animal to the human. But all evidence suggests that this is only a shadow cast
by language, a presupposition of speaking man, by which we always obtain only an animalization of man
(an animal-man, like Haeckels ape-man) or a humanization of the animal (a man-ape). The animal-man
and the man-animal are the two sides of a single fracture, which cannot be mended from either side.
Returning to his theory some years later, after having learned of Darwins and Haeckels theses, which by
then were at the center of scientific and philosophical debates, Steinthal is perfectly well aware of the
contradiction implicit in his hypothesis. What he had tried to understand was why man alone and not the
animal creates language; but that was tantamount to understanding how man originates from animal. And
this is precisely where the contradic- tion arises: The prelinguistic stage of intuition can only be one, not
double, and it cannot be different for animal and for man. If it were different, that is, if man were naturally
higher than the animal, then the origin of man would not coincide with the origin of language, but rather
with the origin of his higher form of intuition out of the lower form which is the animals. Without realizing
it, I presupposed this origin: in real- ity, man with his human characteristics was given to me through cre-
ation, and I then sought to discover the origin of language in man. But in this way, I contradicted my
presupposition: that is, that the origin of language and the origin of man were one and the same; I set man
up first and then had him produce language.5 The contradiction that Steinthal detects here is the same
one that defines the anthropological machine whichin its two vari- ants, ancient and modernis at work
in our culture. Insofar as the production of man through the opposition
man/animal, human/inhuman, is at stake here, the machine
necessarily func- tions by means of an exclusion (which is also always already a
cap- turing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclu- sion). Indeed, precisely
because the human is already presupposed every time, the machine
actually produces a kind of state of excep- tion, a zone of
indeterminacy in which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an
inside and the inside is in turn only the inclu- sion of an outside . On
the one hand, we have the anthropological machine of the moderns. As we have seen, it functions by
excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by
isolating the nonhuman within the human: Homo alalus, or the ape-man. And it is enough to move our field
of research ahead a few decades, and instead of this innocuous pale- ontological find we will have the Jew,
that is, the non-man pro- duced within the man, or the nomort and the overcomatose per- son, that is, the
animal separated within the human body itself. The machine of earlier times works in an exactly
If, in the machine of the moderns, the outside is
symmetrical way.
produced through the exclusion of an inside and the inhuman
produced by animalizing the human, here the inside is obtained
through the inclusion of an outside, and the non-man is produced by
the humanization of an animal: the man-ape, the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also
and above all the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as figures

of an animal in human form . Both machines are able to function only by establishing a
zone of indifference at their centers, within whichlike a missing link which is always lacking because it
is already virtually pres- entthe articulation between human and animal, man and non- man, speaking
being and living being, must take place.
Like every space of exception, this zone
is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should
occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in
which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated
and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained , however, is neither an
animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from
itselfonly a bare life . And faced with this extreme figure of the human and the inhu- man, it
is not so much a matter of asking which of the two machines (or of the two variants of the same machine)
is better or more effectiveor, rather, less lethal and bloodyas it is of understanding how they work so
that we might, eventually, be able to stop them.

The constant demarcating of what it means to be human

and non-human is what allows the machine to produce
and destroy bare lifecurrent notions of what each means
must thus be abandoned
Agamben 04 (Giorgio, Italian Continental Philosopher and current
Professor at Accademia di Archiettura Mendrisio, The open: Man and
animal, Stanford University Press, pg. 79-80)//ds

Let us try to state the provisional results of our reading of Western philosophys anthropological machine in
Anthropogenesis is what results from the caesura and
the form of theses:
articu- lation between human and animal. This caesura passes first of all within
man. Ontology, or first philosophy, is not an innocuous academic discipline, but in every sense the
fundamental operation in which anthropogenesis, the becoming human of the living being, is real- ized.
From the beginning, metaphysics is taken up in this strate- gy: it concerns precisely that meta that
This
completes and preserves the overcoming of animal physis in the direction of human history.
overcoming is not an event that has been completed once and for
all, but an occurrence that is always under way, that every time and
in each individual decides between the human and the animal,
between nature and history, between life and death. Being, world, and the
open are not, however, something other with respect to animal environment and life: they are noth- ing
The open is
but the interruption and capture of the living beings relation- ship with its disinhibitor.
nothing but a grasping of the animal not-open. Man suspends his
animality and, in this way, opens a free and empty zone in which
life is captured and a-ban- doned {ab-bandonata} in a zone of exception.
Precisely because the world has been opened for man only by means of the suspension and capture of
animal life, being is always already traversed by the nothing; the Lichtung is
always already Nichtung. In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict,
in its origin Western
is that between the animality and the human- ity of man. That is to say,
politics is also biopolitics. If the anthropological machine was the motor for mans becoming
historical, then the end of philosophy and the comple- tion of the epochal destinations of being mean that
today the machine is idling. At this point, two scenarios are possible from Heideggers per- spective: (a)
posthistorical man no longer preserves his own ani- mality as undisclosable, but rather seeks to take it on
man, the shepherd of being, appro-
and govern it by means of technology; (b )
priates his own concealedness, his own animality, which neither
remains hidden nor is made an object of mastery, but is thought as
such, as pure abandonment.

The distinctions and divisions made by the biopolitical

state must be abandoned and erased in order to engage
in a more pragmatic and productive politics
Agamben 04 (Giorgio, Italian Continental Philosopher and current
Professor at Accademia di Archiettura Mendrisio, The open: Man and
animal, Stanford University Press, pg. 91-92)//ds

In Heideggers interpretation, the animal can relate itself to its disinhibitor neither as a being nor as a
nonbeing because only with man is the disinhibitor for the first time allowed to be as such; only with man
can there be something like being, and beings become accessible and manifest. Thus, the supreme cate-
gory of Heideggers ontology is stated: letting be. In this project, man makes himself free for the possible,
and in delivering himself over to it, lets the world and beings be as such. However, if our reading has hit
the mark, if man can open a world and free a pos- sibile only because, in the experience of boredom, he is
able to sus- pend and deactivate the animal relationship with the disinhibitor, if at the center of the open
lies the undisconcealedness of the ani- mal, then at this point we must ask: what becomes of this rela-
tionship? In what way can man let the animal, upon whose sus- pension the world is held open, be?
Insofar as the animal knows neither beings nor nonbeings, nei- ther open nor closed, it is outside of being;
it is outside in an exte- riority more external than any open, and inside in an intimacy more internal than
To let the animal be would then mean: to let it be outside
any closedness.
of being. The zone of nonknowl- edgeor of a-knowledgethat is at
issue here is beyond both knowing and not knowing, beyond both
disconcealing and con- cealing, beyond both being and the nothing .
But what is thus left to be outside of being is not thereby negated or taken away; it is not, for this reason,
inexistent. It is an existing, real thing that has gone beyond the difference between being and beings.
However, it is not here a question of trying to trace the no longer human or animal contours of a new
in our
creation that would run the risk of being equally as mythological as the other. As we have seen,
culture man has always been the result of a simultaneous division
and articulation of the animal and the human, in which one of the
two terms of the operation was also what was at stake in it. To
render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man
will therefore mean no longer to seek newmore effective or more
authenticarticulations , but rather to show the central emptiness,
the hiatus thatwithin manseparates man and animal, and to risk
ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension , Shabbat
of both ani- mal and man. And if one day, according to a now-classic image, the face in the sand that
the sciences of man have formed on the shore of our history should finally be
erased, what will appear in its place will not be a new mandylion or Veronica of a regained human- ity
or animality. The righteous with animal heads in the minia- ture in the Ambrosian do not represent a new
declension of the man-animal relation so much as a figure of the great ignorance which lets both of them
be outside of being, saved precisely in their being unsavable. Perhaps there is still a way in which living
beings can sit at the messianic banquet of the righteous without taking on a historical task and without
the solution of the mysteri-
setting the anthropologi- cal machine into action. Once again,
um coniunctionis by which the human has been produced passes
through an unprecedented inquiry into the practico-political mystery
of separation

Labeling the omission of nonhuman animals as

anthropocentric is inaccurate and destroys legitimate
movements

Lewis 92 (Martin, [Professor of Environment at the School

of the Environment and the Center for International
Studies at Duke University]. Green Delusions, 1992 p17-
18) //mc
Nature for Natures SakeAnd Humanity for Humanitys It is widely accepted that environmental thinkers can be divided
into two camps: those who favor the preservation of nature for natures sake, and those who wish only to maintain the
environment as the necessary habitat of humankind (see Pepper 1989; ORiordan 1989; W Fox 1990). In the first group
stand the green radicals, while the second supposedly consists of environmental reformers, also labeled shallow
ecologists. Radicals often pull no punches in assailing the members of the latter camp for
their anthropocentrism, managerialism, and gutless accommodationismto some, shallow ecology is just
a more efficient form of exploitation and oppression (quoted in Nash 1989:202). While
this dichotomy may
accurately depict some of the major approaches of the past, it is remarkably unhelpful
for devising the kind of framework required for a truly effective
environmental movement. It incorrectly assumes that those who adopt an anti-
anthropocentric view (that is, one that accords intrinsic worth to nonhuman beings) will also embrace the larger political
programs of radical environmentalism. Similarly, it portrays those who favor reforms
within the political and economic structures of representative democracies as thereby
excluding all nonhumans from the realm of moral consideration. Yet
no convincing reasons are ever provided to show why these beliefs
should necessarily be aligned in such a manner. (For an instructive discussion of the
pitfalls of the anthropocentric versus nonanthropocentric dichotomy, see Norton 1987, chapter ir.)

They say ballot endorses writing in place where the

animal died:
1. Critical Animal Studies is a commodified product of
white western elitists within academia. Under the
guise of rigorous objective knowledge, the K
reinforces a colonial relation between researcher
and object of study

Steven Best 12
Steven; Former professor and Founder of Critical Animal Studies- The Rise (and Fall) of Critical Animal Studies [1]- online
-// Lenny Wheres My Phone Herrera
In the last three decades, animal studies has grown exponentially in the global academy. The "animal turn" has moved
throughout humanities, the fine arts, and social sciences; it has crossed into psychology, philosophy, anthropology, political science,
and sociology; and it has made its mark in literature, history, cultural studies, geography, feminism, and queer theory. Alongside the
explosion of articles, books, and conferences, there are hundreds of animal studies courses taught in dozens of universities and
colleges worldwide, from the UK and Canada to the Germany and the US to Poland and Israel and New Zealand to Australia. Without
question, animal studies will grow in popularity and evolve in dynamic ways. Within a few years, one can expect Animal Studies
programs and departments to become as widespread as Women's Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano/a Studies, Disability
Studies, and Queer Studies. The rapid surge in animal studies programs, moving it from the margins to the mainstream, is both
laudable and lamentable. For as animal studies is a potential force of enlightenment and progressive change in public attitudes and
academic proponents can only advance it within
policies toward nonhuman animals, its
tight institutional constraints and intensive normalizing regimes that
frequently demand conformity, neutrality, disengaged detachment, and activism
within narrowly accepted limits. The growth, acceptance, and success of animal studies in the sterile
corporate environment of academia, in other words, typically demands pacifying the scholar-professor and gutting the
subversive implications of anti-speciesism and challenging the human/animal dualism that underpins the
violent tyranny of humans over other animals. The academy domesticates the systemic

critical power of the animal standpoint which provides vital and unique critical insights into the
origins of war, slavery, hierarchical domination, and a vast spectrum of psychological, moral, social, and ecological crises (see
below); the stultifying structure of higher education defuses the potential volatility of critical knowledges in general, including those
which might work to expose the true horror of the animal holocaust and international animal slave trade, which exploits, tortures, and
murders burgeoning billions of victims, as the academic-industrial complex itself, in its highly profitable vivisection sectors, claims
butchers over one hundred million animals a year for medical research. Homo academicus that typically competitive, cutthroat,
ambitious, vain, arrogant, pompous, one-dimensional, desiccated, apolitical, sycophantic, opportunist, narcissistic career-obsessed
primate -- has rushed en masse from the staid paradigms, boring traditions, and mummified classics to chase the hot, trendy,
fashionable novelty of animal studies in the hopes of jump-starting a new career or revivifying a moribund research life. Because
animal studies is so broad, vague, open, and amorphous a field, it offers something for everyone. Yet the similarities of the animal
in
studies paradigm with conventional humanist, positivist, or analytic frameworks are more significant than the differences. For
animal studies, as well, there are no expectations of coherence between
research and ethics or theory and practice, such that personal and academic integrity in animal studies hardly
demand normative and political commitments to veganism, animal liberation, and social transformation. Mainstream, animal
studies (MAS) has been neutralized, stripped of political relevance, co-opted, and contained
by the hegemonic norms of the academic-industrial complex . As a potentially
subversive and radical discourse taking shape within the prisonhouse of dead scholars
walking, animal studies has unavoidably succumbed to the fate of all
other critical paradigms and identity politics studies programs by introjecting
institutionalized discursive rules, bowing to peer- pressure and
bureaucratic surveillance, and conforming to the codes of detachment
and abstraction; fecund with insight and potential, animal studies has
become another specialized, technical, abstruse product and
commodity of todays knowledge factories that specialize in producing
data pertinent to profit and social control imperatives but irrelevant to
the crises of the day. Animal studies has been confined within the cage of theory-for-theorys sake, severed from
practical and activist concerns, and sundered from the pressing demands of global social and ecological crisis. The Faustian pact that
academics sign with bureaucratic overlords demands fidelity to scholarship as its own end, pseudo-
objectivity and drone-like detachment, existential and theoretical
abstraction, inscrutable jargon, and the pompous profundity of the illuminati. The scholar-activist and engaged intellectual
with dirty hands, is viewed with contempt, shunned as threatening, and ridiculed as a dilettante. Hardly showered with awards and
accolades, those who violate this tacit terrorism and speak against the tacit codes of complicity incur endless slights, condescension,
alienation, and penalties ranging from reduced pay to non-promotion or even termination. Critical academics deconstruct every
boundary, dualism, and opposition except the bifurcation between theory and practice and the Ivy Curtain dividing universities from
the communities. The recipe for the "success" of animal studies is also the formula for its failure. For in order to allay fears, disarm
skepticism, establish the human-animal studies as a respectable and rigorous research paradigm, institutionalized power systems, and
the obliging knowledge- producing work force, process animal studies through the standard filters of positivism, scientism, statistics,
quantification, methodologies, theorems, and philosophical obfuscation. The potential virtues and contributions of animal studies
include challenges to humanist ideologies and speciesist philosophies; illuminating histories of the co-evolution of animals and
humans; revelations of the complexity of animal consciousness, social life, behaviour, and agency; and stimulating insights into our
own animality, and the genesis of dominator cultures, debilitating mindsets, and an array of dysfunctional relations and institutions
generating social pathologies and crises. MAS can help spawn a new ethic of inclusiveness, interconnectedness, and community
critical potential of animal
uniting human and nonhuman animals and the earth as a whole. But too often the
studies is thwarted by the complicity of academics in their own
domestication, in the proclivity to posture as serious researchers, to cloak mundane observations and banal discoveries
in pretentious jargon and execrable abstractions, and to entomb themselves in seminars and assiduously avoid the streets. The
production and performance of the scholarly self whose professionalism would be tainted through involvement in social movements
and struggles conveniently excuses academics from their overriding duties in the political sphere, for they are citizens before scholars,
and social beings over private individuals. The professional mask, the insular nature of academia, and the reified language affords the
professoriate a numb detachment from a world screaming in pain and dying system by system. The functionarys disinterested

the feigning of neutrality only serves the

demeanor pleases academic bureaucrats, as it
interests of social elites, corporate exploiters , environmental rapists, and the animal holocaust
industry.

2. Whiteness Disad- commodification is expansion of

white supremacy and political crackdown on
indigenous and minority communities. Their
research reifies western humanism by proscribing
that the conclusions of white privileged academics
is the optimal way for people to live in relation to
the worldEvaluate the competing positions in
terms of who best resists white
supremacist/colonialist formations in our research.

Cone 2k
(James H., Briggs Distinguished Professor at Union Theological Seminary and the author of many books on black
theology of liberation, including Martin and Malcolm and America. WHOSE EARTH IS IT ANYWAY?, 2000,
http://www.crosscurrents.org/cone.htm)

The logic that led to slavery and segregation in the Americas, colonization and Apartheid in
Africa, and the rule of white supremacy throughout the world is the same one that leads
to the exploitation of animals and the ravaging of nature. It is a
mechanistic and instrumental logic that defines everything and everybody
in terms of their contribution to the development and defense of white
world supremacy. People who fight against white racism but fail to connect it to the degradation of the earth are anti-
ecological -- whether they know it or not. People who struggle against environmental degradation but
do not incorporate in it a disciplined and sustained fight against white supremacy are
racists -- whether they acknowledge it or not. The fight for justice cannot be segregated but must be integrated with the fight for
life in all its forms. Until recently, the ecological crisis has not been a major theme in the liberation movements in the African
Racial and
American community. "Blacks don't care about the environment" is a typical comment by white ecologists.
economic justice has been at best only a marginal concern in the mainstream
environmental movement. "White people care more about the endangered whale and the
spotted owl than they do about the survival of young blacks in our nation's cities " is a
well-founded belief in the African American community . Justice fighters for
blacks and the defenders of the earth have tended to ignore each other in their public
discourse and practice. Their separation from each other is unfortunate
because they are fighting the same enemy -- human beings'
domination of each other and nature. The leaders in the mainstream environmental movement are
mostly middle- and upper class whites who are unprepared culturally and intellectually to dialogue with angry blacks. The leaders in
the African American community are leery of talking about anything with whites that will distract from the menacing reality of racism.
What both groups fail to realize is how much they need each other in the struggle for "justice, peace and the integrity of creation." (2)
In this essay, I want to challenge the black freedom movement to take a critical look at itself through the lens of the ecological
movement and also challenge the ecological movement to critique itself through a radical and ongoing engagement of racism in
American history and culture. Hopefully, we can break the silence and promote genuine solidarity between the two groups and thereby
No threat has been more
enhance the quality of life for the whole inhabited earth -- humankind and otherkind.
deadly and persistent for black and Indigenous peoples than the rule of
white supremacy in the modern world.

3. The K alone fails and fosters racism since it

operates in a public space where liberal appeals
through whiteness actually prevents the possibility
for animal liberation. The AFF is the essential first
step toward making the alt work. Only establishing
a racial justice framework creates the space for a
functional animal rights/ anti-anthropocentrism
movement.

Anthony J. NOCELLA, 2012- - professor of Urban Education

in the Hamline University's School of Education - Journal
for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2012
(ISSN1948-352X) 142 - INTERVENTION - Challenging
Whiteness in the Animal Advocacy Movement
To the white persons question, How do we get more People of Color involved in the animal advocacy
movement? I can only reply that fighting for human animal rights is fighting for
nonhuman animal rights. There are many actions we might take to make the world more just for all
concerned: Start a community garden and develop with the community an affordable, healthy
cooperative grocery store; when protesting against a McDonalds or a slaughterhouse, ask employees
what you can do to assist them once you shut down their place of employment and they become
homeless. Workers at slaughterhouses and fast food restaurants are often
poor or living just above the poverty line; they struggle to keep the electricity on and
must visit their family members in prison while going to school, taking care of their siblings and dealing
with police profiling and minimum wage jobs at the very McDonalds or slaughterhouse that
Are we helping these individuals to get new
animal advocates seek to dismantle.
jobs, or are we simply calling them evil murderers of nonhuman
animals? Are we demanding that the state offer healthy food tax breaks or financial assistance to
buy healthy food, or are we just demanding that the oppressed go to a cooperative health food store and
buy expensive food? And what if they have physical disabilities that make it difficult or
impossible to leave their homes and beds so that they do not have a choice of the foods they are served?
How are animal advocates in solidarity with these individuals? The field of critical animal studies
engages with these questions and argues that animal advocacy as a social justice issue. Further,
critical animal studies complicates the goal of animal advocacy by positioning the
movement as an anti-domination and oppressive social justice movement rooted in anarchist
theory. When white people ask oppressed Persons of Color to change
their socio-political and economic behaviors, they are practicing
domination. Rather than addressing racism and assuming that it does not have
anything to do with animal advocacy, they reinforce their dominant role in
society. In the U.S., to be vegan in an urban community may mean expecting youth to walk through a number of gang territories and pay bus fair multiple times to get to a grocery store
that sells fruits and vegetables because most of the corner stores in urban communities instead sell mostly liquor and highly processed foods. Therefore, to engage with other social justice movements and
struggles, it would be better to speak of animal justice rather than animal liberation. This is similar to the critiques by radical environmental justice activists of the white dominated environmental movement that is
more concerned with wilderness instead of how human being also suffer from environmental racism and exploitation (Bullard, 2005). The environmental movement has a history of excluding People of Color
and women, and has even argued that immigration is an ecological problem (Best and Nocella, 2004). Furthermore, very few activist groups direct people to examine systems of domination, such as
capitalism and the military industrial complex, instead focusing on similarities between human and nonhuman exploitation while often failing to acknowledge that the experience of oppression is
different for everyone. If we want the world to go vegan, we have to end racism and other human oppressions, which prevents mass segments of society to go vegan. or else we prevent every human
from joining an anti-speciesist human-based movement for animal advocacy. Not that we cannot strive for them at the same time , but if you want the whole world to go vegan, the only way to go about this is to
provide access to affordable healthy local vegan food market, while also educating community members on the benefits of a vegan plant based diet. Therefore, we must secure justice for all in order to create a

we must stop talking and writing about so-called alliance politics and
vegan global justice movement. This means that

solidarity and get involved in struggles to end racism , poverty, sexism, ableism,
and heterosexism, while also working for animal justice. Not simply joining a protest
her or there, but to give as much time and energy as you do to animal justice. If this does not happen,
animal advocacy will continue to be a movement of wealthy people
who shop at Whole Foods, green washing the world and criticizing people who are poor and
incarcerated for not going vegan. Before activists ask why People of Color rarely join the animal advocacy
movement, they should first ask themselves: What am I doing to stop racism, beyond not joining the
If you are not doing anything beyond talking or writing
KKK or using racial slurs?
about these issues, you are doing very little and, at worst,
you are reinforcing white
hegemony, poverty, patriarchy, ableism, homophobia, and speciesism.

They have a terrible reading of Medina- you should prefer

the 1AC reading that prescribes how to act within
academic spaces, which is to point out discontinuities and
gaps within narratives but to then use and mobilize those
for new knowledge production against power structures
which means its not a reason you reject the 1AC, and is a
reason you prefer the 1AC or the perm for both being
open to engagement and understanding structures the
1NC doesnt grapple with
Perm do both:
Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary
differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end,
the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
aspects of
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or

oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking
Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question
of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
which is to say, in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
the
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.

3 net bens
Strict speciesism creates phylumism recognizing
humanitys unique gambit key to resolve violence
Staudenmeir 5 (Peter Staudenmeir, human rights advocate and philospher, THE
AMBIGUITIES OF ANIMAL RIGHTS, January 1, 2005, http://www.social-
ecology.org/2005/01/ambiguities-of-animal-rights/)

Relying on a dubious analogy to institutionalized forms of social domination and hierarchy, animal rights advocates argue that drawing an
ethically significant distinction between human beings and non-human animals is a form of
speciesism, a mere prejudice that illegitimately privileges members of ones own species over members of other species. According to this theory, animals that display a certain level of relative
physiological and psychological complexity usually vertebrates, that is, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have the same basic moral status as humans. A central nervous

system is, at bottom, what confers moral considerability; in some versions of the theory, only creatures with the capacity to experience pain
have any moral status whatsoever. These animals are often designated as sentient. Thus on the animal rights view, to draw a line between

human beings and other sentient creatures is arbitrary and unwarranted, in the same way that classical racism and
sexism unjustly deemed women and people of color to be undeserving of moral equality. The next logical step in expanding the circle of ethical concern is to overcome speciesism and grant equal consideration to the

interests of all sentient beings, human and non-human.5 These arguments are seductive but spurious . The central analogy
to the civil rights movement and the womens movement is trivializing and ahistorical. Both
of those social movements were initiated and driven by members of the dispossessed and excluded
groups themselves, not by benevolent men or white people acting on their behalf . Both movements

were built precisely around the idea of reclaiming and reasserting a shared humanity in the face of a
society that had deprived it and denied it. No civil rights activist or feminist ever argued, Were sentient beings too! They argued, Were fully human too! Animal liberation

doctrine, far from extending this humanist impulse, directly undermines it . Moreover, the animal
rights stance forgets a crucial fact about ethical action. There is indeed a critically
important distinction between moral agents (beings who can engage in ethical deliberation, entertain alternative moral choices, and act according to their best judgement) and all other
morally considerable beings. Moral agents are uniquely capable of formulating, articulating, and defending
a conception of their own interests. No other morally considerable beings are capable of this; in order for their interests to be taken into account in ethical deliberation,
these interests must be imputed and interpreted by some moral agent. As far as we know, mentally competent adult human beings are the only moral agents there are.6 This decisive

distinction is fundamental to ethics itself. To act ethically means, among other things, to respect the principle that persuasion and consent are preferable to
coercion and manipulation. This principle cannot be directly applied to human interactions with animals.

Animals cannot be persuaded and cannot give consent. In order to accord proper consideration to an animals well-being,

moral agents must make some determination of what that animals interests are. This is not
only unnecessary in the case of other moral agents, it is morally prohibited under normal
conditions. To grasp the significance of this difference, consider the following. I live with several people and a number of cats, toward whom I have various ethical responsibilities. If I am
convinced that one of my human housemates needs to take some kind of medicine, it is not
acceptable for me to force feed it to her, assuming she isnt deranged. Instead, I can try to persuade her, through
rational deliberation and ethical argument, that it would be best if she took the medicine. But if I think that one of the cats needs to take some

kind of medicine, I may well have no choice but to force feed it to him or trick him into eating it.7 In
other words, taking the interests of animals seriously and treating them as morally considerable beings requires a very different sort of ethical action from the sort that is typically appropriate with other people. The

an equally serious failing of

failure to account for this salient feature of moral conduct is one reason why so many proponents of animal rights are hostile to humanist values. But

animal rights thinking is its obliviousness to ecological values . Recall that on the animal rights view, it is only
individual creatures endowed with sentience that deserve moral consideration. Trees, plants, lakes,
rivers, forests, ecosystems, and even most creatures that zoologists classify as animals, have no interests, well-being, or worth of their own, except inasmuch as

they promote the interests of sentient beings. Animal rights advocates have simply traded
in speciesism for phylumism .8 Thus even on its own terms, as an attempt to expand the circle of moral
consideration beyond the human realm to the natural world, animal rights falls severely
short. But the problem is not merely one of inadequate scope. The individual rights
approach, with its concomitant view of interests, suffering, and welfare, cannot be reconciled with an ecological perspective .
The well-being of a complex functioning ecological community, with its soils, rocks, waters, micro-organisms, and animal and plant
denizens, cannot be reduced to the well-being of those denizens as individuals. The dynamic relationships among the

constituent members are as important as the disparate interests of each member of the ensemble. To focus on the interests of singular animals (and on the

small minority of sentient ones at that), and to posit a general duty not to harm these interests or cause suffering, is to miss this ecological dimension

entirely.9 Conflicting interests are part of what accounts for the magnificent variety and
complexity of the natural world; the notion of granting equal consideration to all such
interests is incoherent in evolutionary as well as ecological terms . This would remain the case even in a completely vegetarian
society populated solely by organic subsistence farmers; food cultivation of any sort means the systematic deprivation of habitat and sustenance for some animals and requires the continuous frustration of their

Extending the individual rights paradigm to sentient animals simply obscures this
interests.

fundamental facet of terrestrial existence.10 Animal rights thus degrades, rather than develops, the humanist impulse
embodied in liberatory social movements, and its basic philosophical thrust is directly contrary to

the project of elaborating an ecological ethics. As a moral theory, it leaves much to be desired. But what of its political affiliations and its practical
implications? Here as well skepticism is in order.

Prefer our evidence since a focus on species liberation

doesnt necessarily solve for issues of race, but an anti-
racist mode of engagement necessarily solves for species
through its enabling of intersectional thought

Harper 2013 (Breeze [PdD UC Davis] Vegan

Consciousness and the Commodity Chain: On the
Neoliberal, Afrocentric, and Decolonial Politics of
Cruelty-Free , d/l:
http://sistahvegan.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/harperpdf
telfordupdates.pdf) //jl
Shortly after Singer published Animal Liberation (1975), Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco would create the
now widely known pro-vegan/vegetarian organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in
1980 (Iacobbo 2004; 2006). Most of their small membership had been students from George Washington
University and members of the 12 Vegetarian Society of D.C. Thoughthere are many other well-
known animal liberation organizations throughout the United
States7, it is PETA that is a household name in connection to "animal rights" and
"veganism/vegetarianism" (Julius 2012). Since its inception, and explored in chapter two, PETA
has been accused of employing racially insensitive tactics to sell the message of animal rights to the
mainstream population (Deckha 2008; Harris 2009). There are feminist and critical animal studies scholars
who do not consider Newkirk's approach to animal liberation as the feminist ideal (Danis 2007; Deckha
2008; Glasser and Bron 2008). It wouldn't be until 1990, that the canon of critical vegan feminism would
engagement with animal
emerge (Adams 1990). Up until the 1990s, critical feminist
rights and veganism/vegetarianism in the West had been silent in
the mainstream vegan discourse. Sexual Politics of Meat (Adams 1990) was one of the
first books to employ "feminist ethics of care" logic for abstaining from animal and animal by-products
consumption. "Just as feminist theory needs to be informed by vegetarian insights, animal rights theory
requires an incorporation of feminist principle. Meat is a symbol for what is not seen but is always there-
patriarchal control of animals" (Adams 1990:16). Most of post-1980s scholarship about feminist-
vegan/vegetarian critical theory focused on the faults of 'patriarchy' and/or 'male-stream' thought within
However, rarely, if ever did these authors consider how
animal ethics.
racial formation affected their own scholarship and world-view about
food and animal ethics. This is indicative of a dominant white and
middle-class feminist standpoint. Such a dominant standpoint has
historically engaged in feminism with the assumption that everyone
is white, middle-class, and from the global North (Frankenberg 1993; Collins
2000). However, there are omnivorous ecofeminists that argue vegan feminism creates the myth that
women are "naturally" suited for supporting veganism because they are not "natural" predators (hunters)
like males are (Plumwood 2000). Such a theory stems 13 from a perceived world history of food access
being connected to women as 'gatherers' and men as 'hunters.' However, some scholars argue that it can
be rather essentialist to imply that women are non-predatory and were never 'natural' hunters while men
were the opposite (George 1994; Plumwood 2000). Sacred Woman serves to show that what is absent from
the canon of vegan feminist ethics-of-care is a better understanding of how "gender" and "patriarchy" are
not universal notions; furthermore they are complicated by the racial dynamics that whiteness produces.
Missing from the scholarly literature on pro-vegan philosophies of the
1960s-1990s are epistemologies that challenge how whiteness configures
vegan methodology and rationale. One doesn't really see such contributions until nearly
20 years after The Sexual Politics of Meat was published. In 2009, Harris examines PETA's
"Animal Liberation" 2005 campaign, which compared the animal
farming industry to Black slavery in the USA. She tries to explain
why, even though she is pro-vegan animal rights proponent, it is
inappropriate for PETA to use institutionalized racism as a
comparison to the treatment of livestock animals in the USA (Harris
2009). Such a position for a vegetarian and animal rights philosopher
clashes against slightly earlier works by pro-vegan animal rights
defense scholars who claim that Black slavery and the Jewish
Holocaust are comparable to speciesism (Spiegel 1996; Patterson 2002). In 2010,
Journal of Critical Animal Studies published one of the first issues that would focus on veganism from a
Such recent contributions have
critical race perspective (Harper 2010b; Serrato 2010).
expanded the scholarship on food and ethical consumption by
creating academic and literary spaces to discuss race in a way that
critical food and critical animal studies scholarship basically have
ignored. Indeed, though such contributions are slowly being
published in the academy, non-white vegans have, and are,
producing epistemologies that barely hit the 14 radars of popular
media and scholarly literature that are represented in the pro-vegan
organizations and academic literature. African American vegan and holistic health
activist, Queen Afua, published Sacred Woman: A Guide to Healing the Feminine Body, Mind, and Spirit in
2000. Neither an engagement with white male centered animal rights nor the traditional Western feminist
ethics of care tradition, Sacred Woman speaks directly to the collective Black female experiences in the
USA (Afua 2000). In 2009, African-American vegan chef, Bryant Terry, published Vegan Soul Kitchen, a
cookbook to reclaim soul food. Terry hoped his healthier vegan soul food would combat Black health
disparities (2009). In 2010, I published the edited volume Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak
on Food, Identity, Health and Society (Harper 2010). It was the first book of its kind to
capture the experience of Black female vegans in the USA. In my introduction, I
explain that in a country in which racialized-sexualized hierarchies of power are the norm, Black
women will collectively approach vegan philosophy in a way that is
significantly different from the standard white middle-class vegan
(Harper 2010). That same year, Tracye McQuirters By Any Greens Necessary vegan guidebook was
published, specifically acknowledging the politics of what it means to be a Black female in the USA (2010).
Black American vegan activist DJ Cavem Moetavation, released
In 2010,
hip-hop vegan album Teacher's Lounge. The album fuses critical
issues of structural racism and poverty, with hip-hop philosophy and
pedagogies, to produce an alternative vegan epistemology in
response to the mainstream. Similarly, Supa Nova Slom released his book The Remedy
(2010) to specifically address the "ill" health and food status of brown and Black hip-hop generation. Even
though they are not books, online sites such as Decolonial Food for Thought, Vegans of Color (2012), and
Food Empowerment Project (2011) are deeply critical pro-vegan websites that guide people 15 through
veganism while engaging with the fact that racism, Eurocentrism, white supremacy, neoliberalism, and
colonialism have all deeply affected the lived experiences of most people living in the global North. The
above-mentioned literature, websites, and musical media all arise from lived experiences and document a
particular cultural expression just like the work of Singer, Adams, and Donovan. However, what is
noteworthy is that they mostly exist outside of the mainstream
academic canon. This is because they disrupt the fundamental
tenets of the traditional canon in pro-vegan and animal liberation
studies which assumes that everyone has a white, middle class, and
global North relationship with food and animals (Deckha 2012; Nocella 2012).
This new race-conscious canon of veganism acknowledges that
veganism cannot be post-racial. For this canon, decolonial politics
and resistance against the value system of Eurocentric whiteness
are fundamentally rooted in, if not central to, their food and
nutritional activism. In addition, these alternative vegan scholars and activists reflect a more democratized access to
food and health knowledge. That means this knowledge is more easily accessible via the medium of music, nonacademic writing, and online
social media tools. The next section will provide my chosen methodologies to engage in critical race material analysis of the three vegan food
guides. Methodologies Racial Formation and Critical Studies of Race This dissertation will be drawing from the canon of racial studies that
understand race to be a social construction with political, geographical, and economic consequences. I will not be drawing from the canon that
traditionally thought race to be biological (Tucker 2002). Nor will I be drawing from the modern theories that came out of the Chicago School of
sociology. These 16 theories promoted the idea that racial assimilation would achieve equality for non-whites (Omi and Winant 1994). Critical
Race Studies of the 1970s emerged from many, but I will focus on the dominant influence of two critical thinkers: DuBois and Frantz Fanon.
The sociology of race during DuBois's era was still very much produced through a white male supremacist lens, but DuBois began to question
the fundamentals of racial study itself. During the early part of the twentieth century, DuBois began studying the studier (white male
sociologists) and the objectivity they espoused as authority to speak about the racial problems. At the heart of Du Boiss critical race
theory, then, was a critical theorya critique of theory itself. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois formulated the problem succinctly as a failure
on the part of the theorists to study the problems of racialized people instead of reducing such peoples to the problems themselves. (Gordon
1999: 24) In the mid twentieth century, Frantz Fanon (2004 and 2008) helped to lay the foundation for critical race discourse within an era of
global decolonization. Taking a Freudian psychoanalytical approach to anti-colonialism and decolonization, Fanon addressed the collective
emotional and mental processes of colonized peoples of African descent living in white colonies. Fanons constant reference to trauma and
This Fanonian
psychological scarring is one of the most provocative and innovative aspects of his scholarship (2004 and 2008).

strain of thought significantly influenced the direction of creating a

post-structural approach to the phenomenon of race for the later
half of the twentieth century. Post-structuralists understand that one cannot study
phenomenon in a vacuum. Instead, one must interrogate how discursive structures and processes
construct and constitute particular phenomenon. Such an analytical approach to phenomenon of race
CRT
would lead to the establishment of Critical Race Theory (referred to as CRT). 17 In the 1980s,
scholarship contested the American myth that the American legal
system, state, and national policies treat all of its citizens fairly and
without racial discrimination (Williams 1991; Bell 1992 ; Crenshaw 1995; Delgado 1995;
Bell 1996). CRT asserts that race still does matter, despite a post-Civil Rights era. Racism is so
deeply embedded in the fabric of American society that it is made
invisible in a society that professes meritocracy and colorblindness
(Chapman 2010). Most notably, CRT argues that the law is not neutral and that it serves to maintain the
interests of neoliberal whiteness (Bell 1996; Lipsitz 2006). In 1986, introduced to the canon of CRT was the
theory of racial formation, which is a Sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created,
inhabited, transformed, and destroyed[R]acial formation is a process of historically situated projects in
which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized. Next we link racial formation to
the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled. (Omi and Winant 1994:56)
Racial formation theory creates a better understanding of racism as
well as other inequalities such as classism, sexism, and nationalism
that are linked. Social structure and cultural representation are both
implicit in racial formation and inextricably connected. Racial
projects do the ideological work of making these links. A racial
project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or
explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and
redistribute resources along particular racial lines (Omi and Winant 1994:56)
Integral to this dissertation is how resources are extracted and
unevenly distributed along particular racial line, and within the food
commodity chain. How are they commoditized, and how do racial projects, such as neoliberal
whiteness, configure who has the privilege to consume vegan commodities
and who must be exploited to harvest and produce them?

The critique is obsessed with the politics of purity that

creates fascism
Staudenmeir 5 (Peter Staudenmeir, human rights advocate and philospher, THE
AMBIGUITIES OF ANIMAL RIGHTS, January 1, 2005, http://www.social-
ecology.org/2005/01/ambiguities-of-animal-rights/)

The unexamined cultural prejudices embedded deep within animal rights thinking carry political
implications that are unavoidably elitist . A consistent animal rights stance, after all, would
require many aboriginal peoples to abandon their sustainable livelihoods and lifeways
completely. Animal rights has no reasonable alternative to offer to communities like the
Inuit, whose very existence in their ecological niche is predicated on hunting animals. An animal rights viewpoint can only look down
disdainfully on those peasant societies in Latin America and elsewhere that depend on small-scale animal husbandry as an integral part of their diet, as well as pastoralists in Africa and Asia who rely centrally upon

These are not matters of taste but of

animals to maintain traditional subsistence economies that long predate the colonial imposition of capitalism.

sustainability and survival. Forsaking such practices makes no ecological or social sense, and would be tantamount
to eliminating these distinctive societies themselves, all for the sake of assimilation to
standards of morality and nutrition propounded by middle-class westerners convinced of
their own rectitude. Too many animal rights proponents forget that their belief system is
essentially a European-derived construct, and neglect the practical repercussions of
universalizing it into an unqualified principle of human moral conduct as such.13 Nowhere is this combination of parochialism
and condescension more apparent than in the animus against hunting. Many animal rights
enthusiasts cannot conceive of hunting as anything other than a brutal and senseless activity
undertaken for contemptible reasons. Heedless of their own prejudices, they take hunting for an expression of speciesist prejudice. What animal rights theorists malign as sport hunting often provides a significant

Even indigenous communities engaged in

seasonal supplement to the diets of rural populations who lack the luxuries of tempeh and seitan.

conspicuously low-impact traditional hunting have been harassed and vilified by animal rights activists. The
campaign against seal hunting in the 1980s, for example, prominently targeted Inuit practices.14 In the late 1990s, the Makah people of Neah Bay in the northwestern United States tried to re-establish their
communal whale hunt, harvesting exactly one gray whale in 1999. The Makah hunt was non-commercial, for subsistence purposes, and fastidiously humane; they chose a whale species that is not endangered and
went to considerable lengths to accommodate anti-whaling sentiment. Nevertheless, when the Makah attempted to embark on their first expedition in 1998, they were physically confronted by the Sea Shepherd
Society and other animal protection organizations, who occupied Neah Bay for several months. For these groups, animal rights took precedence over human rights. Many of these animal advocates embellished their
pro-whale rhetoric with hoary racist stereotypes about native people and allied themselves with unreconstructed apologists for colonial domination and dispossession.15 Such examples are far from rare. In fact,
animal rights sentiment has frequently served as an entry point for rightwing positions into left movements. Because much of the left has generally been reluctant to think clearly and critically about nature, about
biological politics, and about ethical complexity, this unsettling affinity between animal rights and rightwing politics an affinity which has a lengthy historical pedigree remains a serious concern. While hardly

most militant proponents of animal liberation also espousing

typical of the current as a whole, it is not unusual to find the

staunch opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and other purportedly unnatural

phenomena. The Hardline tendency, which in the 1990s spread from North America to Central Europe, is perhaps the most striking example.16 But the connections to reactionary politics extend
substantially further. The recent Russian youth group Moving Together, an ultranationalist and sexually repressive organization, has made animal protection one of the central planks in its platform, while the Swiss
Association Against Animal Factories wallows in antisemitic propaganda. In Denmark, the only party with a designated portfolio for animal concerns is the anti-immigrant Danish Peoples Party, while the far-right
British National Party boasts of its commitment to animal rights. The contemporary neofascist scene in Europe and North America has shown an abiding interest in the theme as well; over the last decade many

this widespread overlap between

National Revolutionaries and Third Positionists have become actively involved in animal rights campaigns.17 Although

animal liberation politics and the xenophobic and authoritarian right may seem
incongruous, it has played a prominent role in the history of fascism since the early
twentieth century. Many fascist theoreticians prided themselves on their movements
steadfast rejection of anthropocentrism, and the German variant of fascism in particular frequently tended toward an animal rights position. Nazi
biology textbooks insisted that there exist no physical or psychological characteristics
which would justify a differentiation of mankind from the animal world.18 Hitler himself
was zealously committed to animal welfare causes, and was a vegetarian and opponent of vivisection. His lieutenant Goebbels declared: The Fuhrer is a
convinced vegetarian, on principle. His arguments cannot be refuted on any serious basis. They are totally unanswerable.19 Other leading Nazis, like Rudolf Hess, were even stricter in their vegetarianism, and the
party promoted raw fruits and nuts as the ideal diet, much like the most scrupulous vegans today. Himmler excoriated hunting and required the top ranks of the SS to follow a vegetarian regimen, while Goering

more important are the animal rights policies

banned animal experimentation. The list of pro-animal predilections on the part of top Nazis is long, but

implemented by the Nazi state and the underlying ideology that justified them. Within a few months of taking
power, the Nazis passed animal rights laws that were unprecedented in scale and that explicitly affirmed the moral status of animals

independent of any human interest. These decrees stressed the duty to avoid causing pain to animals and established extremely detailed and concrete guidelines for
interactions with animals. According to a leading scholar of Nazi animal legislation, the Animal Protection Law of 1933 was probably the strictest in the world.20 A 1939 compendium of Nazi animal protection
statutes proclaimed that the German people have always had a great love for animals and have always been conscious of our strong ethical obligations toward them. The Nazi laws insisted on the right which
animals inherently possess to be protected in and of themselves. 21 These were not mere philosophical postulates; the ordinances closely regulated the permissible treatment of domestic and wild animals and

The official reasoning behind these decrees was

designated a variety of protected species while restricting commercial and scientific use of animals.

remarkably similar to latter-day animal rights arguments. To the German, animals are not merely creatures in the organic sense, but
creatures who lead their own lives and who are endowed with perceptive facilities, who feel pain and experience joy, observed Goering in 1933 while announcing a new anti-vivisection law. 22 While contemporary
animal liberation activists would certainly do well to acquaint themselves with this ominous record of past and present collusion by animal advocates with fascists, the point of reviewing these facts is not to suggest a

the historical pattern is unmistakable and demands

necessary or inevitable connection between animal rights and fascism.23 But

explanation. What helps to account for this consistent intersection of apparently contrary worldviews is a
common preoccupation with purity. The presumption that true virtue requires repudiating
ostensibly unclean practices such as meat eating furnishes much of the heartfelt vehemence behind animal rights discourse. When disconnected from an articulated critical social
perspective and a comprehensive ecological sensibility, this abstentionist version of puritan politics can easily slide into a

distorted vision of ethnic, sexual, or ideological purity. A closely related trope is the recurrent insistence within animal rights thinking on a
unitary approach to moral questions. Rightly rejecting the inherited dualism of humanity and non-human nature,

animal rights philosophers wrongly collapse the two into one undifferentiated whole, thus
substituting monism for dualism (and neglecting most of the natural world in the process). But regressive dreams of purity and
oneness carry no emancipatory potential; their political ramifications range from trite to
dangerous . In the wrong hands, a simplistic critique of speciesism yields liberation for neither people
nor animals, but merely the same rancid antihumanism that has always turned radical
hopes into their reactionary opposite.

The focus on the human/animal divide misses the mark.

Rather, we must look at the thingification of nature

Smith 2014 (Andrea [ is Associate Professor of Media and

Cultural Studies at UC Riverside.] Humanity Through
Work, Borderlands, VOLUME 13 NUMBER 1, 2014, d/l:
https://www.academia.edu/8221926/Humanity_Through_W
ork) //jl

The divide then that is created in part through work presumes that
nature has the status of being a thing. Consequently, any analysis
of raciality must concern itself not only with the human/animal
divide but the thingification of nature itself. For indigenous peoples
to be removed from their land bases, land first has to be thingified.
As Dian Million notes, our typical paradigm for articulating indigenous
struggles as a land-based struggle may itself be a result of this
colonial discourse. That is, under our current legal system, the only
way indigenous peoples can intervene when there is colonial
encroachment on indigenous lands is to argue, its not your land; its
our land. One cannot argue that land should not be owned by
anyone. But as I have discussed elsewhere, many Native scholars and activists argue that land should
not be a commodity that can be owned and controlled by one group of people (Smith 2012). Rather, all
Consequently, the
peoples must exist in relationship with all of creation and care for it.
principles of indigenous nationhood that emerge from these
relationships are principles of inclusivity, mutual respect, and
interrelationality with all other nations. However, contends Million, the term land
itself does not speak to the manner in which indigenous peoples have relationships with all of creation, the
entirety of the biosphere. Thus,the term land itself truncates what these
relations signify in order to facilitate the commodification of a piece
of creation that is separated from the rest of the biosphere (Personal
conversation, November 17, 2012). While Native peoples are thingified as a
natural resource, they are simultaneously promised the possibility
of humanity if they mature out of their status as children. And yet as will
be discussed in the next section, they never effectively mature into full humanity
under settler colonialism.

Perm: do both as a means of establishing a paradox

Perm Solves a mix of critical reflection and calculative
thought opens a paradox that solves the alternative

McWhorter, 92 (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeast Missouri State

University (Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth, ed. by Ladelle McWhorter)//GUYWe do
not support the ableist language within this card

Heidegger's work is a call to reflect, to think in some way other than

calculatively, technologically, pragmatically. Once we begin to move with and
into Heidegger's call and begin to see our trying to seize control
and solve problems as itself a problematic approach, if we still
believe that thinking's only real purpose is to function as a prelude
to action, we who attempt to think will twist within the agonizing
grip of paradox, feeling nothing but frustration, unable to conceive of ourselves as anything but
paralyzed. However, as so many peoples before us have known, paradox IS not only a trap;
it is also a scattering point and passageway. Paradox invites
examination of its own constitution (hence of the patterns of thinking within which it
occurs) and thereby breaks a way of thinking open, revealing the
configurations of power that propel it and hold it on track. And thus
it makes possible the dissipation of that power and the deflection of
thinking into new paths and new possibilities.

Perm: Affirm both simultaneously: Perm is always in flux,

asymmetrically becoming, a radical third way that
disrupts the binarity of the 1AC and K
Deleuze 08 (Gilles, [Prolific Continental Philosopher and
Clinical Pyschologist], Dialogues II, Pgs. 130-132) //DF
The status of the other type of lines seems to be completely different. The segments here are not the
same, proceeding by thresholds, constituting becomings, blocs of becoming, marking continuums of
intensity, combinations of fluxes. The abstract machines here are not the same, they are mutating and not
overcoding, marking their mutations at each threshold and each combination. The plane is not the
same_plane of consistence or of immanence which tears from forms particles between which there are
now only relationships a( speed and slowness, and tears from subjects affects which now only carry out
individuations by 'hecceity'. The binary machines no longer engage with this real, not because the
dominant segment would change (a particular class, a particular sex ... ), nor because mixtures like
molecular lines make
bisexuality or class- mixing would be imposed: on the contrary, because the
fluxes of deterritorialization shoot between the segments, fluxes which no
longer belong to one or to the other, but which constitute an asymmetrical
becoming of the two, molecular sexuality which is no longer that of a man or of a woman,
molecular masses which no longer have the outline of a class, molecular races like little lines which no
longer respond to the great molar oppositions.
It is certainly no longer a matter of a
synthesis of the two, of a synthesis of 1 and 2, but of a third which always
comes from elsewhere and disturbs the binarity of the two, not so much
inserting itself in their opposition as in their complementarity. It is not a matter
of adding a new segment on to the preceding segments on the line (a third sex, a third class, a third age),
but of tracing another line in the middle of the segmentary line, in the middle
of the segments, which carries them off according to the variable speeds and slownesses in a
movement of flight or of flux. To continue the use of geographical terms: imagine that between the West
and the East a certain segmentarity is introduced, opposed in a binary machine, arranged in the State
apparatuses, overcoded by an abstract machine as the sketch of a World Order. It is then from North to
South that the destabilization takes place, as Giscard d'Estaing said gloomily, and a stream erodes a path,
even if it is a shallow stream, which brings everything into play and diverts the plane of organization. A
Corsican here, elsewhere a Palestinian, a plane hijacker, a tribal upsurge, a feminist movement, a Green
ecologist, a Russian dissident there will always be someone to rise up to the south. Imagine the Greeks
and the Trojans as two opposed segments, face to face: but look, the Amazons arrive, they begin by
overthrowing the Trojans, so that the Greeks cry, 'The Amazons are with us', but they turn against the
Greeks, attacking them from behind with the violence of a torrent. This is how Kleist's Penthesilea begins.
The great ruptures, the great oppositions, are always negotiable; but not the little crack, the imperceptible
ruptures which come from the south. We say 'south' without attaching any importance to this. We talk of
the south in order to mark a direction which is different from that of the line of segments. But everyone
has his south - it doesn't matter where it is -that is, his line of slope or flight. Nations, classes, sexes have
their south. Godard: what counts is not merely the two opposed camps on the great line where they
confront each other, but also the frontier, through which everything passes and shoots on a broken
molecular line of a different orientation. May 1968 was an explosion of such a molecular line, an irruption
of the Amazons, a frontier which traced in unexpected line, drawing along the segments like torn-off blocs
which have lost their bearings.
Bataille
 Block
1. The belief that humans can act in positive ways
already exists in the status-quo, which means (a)
were not the cause of it so you dont reject us; and
(b) that a neg ballot cant solve since its just the
status-quo.

2. Even if human nature is evil we must discriminate

between what can and cannot be tolerated in order
to produce any form of change or otherwise the
intolerable will only grow

Marcuse 1965 (Herbert [In 1952 he [sie] began a

university teaching career as a political theorist, first at
Columbia and Harvard, then at Brandeis from 1954 to
1965, and finally (already retirement-age), at the
University of California, San Diego. his [here] critiques of
capitalist society (especially his [here] 1955 synthesis of
Marx and Freud, Eros and Civilization, and his [here] 1964
book One-Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns
of the leftist student movement in the 1960s. he [sie] had
many speaking engagements in the US and Europe in the
late 1960s and in the 1970s] Repressive Tolerance, d/l
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressi
vetolerance.htm)
Within the affluent democracy, the affluent discussion prevails, and within the
established framework, it is tolerant to a large extent. All points of view can be heard: the
Communist and the Fascist, the Left and the Right, the white and the Negro, the crusaders for armament and for
disarmament. Moreover, in endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same
respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with
This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by the
education, truth with falsehood.

democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of

the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore,
all contesting opinions must be submitted to 'the people' for its deliberation and
choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the
people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic
In the
information, and that, on this. basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.

contemporary period, the democratic argument for abstract tolerance tends to be

invalidated by the invalidation of the democratic process itself. The liberating force of
democracy was the chance it gave to effective dissent, on the individual as well as social scale, its openness to
The
qualitatively different forms of government, of culture, education, work--of the human existence in general.

toleration of free discussion and the equal right of opposites was to define and clarify
the different forms of dissent: their direction, content, prospect. But with the
concentration of economic and political power and the integration of opposites in a
society which uses technology as an instrument of domination, effective dissent is
blocked where it could freely emerge; in the formation of opinion, in information and
communication, in speech and assembly. Under the rule of monopolistic media--themselves the mere
instruments of economic and political power--a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are
predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society. This is, prior to all expression and communication, a
matter of semantics: the blocking of effective dissent, of the recognition of that which is not of the Establishment which
The meaning of words is rigidly stabilized.
begins in the. language that is publicized and administered.

Rational persuasion, persuasion to the opposite is all but precluded. The avenues of
entrance are closed to the meaning of words and ideas other than the established
one--established by the publicity of the powers that be, and verified in their practices.
Other words can be spoken and heard, other ideas can be expressed, but, at the
massive scale of the conservative majority (outside such enclaves as the intelligentsia), they are
immediately 'evaluated' (i.e. automatically understood) in terms of the public language--a
language which determines 'a priori' the direction in which the thought process
moves. Thus the process of reflection ends where it started: in the given conditions
and relations. Self-validating, the argument. of the discussion repels the contradiction because the antithesis is
redefined in terms of the thesis. For example, thesis: we work for peace; antithesis: we prepare

for war (or even: we wage war); unification of opposites; preparing for war is working
for peace. Peace is redefined as necessarily, in the prevailing situation, including preparation for war (or even war)
and in this Orwellian form, the meaning of the word 'peace' is stabilized. Thus, the basic vocabulary of the
Orwellian language operates as a priori categories of understanding : preforming all
content. These conditions invalidate the logic of tolerance which involves the rational
development of meaning and precludes the 'closing of meaning. Consequently,
persuasion through discussion and the equal presentation of opposites (even where it is
really, equal) easily lose their liberating force as factors of understanding and learning;

they are far more likely to strengthen the established thesis and to repel the
alternatives.

3. Perm: Do the plan and then the alternative. If the

perm can overcome residual links or the alternative
isnt strong enough to overcome the status-quo.
Permutation is also net-beneficial since it ensures
the universe is safe before changing our mindsets
and understanding the world as per the K. Absent
plan, theres no chance for their alternative.
4. Perm: Do the plan and the non-competitive parts of
the alternative.
Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary
differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)
The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or

oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking

Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question

of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
which is to say,
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.

5. Attempting to establish what constitutes human

nature is heteronormative

Rodger Lancaster 2003 The Trouble with Nature, d/l:

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rlancast/Trouble_Nature
Concurrent with the concluding stages of The Gender/Sexuality Reader, and over the course of the 1990s, I
We're constantly
engaged in a long-term research project on representations of sex in science.
told that scientists have gained a new sophistication, that genetics
has crossed some sort of conceptual threshold, and that biology now
enjoys a new relationship with nature. This may be so, but if you see the world
from where I live, it is clear that understandings of biology's relationship to
gender, sexuality, and human nature in general have actually
regressed -- dramatically -- in the long shadow of the Human Genome
Project, and perhaps especially since the publication of Simon LeVay's "gay brain" study at the
beginning of the 1990s.
contrary claims about the
My new book, The Trouble with Nature, thus tracks the flow of
nature of men, women, and sexual longings: from popular culture to the culture of
science, and back again through mass media outlets like the New York Times, Newsweek, and prime-time
sit-coms. It recounts the checkered history of scientific theories about sex to
show how reductivist explanations for sexual orientation lean on
essentialist ideas about gender, which are in turn party to shifting
institutional rubrics in changing race/class formations.
Let me say right off: I feel like I've been wading through a toxic waste dump of
ideas, pressing little exhibits in my scrapbook like Doris Lessing on a bad day. The pages of recent
works in evolutionary theory, no less than the pages of the New York Times science news,
are strewn with examples of what anthropologist Alfred Kroeber used to call " fake universals."
These fake universals are usually attributed to the supposed
legacies of male hunting and female gathering -- a convenient
attribution, since the "evidence" mobilized to support said theory
consists entirely of untestable but plausible-sounding stories about
what the lives of Adam Hunter and Eve Gatherer might have been
like.
Cut to chase: No doubt egotistically, I've nominated myself for the task of slaying that evil dragon,
the modern spawn of sociobiology, who's wreaked
evolutionary psychology --
havoc and destruction across the public sphere for the better part of
a decade. I don't claim a great deal of originality in my critique of the bioreductivist nonscience of
human nature. My invocation of Kroeber gives a sense of the venerable heritage of some of the
I've tried to round up basic lessons from cultural
counterarguments I invoke.
anthropology to contest a set of silly but ubiquitous notions: the
idea that male and female are "opposites" that attract; the premise
that heterosexuality is the default condition of human nature ; the
claim that the nuclear family is the basic building block of all human
societies; the idea that our political options are constricted by a
closed human nature.
The Trouble with Nature is a book of mockery, really, and its punch line couldn't be more transparent.
Ideas about a "hardwired" and immutable human nature circulate at
a decidedly odd moment in human history: a period marked by
pitched struggles around the politics of sex, by dramatic changes in
gender roles alongside an unprecedented normalization of lesbian
and gay relationships, and by the broad dissemination of a queer
aesthetic in popular and commercial culture -- a time, in short, when not much
really seems certain about the nature of men, women, and others.
This ongoing crisis of heteronormative family values is in part the
happy legacy of the new social movements (feminism and gay liberation). But it
is also the result of changes in what Gramsci once glossed "the institutions
related to sex," as these are integrated into a larger political economy. It is not clear that
postfordist capitalism still needs stable nuclear families, a clear
sexual division of labor, gay invisibility, and all the other hallmark
traits of heteronormativity -- or rather, this is precisely what is in
contest today.

6. Heterosexism results in violence and war

Tatchell 5/26/1999 (Peter [Journalist & Gay Activist]

Homophobia As a Weapon of War, Outcast No 2, d/l:
http://www.petertatchell.net/international/homophobia.ht
m)
the cultural war against queers - and
The military war against Slobodan Milosevic may be over, but

between queers continues. In the nations of the former Yugoslavia, peace for lesbian and gay
people remains, at best, ambiguous and uncertain, both politically and
personally. Sex, love and friendship between Serbs, Kosovars, Bosnians and Croats is, to say the least, difficult -
even dangerous. Ethnic hatred still runs deep and the memory of recent genocide lingers vividly. Gay life in the Balkans is
Guns are more common than condoms. Lovers may be
not as we, in Britain, know it.
military torturers. Cruising is a minefield of ethnic animosity and violence ,
When Kosovar and Bosnian Muslims are circumcised and Serbs are not, picking up the wrong man can
have frightening consequences. In his book, Serbian Diaries (GMP, 1996), a gay Belgrade university lecturer, writing under the
pseudonym Boris Davidovich, tells the tale of a friend, Branko, who was nearly murdered by a member of the Serb special forces. During the
conflict in Bosnia, Branko met the soldier while visiting his brother at the Belgrade Army Hospital. After wild, passionate sex, the Serb special
forces agent suddenly noticed Branko was circumcised and went beserk. Grabbing a gun from under the pillow, he put it to Branko's head and
threatened to blow out his brains, accusing him of being "Muslim scum". It was only Branko's quick-witted ability to convince him otherwise
that saved his life - such are the perils of gay sex in the fratricidal strife of the ex-Yugoslavia. As we saw on the battlefields of Kosovo - and
the jingoistic, hysterical patriotism of wartime can turn routine
previously Bosnia

homophobia into something even more sinister and evil. The Balkan bloodbath
was no exception. Home-sadism became a weapon of war. While the rape of
women was widely reported in the press, the rape of male prisoners passed
almost without mention. Why?
The widespread sex abuse of men has been publicly acknowledged by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson. What
motivated journalists to suppress information about these monstrous sex crimes? The media did, after all, report every other inhumanity with
a reasonable degree of honesty and impartiality.
Accounts collected by UN observers from ethnic Albanian refugees and former detainees confirm that many male prisoners were raped at gun-
point and sexually tortured under interrogation by Serb forces in Kosovo. In some conquered villages, Serb soldiers rounded up the men and
boys, stripped them naked, and forced the boys to fellate their fathers, and the fathers to sodomise their sons. These are the rarley reported
homophobic humiliations of the terror in the Balkans. The Belgrade-based gay rights movements, Arcadia and the Campaign Against
Homophobia, say the Nato bombing strengthened Serbian nationalism, which is notorious for its strong streak of anti-gay machismo.
There is no place for queers in the nationalist vision. Homosexuals are
dismissed from the Yugoslav armed forces on the grounds of "abnormality". Serbia's patriotic hero is the virile, masculine soldier
defending his family and homeland. Those perceived to be weak, effeminate and unmanly are

vilified as traitors and fifth columnists. During the war, some Serb television stations denounced
homosexuality as a "perversion" and "disorder" that is alien to Serbian culture, accusing gays of subverting national defence. Western
governments, such as the British, were condemned by sections of the state-controlled press as "homosexual", and homosexuality was
manipulation of anti-gay sentiment for propaganda
caricatured as a "western disease". This

purposes led to a sharp rise in homophobic violence and police harassment.

"Anyone who does not fit the standard model of the strong man defending his
native land until the last drop of blood, is a possible victim of discrimination,
ranging from verbal insults to physical violence and even murder" , according to Dusan
Maljkovic, a 23 year old gay activist in Belgrade. He reports police raids on gay venues and cruising places, and the compilation of police files
on known or suspected homosexuals. Even worse, the Serbian version of skinhead gangs - the dizelasi - are targeting gays in their violent
attacks on "social decadence". Homophobia is also a political weapon. The Civic Alliance of Serbia is the only
movement that has spoken out in support of lesbian and gay human rights. Most other parties and factions use allegations of homosexuality to
discredit their opponents. Anti-war students have denounced President Slobodan Milosevic with the chant "Slobo is a faggot". The rightist
deputy prime minister, Vojislav Seselj, is pilloried by left- wingers as the "Serbian Ernst Rohm" (a reference to the gay Nazi chief).
Extreme nationalist-fascist parties advocate the "extermination" of gays to
cure the "homosexual sickness". During the western bombing raids, anti-Nato
demonstrators in Belgrade carried placards with the slogans: "Clinton, Blair &
Schroeder = Fags".

7. If there is a human nature that nature is to tend

toward ethical engagement, not evil

Noam Chomsky 1998 On Human Nature, d/l:

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199808--.htm
CHOMSKY: Not even the most extreme postmodernist can seriously argue that there is no such thing as
human nature. They may argue that the exact properties of human nature are difficult to substantiate --
this is certainly correct. However, it is impossible to coherently argue that an intrinsic, universal human
nature does not exist. This amounts to the belief that the next human zygote conceived might just as well
develop into a worm or a crab as a human being. Postmodernists might limit their assertion to denying any
effect of human nature on our mental make-up -- our values, our knowledge, our wants, etc. This also
makes no sense. The postmodernist will argue that a child growing up in New York will develop a certain
way of thinking, and if that child had grown up amongst Amazon tribespeople she would have developed a
we must then ask how a child could
completely different way of thinking. This is true. But
develop these different consciousnesses. In whatever environment it
finds itself, the child will mentally construct a rich and complex
culture on the basis of the extremely scattered and limited
phenomena it is exposed to. That consideration tells us (in advance of any detailed
knowledge) that there must be an extraordinary directive and organisational component to the mind that
We can begin to see human nature in terms of certain
is internal.
capacities to develop certain mental traits. I think we can go further
than this and begin to discover universal aspects of these mental
traits which are determined by human nature. I think we can find this in
the area of morality. For example, not long ago I talked to people in
Amazon tribes and I took it for granted that they have the same
conception of vice and virtue as I do. It is only through sharing these
values that we were able to interact -- talking about real problems such as being
forced out of the jungle by the state authorities. I believe I was correct to assume this: we had no problem
communicating although we were as remote as is possible culturally.
QUESTION: Are you suggesting everyone agrees about the nature of vice and virtue?
CHOMSKY: In fact I think they probably have a very high measure of
agreement. One strong bit of evidence for this is that everyone -- a
Genghis Khan, Himmler, Bill Gates -- creates stories of themselves where they
interpret their actions as working for the benefit of human beings.
Even at the extreme levels of depravity, the Nazis did not boast that
they wanted to kill Jews, but gave crazed justifications -- even that they
were acting in 'self-defence'. It is very rare for people to justify their actions by
saying 'I'm doing this to maximise my own benefit and I don't care
what happens to anybody else'. That would be pathological.

8. There is no essential human nature without nurture

Sara Gable d/l 12/127/2009 [State Extension Specialist,

Human Development] Nature, Nurture and Early Brain
Development, d/l:
http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.asp
x?P=GH6115

For some time, we have known that development results from the
dynamic interplay of nature and nurture. From birth on, we grow and
learn because our biology is programmed to do so and because our
social and physical environment provides stimulation. New research
on early brain development provides a wonderful opportunity to
examine how nature and nurture work together to shape human
development. Through the use of sophisticated technology, scientists
have discovered how early brain development and caregiver-child
relationships interact to create a foundation for future growing and
learning.
Baudrillard
 2AC
1. The affs relationship to death is one of up-front
recognition and humility. By banishing the specter of
death, they just make the sarcophagus invisible,
turning confrontation into obsession

Dollimore 98
(, Sociology U Sussex , Jonathan, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, pg. 221)

Jean Baudrillardpresents the argument for the existence of a denial of death in its most
extreme form. For him, this denial is not only deeply symptomatic of contemporary reality, but represents an insidious and
pervasive form of ideological control. His account depends heavily upon a familiar critique of the Enlightenment's intellectual,
cultural and political legacy. This critique has become influential in recent cultural theory, though Baudrillard's version of it
is characteristically uncompromising and sweeping, and more reductive than most. The main
claim is that Enlightenment rationality is an instrument not of freedom and democratic empowerment but, on the contrary, of
repression and violence. Likewise with the Enlightenment's secular emphasis upon a common humanity; for Baudrillard this resulted
in what he calls 'the cancer of the Human' - far from being an inclusive category of emancipation, the idea of a universal humanity
made possible the demonizing of difference and the repressive privileging of the normal: the 'Human' is from the outset the institution
of its structural double, the 'Inhuman*. This is all it is: the progress of Humanity and Culture are simply the chain of discriminations
with which to brand 'Others' with inhumanity, and therefore with nullity, {p. 125) Baudrillard acknowledges here the influence of
Michel Foucault, but goes on to identify something more fundamental and determining than anything identified by Foucault: at the
very core of the 'rationality' of our culture, however, is an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of
madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death,
(p. 12.6) So total is this exclusion that, 'today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly;
nothing else is as offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy' (p. 126). He insists that the attempt
to abolish death (especially through capitalist accumulation), to separate it from life, leads only to a culture
permeated by death - 'quite simply, ours is a culture of death' (p. 127). Moreover, it is the repression of death which
facilitates 'the repressive socialization of life'; all existing agencies of repression and control take root in
the disastrous separation of death from life (p. 130). And, as if that were not enough, our very
concept of reality has its origin in the same separation or disjunction (pp. 130-33). Modern culture is
contrasted with that of the primitive and the savage, in which, allegedly, life and death were
not separated; also with that of the Middle Ages, where, allegedly, there was still a
collectivist, 'folkloric and joyous' conception of death. This and many other aspects of the
argument are questionable, but perhaps the main objection to Baudrillard's case is his view of
culture as a macro-conspiracy conducted by an insidious ideological prime-mover whose
agency is always invisibly at work (rather like God). Thus (from just one page), the political economy
supposedly ^intends* to eliminate death through accumulation; and 'our whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate life and
death' {p. 147; my emphases). What those like Baudrillard find interesting about death is not the old conception of it as a pre-cultural
constant which diminishes the significance of all cultural achievement, but, on the contrary, its function as a culturally relative - which
is to say culturally formative - construct. And, if cultural relativism is on the one hand about relinquishing the comfort of the absolute,
for those like Baudrillard it is also about the new strategies of intellectual mastery made possible by the very disappearance of the
absolute. Such modern accounts of how death is allegedly denied, of how death is the supreme
ideological fix, entail a new intensity and complexity of interpretation and decipherment, a kind of hermeneutics of
death. To reinterpret death as a deep effect of ideology, even to the extent of regarding it as
the most fundamental ideological adhesive of modern political repression and social control,
is simultaneously to denounce it as in some sense a deception or an illusion, and to bring it within the
domain of knowledge and analysis as never before. Death, for so long regarded as the ultimate reality - that
which disempowers the human and obliterates all human achievement, including the achievements of knowledge - now becomes the
object of a hugely empowering knowledge. Like omniscient seers, intellectuals like Baudrillard and Bauman
relentlessly anatomize and diagnose the modern (or post-modern) human condition in relation to
an ideology of death which becomes the key with which to unlock the secret workings of
Western culture in all its insidiousness. Baudrillard in particular applies his theory
relentlessly, steamrollering across the cultural significance of the quotidian and the
contingent. His is an imperialist, omniscient analytic, a perpetual act of reductive
generalization, a self-empowering intellectual performance which proceeds without
qualification and without any sense that something might be mysterious or inexplicable . As
such it constitutes a kind of interpretative, theoretical violence, an extreme but still
representative instance of how the relentless anatomizing and diagnosis of death in the
modern world has become a struggle for empowerment through masterful -i.e. reductive -
critique. Occasionally one wonders if the advocates of the denial-of-death argument are not
themselves in denial. They speak about death endlessly yet indirectly, analysing not death so much as our
culture's attitude towards it. To that extent it is not the truth of death but the truth of our culture that they seek. But, even as they
make death signify in this indirect way, it is still death that is compelling them to speak. And those
like Baudrillard and Bauman speak urgently, performing intellectually a desperate mimicry of
the omniscience which death denies. One senses that the entire modern enterprise of relativizing
death, of understanding it culturally and socially, may be an attempt to disavow it in the very act of
analysing and demystifying it. Ironically then, for all its rejection of the Enlightenment's
arrogant belief in the power of rationality, this analysis of death remains indebted to a
fundamental Enlightenment aspiration to mastery through knowledge. Nothing could be
more 'Enlightenment', in the pejorative sense that Baudrillard describes, than his own
almost megalomaniac wish to penetrate the truth of death, and the masterful controlling
intellectual subject which that attempt presupposes. And this may be true to an extent for all of us more or less
involved in the anthropological or quasi-anthropological accounts of death which assume that, by looking at how a culture handles
death, we disclose things about a culture which it does not know about itself. So what has been said of sex in the nineteenth century
may also be true of death in the twentieth: it has not been repressed so much as resignified in new,
complex and productive ways which then legitimate a never-ending analysis of it . It is
questionable whether the denial of death has ever really figured in our culture in the way
that Baudrillard and Bauman suggest. Of course, the ways of dealing with and speaking about death have changed hugely,
and have in some respects involved something like denial. But in
philosophical and literary terms there
has never been a denial of death.2 Moreover, however understood, the pre-modern period can
hardly be said to have been characterized by the 'healthy* attitude that advocates of the
denial argument often claim, imply or assume. In fact it could be said that we can begin to understand the vital
role of death in Western culture only when we accept death as profoundly, compellingly and irreducibly traumatic.

2. Our aff may contain an element of fear, but thats not

really the point its about embracing freedom
their search for an authentic relationship to mortality
recreates the worst kind of solipsism

Dollimore 98
(, Sociology U Sussex , Jonathan, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, pg. 221)

But freedom cannot embrace death. Despite taking so much from modern philosophers of death like Heidegger and
Kojeve, Sartre finally has to eliminate death from the finitude of being. He takes Heideggerian nothingness into self, making it the
basis of freedom, but he also privileges selfhood in a way which Heidegger emphatically did not, and resists
Heidegger's
embrace of death. Sartre knows that to take death so profoundly into being, as did Heidegger and Kojeve,
threatens the entire project of human freedom as praxis, which is the most important aspect of Sartre's
existentialism. Certainly, for Heidegger, authenticity did not entail praxis, and in his Letter on Humanism' he actually repudiated
Sartre's attempt to derive from his work a philosophical rationale for existential engagement; so far as Heidegger was concerned, such
engagement was only another version of inauthentic 'social' existence, a social evasion of the truth of Being. But was
Heidegger's own truth of Being ever more than a state of authenticity whose main objective is
obsessively to know or insist on itself as authentic? For all his talk of freedom, there remains in
Heidegger a sense in which authenticity remains a petrified sense of self , paralysed by the very effort
of concentrating on the profundity of Being, which always seems to be also a condition of
mystical impossibility: 'Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein* (Being and Time, p. 294). Not so for
Sartre. He recognizes the modern project whereby death is Snteriorizcd . . . humanized (and] individualized*, and that Heidegger gave
philosophical form to this process. On the face of it, this is an attractive development, since death as apparent limit on our freedom
is reconceptualized as a support of freedom {Being and Nothingness, pp. 532-3). But, against Heidegger, Sartre argues that death,
far from being the profound source of being and existential authenticity , is just a contingent
fact like birth, and this, far from being a limit, is what guarantees one's freedom. Heidegger's
entire account of death rests on an erroneous conflation of death and finitude ; finitude is
essentially internal to life and the grounds of our freedom - 'the very act of freedom is therefore the
assumption and creation of finitude. If I make myself, I make myself finite and hence my life is unique' - whereas
death is simply an external and factual limit of my subjectivity (pp. 546-7). Quite simply, 'It is absurd that we are born;
it is absurd that we die' (p. 547). This perhaps entails a fear of death, since 'to be dead is to be a prey for
the living': one is no longer in charge of one's own life; it is now in the hands of others, of the living (p. 543). It is true that
death haunts me at the very heart of each of my human projects, as their inevitable reverse side. But this reverse side
of death is just the end of my possibilities and, as such, 'it does not penetrate me. The
freedom which is my freedom remains total and infinite . . . Since death is always beyond
my subjectivity, there is no place for it in my subjectivity' (pp. 547-8).

3. The search for an authentic relationship to death

devalues life

Sanders 6
(Theresa, theology prof at Georgetown, Tenebrae: Holy Week after the Holocaust, googlebooks)

In her book Spirit of Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death, Edith Wyschogrod presents a history of how Western
philosophers have thought of the meaning of death and its relation to life. She explains that for the most part, death has
been viewed according to what she calls the authenticity paradigm. This paradigm is governed
by the assumption that a good death, even if not free of pain, is the measure of a good life .
The ultimate test of ones life, according to this model, is whether one meets the inevitability
of death with unflinching acceptance or with terror before the unknown. Wyschogrod offers two
examples of the authenticity paradigm, one ancient and one more modern. The first comes from Platos Phaedo, which records the
death of Socrates. According to the Phaedo, Socrates met his death not only with calm but with positive good
cheer, taking time to instruct his disciples and to offer them words of encouragement even as the hemlock neared his lips.
Because he had so thoroughly examined the nature of death while still alive , for him death held
neither surprise nor sting. Socrates was able to accept the possibility that death would mean sinking into non-existence, even as he
hoped that it might lead him to the freedom of the unimpaired soul, and the truth that is the goal of all philosophers. He
underwent a good death because of the thoughtfulness and courageous quality of his life. Wyschogrods second example
comes from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. For Rilke, she says, death is not so much a future event as it is a dimension of the
present. She explains that for the poet, Only by integrating death into the texture of life is an
authentic living and dying possible. In this view, life can only be experienced in its depths if
death is not only accepted but is allowed to illuminate each moment. And yet death does not
thereby become the victor over life. Instead, death is the very condition of life; it is what
makes the intensity of each moment possible and what makes each moment worth living. This point is crucial to Wyschogrods
argument, as she believes that it is what differentiates Rilkes situation from our own. For Rilke, she explains, there is a continuity that
binds the present and the future together. She cites the first of Rilkes Duino Elegies: True it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, /
to use no longer customs scarcely required, / not to interpret roses, and other things / that promise so much, in terms of a human
futureand to lay aside / even ones proper name like a broken toy. Even as the poem contemplates the
disruption between the cares of the living and the concerns of the dead, it asserts a continuity
between them. Explains Wyschogrod, For this reason the fundamental assumption, the hidden premise, which
undergirds this verse is the indestructability of an accustomed field of reference the things that promise
so much, customs scarcely acquired, roses, the name laid aside since these are the stuff through which any meaningful grasp of
the future comes about. However, says Wyschogrod, the possibility of anticipation, of looking forward to, is
precisely what has been called into question by the twentieth century and the advent of mass death.
The threat of annihilation made possible by nuclear holocaust overwhelms any poetic
holding-in-balance of life and death. We face, she observes, the prospect of wiping not only
ourselves but allearthly being out of existence. This possibility of pure annihilation opens up a
breach between our present and our future. In contemplation of mass destruction, we can no
longer imagine, as Rilke did, the dead gently laying aside their customs, their roses, and their names like so many broken toys.
We do not have the luxury of imagining individual souls parting reluctantly from those whom they leave
behind, and thus no one to weight the meaning of death with a counterbalancing
intensity of life. Concludes Wyschogrod, By destroying the system of meanings which rendered
death-accepting behavior possible, the effect of man-made mass death has undercut the
power of the authenticity paradigm which permitted mastery over death . What can we say, then,
about the Catholic admonition to remember that we are dust and that we will return to dust? Let us begin with what we cannot say.
We cannot simply comfort ourselves with the idea that death is a part of life , that is always
has been and always will be, and that our deaths will clear the way for the generation of new
life. Not only has the projection towards always been called into question, but the notion
that death contributes to life has been overshadowed by the possibility of the complete
annihilation of all life. Moreover, death as the origin of life has been given sinister meaning by the calculations of Nazism:
the use of human remains as fertilizer and stuffing for mattresses, among other things. Such economics turn imagery of the cycle of
life into mockery.

1. History d/a- Baudrillards analysis of simulacra so

misses the point that it makes easier the reign of
post-modern capital. His analysis covers up the
codes by which post-modern capital perpetuates
itself, allowing the logic of capital to always already
remain hidden from the eyes of theory.

Lock 97
Margaret Professor in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine and the Department of
Anthropology at McGill University, Decentering the Natural Body: Making Difference Matter
Configurations 5.2 (1997) 267-292

We are suggesting that Baudrillard took his analysis of the simulacrum up to the site of the new forms of capitalist exploitation
did not name the new sites of exploitation or
that have introjected class structure into postmodernity. But he
initiate critical examination of them. His failure in this regard places his work at great
risk. Historically it may contribute as much to the new forms of exploitation and their
cover-up as to their exposure and eventual overthrow. He cannot read or see Mickey
Mouse because Mickey stands in precisely the same relation to code creation as Baudrillards theory taken in its entirety. Ultimately,
both Baudrillard and Mickey Mouse insist on a generalized sense of the possible existence
not of codes, which would be subversive, but of The Code, a single framework, already in
existence, for everything. The Code, and correlatively the pretence of the absence of need for any new code, is the only
field for the putative free play of simulacra, or the appearance of a figure of lack which can be universally worshipped. If there were
a code, it truly would accommodate human life to the impossible, to death, to ultimate pleasure, to the real. If there were a code it
would be equally and freely available to all human beings. Group, class, status, category, would disappear or be rendered
insignificant. No wonder it is fervently desired by the prematurely Utopian adherents of every political position. It would be stable
and open to all for all time until the radical end of time that is supposed to be the Last Judgement. Postmodernity affirms the
possibility of The Code in the form of pure repetition, the simulacrum, and the random cannibalization of styles of the past, as
Jameson put it. But postmodern capitalism is also committed to apparent diversity of consumer
goods within the framework of a single Code, a commitment that produces a certain
tension if not a contradiction and dialectic. Apparent diversity is achieved by the marketing of diverse codes the
source and origin of which are officially unrecognized and repressed. We suggest that what is being exploited by
postmodern capitalism are the codes of those in the starkest of human situations , who have
confronted the worst most radically in their lifestyles (=codes) or modes of relating to death and fulfilment. What is most
successfully marketed today are simulacra of whole ways of existing, adaptations of gang youth, punks, primitive Brazilian
Indians (At Play in the Fields of the Lord), homeless people, bag ladies, hookers, war victims, AIDS sufferers (the list is extended
daily), their codes, the means they have worked out for dealing with the worst. We further suggest that Lacan was
correct in his assertion that the panic of the drive has displaced the Symbolic of desire for the contemporary or postmodern subject.
There is no more needs fulfilment in postmodernity. Capitalism, driven beyond its capacity to provide, has seen to that. All that it
can promise us now is an endless series of futile attempts to accommodate that which cannot be accommodated: the satisfied need,
ultimate jouissance, death. Its radical failure of symbolization leaves its believers eyeball to eyeball with The Real. Postmodern
capitalism is the realm of enjoyment, where the human subject is commanded to enjoy but cannot, where pleasure that cannot be
experienced spills over into The Thing, where our things obscenely and menacingly enjoy themselves at our expense. But there
are those among us who deal directly with the absoluteness of loss, those who know there is
no substitutability, no iterability, no supplement. They have carved out an existence on the
empty gound between the possibility of the symbolization of desire and the dream of a
single Symbolic-Paternal Order. They are the only possible source of a critical viewpoint on
postmodern capitalism and of the creative energy needed to move it. We are disappointed
with Baudrillard for not having found the site of post-modern exploitation, for giving us
instead nostalgia for the medieval Church in the form of the now commonplace
postmodern assertion of its absence. But if Baudrillard spends all his time with
commodities-as-simulacra, with God as simulacrum, with things that can have no relation
to need, there must be a reason for it. He is avoiding the ground that has been departed by
the cause of desire, the ground where new codes are created as a matter of necessity. This is the
reason he did not find Mickey Mouse. Mickey is there on the ground of departed desire as a defender of its borders, to block those
who have not entered and to cover up the creative adaptations of those who have. Mickey permits us to imagine that there is a
universal code of which he is the emanation and emissary, while his owners, if not his animators, know there are as many codes
ripe for the pluckingas there are human groupings. What Mickey does not permit us to imagine is his code: that his head, with the
two ears that never change their location or position, that his head is not only the maternal breast and the castrated balls, but a motion
picture projector. What this Mickey-projector reproduces is not a universal code for iteration as has been claimed. It is rather a
faithful reproduction of the absolute loss human life is based upon; of the theft of its creativity, its reduction, and abject resignation in
the face of The Real.

1. Two-Poles d/a- Reading Reality through Baudrillards

lens misses the fundamental problem with the
relationship between reality and the virtual. Only by
negotiating the ebb and flow in-between the two
poles, rather than homogenizing them, or eliminating
one or the other, can we stave off totalitarian
takeover and extinction

Virillio, 95 Paul, This interview was conducted and

originally published in German by Frankfurter Rundschau,
September 2, 1995. Patrice Riemens is an associate
research fellow at the Institute for Development
Research) at the University of Amsterdam.,
http://www.alchemists.com/visual_alchemy/manifesto/virili
o1.html

Baudrillard however, simply

Carlos Oliveira: You are still talking about "reality". Your friend
negates the existence of reality in our society, which has entered the
realm of simulation. Has reality in fact disappeared, and is humankind, as a consequence, no
longer able to bear what happened to our earlier sociality in the face of the widespread artificiality and
coldness of present living conditions? Paul Virilio: First, against the opinion of Baudrillard, I have to say
that reality never vanishes. It constantly changes. Reality is the
outcome of a pre-determined epoch, science, or technique. Reality
must be re-invented, always. To me, it is not the simulation of reality that makes the
difference, it is the replacement of a pre-determined reality by another
pre-determined reality. I proceed from the antagonism between real
and virtual reality, and I notice that both will shortly constitute one
single reality, but this will only take place through an unbelievable
change that will have very profound consequences for life; and these
negative consequences are at the core of my writing. Carlos Oliveira: Could you try to concretize this
question in its immediate philosophical consequences? Take for instance the alteration of our reality
through the mass media. Do the media create reality? Or do they alter or destroy it? Incidentally, when
saying this, I am thinking of your statement about "the media-coup" following the electoral successes of
Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. Paul Virilio: I have to take a detour through physics here, and this is one of the
Baudrillard and myself. Unlike him, I have a formal
differences between and
scientific education (that's why physics and military sciences kept
me busy for a very long time). In the past, reality was a matter of
mass; then it became mass + force. Today, reality is the outcome of:
mass + force + information. Matter has now become truly three-
dimensional. This is a clear break. What we have witnessed in Italy, with Berlusconi
seizing power, is the first successful media-coup in history. Italy is again Europe's avant-garde, and is
showing us where the new political alternative resides - in a realm where "left" or "right" are no longer
The new political alternative is between the old political class
relevant.
on one side, and the new media-class on the other. With Italy, the media-class
has now seized power in Europe. It will also happen in the United States, in France, in Spain, and
elsewhere. Carlos Oliveira: Do you see some kind of media-fascism looming on the horizon? Paul Virilio:
Due to its overwhelming power, the
No, because what I see is far worse!
totalitarianism of the information-medium is going to be even more
powerful than the traditional political totalitarianism of the old
national-socialist or communist hues. The dangers are looming
larger. I repeat: only if one is guarded against its dangers will it be
possible to enjoy the positive aspects of the developments in the
realm of new technologies.

2. Baudrillard theorization of the loss of the world

recreates a logocentric/metaphysical logic for the
sign

Villa 92
Dana R. [Amherst College] Postmodernism and the Public Sphere, The American Political
Science Review, Vol. 86, No. 3, d/l: jstor //jl

Here Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche and Baudrillard's theorization of simulacra show us

how the "loss of the world" remains trapped within the logocentric/metaphysical logic of
the sign. From this perspective, Arendt does not overcome the terms, she merely inverts them. The Arendtian public
sphere is a space of genuine appearances, of signs whose play and self-referentiality is
restricted by their being "seen and heard by everyone." This implies and preserves an
opposition between an authentic, real in-between and its inauthentic, manipulated
counterpart-the former both condition and result of action and speech, the latter nothing
more than the proliferation of signs/images that only serve further to destroy our feeling for
the world. Baudrillard's point is that this way of looking at things (of seeing the "world" as increasingly
"dimmed-down" or cov- ered over) does not make a final break with the representational episteme.
Postmodernity, on the other hand, has left the "order of appearance" be- hind: "reality" (including the reality of appearances Arendt
wants to preserve) is presently generated as a simulation effect. The "decisive turning point," Bau- drillard
states, is "the transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate
that there is nothing" (1988, 170). Arendt's ontology of the public realm prevents us from seeing just how well and truly lost
the world is. Her nostalgia for the "world," for worldliness, is a nostalgia for a common
referent-a nostalgia that power is able to exploit for its own ends, in order to "rejuvenate
the fiction of the real" (ibid., 178).
 3. Hyperreality is not a threat to the world but is rather
the liberatory potential of becoming

Trifonova 4
Temenuga A Nonhuman Eye: Deleuze on Cinema, SubStance, Vol. 33, No. 2, Issue 104:
Special Section: Contemporary Novelist Lydie Salvayre (2004), pp. 134-152, d/l: jstor //jl

Deleuze's description of the time-image as a planetary or cosmological image recalls

Baudrillard's vision of the subject in hyperreality, an "ex-orbited," planetary, inhuman
subject. In fact, Deleuze's time-image as a direct presentation of time is indistinguishable from Baudrillard's simulated time.
However, while Baudrillard considers the hyperreal a threat to the reality of the world, to
the extent that it makes it possible for us to perceive something that has stopped existing a
long time ago but whose virtual image still persists, Deleuze views the increasing
virtualization of the world as liberating. Baudrillard laments the fact that we have been "ejected from a position in
space and time where we were able to reflect our events back to ourselves with any endurance, and therefore consequence" (Horrocks
10). Since all events and all our acts have been reduced to information, we are no longer the
source or origin of what we do or what happens to us. Events and acts refer only to other
events and acts, not to a subject who produces them and who attributes to them their
significance. The subject has either vanished completely or has been inscribed in a network of events and acts, which no longer
have particular causes and effects (the very notions of "cause" and "effect" rest on the ascription of value to things; however, in a
virtual world the question of value can no longer arise). While Deleuze interprets the humbling of the subject
to the status of any-point-of-view-whatever as a liberation of things (of other images) from
the necessity to be true or consistent, Baudrillard does not think such liberation possible, arguing instead that although
the old idea of truth has long disappeared, it has been replaced with the idea of credibility. Credibility does not describe a state where
all images are "equal" and none subordinated to a central, privileged image; rather, credibility is the principle of truth gone mad.

4. Ignoring the potentiality of becoming to merely

accept the end of politics enables a total take over
by the war machine

Kellner 99
Douglas, Philosophy of Education at UCLA, Virilio, War and Technology Theory, Culture &
Society, Vol. 16, No. 5-6, 103-125 (1999)

Yet Virilio differs from Baudrillard in his theorizing of contemporary technological society. In an interview with John Armitrage
published in this issue, Virilio says that he disagrees with Baudrillard over the issue of simulation,
seeing simulation not as an obliteration of reality, but instead as substitution, in which a
technological reality replaces a human one, as photography substitutes itself for real life, or film substitutes the
static representation of the real with "moving pictures," or, in our day, when virtual reality substitutes itself for "real life."
Consequently, unlike Baudrillard, Virilio believes reality does not disappear, but is rather displaced by
another mode of reality, a virtual reality: "Thus, there is no simulation, but substitution. Reality has become
symmetrical. The splitting of reality in two parts is a considerable event which goes beyond simulation" (Virilio 1997a: 43). Thus,
whereas for Baudrillard reality disappears in hyperreality , for Virilio new technologies provide a substitute
reality, a virtual reality which becomes more powerful and seductive than ordinary reality. Virilio theorizes speed, dynamics, and the
simultaneous eruption of a dialectic of implosion and explosion, while Baudrillard theorizes inertia, implosion,
and the crisis of the political. Both, however, evoke the end of history and politics in the contemporary moment. More
than Virilio, who often articulates political and religious passions, Baudrillard more neutrally describes, accepts,
perhaps even affirms, the end of politics, history, in the "catastrophe of modernit y." Virilio,
by contrast, wants to preserve and expand the social and politics against pure war and the
military, opposing a transpolitics which denies the continued relevance of modern politics. [4]
In terms of concrete political analysis, Baudrillard has had a particularly poor record as a social and
political analyst and forecaster. As a political analyst, Baudrillard has often been superficial
and off the mark. In a essay "Anorexic Ruins" published in 1989, Baudrillard read the
Berlin wall as a sign of a frozen history, of an anorexic history, in which nothing more can
happen, marked by a "lack of events" and thus the end of history, taking the Berlin wall as
a sign of a stasis between communism and capitalism that would endure for the millennium.
Shortly thereafter, rather significant events destroyed the wall that Baudrillard took as
eternal and opened up a new historical era. The Cold War stalemate was long taken by Baudrillard as establishing
a frozen history in which no significant change could take place. Virilio, by contrast, perceived the beginning of the break-up of the
Soviet Empire and the opening up of a new era. Already in _L'Insecurite du territiore_ (1976), Virilio cited Helene Carriere de
Encausse's _Decline of an Empire_ and returned to this theme in _Pure War_, noting that the Soviet empire is "breaking apart"
(Virilio and Lotringer 1983: 155). Of course, no one anticipated the extent and suddenness of the breakdown of the Soviet empire and
collapse of the Soviet Union itself, and in the 1980s Virilio tended to exaggerate the continuing power of the Soviet military machine
and operated with the Cold War model of a bipolar world as the key constituent of contemporary history, much as Baudrillard.

1. Perm Do the Aff and all non-competitive parts of the

alternative
Rather than attempt to find meaning through the
symbolic economy and trace those relations, we should
through ourselves into the socius head first. Only such a
radical negative action can overcome the overcoded
system to signification

Deleuze and Guattari 83

Gilles and Felix, Anti-Oedipus, weve been reading evidence from these guys for awhile,
theyre probably more qualified than anyone else to talk about this //gr

And then, above all, we are not looking for a way out when we say that schizoanaiysis as such has strictly no political program to
propose. If it did have one, it would be grotesque and disquieting at the same time. It does not take itself for a party or even a group,
and does not claim to be speaking for the masses. Mo political program will be elaborated within the framework of schizoanaiysis.
Finally, schizoanaiysis is something that does not claim to be speaking for anything or anyone,
not evenin fact especially notfor psychoanalysis: nothing more than impressions, the impression that things aren't going well in
psychoanalysis, and that they haven't been since the start. We are still too competent; we would like to speak in the
name of an absolute incompe- tence. Someone asked us if we had ever seen a schizophrenicno, no, we have never
seen one. If someone reading this book feels that things are fine in psychoanalysis, we're not speaking for him, and for him we take
back everything we have said. So what is the relationship between schizoanaiysis and politics on the
one hand, and between schizoanaiysis and psychoanalysis on the other? Everything revolves
around desiring-machines and the production of desire. Schizoanaiysis as such does not
raise the problem of the nature of the socius to come out of the revolution; it does not claim
to be identical with the revolution itself. Given a socius, schizoanaiysis only asks what place it reserves for desiring-
production; what generative role desire enjoys therein; in what forms the conciliation between the regime of desiring-production and
the regime of social production is brought about, since in any case it is the same production, but under two different regimes; if, on
this socius as a full body, there is thus the possibility for going from one side to another, i.e., from the side where the molar aggregates
of social production are organized, to this other side, no less collective, where the molecular multiplicities of desiring-production are
formed; whether and to what extent such a socius can endure the reversal of power such that
desiring-production subjugates social production and yet does not destroy it, since it is the
same production working under the difference in regime ; if there is, and how there comes to be, a formation
of subject-groups; etc. If someone retorts that we are claiming the famous rights to laziness, to
nonproductivity, to dream and fantasy production, once again we are quite pleased, since we
haven't stopped saying the opposite, and that desiring-production produces the real, and that desire has little to do with fantasy and
dream. As opposed to Reich, schizoanal-ysis makes no distinction in nature between political
economy and libidinal economy. Schizoanalysis merely asks what are the machinic, social, and technical indices on a
socius that open to desiring-machines, that enter into the parts, wheels, and motors of these machines, as much as they cause them to
enter into their own parts, wheels, and motors. Everyone knows that a schizo is a machine; all schizos say this, and not just little Joey.
The question to be asked is whether schizophrenics are the living machines of a dead labor, which are then contrasted to the dead
machines of living labor as organized in capitalism. Or whether instead desiring, technical, and social machines join together in a
process of schizophrenic production that thereafter has no more schizophrenics to produce. In her Lettre aux ministres, Maud Mannoni
writes: "One of these adolescents, declared unfit for studies, does admirably well in a third-level class, provided he works some in
mechanics. He has a passion for mechanics. The man in the garage has been his best therapist. If we take mechanics away from him he
will become schizophrenic again."52 Her intention is not to praise ergotherapy or the virtues of social adaptation. She marks the point
where the social machine, the technical machine, and the desiring-machine join closely together and bring their regimes into
communication. She asks if our society can handle that, and what it is worth if it can't. And this is indeed the direction the social,
technical, scientific, and artistic machines take when they are- revolutionary: they form desiring-machines for which they are already
the index in their own regime, at the same time that the desiring-machines form them in the regime that is theirs, and as a position of
desire. What, finally, is the opposition between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis, when the negative and positive tasks of
schizoanalysis are taken as a whole? We constantly contrasted two sorts of unconscious or two interpretations of the unconscious: the
one schizoanalytic, the other psychoanalytic; the one schizophrenic, the other neurotic-Oedipal; the one abstract and nonfigurative, the
other imaginary; but also the one really concrete, the other symbolic; the one machinic, the other structural; the one molecular,
microphysical, and micrological, and the other molar or statistical; the one material, the other ideological; the one productive, the
other expressive. We have seen how the negative task of schizoanalysis must be violent, brutal:
defamiliarizing, de-oedipalizing, decastrating; undoing theater, dream, and fantasy;
decoding, deterritorializinga terrible curettage, a malevolent activity. But everything
happens at the same time. For at the same time the process is liberatedthe process of
desiring-production, following its molecular lines of escape that already define the
mechanic's task of the schizoana-lyst. And the lines of escape are still full molar or social investments at grips with
the whole social field: so that the task of schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case
the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts,
their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible
conflicts with thesein short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the
repression of desire. Completing the process and not arresting it, not making it turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal.
We'll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth ("In truth, the earth will one day
become a place of healing") is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that
arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the
completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already
complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It therefore remains for us to see how,
effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed.

Perm S!: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary differences

in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative politics
that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end,
the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
aspects of
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.
Cap
 2AC- Revolution Against Cap
Sequencing D/A: Hegemonic paranoia must be revealed
and critiqued to clear the space for their K in the first
place- McClintock says that paranoia becomes so strong
because of the way we fail to question the base of our
reasoning, which is geared towards seeking conflict and
displaying military might. This paranoia would swamp the
alt- *alt specific stuf*
Link turn- 1AC discusses how neoliberalism has created
conditions for violence but Rodriguez argues that that I
do not find the analytics of neoliberalism to be sufficient
for describing the conditions of political work within the
U.S. acaedemy today. It is not just different structures of
oppressive violence that radical scholars are trying to
make legible, it is violence of a certain depth, with
specific and morbid implications for some peoples future
existence as such If we can begin to acknowledge this
.

fundamental truththat genocide is this place (the

American academy and, in fact, America itself)then our
operating assumptions, askable questions, and scholarly
methods will need to transform.
Link Turn- 1AC understands the capitalist drive that co-
produced the War on Terror such as the desire to control
oil and water in Iraq
Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary
differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

5 Net Bens:
Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or
oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking

Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question

of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
which is to say,
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.

Only through the 1AC and perm can we recognize the co-
constitutive nature of class and race- key to keep them
compatible
Leonardo 3 (Zeus, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education, Associate
Professor Language and Literacy, Society and Culture at UC Berk, Resisting
Capital: Simulationist and Socialist StrategiesCritical Sociology, Volume 29,
issue 2)

Thedialectical tension between discourse and historical materialism is

productive , but the end of the real thesis appears unsustainable, and worse, complicit with relations of exploitation. In fact, ludic postmodernists
may have succeeded in dodging Scylla only to strengthen Charybdis. It is fair to assume that if the United States were to become a

socialist state , white men will likely hold the important bureaucratic
positions , therefore racism will still be a problem and women will ?nd themselves ?ghting for gender rights. The
ugliest forms of racist and patriarchal relations may signi?cantly decrease through
economic transformation, but race and gender relations will not become
insignificant in socialist America (Hunter 2002). Thus, social theory must incorporate an
analysis of differences, especially in their commodi?ed form. Here, postmodern theorizing has been helpful. Discourses of difference
 although gender, sexual, and race issues do not exist autonomously from
remind us that

material relations, they are articulated in meaningful ways that have their particular
concerns .
For example, we notice that socialist Cuba had to reconstruct the family, Maos China instituted the cultural revolution, and the elite in the former Soviet Union
Marxist
was all but male. Difference is in?ected by the economy, but is not determined by it in the orthodox sense of Marxism. To the extent that

praxis neglects the specific discourses of identity formation, it is guilty of subsuming the social meanings that
racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects experience on a daily basis, some of which inform
the epistemological work of revolutionary movements . Re- ducing identity politics to an
individuals experience minimizes the institu- tional aspect of a subjects identity. But asserting identity in its traditionally vague way assumes an a priori sameness
between those who invoke it, some of whom may experience a rude awakening when they discover the pane of difference (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Rather, the
process of identi?- cation may be preferable to the apparent condition of having an identity.
This is where Nancy Frasers (1998) ideas on the politics of (mis)recognition ameliorate the otherwise vulgar suggestion that identity is private and only particular.
She deploys a neo-Weberian model for addressing the differ- ential status and rights of gays and lesbians in the context of heterosexist capitalism. This is an area
where orthodox Marxism has been criticized for its refusal to address identity discourses with respect to rights, prestige, and status. Although Baudrillards theories
did not create the notion of difference, they attend to its contours. The politics of identity is based on the notion that groups of people have been treated as merely
different in patterned ways that have material sources and consequences (Leonardo 2000, 2002).

Civil Rights Movement was supra-individual . It was the

For example, the social movement we know as the

recognition by masses of people of color, women, and gays and lesbians that the
white, male, heterosexual state was deliberately thwarting their rights as groups of people. There is also
a sense that the 1960s identity politics movement extended beyond identity as politics-of-the-self when white Americans joined hands with people of color and
acknowledged that minorities were being oppressed on the basis of their identity. Looked at in this way, we can avoid relegating identity politics to the margins of

theory as a form of privatized discourse having no ties with material life. There is something to suggest that the new identity politics
and materialist politics are compatible . For the very notion of identity is traceable to the material ?ow of life
and how, for example, the black body is commodi?ed as the sexualized subject. In other words, a materialist identity politics is part of an overall and
more complete transformation of objective life insofar as it leaves its stamp on our subjectivity.
Identity is real because it is part of the productive process insofar as
workers gain an identity through their practical activity . To the extent that identity is abstract, it is
imagined. It is very much like the sort of thing that Levi-Strauss described as a virtual center (foyer virtuel) to which we must refer to explain certain things, but
Keeping in mind the dialectic
without it ever having a real existence (cited by Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 9; italics in original).

between the real and imagined aspects of identity, theorists avoid a fetishism of either
pole .

Total rejection fragments resistance perm solves best

Gibson-Graham 96
(JK- feminist economist, 96, End of Capitalism)

One of our goals as Marxists has been to produce a knowledge of capitalism. Yet as that which is known, Capitalism has become
the intimate enemy. We have uncloaked the ideologically-clothed, obscure monster, but we have installed a naked and visible
monster in its place. In return for our labors of creation, the monster has robbed us of all force. We hear and find it easy to
believe that the left is in disarray. Part of what produces the disarray of the left is the vision of what the left is arrayed against.
When capitalism is represented as a unified system coextensive with the nation or even the
world, when it is portrayed as crowding out all other economic forms , when it is allowed to define
entire societies, it becomes something that can only be defeated and replaced by a mass
collective movement (or by a process of systemic dissolution that such a movement might assist). The revolutionary
task of replacing capitalism now seems outmoded and unrealistic, yet we do not seem to
have an alternative conception of class transformation to take its plac e. The old political economic
systems and structures that call forth a vision of revolution as systemic replacement still seem to be dominant in the Marxist
political imagination. The New World Order is often represented as political fragmentation founded upon economic unification. In
this vision the economy appears as the last stronghold of unity and singularity in a world of diversity and plurality. But why cant the
economy be fragmented too? If we theorized it as fragmented in the United States, we could being to see a huge state sector
(incorporating a variety of forms of appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of self-employed and family-based producers
(most noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various in terms of forms of exploitation, with some households moving
towards communal or collective appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in which one adult appropriates surplus labor
from another). None of these things is easy to see. If capitalism takes up the available social space, theres
no room for anything else. If capitalism cannot coexist, theres no possibility of anything
else. If capitalism functions as a unity, it cannot be partially or locally replaced. My intent is to
help create the discursive conception under which socialist or other noncapitalist construction becomes realistic present
activity rather than a ludicrous or utopian goal. To achieve this I must smash Capitalism and see it in a thousand pieces. I
must make its unity a fantasy, visible as a denial of diversity and change.

Genocide is a net benefit- Their essentialist revolution re-

inscribes oppression external to capitalism, trivializing
their impact and destroying their agency
Binnie 4 Jon Binnie is Professor in the School of Science and The Environment Staff in Division of
Geography & Environmental Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, (2004) The Globalization
of Sexuality. London: Sage, p. 51-54)//TR

While writers such as Michael Warner (1993) have long since criticised the heteronormativity of social theory and the lefts attitude
towards sexual politics, it is lamentable that commentators such as Slavoj Zizek continue this tradition. Consider this excerpt from his
essay in New Left Review on multiculturalism as the logic of late capitalism, in which he argues that: Critical energy has found a
substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences, which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world-system intact. So we are
fighting our PC battles for the rights of ethnic minorities, of gays and lesbians, of different life-styles, and so on, while capitalism
pursues its triumphant march-and todays critical theory, in the guise of cultural studies, is doing the ultimate service to the
unrestrained development of capitalism by actively participating in the ideological effort to render its massive presence invisible.
(1997: 46) Zizek appears to target cultural criticism for abandoning any critique of late
capitalism. He seems to be blaming struggles for the rights of minorities for deflecting
critical attention away from the real enemy contemporary capitalism. After reading Zizek one might despair
of the possibility of forging a critically queer perspective on contemporary global capitalism. He argues that the ever-
increasing plurality of political struggles serves to displace critical attention from global
capitalism. Does Zizeks argument mean that asserting plurality and difference within struggles for sexual citizenship necessarily
means a devaluing or downgrading of critical attention on economics and material inequalities in capitalist societies? Sometimes it can
be really depressing reading Zizek especially when he presents an argument in a rather cut-and-dried fashion: the choice between
nationalism, totalitarianism or the cosmopolitan liberal free market. The polarization of the debate between those
who promote political economic perspectives on sexuality but who are hostile towards
contemporary queer intellectual, political and consumer culture (Hennessy, 2000; Altman, 1999), and
those who have come to constitute a queer establishment which in recent years has tended
to completely marginalize questions of class, economics and redistribution, is particularly
irksome for those who argue that both positions are to a certain extent establishment or
class-based positions. This is a problem for those who feel neither position or grouping adequately reflects where they are
coming from. There are basically two different intellectual camps defending established territories within academia. Roger Lancaster
argues that the trivialization of homophobia within Marxism as marginal to production means
that: With good reason feminists, gays, and lesbians have largely rejected orthodox Marxist
attempts to understand gender relations, sexism and homophobia as cultural glosses on economic production
(1997: 195). However, he maintains that that there is a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater if political economy is
rejected out of hand. If we are to try to construct the bigger picture of how sexual politics are interconnected with wider economic and
political structures, arguing that feminists, lesbians and gays: have also sometimes less validly dismissed approaches from political
economy as totalizing metanarratives or discarded grand theories (ibid: 195). Lancaster sums up the tension between political
economy and culture in Marxist approaches to sexuality. The main issue, though, is how we resolve the
assertion of the sexual without jeopardizing other forms of equality and difference and
sidelining the economic altogether. For instance, Anne Phillips suggests that in contemporary society: equality is now
thought to be a matter of politics or culture as much as (if not more than) one of the distribution of economic resources (1999: 20).
Can the reassertion of the economic add weight and conceptual clarity to the analysis of sexual citizenship? Or must an approach that
places economics at the centre necessarily marginalize sexuality, as has often been the case on the left in the past? Phillips argues that:
The hegemonic status of difference in contemporary social and political thought can make it very difficult to talk about class (1999:
42). While difference may be hegemonic, some differences are more hegemonic than others . It would be
unfortunate if this view fogged the current landscape of sexual citizenship. It is increasingly clear that race, class and gender are
becoming central to debates on inclusion and exclusion within sexual communities. Anne Phillips (1999) rails against dominant
discourses of difference for neglecting class. In terms of globalization and the politics of transnationalism, there are studies that
thoughtfully manage to interconnect the cultural and the economic. Aihwa Ongs Flexible Citizenship provides an excellent example
of how to marry the cultural and economic in narrating and investigating transnational flows. At the start of her book she notes how
researchers in different disciplines have approached globalization in their subject-specific ways with economists focusing more on
global business strategies and anthropologists more concerned with understanding diasporic flows of people. Ong, however, is keen to
avoid a dualism between culture and economics and stresses how they are interconnected. A political economic view
often serves to neglect questions of agency, yet for Ong the questions of motivation and agency are crucial to an
understanding of transnational migrations: flexibility, migration, and relocations, instead of being coerced or resisted, have become
practices to strive for rather than stability (1999: 19). So migration is not simply an effect of global restructuring, but is also the result
of agency and of desire. Of course it is one of the truisms of social theorys engagement with globalization that it is too vast a subject
for one discipline or subject to lay claim to. Globalization resists neat compartmentalization into the economic, political and the
cultural, for it is precisely one of the key elements of globalization that these are inextricably interlinked. It is imperative therefore that
discussions of sexuality and economics acknowledge this. In Globalization and Culture John Tomlinson argues that: globalization
therefore matters for culture in the sense that it brings the negotiation of cultural experience into the centre of strategies or intervention
in the other realms of connectivity: the political, the environmental, the economic (1999: 301). Ongs work is significant in the way
she conceptualizes culture and economies as mutually constitutive, rather than in opposition. Tomlinson is keen to articulate the links
between culture, economics and politics in a way that reinforces their interconnectivity and interdependence. While Altman stresses
the political economic basis of globalization and reads off cultural changes as effects of globalizing economic processes, Tomlinson
argues that culture is fundamental to globalization: culture also matters for globalization in this sense: that it marks out a symbolic
terrain of meaning-construction as the arena for global political interventions (1999: 27). However, he does not see the culture
globalization equation as a one-way street, emphasizing that globalization has had a major impact on the way in which we conceive
culture, specifically the disconnection of the idea of culture from an attachment to a fixed locality.

Double bind- either the alternative is coopted and pacified

by the academy or the historical materialist account is
used as a justification to destroy indigenous culture and
people- history proves
Means 80was a leader in the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the
1960s and 70s, and remains one of the most outspoken Native Americans in
the U.S. (Russell, Revolution and American Indians: Marxism is as Alien to My
Culture as Capitalism, http://endofcapitalism.com/2010/10/17/revolution-
and-american-indians-marxism-is-as-alien-to-my-culture-as-
capitalism/#more-1730)
I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, Im not allowing for false
distinctions. Im not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary, European intellectual development which is

Marxism
bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. Im referring here to the so-called theories of

and anarchism and leftism in general. I dont believe these theories

can be separated from the rest of the of the European intellectual tradition. Its really
just the same old song. The process began much earlier. Newton, for example, revolutionized physics and the so-called

natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical

equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it
with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these thinkers took a piece of the spirituality of
human existence and converted it into code, an abstraction. They picked up where
Christianity ended: they secularized Christian religion, as the scholars like to sayand in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist
culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the
universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer! This is what has come to be termed efficiency in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical
is perfect; whatever seems to work at the momentthat is, proves the mechanical model to be the right oneis considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is
why truth changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in

Hegel and Marx were heirs to

favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive.

the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke and Smith. Hegel finished the process of
secularizing theologyand that is put in his own termshe secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegels

Marx despiritualized Hegels work altogether.

philosophy in terms of materialism, which is to say that

Again, this is in Marx own terms . And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans

may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as

still more of that same old European conflict between being and
gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European
imperialism lie in Marx and his followerslinks to the tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others. Being is a
spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted
to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false
status among traditional people, while it is proof that the system works to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is

The
very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But lets look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate.

European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very

similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another
person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going
back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the
workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is
that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, Thou shalt not kill, at least not humans, so the trick is to
mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue. In terms of the despiritualization of the universe,

the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the

planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization
process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to developing a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent
destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be developed through the construction of road

the whole universe is openin the European viewto this sort

beds. Ultimately,

of insanity. Most important here, perhaps, is the fact that Europeans feel no sense of loss in all this. After all, their
philosophers have despiritualized reality, so there is no satisfaction (for
them) to be gained in simply observing the wonder of a mountain or a lake or a
people in being. No, satisfaction is measured in terms of gaining
material. So the mountain becomes gravel, and the lake becomes coolant for a factory, and the people are rounded up for processing through the
indoctrination mills Europeans like to call schools. But each new piece of that progress ups the ante out in the real world. Take fuel for the industrial machine as an
example. Little more than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wooda replenishable, natural itemas fuel for the very human needs of cooking and staying warm.
Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the dominant fuel, as production became the social imperative for Europe. Pollution began to become a problem in
the cities, and the earth was ripped open to provide coal whereas wood had always simply been gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later, oil
became the major fuel, as the technology of production was perfected through a series of scientific revolutions. Pollution increased dramatically, and nobody yet knows
what the environmental costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the long run. Now theres an energy crisis, and uranium is becoming the dominant

Capitalists, at least, can be relied upon to develop uranium as fuel only at the rate which
fuel.

they can show a good profit. Thats their ethic, and maybe they will buy some time. Marxists, on the other hand,
can be relied upon to develop uranium fuel as rapidly as possible
simply because its the most efficient production fuel available.
Thats their ethic, and I fail to see where its preferable . Like I said,
Marxism is right smack in the middle of European tradition. Its the
same old song. Theres a rule of thumb which can be applied here. You cannot judge the real nature of a
European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to
make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it
by the effects it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every
revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europes
tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples,
other cultures and the environment itself . I defy anyone to point out an example where this is not true. So
now we, as American Indian people, are asked to believe that a new European revolutionary

doctrine such as Marxism will reverse the negative effects of European history

on us. European power relations are to be adjusted once again, and thats supposed to make things better for all of us. But what does this really mean? Right
now, today, we who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation are living in what

white society has designated a National Sacrifice Area. What this means is that we
have a lot of uranium deposits here, and white culture (not us) needs this uranium as energy production
material. The cheapest, most efficient way for industry to extract and deal with the processing of this uranium is to dump the waste by-products right here at
the digging sites. Right here where we live. This waste is radioactive and will make the entire region

uninhabitable forever. This is considered by the industry, and by the

white society that created this industry, to be an acceptable price
to pay for energy resource development. Along the way they also plan to drain the water table under this part
of South Dakota as part of the industrial process, so the region becomes doubly uninhabitable. The same sort of thing is happening down in the land of the Navajo and
Hopi, up in the land of the Northern Cheyenne and Crow, and elsewhere. Thirty percent of the coal in the West and half of the uranium deposits in the United States have
been found to lie under reservation land, so there is no way this can be called a minor issue. We are resisting being turned into a National Sacrifice Area. We are resisting
being turned into a national sacrifice people. The costs of this industrial process are not acceptable to us. It is genocide to dig uranium here and drain the water tableno
more, no less. Now lets suppose that in our resistance to extermination we begin to seek allies (we have). Lets suppose further that we were to take revolutionary
Marxism at its word: that it intends nothing less than the complete overthrow of the European capitalists order which has presented this threat to our very existence. This
would seem to be a natural alliance for American Indian people to enter into. After all, as the Marxists say, it is the capitalists who set us up to be a national sacrifice. This

Revolutionary Marxism is
is true as far as it goes. But, as Ive tried to point out, this truth is very deceptive.

committed to even further perpetuation and perfection of the very

industrial process which is destroying us all. It offers only to
redistribute the resultsthe money, maybeof this industrialization to a wider section of the population. It offers to
take wealth from the capitalists and pass it around; but in order to
do so, Marxism must maintain the industrial system. Once again, the power
relations within European society will have to be altered, but once again the
effects upon American Indian peoples here and non-Europeans elsewhere will remain
the same . This is much the same as when power was redistributed
from the church to private business during the so-called bourgeois
revolution. European society changed a bit, at least superficially, but
its conduct toward non-Europeans continued as before. You can see what the American
Revolution of 1776 did for American Indians. Its the same old song. Revolutionary Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks

to rationalize all people in relation to industrymaximum industry, maximum production. It is a doctrine that despises the American

Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called us precapitalists and
primitive. Precapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and become capitalists; we have always been economically retarded in
Marxist terms. The only manner in which American Indian people could participate in a Marxist revolution would be to join the industrial system, to become factory

workers, or proletarians, as Marx called them.The man was very clear about the fact that his
revolution could only occur through the struggle of the proletariat,
that the existence of a massive industrial system is a precondition of
a successful Marxist society. I think theres a problem with language here. Christians, capitalists, Marxists. All of them have
been revolutionary in their own minds, but none of them really means revolution. What they really mean is continuation. They do what they

do in order that European culture can continue to exist and develop

according to its needs. Like germs, European culture goes through
occasional convulsions, even divisions within itself, in order to go on
living and growing. This isnt a revolution were talking about, but a
means to continue what already exists. An amoeba is still an amoeba after it reproduces. But maybe comparing
European culture to an amoeba isnt really fair to the amoeba. Maybe cancer cells are a more accurate comparison because European culture has historically destroyed

everything around it; and it will eventually destroy itself. So, in order for us to really join forces with
Marxism, we American Indians would have to accept the national
sacrifice of our homeland; we would have to commit cultural suicide
and become industrialized and Europeanized. At this point, Ive got to stop and ask myself whether

in the
Im being too harsh. Marxism has something of a history. Does this history bear out my observations? I look to the process of industrialization

Soviet Union since 1920 and I see that these Marxists have done what it took the
English Industrial Revolution 300 years to do; and the Marxists did it in 60 years. I see that the territory
of the USSR used to contain a number of tribal peoples and that they

have been crushed to make way for the factories. The Soviets refer to this as the National
Question, the question of whether the tribal peoples had the right to exist as peoples; and they decided the tribal peoples were an acceptable sacrifice to the industrial

. I look to China and I see the same thing. I look to Vietnam and I
needs

see Marxists imposing an industrial order and rooting out the

indigenous tribal mountain people. I hear the leading Soviet scientist saying that when uranium is exhausted, then
alternatives will be found. I see the Vietnamese taking over a nuclear power plant abandoned by the U.S. military. Have they dismantled and destroyed it? No, they are
using it. I see China exploding nuclear bombs, developing uranium reactors, and preparing a space program in order to colonize and exploit the planets the same as the
Europeans colonized and exploited this hemisphere. Its the same old song, but maybe with a faster tempo this time. The statement of the Soviet scientist is very
interesting. Does he know what this alternative energy source will be? No, he simply has faith. Science will find a way. I hear revolutionary Marxists saying that the
destruction of the environment, pollution, and radiation will all be controlled. And I see them act upon their words. Do they know how these things will be controlled? No,
they simply have faith. Science will find a way. Industrialization is fine and necessary. How do they know this? Faith. Science will find a way. Faith of this sort has always
been known in Europe as religion. Science has become the new European religion for both capitalists and Marxists; they are truly inseparable; they are part and parcel of

Marxism demands that non-European peoples

the same culture. So, in both theory and practice,

give up their values, their traditions, their cultural existence

altogether. We will all be industrialized science addicts in a Marxist
society. I do not believe that capitalism itself is really responsible for the
situation in which American Indians have been declared a national
sacrifice. No, it is the European tradition ; European culture itself is responsible. Marxism is
just the latest continuation of this tradition, not a solution to it. To
ally with Marxism is to ally with the very same forces that declare
us an acceptable cost .
Caps not the root cause

Aberdeen 3
(Richard Aberdeen is an Author & Philanthropist,, Uncommon Sense, Ch. 80, p. google)

A view shared by many modern activists is that capitalism, free enterprise, multi-national corporations and
globalization are the primary cause of the current global Human Rights problem and that
by striving to change or eliminate these, the root problem of what ills the modern world is being addressed. This
is a rather unfortunate and historically myopic view, reminiscent of early class struggle Marxists who soon resorted
to violence as a means to achieve rather questionable ends. And like these often brutal early Marxists, modern anarchists who resort
to violence to solve the problem are walking upside down and backwards, adding to rather than correcting, both the immediate and
long-term Human Rights problem. Violent revolution, including our own American revolution, becomes a breeding ground for
poverty, disease, starvation and often mass oppression leading to future violence. Large, publicly traded corporations
are created by individuals or groups of individuals, operated by individuals and made up of individual and/or
group investors. These business enterprises are deliberately structured to be empowered by individual (or group) investor greed.
For example, a theorized need for offering salaries much higher than is necessary to secure competent leadership (often resulting in
corrupt and entirely incompetent leadership), lowering wages more than is fair and equitable and scaling back of often hard fought for
benefits, is sold to stockholders as being in the best interest of the bottom-line market value and thus, in the best economic interests of
individual investors. Likewise, major political and corporate exploitation of third-world nations is rooted in the individual
and joint greed of corporate investors and others who stand to profit from such exploitation. More than just investor greed,
corporations are driven by the greed of all those involved, including individuals outside the enterprise itself who profit indirectly from
it. If one examines the course of human events closely, it can correctly be surmised that the root cause
of humanitys problems comes from individual human greed and similar negative individual
motivation. The Marx/Engles view of history being a class struggle does not address the root problem and is thus fundamentally
flawed from a true historical perspective (see for more details). So-called classes of people,unions, corporations and political
groups are made up of individuals who support the particular group or organizational position based on their own individual needs,
greed and desires and thus, an apparent class struggle in reality, is an extension of individual motivation. Likewise, nations
engage in wars of aggression, not because capitalism or classes of society are at root cause, but
because individual members of a society are individually convinced that it is in their own economic
survival best interest. War, poverty, starvation and lack of Human and Civil Rights have existed on our
planet since long before the rise of modern capitalism, free enterprise and multi-national corporation avarice, thus the root
problem obviously goes deeper than this. Junior Bush and the neo-conservative genocidal maniacs of modern-day America could not
have recently effectively gone to war against Iraq without the individual support of individual troops and a certain percentage of
individual citizens within the U.S. population, each lending support for their own personal motives, whatever they individually may
have been. While it is true that corrupt leaders often provoke war, using all manner of religious, social and political means to justify,
often as not, entirely ludicrous ends, very rare indeed is a battle only engaged in by these same unscrupulous miscreants of power.
And though a few iniquitous elitist powerbrokers may initiate nefarious policies of global genocidal oppression, it takes a very great
many individuals operating from individual personal motivations of survival, desire and greed to develop these policies into a multi-
national exploitive reality. No economic or political organization and no political or social cause exists unto itself but rather, individual
members power a collective agenda. A workers strike has no hope of succeeding if individual workers do not perceive a personal
benefit. And similarly, a corporation will not exploit workers if doing so is not believed to be in the economic best interest of those
who run the corporation and who in turn, must answer (at least theoretically) to individuals who collectively through purchase or other
allotment of shares, own the corporation. Companies have often been known to appear benevolent, offering both higher wages and
improved benefits, if doing so is perceived to be in the overall economic best interest of the immediate company and/or larger
corporate entity. Non-unionized business enterprises frequently offer carrots of appeasement to workers in order to discourage them
from organizing and historically in the United States, concessions such as the forty-hour workweek, minimum wage, workers
compensation and proscribed holidays have been grudgingly capitulated to by greedy capitalist masters as necessary concessions to
avoid profit-crippling strikes and outright revolution. It is important to understand that so-called workers rights and benefits were not
volunteered by American capitalists or their political stooges (including several U.S. presidents) without extreme and often violent
worker coercive persuasion over a great many years of prolonged strikes and similar worker revolts. Modern supply-side Adam Smith
inspired economic pipe dreams of unencumbered markets freely moving toward the common good are clearly and fundamentally,
based on outright lies and not very well-masked, deliberate capitalist deception (again, see Gallo Brothers for more information.
Those who proclaim the twisted gospel of modern supply-side economic theory are generally those who have a lot to gain from its
acceptance, both economically and politically. Large political and other problems are historically created gradually stemming from
negative individual leading to negative group motivation, in turn leading to negative individual and group action. The correct root
solution to humanitys problems becomes, by historical default, changing individual negative motivation towards positive motivation.
This is not at all a new theory, as it was first stated over two thousand years ago by Jesus, historically the founder of Human and Civil
Rights and not at all, the founder of Christianity or of any other religious movement; virtually everything Jesus said and did goes
directly to human motivation, is community oriented, has little to do with modern conceptions of religion and is the antithesis of
modern Christianity (see Revolution for more information). Contrary to many current views painted of him, Jesus was extremely
political, the correct political (and other) solution from true perspective being to center on and change individual motivation. That is,
if we wish to constructively change the extensive political and social problem plaguing our planet today, the root cause of negative
individual human motivation leading to negative action must be addressed at the fundamental individual level. This correct political
theory is seen as successfully initiated by early followers of Jesus, who practiced extreme communism, having no law but to love one
another, sharing all things in common, allotting to each according to their need and giving the excess to the poor (which since they
were mostly very poor, was a true sacrifice). This was a way of life foreign to their culture, was viewed as a severe threat to the
established religious and political order and thus, they were thrown to the lions accordingly. The arising extended movement, called
The Way by those who joined (it was not called Christianity by them, nor did these early followers view themselves as founders
of a religion ), represents extreme far-left radicalism even by modern liberal activist cooperative standards. It has thus been
historically demonstrated that if people practice the Human Rights foundation axiom set down by Jesus to treat other people as we
ourselves wish to be treated, established ways of living will change, including non-violent elimination of the entire idea of capitalist
oppression based on individual gain and private property ownership. In practicing The Way, economic oppression is dealt with from
the root cause up and thus, is overcome with love and peaceful unselfish collective co-existence. It is important to note that claiming
to be a follower of Jesus and actually practicing The Way are today usually two entirely different realities; the modern 21st Century
world has plenty of examples of the former and virtually no examples of the latter. Lenin and the Communist party overthrew
a very oppressive capitalist Czarist system. It did not take long for one corrupt system to be
replaced by another, where even without capitalism and free enterprise to aggravate the Human Rights
problem, people of power within the Communist political structure began, similar to their counterparts of capitalistic excess
in Europe and America, exploiting the mass population for their own individual benefit, comfort and excess.
Thus the root problem is exposed as going deeper than simply changing an oppressive capitalist or
other system. Quite obviously, changing a corrupt system does not by itself, change the corrupt people
who invented and supported it, neither does it change negative individual motivation leading to group oppression based on
irrational disparagement of others regarding sex, color, intelligence or other perceived difference and neither does it prevent waste,
laziness, murder, theft and rape by individuals within a perceived economic class.

Capitalism builds off colonialism and racism but doesnt

explain either of them

Quijano 2000 (Anibal, He attended National University of San Marcos (UNMSM), Peru, where he earned a
Ph.D. degree in 1964. Until 1995, he was Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences of San Marcos. He is currently
Professor of the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. Dr. Quijano is a distinguished intellectual in
the Social Sciences, who has held several positions as a visiting professor at universities worldwide: Maison des Sciences
de l'Homme (Paris), University of So Paulo, University of Puerto Rico, University of Hannover, Free University of Berlin,
National University of Ecuador, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Universidad de Chile, Latin American
School of Economics (ESCOLATINA), and George Washington University. He has written numerous books and
publications on colonialism, politics, democracy, globalization and other social issues., Coloniality of Power,
Eurocentrism, and Latin America, Neplanta: Views from South 1.3, Duke University Press, 2000)//JS

The progressive monetization of the world market that the precious metals
from America stimulated and allowed, as well as the control of such large
resources, made possible the control of the vast preexisting web of
commercial exchange that included, above all, China, India, Ceylon, Egypt,
Syriathe future Far and Middle East. The monetization of labor also
made it possible to concentrate the control of commercial capital,
labor and means of production in the whole world market. The fact is
that from the very beginning of the colonization of America,
Europeans associated nonpaid or nonwaged labor with the
dominated races because they were inferior races. The vast
genocide of the Indians in the first decades of colonization was not
caused principally by the violence of the conquest nor by the
plagues the conquistadors brought, but took place because so many
American Indians were used as disposable manual labor and forced
them to work until death. The elimination of this colonial practice did not
end until the defeat of the encomenderos in the middle of the sixteenth
century. The subsequent Iberian colonialism involved a new politics of
population reorganization, a reorganization of the Indians and their relations
with the colonizers. The racial classification of the population and the
early association of the new racial identities of the colonized with
the forms of control of unpaid, unwaged labor developed among the
Europeans the singular perception that paid labor was the whites
privilege. The racial inferiority of the colonized implied that they
were not worthy of wages. They were naturally obliged to work for the
profit of their owners. It is not difficult to find, to this very day, this
attitude spread out among the white property owners of any place in
the world. Furthermore, the lower wages inferior races receive in
the present capitalist centers for the same work as done by whites
cannot be explained as detached from the racist social classification
of the worlds populationin other words, as detached from the global
capitalist coloniality of power. The control of labor in the new model of
global power was constituted thus, articulating all historical forms of labor
control around the capitalist wage-labor relation. This articulation was
constitutively colonial, based on first the assignment of all forms of
unpaid labor to colonial races (originally American Indians, blacks,
and, in a more complex way, mestizos) in America and, later on, to
the remaining colonized raced of the world, olives and yellows.
Second, labor was controlled through the assignment of labor to the
colonizing whites. Coloniality of labor control determined the
geographic distribution of each one of the integrated forms of labor
control in global capitalism. In other words, it determined the social
geography of capitalism: capital, as a social formation for control of
wage labor, was the axis around which all remaining forms of labor
control, resources, and products were articulated.
 2AC- Historical Materialism
Link turn- 1AC discusses how neoliberalism has created
conditions for violence but Rodriguez argues that that I
do not find the analytics of neoliberalism to be sufficient
for describing the conditions of political work within the
U.S. acaedemy today. It is not just different structures of
oppressive violence that radical scholars are trying to
make legible, it is violence of a certain depth, with
specific and morbid implications for some peoples future
existence as such If we can begin to acknowledge this
.

fundamental truththat genocide is this place (the

American academy and, in fact, America itself)then our
operating assumptions, askable questions, and scholarly
methods will need to transform.
Historical materialism results in ecological destruction,
imperialism, and the furthering of social oppression

Coburn 2014 (Elaine [has been the Co-Editor and Editor of

Socialist Studies from August 2009 toJuly 2014. She is
assistant professor at the American University of Paris
and researcher at the CADIS, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales. Her recent work is collaborative
research around discourses of the International Monetary
Fund and World Bank over the last forty years and
Indigenous resistance and resurgence] NOTHING HUMAN
IS ALIEN TO ME: RETHINKING HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
AND SOCIALISM, Socialist Studies / tudes socialistes 10
(1) Summer 2014) //jl

I have said that historical materialism and socialism are inadequate. But some might argue that the
situation is much more serious than that: historical materialism and socialism are not inadequate. They are not even useless.
are worse than useless. One ground for making this argument is the
Rather they
horrors of the ostensibly Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, China and so
on. As my colleague Augustin ('Catalin') Stoica used to tell me when we were graduate students, having survived life and
struggles against Ceausescu's regime in Romania: I've lived your utopia!. To me, the obvious answer is that these regimes
were not Communist in any meaningful sense of the world. Certainly, they were not socialist if socialism is about meeting
The draconian limits on human freedoms
needs and the unalienated expression of each human being.
so characteristic of these regimes, not least the drastic limits to the free
expression of ideas, are not compatible with socialism thus imagined. Neither, it
should go without saying, is mass murder and starvation, mass incarceration
and torture. The explicit, formal censorship of these regimes and the horrendous persecution of dissidents and
ordinary prisoners has nothing to do with what GA Cohen might have called a socialist ethos (2009, e.g., pp. 344-56) of
community and solidarity. If Romania were socialist, then socialism would rightly be struggled against as a horrifying
prospect -- but I don't think that the case can even remotely be made that such regimes' fulfill socialist criteria of meeting
 They were also, typically, ecological disasters.
needs and unalienated self-expression.
Observing this does not exonerate the countries of the West. North American and Western
European states are guilty of anti-Communist witchhunts and de facto limits on free expression given a privately-owned so-
There are, moreover, the realities of mass incarceration, not least
called free press.
in the United States but also in Canada. These injustice systems capture, as Sakej
Youngblood Henderson (forthcoming) vividly describes it, subaltern masses, particular poor Black,
Indigenous and other racialized minorities. There are the seemingly never-
ending entanglements in imperial wars, which are typically deadly to those
being rescued by a Western military itself made up of racialized and working
class men and some women. There are the facts of contemporary slavery, a
brisk world-wide trafficking of organs and human beings, including in the sex
trade, with the world's working and underclasses literally supplying bodies and
body parts to the wealthy and infirm in the West (see, for instance, Scheper-Hughes 2001). But
Communist nations are not exemplars of socialism, any more than contemporary
Western nations live up to democratic liberal ideals of freedom and equality.
Some might argue that this is an intellectual pirouette to save socialism and
that actually-existing socialisms must be analysed just as actually-existing
capitalisms are. But that a murderous dictator calls his regime socialist does not make it so. Indeed, to admit
Ceaucescu's claim is to disfigure socialist contributions from Marx to Rosa Luxemburg to GA Cohen and Himani Bannerji to
those of many more anonymous and admirable people who have fought nationally and internationally for socialism. They
have done so partly in the name of self-expression and freedoms, because these will be rooted within shared material well-
being that makes the genuine exercise of those freedoms possible. In fact, far from being present in the self-declared
Communist regimes, if there have been embryonic expressions of socialism, these are not embodied by any national state.
Instead, they are found in the interstices of the world political economy, in cooperatives, in persistent patterns of informal
sharing, and in examples of joyous solidarity combined with individual fulfillment, like playing in a jazz band (Vrousalis
An equally serious but to me more credible charge against historical
2012).
materialism and socialism is that they have often collaborated with racism,
sexism, homophobia, disabling social relations and structures and colonization,
while ignoring life-threatening ecological damage. For instance, when I asked Sherene Razack to
interview Himani Bannerji for Socialist Studies (the interview unfortunately suffered from poor recording and may be
irretrievable), she had to brave the criticisms of anti-racist colleagues who saw this as a betrayal so many historical
This
materialists and socialists have energetically argued against anti-racist scholarship as a form of false consciousness.
is a problem; and it is a problem for historical materialists and socialists who must
prove we are not complicit in racism and other injustices , as we too often are by commission,
by omission and through failure to challenge routine, institutionalized forms of racism and other oppressions in our own
scholarship and activism. Here,it is impossible to enumerate all the ways that historical
materialists and socialists have collaborated. Instead, I offer three ideal-typical (and partially
overlapping) arguments that will be familiar to many, emphasizing how they manifest in academia. But they take
not dissimilar forms in the world of activism, with sometimes horrendous
consequences.

Historical materialism must take into account race and

gender otherwise they will reproduce whiteness; Only by
including racial analysis can we truly challenge capitalism

Coburn 2014 (Elaine [has been the Co-Editor and Editor of

Socialist Studies from August 2009 toJuly 2014. She is
assistant professor at the American University of Paris and
researcher at the CADIS, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales. Her recent work is collaborative research around
discourses of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank
over the last forty years and Indigenous resistance and
resurgence] NOTHING HUMAN IS ALIEN TO ME: RETHINKING
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND SOCIALISM, Socialist Studies /
tudes socialistes 10 (1) Summer 2014) //jl
The single most well-known Black feminist is arguably Sojourner Truth (1851), a former slave and abolitionist. Her 1851 Ain't I a Woman!
extemporaneous speech at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention still rings down more than a century later; in it, she affirms her experiences as a former
slave who engages in hard physical labour and demands recognition of that reality before the assembled white women whose grievances included being
treated as physically fragile and incapable. In other words, Sojourner Truth spoke from her own lived experiences against white women's falsely
Despite her heroic efforts and those of
universalizing description of their oppression within patriarchal capitalism.

many other Black men and women, however, many historical materialists
still deny the importance of gender and race to actually-existing
capitalism. Empirically, this is impossible to justify. Thus, officially
sanctioned slavery existed for four hundred of capitalism's five hundred
year old existence. In this system, ten to twelve million individuals were
treated as mere commodities, to be bought, sold and subject to extreme
violence at the whim of their owners, on the basis of race. The labour
they carried out and the kinds of violence, including sexual violence, that
they were subject to was often sharply divided by gender. Official slavery
on such a scale is hardly a detail of world capitalist history. Nor are the
ongoing wounds of racism, as is clear given the mass incarceration of
Black men and women, particularly in the United States, but also Canada,
massive economic inequalities linked to race and the enduring reality that
many Blacks are still treated, at least in certain moments as no more
than subhuman niggers, regardless of class (on this last in particular see Anderson
2011, pp.249-273). Achille Mbembe's brilliant Critique de la raison ngre (2013), is a recent example of the kind of
historical materialists and socialists too often wrongly
contribution that
ignore, precisely because it centres race as the principle from which to
illuminate a universal history of the last centuries, the present, and even
into the future. This complex, nuanced if imperfect book examines the multiple and changing significations of what it means to be
ngre, both from the point of view of white slave owners and colonizers and from those reduced to sub-human status under this ideology. Mbembe
likewise looks at the material relations, including those of extreme violence (pp.153-189), between whites and ngres. Throughout, he insists on the
'ngre' as the epitome of the world capitalist system, as well as the product of tendencies to classify humans only to devalue some humans so classified
based on race (eg., p.257). Thus, he argues in unfortunately masculinist language that the 'ngre', as the man-object (sic), man-currency (sic) is the
future within capitalism, as neoliberalism generalizes the human being as a mere instrument for exploitation (including self-exploitation) for future profits
But the 'ngre' also offers possibilities for emancipation,
(2013, p.14, p.258).

historical possibilities that are pregnant in prior victories over slavery,

colonization and most recently formal apartheid in South Africa.
Materialists might quarrel with some idealistic tendencies within Mbembe
(2013), not least his argument that transcending the idea of race is the
central pathway towards freedom from the instrumentalization and
objectification of human beings (p.258). But the common ground is more
important than any divergences, as he offers a history of the world from
the point of view of the changing and complex significations and realities
of the 'ngre'. These are vital insights for historical materialists seeking to
think about the changing nature of world capitalism over centuries,
including the ways that material relations of racial inequality
emblematically in the slave trade are reflected in, and legitimated by
complex racist ideologies in popular and elite cultures. Moreover, Mbembe's history
ought to be critical to informing socialist practices, as he insists on the importance of appreciating the unique and
universal humanity of each and all against racial inequalities that deny this to human beings transformed into
Socialists argue that the liberation of the working class
nothing more than 'ngres'.
will require the overthrow of class inequalities; but equally, with Mbembe
as with prior scholars and activists, it is clear that such liberation cannot
come about as long as masses are effectively relegated to sub-human
status through racisms. Such racisms are shape-shifting but constant
features of a world capitalism that tends to reduce human beings to
nothing more than commodities: besides the enormous human importance
of this reality, this is why the 'ngre' as a slave-commodity is so critical
analytically, illuminating this central feature of capitalist dynamics.
Historical materialism doesnt live up to its promises in
theory or in action, resulting in the solidification of
oppression

Coburn 2014 (Elaine [has been the Co-Editor and Editor of

Socialist Studies from August 2009 toJuly 2014. She is
assistant professor at the American University of Paris
and researcher at the CADIS, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales. Her recent work is collaborative
research around discourses of the International Monetary
Fund and World Bank over the last forty years and
Indigenous resistance and resurgence] NOTHING HUMAN
IS ALIEN TO ME: RETHINKING HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
AND SOCIALISM, Socialist Studies / tudes socialistes 10
(1) Summer 2014) //jl
What, then, is the problem with historical materialism, as a theory offering insights into actually existing capitalism,
and with socialism, as a normative vision of a just world rooted in contemporary struggles, first, to meet needs
The first major
within life-sustaining ecological limits and second, to enable unalienated human expression?
problem for historical materialism is that it does not live up to its own
historical materialist premises. By this, I mean that too many historical
materialist analyses ignore fundamental realities of human lives, of
human suffering and of human solidarity within capitalism, on the grounds
that inequalities around race, gender, sexuality, colonialism and disability
are not essential aspects of the world capitalist political economy. They
maintain this even in the face of overwhelming evidence that such unjust
inequalities shape everyday life for the vast majority of humanity within
actually-existing capitalism. I have tried to emphasize that unjust inequalities are neither natural
nor ahistorical. Rather, they are social, hence contingent and historically changing; they must be theorized and
they
their emergence and transformations cannot be deduced but must be empirically investigated. But
cannot be ignored on the grounds that they are just another form of
oppression, hence unworthy of investigation. In addition, in historical
materialist theory too many write as if the ultimate context for social life
were the world capitalist political economy and not the natural world that
sustains us. This is sometimes stated explicitly, sometimes implicitly , as I
explore below, and these omissions are often institutionally organized which should come as no surprise to
Second, on both empirical and moral grounds, it is not
materialist theorists.
simply a matter of live and let live in a world in which historical
materialists and socialists focus on class revolution while other anti-
oppressive moments occupy themselves with other unjust inequalities in a
clean division of labour. There could be differences of emphases, with
some approaches primarily emphasizing gender, for instance, and others
stressing class. But a 'clean' division of analytical and empirical labour is
impossible, insofar as these other inequalities are thoroughly mixed up
with class and with each other. As already observed, following Bannerji (2005), we do not
experience race, gender, class and disability, sexuality etc. separately
and sequentially but all together and all at once7. At the same time, how these are
experienced and how they are articulated with broader capitalist relations are not fixed but change over time and
across different national contexts. On moral grounds, insofar as socialist struggles
overlook inequalities for instance, around race, gender, disability,
sexuality, ongoing colonization, and so on, they reproduce such injustices.
In the familiar rhetoric of social movements, if historical materialism and socialism are not
part of the solution with respect to these other unjust inequalities, they
are part of the problem. Third, historical materialism and socialist
struggles have been marginalized for decades for multiple reasons, not
least the relative increasing strength of the world capitalist class and
hence the relative decline of the dominated classes. During the same time period,
however, elements of the working and dominated classes have made critical gains in anti-racist struggles, including
the successful struggle against legal apartheid in South Africa, improvements to womens equality if certainly not
Both historical materialism and socialism are
an end to male domination, and so on.
doomed to continued irrelevancy if they dismiss major, everyday sources
of suffering and also solidarities on the grounds that these are illusory
because they are not primarily concerned with class. In other words,
although they do have vital insights, historical materialisms and
socialisms are inadequate on quadruple analytical, empirical, moral and
pragmatic grounds insofar as they marginalize questions around race,
gender, sexuality, colonialism, disability and the natural world. They may
even be harmful insofar as they perpetuate non-class based injustices.
Since injustices may arise and take new forms, while others disappear,
historical materialists must be alert to how both new and old unjust
relations of inequality are articulated within world capitalism at any time.

No root cause- capitalism builds off colonialism and

racism but doesnt explain either of them

Quijano 2000 (Anibal, He attended National University of San Marcos (UNMSM), Peru, where he earned a
Ph.D. degree in 1964. Until 1995, he was Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences of San Marcos. He is currently
Professor of the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. Dr. Quijano is a distinguished intellectual in
the Social Sciences, who has held several positions as a visiting professor at universities worldwide: Maison des Sciences
de l'Homme (Paris), University of So Paulo, University of Puerto Rico, University of Hannover, Free University of Berlin,
National University of Ecuador, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Universidad de Chile, Latin American
School of Economics (ESCOLATINA), and George Washington University. He has written numerous books and
publications on colonialism, politics, democracy, globalization and other social issues., Coloniality of Power,
Eurocentrism, and Latin America, Neplanta: Views from South 1.3, Duke University Press, 2000)//JS

The progressive monetization of the world market that the precious metals
from America stimulated and allowed, as well as the control of such large
resources, made possible the control of the vast preexisting web of
commercial exchange that included, above all, China, India, Ceylon, Egypt,
Syriathe future Far and Middle East. The monetization of labor also
made it possible to concentrate the control of commercial capital,
labor and means of production in the whole world market. The fact is
that from the very beginning of the colonization of America,
Europeans associated nonpaid or nonwaged labor with the
dominated races because they were inferior races. The vast
genocide of the Indians in the first decades of colonization was not
caused principally by the violence of the conquest nor by the
plagues the conquistadors brought, but took place because so many
American Indians were used as disposable manual labor and forced
them to work until death. The elimination of this colonial practice did not
end until the defeat of the encomenderos in the middle of the sixteenth
century. The subsequent Iberian colonialism involved a new politics of
population reorganization, a reorganization of the Indians and their relations
with the colonizers. The racial classification of the population and the
early association of the new racial identities of the colonized with
the forms of control of unpaid, unwaged labor developed among the
Europeans the singular perception that paid labor was the whites
privilege. The racial inferiority of the colonized implied that they
were not worthy of wages. They were naturally obliged to work for the
profit of their owners. It is not difficult to find, to this very day, this
attitude spread out among the white property owners of any place in
the world. Furthermore, the lower wages inferior races receive in
the present capitalist centers for the same work as done by whites
cannot be explained as detached from the racist social classification
of the worlds populationin other words, as detached from the global
capitalist coloniality of power. The control of labor in the new model of
global power was constituted thus, articulating all historical forms of labor
control around the capitalist wage-labor relation. This articulation was
constitutively colonial, based on first the assignment of all forms of
unpaid labor to colonial races (originally American Indians, blacks,
and, in a more complex way, mestizos) in America and, later on, to
the remaining colonized raced of the world, olives and yellows.
Second, labor was controlled through the assignment of labor to the
colonizing whites. Coloniality of labor control determined the
geographic distribution of each one of the integrated forms of labor
control in global capitalism. In other words, it determined the social
geography of capitalism: capital, as a social formation for control of
wage labor, was the axis around which all remaining forms of labor
control, resources, and products were articulated.

This separation that allows white workers to feel better

about themselves in relation is empirically shown to have
value for them- part of the wage of whiteness that keep
parasitic racist politics going

Olson, Professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University, 04

(Joel, The Abolition of White Democracy, Minnesota Press, 2004, BH)

The key to explaining why white workers sided with the elites on the basis of racial interests rather than with Black workers on
the basis of class interests, Du Bois suggests, lies not so much in the particular events of Reconstruction but in a set of privileges
white workers had enjoyed even before the Civil War. Du Bois argues that white workers actively oppressed their
fellow workers in exchange for the wages of whiteness. It must be remembered that the white group of
laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.
They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all
classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the
courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public
offcials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the
deference shown them.29 The wages of whiteness literally pay off in terms of higher wages, two-tiered
wage scales, exclusive access to certain jobs, and informal unemployment insurance (first hired, last
fired). They also ensure access to land, capital, and markets to those who can afford them, giving white workers-cum-
entrepreneurs the chance to become capitalists. But they also grant whites an elevated social status, which in many ways is as
significant as the tangible benefits. The public and psychological wages of whiteness grant the white worker the same political
rights and privileges accorded elites: legal equality with all other whites, the right to elect leaders, join political parties, assemble
and speak freely, bear arms. They provide the white citizen with an air of both equality and superiority:
equal to all white peopleeven the richyet superior to all Black peopleeven the rich. The wages of
whiteness ensure that no matter how poor, mean, or low a white citizen may be and in spite of gender or other social identities, he
or she still has, in many ways, a social status higher than the most intelligent, well-off Black person. The most educated and
deserving black man, Du Bois solemnly notes, was compelled in many public places to occupy a place beneath the lowest and
least deserving of the whites.30 The flip side of white wages was Black subordination. The Black man was
subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was
compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority.31 Black women additionally faced the
threat of sexual assault without any expectation of legal or social protection. The wages of
whiteness drove a wedge between Black and white workers such that, although they shared a language, dialect,
religion, music, food, and (often enough) condition of squalor, they seemed to have almost nothing in common. Du Bois insists
that the white workers actions cannot be explained away as false consciousness. Devious capitalists plot to divide and conquer
the working class by fomenting racial divisions. Some white workers may be irrationally prejudiced against African Americans.
Nevertheless, The bulk of American white labor is neither ignorant nor fanatical. It knows exactly what it is doing and it means
to do it. [White labor leaders] have no excuse of illiteracy or religion to veil their deliberate intention to keep Negroes and
Mexicans and other elements of common labor, in a lower proletariat as subservient to their interests as theirs are to the interests
of capital.32 White workers, Du Bois emphasizes, repress the Black community because they see it in their (shortterm) interests
to do so. The tragedy is that in exchange for such wages poor whites maintain a system that exploits
them, too. For even as these wages specifically benefited white workers, Du Bois maintains, they were absolutely necessary
for the continued power of the capitalist class. In all class systems, laborers must be disciplined if they are to work efficiently. 33
American slavery was no different in this respect. What was unique about the policing of enslaved Southern workers and later
free Black workers was that it was done not by a middle group standing between worker and owner (such as a managerial class or
a mulatto race/class) but by fellow workers. In this peculiar system of discipline, there were more police than the policed because
the entire white population of the solid South was conscripted into the struggle to secure the political obedience and economic
productivity of the Black worker.34 But since planters made up only a small percentage of the whites, workers effectively policed
workers. Northern white labor also policed the slaves by enforcing the fugitive slave law, sharing the same political party with
Southern elites, acquiescing to Southern dominance of the national government, and degrading free Black Northerners. Slavery
and later Jim Crow segregation, Du Bois concludes, was held stable and intact by the poor white.35 In this way a unique
system of docility utility was achieved that maximized the political obedience and economic
usefulness of all workers. This system is reproduced by more than conscious intent and tacit
consent. In a sense, race functions like a discipline. Disciplines, Michel Foucault argues, are techniques for assuring
the ordering of human multiplicities. They are specific institutions like armies, workshops, hospitals, and prisons, but they are
also general formulas of domination in the modern era.36 This domination is productive as much as it is repressive. That is,
disciplines produce subjects who are economically useful and politically docile through norms, techniques, routines, and other
rote means of minutely organizing time and space. The wages of whiteness serve precisely this function of
organizing, directing, shaping, producing, and repressing individuals in order to create relations
of docility-utility.37 More than a means of dividing and conquering the working class, white privilege is a central form
of power in the accumulation of humans that, Foucault notes, always accompanies the accumulation of capital.

Perm: Incorporate a historical materialist account into the

narrative of the 1AC: Materialist accounts of political
relations that reduce capitalism to the economic
accumulation of capital ignore the human elements and
socio/cultural forces that shape a population for efficient
means of production. Only a materialist analysis of race-
as-politics can account for the US society
Olson, Professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University, 04
(Joel, The Abolition of White Democracy, Minnesota Press, 2004, BH)

This contrasts with approaches that define race as an ideology. Matthew Pratt Guterls The Color of Race in
America, for example, examines the rise of a biracial order from 1900 to 1940 through an analysis of the social and political thought
of Figures such as Du Bois, Madison Grant, Lathrop Stoddard, and Jean Toomer. Guterls interpretations of each are acute and
historically sensitive, yet his book too much assumes that the racial order is shaped by what people write
and say about race rather than how it is reproduced in economic and social structures .31 Madison Grants
obsession with the supremacy of the Nordic white race and his fear of the corrupting influence of the lower Alpine and
Mediterranean races, for example, says much about Grant and other WASP intellectuals anxieties at the turn of the twentieth
century regarding the consolidation of legal segregation and the resultant expansion of the white race to include Southern and Eastern
European immigrants, but we should not presume that his ideas illuminate how race actually functioned then. Jim Crow never
recognized differences between Nordics and Mediterraneans. Guterl is correct that there is an important ideological
component to the reproduction of race, but the history of ideas on race must be placed in a historical-
structural context. As Michael Dawson notes, white supremacy is best understood not as an ideology, but as
a system of power relations that structure society.32 Nevertheless, given materialisms unfashionable standing
these days, I feel obligated to point out that a materialist approach does not require me to reduce all social
relations to class or to argue that social and political relationships, including racial ones, are
secondary in importance to class relations. While some materialists have taken these positions, doing so
generally results in the uninteresting flight from politics of which Shklar rightfully warns. Capitalism is not
just an economic system that produces commodities. It is also the ensemble of relationships involved in such
production. As Michel Foucault writes, the accumulation of capital requires an accumulation of men.33 In other words,
humans in capitalist societies are accumulated, or organized and arranged, through forms of
power that make them more politically docile and economically efficient. It is my contention that racialized
citizenship has been central in constructing the relations of docility utility necessary for the
accumulation of capital in the United States. While some will question my materialist approach, I suspect that others
will criticize my account of white democracy for granting too much agency to whites, particularly white workers, in their complicity
with capitalist domination. To these critics my argument may seem to lack an appreciation of the more subtle and impersonal means
by which power is exercised. I wholeheartedly agree that power acts through social structures in diffuse and complex ways that lie
outside the bounds of rational agency, yet I insist that whites have made choices that have ensured their privileged
standing throughout American history and that these choices were crucial in shaping American
democracy. White workers had a voice in the Democratic Party, the unions, and the local political
machines, and all too often they opted for whiteness rather than class solidarity . Dixiecrats continually
obstructed any legislation that whiffed of racial equality. White bosses deliberately established two-tiered wage
systems. White parents consistently opposed efforts to desegregate their childrens schools. White
liberals constantly castigated Black civil rights leaders for moving too fast. I do not intend for my argument
to be too voluntaristic, but white citizenship must be posed as a choice (even if it is not just a choice) in
order to suggest political alternatives. Historically white citizens have made the wrong choice about
their democratic alternatives, but the beautiful thing about the ability to make a decision is that one
can always change ones mind

Perm S!: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary differences

in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative politics
that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

5 Net Bens:
Violence d/a- The alternative approach is the teleological
memory work that is the root cause of the biopolitical
violence and domination it claims to solve- leads to the
Gulag

Mbembe 2003 (Achille [a senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic
Research at the University of the Witwatersrand], public culture, http://wiserweb.wits.ac.za/PDF
%20Files/biopolitics%20-%20mbembe.pdf//PTG
But nowhere is the conflation of reason and terror so manifest as during the French Revolution.25 During
the French Revolution, terror is construed as an almost necessary part of politics. An absolute transparency
is claimed to exist between the state and the people. As a political category, the people is gradually
displaced from concrete reality to rhetorical figure. As David Bates has shown, the theorists of terror
believe it possible to distinguish between authentic expressions of sovereignty and the actions of the
enemy. They also believe it possible to distinguish between the error of the citizen and the crime of the
counterrevolutionary in the political sphere. Terror thus becomes a way of marking aberration in the body
politic, and politics is read both as the mobile force of reason and as the errant attempt at creating a space
where error would be reduced, truth enhanced, and the enemy disposed of.26 Finally, terror is not linked
solely to the utopian belief in the unfettered power of human reason. It is also clearly related to various
narratives of mastery and emancipation, most of which are underpinned by Enlightenment understandings
of truth and error, the real and the symbolic. Marx, for example, conflates labor (the endless cycle
of production and consumption required for the maintenance of human life ) with work (the creation of
lasting artifacts that add to the world of things). Labor is viewed as the vehicle for the
historical self-creation of humankind. The historical self-creation of
humankind is itself a life-and-death conflict; that is, a conflict over what paths
should lead to the truth of history: the overcoming of capitalism and the
commodity form and the contradictions associated with both . According to
Marx, with the advent of communism and the abolition of exchange relations,
things will appear as they really are; the real will present itself as it actually
is, and the distinction between subject and object or being and consciousness
will be transcended.27 But by making human emancipation dependent upon
the abolition of commodity production, Marx blurs the all-important divisions
between the man-made realm of freedom, the nature-determined realm of
necessity, and the contingent in history. The commitment to the abolition of commodity
production and the dream of direct and unmediated access to the real make these processes
the fulfillment of the so-called logic of history and the fabrication of
humankindalmost necessarily violent processes. As shown by Stephen Louw, the
central tenets of classical Marxism leave no choice but to try to introduce
communism by administrative fiat, which, in practice, means that social
relations must be decommodified forcefully.28 Historically, these attempts
have taken such forms as labor militarization, the collapse of the distinction
between state and society, and revolutionary terror. 29 It may be argued that
they aimed at the eradication of the basic human condition of plurality . Indeed,
the overcoming of class divisions, the withering away of the state, the
flowering of a truly general will presuppose a view of human plurality as the
chief obstacle to the eventual realization of a predetermined telos of history.
In other words, the subject of Marxian modernity is, fundamentally, a subject who is intent on proving his
or her sovereignty through the staging of a fight to the death. Just as with Hegel, the narrative of mastery
and emancipation here is clearly linked to a narrative of truth and death. Terror and killing become the
means of realizing the already known telos of history.

Scholarship D/A: The Ks replication of the scholarly

discussion of CAP ignores that capitalisms rationalizing
procedures are interwoven with racial orders.

Page 12
[http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/09/04/represent
-and-destroy-rationalizing-violence-in-the-new-racial-
capitalism/ Allison Page is a PhD student in critical media
studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research
interests include race, consumer culture, neoliberalism,
and reality television.]
One of the books strongest aspects is Melameds analysis of the U.S. universitys collaboration with (and,
in some instances, resistance to) racial capitalism. Indeed, as Melamed demonstrates, the U.S. university
captured the subjugated knowledges of 1960s and 70s social movements in order to put knowledge about minoritized subjects and difference

to work for capital in the wake of post-Keynesianism. Moreover, the U.S. university constituted the knowledgeable white subject

who encountered racial difference through literature , and who was thus prepared as a self-actualized and multicultural member of the
professional-managerial class of global capitalism (while turning a blind eye to the material realities faced by people of
color expunged from academia). Another of Melameds vital contributions is her theorization of neoliberal racial
capitalism, wherein whiteness is delinked from color and yoked instead to wealth and multiculturalism , with critical implications for
citizenship and belonging. In the epilogue, she identifies a new formation that she terms neoliberal-
neoracial capitalism. This understanding of the connections between race and capitalism in our current moment
would be especially significant to media and cultural studies scholars who often consider race and

gender as secondary to capital. In Represent and Destroy, Melamed provides new theoretical
tools that seek to grapple with the abstraction and capitalisms
flexibility of neoliberal

rationalizing procedures as they interweave with racial orders. As an

example, Melamed points to the passage of Arizona State Law SB 1070, co-written by members of the
Arizona state legislature and the Corrections Corporation of America (the largest private prison company
in the world), which enabled the state and private industry to rationalize thousands as racially illegal in
an instant to simultaneously generate new forms of permissible state violence and capital accumulation
(224). Although Melamed draws on literary examples, Represent and Destroy has much to offer scholars
working in media and cultural studies. For example, Melamed often mentions media as a technology for
shoring up official antiracisms, but focuses her project on literature, thus opening up space for further
analysis. Although Anna McCarthys The Citizen Machine: Governing By Television in 1950s America
spends some time considering state antiracisms and racial liberalism in particular (e.g., through the
deployment of figures like Ralph Bunche), McCarthy contains her analysis to the 1950s, and instead of
texts, focuses on the aims of those involved with early television. Given Melameds scope, it is worth
examining, for instance, 1960s television documentaries on race, as well as contemporary trends in media
and film. Considering the title aloneRepresent and Destroy the book greatly complicates questions of representation,
shifts
especially in our current neoliberal moment. By troubling the notion of representation, Melamed
scholarly attention away from conceptions of good or bad
representations to larger questions that consider the state, capital, and knowledge
production, thereby highlighting the necessity for broader historical, political, and social contextualization.
Most powerfully, Melameds text would push media and cultural studies scholars to center race in
their analyses of capital and culture .

Sacrifice D/A: Their anti-capitalist stance romanticizes the

worker at the expense of the slave, shoring up the
Eurocentric values of enlightenment that make ongoing
extermination inevitable.
Wilderson III 2007 [Frank B., Assistant professor of African American
Studies and Drama at UC Irvine, The Prison Slave as Hegemonys (Silent)
Scandal, Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal
Democracy, p. 26-29]
By examining the strategy and structure of the black subject's absence in, and incommensurability with,
the key categories of Gramscian theory, we come face to face with three unsettling consequences: 1.
The black American subject imposes a radical incoherence on the
assumptive logic of Gramscian discourse and on today's coalition politics. In other
words, she or he implies a scandal. 2. The black subject reveals the inability of social
movements grounded in Gramscian discourse to think of white
supremacy (rather than capitalism) as the base and thereby calls into
question their claim to elaborate a comprehensive and decisive
antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian discourse and coalition politics are indeed able to
imagine the subject that transforms itself into a mass of antagonistic identity formations-formations that
can precipitate a crisis in wage slavery, exploitation, and hegemony-but they are asleep at the wheel when
asked to provide enabling antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror. 3. We begin to see
how Marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety. There is a desire for
socialism on the other side of crisis, a society that does away not with the category of worker but with the
imposition that workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its
conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and ensure the
coherence of Reformation and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This
scenario crowds out other post revolutionary possibilities that is, idleness. The scandal with which the
black subject position "threatens" Gramscian and coalition discourse is manifest in the black subject's
incommensurability with, or disarticulation of, Gramscian categories: work, progress, production,
exploitation, hegemony, and historical self-awareness. Through what strategies does the black subject
destabilize-emerge as the unthought, and thus the scandal of-historical materialism? How does the black
subject function within the 'American desiring machine" differently from the quintessential Gramscian
subaltern, the worker? Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African
continent, a phenomenon that is central to neither Gramsci nor Marx. According to Lindon Barrett,
something about the black body in and of itself made it the repository of the violence that was the slave
trade. It would have been far easier and far more profitable to take the
white underclass from along the riverbanks of England and western
Europe than to travel all the way to Africa for slaves . The theoretical
importance of emphasizing this in the early twenty-first century is twofold. First, capital was kick-
started by approaching a particular body (a black body) with direct
relations of force, not by approaching a white body with variable
capital. Thus, one could say that slavery is closer to capital's primal desire than is exploitation. It is a
relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony. Second, today, late capital is imposing
a renaissance of this original desire, the direct relation of force, the
despotism of the unwaged relation. This renaissance of slavery-that is, the
reconfiguration of the prison-industrial complex-has once again as its structuring metaphor and primary
target the black body. The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave by way of noting the
absence of the black subject lies in the black subject's potential for extending the demand placed on
state/capital formations because its reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the
antagonism. In other words, the positionality of the slave makes a demand that is in excess of the demand
made by the positionality of the worker. The worker demands that productivity be fair and democratic
(Gramsd's new hegemony; Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat-in a word, socialism). In contrast, the
slave demands that production stop, without recourse to its ultimate democratization. Work is not an
organic principle for the slave. The absence of black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is
symptomatic of the text's inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of
capitalism, the black body of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. and the generative subject that
resolves late capital's over-accumulation crisis, the black (incarcerated) body of the twentieth century and
does not reify the basic categories that structure
twenty-first century,
conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation .

Historical materialism as a paradigm is racist and

heteronormative

Ferguson 2003 (Roderick Ferguson is professor of race

and critical theory in the American Studies Department at
the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN),
Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique,
Published by U Minn Press, December 10, 2003, p. 7-
10)//TR
The prostitute proves capitals defilement of man. She symbolizes mans dehumanization or more
specifically, mans feminization under capitalist relations of production. While mans
essence in heteropatriarchy suggest undeterred connections with other humans, with ones
self, and with nature, the prostitute represents the ways that capital disrupts those
connections. Capital now violently mediates mans relationship to himself, to others, and to nature. As a figure of self-
interest, the prostitute represents mans descent into vulgar egoism. Suggesting this egoism
spawned by capitalist alienation, Marx argues, [Alienated labor] estranges mans own
body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being. We
can see that violent mediation very clearly as the worker who-like all prostitutes- must sell
his own labor to survive. Castrated from the means of production, the worker has only that
labor that resides in his body to sell. As the prostitute is regarded as the property of
communal lust, the worker is brandedas the property of capital. As Marx imagines
capital implies the mobility of vice, the spread of immorality, and the eruption of social
transgressions. It was precisely this sort of eruption that bourgeois ideologues in nineteenth-
century Britain feared the most. During this period, middle-class observers conflated the anarchic
possibilities of economic production with a presumably burgeoning sexual deviancy among
working-class communities, in general, and working-class women, in particular. The
prostitute symbolized poor and working-class communities potential threat to gender
stability and sexual normativity. As mills throughout London employed young British girls,
enabling them to buy clothes and other items that were previously inaccessible, middle-class
citizens often saw working-class girls tastes in commodities as signs of awakening sexual appetites. Desires for ribbon,
lace, and silks those citizens reasoned, could entice young girls into a life of prostitution . As
Thomas Laquer notes, [W]orking-class women were thought to bear the dangers of
uncontrolled desire that seemed to flow freely from one domain to another, from legitimate
consumption to illegitimate sex. Giving credence to the idea that industrialization was engendering prostitution, the
French socialist and feminist Flora Tristan alleged that there were in London from 8-,000-100,000 women- the flower of the
population- living off prostitution; on the streets and in temples raised by English materialism to their godsmale guests come to
exchange their gold for debauchery. Reports of out-of-wedlock births, prenuptial pregnancy, early
marriage, masturbation, sexually active youth, and so forth arose during this period and
were for the British middle class evidence of a peaking sexual chaos. In doing so, they
conflated the reality of changing gender and sexual relations with the representation of the
prostitute and the working class as pathologically sexual. As middle-class witnesses to industrialization
understood their own families to be sufficiently anchored against the moral disruptions of capital, they regarded the working class as
rootless and uncontrolled- a sort of social correlative to unrestrained id. Corroborating presumptions about industrial capitals
encouragement of libertinism, Frederick Engels argued, [N]ext to the enjoyment of intoxicating liquors, one of the principal faults of
the English working-men is sexual license. Marxs use of the prostitute as the apocalyptic symbol of
capitals emergence points to his affinity with bourgeois discourses of the day. Both
bourgeois ideologues and their radical opponents took the prostitute as the sign of the
gendered and sexual chaos that commodification was bound to unleash. More to the point,
pundits understood this gender and sexual chaos to be an explicitly racial phenomenon .
Indeed, in nineteenth-century Britain, the prostitute was a racial metaphor for the gender and sexual
confusions unleashed by capital, disruptions that destabilized hetero-patriarchal conformity
and authority. In fact, nineteenth-century iconography used the image of Sarah Bartmann,
popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, who was exhibited in freak shows throughout
London, to link the figure of the prostitute to the alleged sexual savagery of black women
and to install nonwhite sexuality as the axis upon which various notions of womanhood
turned. As industrial capital developed and provided working-class white women with limited income and mobility the prostitutes
became the racialized figure that could enunciate anxieties about such changes. Conflating the prostitute with the British working class
inspired racial mythologies about the supposed abnormal reproductive capacities and outcomes of that class. One tale suggested that
the bodies of British-working-class-women could produces races heretofore unseen. One magistrate warned that if empty casks were
placed along the streets of Whitechapel, it would help spawn species of tub men who would wreak havoc on communities in Britain,
creating the conditions by which savages [would live] in the midst of civilization. The universalization of
heteropatriarchy produces the prostitute as the other of heteropatriarchal ideals, an other
that is simultaneously the effect of racial, gender, sexual, and class discourses, an other that
names the social upheavals of capital as racialized disruptions. Unmarried and sexually
mobile, the prostitute was eccentric to the gendered and sexual ideals of normative (i.e..,
patriarchal) heterosexuality. That eccentricity denoted the pathologies, disorders, and
degradations of an emerging civilization. Rather than embodying heteropatriarchal ideals,
the prostitute was a figure of nonheteronormativity, excluded from the presumed security of
heteropatriarchal boundaries. As such, she and others like her were the targets of both
liberal and revolutionary regulations. Those regulations derived their motives from the fact that both bourgeois and
revolutionary practices were conceived through heteropatriarchy. We may imagine Marx asking, How could
she- the prostitute- be entrusted with the revolutionary transformation of society?
Likewise, we could imagine the bourgeoisie declaring, Never could whores rationally
administer a liberal society. Historical materialism and bourgeois ideology shared the
tendency to read modern civilization as the racialized scene of heteronormative disruption.
Marx fell into that ideology as he conflated the dominant representation of the prostitute with the social upheavals
wrought by capital. Put differently, he equated the hegemonic discourse about the prostitute, a
discourse that cast her as the symbol of immorality, vice, and corruption, with the reality of
a burgeoning capitalist economy. Taking the prostitute to be the obvious and transparent
sign of capital, at what point could Marx approach the prostitute and her alleged
pathologies as discursive questions, rather than as the real and objective outcomes of
capitalist social relations? At what point might he then consider the prostitute and others
like her to be potential sites from which to critique capital ? Naturalizing heteropatriarchy
by posing capital as the social threat to heteropatriarchal relations meant that both liberal reform
and proletarian revolution sought to recover heteropatriarchal integrity from the ravages of
industrialization. Basing the fundamental conditions of history upon heterosexual
reproduction and designating capital as the disruption of heterosexual normativity did more
than designate the subject of modern society as heteronormative. It made the
heteronormative subject the goal of liberal and radical practices. Under such a definition of
history, political economy became an arena where heteronormative legitimation was the
prize. Universalizing heteropatriarchy and constructing a racialized other that required
heteropatriarchal regulation was not the peculiar distinction of, or affinity between, Marx and his
bourgeois contemporaries. On the contrary, the racialized investment in heteropatriarchy
bequeathed itself to liberal and revolutionary projects, to bourgeois and revolutionary
nationalisms alike. Queer of color analysis must disidentify with historical materialism so as
not to extend this legacy.

Privilege D/A: White privilege constructs cross-class

alliances among the dominant race which detracts
attention from class, gender, and other issues.
Challenging white privilege must come first.
Olson, Professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University, 04
(Joel, The Abolition of White Democracy, Minnesota Press, 2004, BH)

Black Reconstruction is one of the most powerful indictments of the promise and failure of Reconstruction. It is also a
stinging critique of the American labor movement. But the books argument goes beyond the events of Reconstruction to provide
the basis for a political theory of race. Du Bois shows that racial oppression is a form of social control that
perpetuates class relations. The white working class serves as a buffer control stratum between
capitalists and the rest of the working class, facilitating social stability by holding down Black
workers.38 But Du Bois shows that race does more than exclude, divide, degrade, and repress. It is also a productive form of
power that accumulates humans into particular groups in order to produce relations of docility-
utility. It does this through a peculiar arrangement of class relations, which are secured through
various privileges granted to members of the dominant race. This cross-class alliance between the
capitalist class and a section of the working class is the genesis of the American racial order.39 Members of the alliance are
defined as white while those excluded from it are relegated to a not-white status. Historically, the
cross-class alliance
has ensured the social stability of American democracy by reconciling political equality with
economic exploitation through a system of racial privilege and subordination that deXects
attention from class, gender, and other grievances. Whiteness is a privileged position of standing in a democratic
society. The white race, write Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, consists of those who partake of the privileges of the white
skin in this society. Its most wretched members share, in certain respects, a status higher than that of the most exalted persons
excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to the system that degrades them.40
Churchill
 2AC
Returning the land wont solve the racism that already
exists in the status-quo since even after the dissolution of
the government those with power and resources will still
spread white supremacy.
The focus on the geographical location of imperialism re-
entrenches the spatial norms of imperial practices.
Spanos 9 William V., Disclosing Enclosure, symploke Vol 17, Numb 1-2, 2009

Edward W. Saids Orientalism, first published in 1978, radically changed the terrain of literary scholarship and criticism.
Whereas earlier scholarship and criticism (including an innovative deconstructionist perspective) focused on the textuality
of the literary text, that inaugurated by Saids seminal study came to focus on its worldliness. To put this change more
specifically, Said decisively disclosed the Orientalismof the Western literature , especially the
canonical novel, and literary scholarship and criticism, which is to say, their productive complicity with Western imperialism: the political
Said inaugurated the field, now global in scope, that has
domination of the land of the Orient. In so doing,
come to be called postcolonial studies: a comparativist philological/critical perspective
that is committed not only to the historical task of exposing the Eurocentrism of the
Western canonical tradition that justified the global colonial project, but also the present,
postcolonial, task of resisting neocolonialtransnational capitalistversions of
domination. This development in literary critical studies has on the whole been culturally and sociopolitically
productive, as the massive public campaign of the right to obliterate Saids legacy testifies. Given the preeminent
role that the theme of geographyspecifically, conquered and dominated land (Greek Ge)
plays in it, however, it is ironic that this postcolonial discourse has so overdetermined
the (disciplinary) site of thepolitics of imperial or colonial conquest and domination that it
has marginalized, if not entirely, obliterated both the ontological origins of Western
imperialism and the effect of [End Page 307] this imperialist mode of perception on
humanitys comportment towards the landthe ecos. I mean specifically Western
imperialisms provenance in a metaphysical interpretation of being (the perception of physis,
including the earth, from above) and its hierarchical binarist logic (Identity vs. difference), on the
one hand, and its consequent reification or spatialization (territorialization) of the temporal
dynamic of the land, on the other. Robert P. Marzecs book An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From
Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie is an important contribution to postcolonial studies precisely because he attends to both these neglected
realities of the Western imperial project by way of an analysis of the enormously consequential history of the enclosure movement in
England. I am referring to that onto-eco-politico-logical momentum, simultaneous with and analogous to the emergence of the classificatory
system of knowledge production, inaugurated by the enclosing and regulation of the open Commons, that enabled the formation of the
British national identity (empirical individuality), the British nation (a bourgeois, property-rights oriented people) and, by extension, the
British empire (the administered underdeveloped foreign world). In what follows, I will focus on the importance
of Marzecs scholarship on land, inhabitancy, and empire not only as it pertains to the
complicity between this domestic British enclosure movement vis a vis the ecos, cultural
production (particularly the novel) and the British imperial project, but also to the effort,
based on this critical analysis, to think the positive possibilities of the prior open and
nomadic inhabitancy, which it was the purpose of the enclosure acts and imperialism to
demonize and repress or accommodate by way of the enclosure of the Commons and in
the name of freedom. Marzecs book, the first of a projected two volume treatise on inhabitancy, constitutes an intervention in
the debates over the question of postcolonialism as it pertains to the history of the British novel. Claiming that postcolonial
critiques of empire lack a sustained thematization of what he takes to be the nexus of
culture and colonizationthe comportment of human beings to the land they inhabitthis
book traces the transformative effects of the long history of the Enclosure Movement on the British subject, the British national identity
(culture), and the British imperial project. Indeed, one of the books distinctive features is its reliance on the historical records of the
Enclosure Movement as well as on the enormous archive on British agricultural history inaugurated by Daniel Defoes A Tour Through the
Whole Island of Great Britain (17241726), institutionalized by Arthur Young in the next century, and brought to its apogee by such
historians of British agriculture as Alan Everitt and Joan Thirsk, among many others, to establish the context for reading the rise and
development of the British novels from Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett, through Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, E. M.
Forster, and D. H. Lawrence to Salman Rushdie.
Historicity d/a- Their alternative of impossible realism
embodied in their Churchill evidence ignores historicity
and makes it impossible to challenge power relations

Beller 2k1 (Jonathan L. [visiting assistant professor of

history of consciousness and literature, University of
California at Santa Cruz] Third Cinema in a Global Frame:
Curacha, Yahoo!, and Manila by Night, d/l: muse) //jl
This relationship in which generalized disembodiment gives rise to generalized visuality (as we now can call the logistics of seeing) is
the violation of the real. This phrase means the violation that is the Real (the violation of closure in representation, by a reality
churning in excess of its signifiable limitsa violation not, in my view, an ontological condition of the signifier but a historical one)
and also the violation of the reality principle by forces that overload its function and thus the function of the subject. The impact of
images is not merely formal; we have more than a genre, realism, violated by a mutation of reality itself. As my discussion of Curacha
shows, subjectivity itself (the sustainability of the subject form) is violated materially. Thus, as in classical realism, the
rationality of capitalist society is not intelligible (or at least legible for the subject) simply logically or
structurally via the concept, but affectively, as intensity, sensibility, or viscerality. Only in an apprehension of the
conversion of material relations into image relations and of image relations into material
relations, that is, only by grasping the inseparability of visual and material organization,
might one fully utilize [End Page 343] the intellect as a political pathway to the province of the
image. In Curacha, only in exceeding reality and the realism that is Manila, one might have a chance to see Manilato
grasp it as an image machineotherwise, one is left with an impossible realism caught in an anachronistic
metaphysics and unable to register the historico-technological shift in the social fabric. In
other words, it is necessary that those tacky magical-realist moments break the conventions of realism to register a shift in
the dispensation of reality itself. Power is unrealthat is, it is the unreality foisted on the
disempowered by the tyranny of image-capital. This is the postdictatorship shift I mentioned, a change in the
modality of social organization that can be expressed as a becoming-image of the world or a becoming-world of the image. As the real
violates subjectivities, not only through intervention, but also through absolute pulverization of their expectations of normative
narrativity in life, conventions of realism must also be violated if they are to express this transformation. Those tacky hallucinations in
Curacha achieve their gaudiness only because they will not turn a profit. They cannot be validated by reality and
are left to express the unrealized aspirations of subalterns . Thus they are images of third cinema, of third
cinema in a global frame.

Monumentalizing d/a they monumentalize a lost

indigenous culture and read Indian history as obituary.
This causes what Vizenor calls manifest manners and
Baudrillard calls viral difference we force the other into
our preconcieved frame so that we can know, understand,
and interact with them more smoothly, so that there is no
resistance from those living Indian people.

Vizenor 94
Gerald Vizenor (be afraid, be very afraid). Manifest Manners. 1994. Page 8.

Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and other masters
of manifest manners in the nineteenth century, and earlier, represented tribal cultures as the
other to them "Language did the capturing, building Indian society to a future of
certain extinction,': wrote Larzer Ziff in Writing in the New Nation. "Treating living Indians as
sources for a literary construction of a vanished way of life rather than as
members of a vital continuing culture, such writers used words to replace
rather than to represent Indian reality ." The simulations of manifest manners
are treacherous and elusive in histories; how ironic that the most secure simulations are
unreal sensations, and become the real without a referent to an actual tribal
remembrance. Tribal realities are superseded by simulations of the unreal,
and tribal wisdom is weakened by those imitations, however sincere. The
pleasures of silence, natural reason, the rights of consciousness, transformations of the marvelous, and the
pleasure of trickster stories are misconstrued in the simulations of dominance ; manifest

manners are the absence of the real in the ruins of tribal representations.
Those who "memorialized rather than perpetuated" a tribal presence and
wrote "Indian history as obituary" were unconsciously collaborating "with those bent
on physical extermination," argued Ziff. "The process of literary annihilation would be checked only when Indian writers
began representing their own culture."

Noble Savage d/a- Their evidence essentializes Natives

and makes them into a wilderness theme park for your
enjoyment- reject their scholarship

Grande 4
Sandy Grande. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. 2004. Page 92-
93.

Indeed, various criticalscholars have revealed essentialism as an integral part of the overall project of
domination working to hold American Indian s (and other subaltern peoples) to the polemical and creative
needs of whites. With respect to Native peoples, Deloria argues that the predominant image of the American
Indian the nature-loving, noble savage persists to serve the whitestream need to escape the
deadening effects of modernity. He writes: [Whites] are discontented with their society, their
government, their religion, and everything around them and nothing is more appealing than to cast aside all
inhibitions and strive back into the wilderness, or at least a wilderness theme park, seeking the
nobility of the wily savage who once physically fought civilization and now, symbolically at least, is prepared to do it
again. Deloria's somewhat cynical reference to the wilderness theme park describes the propensity of
whitestream America to satisfy its need for authenticity via climate-controlled, voyeuristic
tours through the lives and experiences of authentic peoples . In this instance, discontented whites
maintain psychological control over the overconsumption of modern society by requiring Indians
to remain nature-loving primitives. The parasitic relationship between whitestream desire, capitalist imperatives, and
American Indians does not end here. Indeed, while the American Indian intellectual community has managed to wrest a degree of
control over the question of who is Indian, is has yet to muster the capability to fetter the powers of capitalism. Thus, the impact of
capitalist desire on the intellectual sovereignty of indigenous peoples remains significant, particularly in the academy. For example,
indigenous scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lyn questions why the same editors and agents who solicit her life
story also routinely reject her scholarly work. She writes: [W]hile I may have a reasonable understanding why a
state-run university press would not want to publish research that has little good to say about America's relationship to tribes I am
at a loss as to explain why anyone would be more interested in my life story (which for one thing is quite unremarkable. The
explanation, of course, is that the marketable narrative is that which subscribes to the whitestream notion
of Indian as romantic figure, not Indian as a scholar and social critic a predisposition that works to favor
cultural/literary forms of indigenous writing over critical forms. As Warrior observes, the current discourse is more
interested in the Charles Eastman [Sioux] who grew up in a traditional Sioux home than in the Charles
Eastman who attended Mark Twain's seventieth birthday party of who read a paper at the First Universal Races
Conference with W.E.B. Dubois.
Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary
differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or

oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking

Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question

of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
which is to say,
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.

Perm Do the Alt Without their Teleology

The Queer Indigenous body suffers in ways unaccountable
by simple decolonization movementsAIDS and other
erotic subjectivities are rejected and ignored. Only a
queering of indigenous knowledge can alter these modes
of oppression

Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and

Scott Lauria Morgensen 11
(: The Revolution is For Everyone: lmagining an
Emancrpatory Future through Queer lndigenous Critical
Theories in Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical
Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature)

Queer Indigenous peoples boldly choose to love and be true to

our desires, dreaming for moments of emancipation from colonial
rule. We look into a horizon of death to make a life for ourselves, despite the
overwhelming hopelessness that can be part of our lived
experiences' Colonialism, poverty, homophobia, displacement,
suicide' and rejection by our families and communities are parts of
our lives' This is not said to perpetuate notions of tragic victimry that so often haunt writing about
Indigenous peoples' Instead, it is said to point out the material and political
conditions That Native GLBQTz people experience under
colonization, including colonization's accompanying systems of
heteropatriarchy, gender regimes, capitalism, ableism, ageism, and
religious oppression. lndigenous queer critiques offer a mode of
analysis that more complexly facilitates an understanding of these
entwined systems so that they can be interruPted. Colonial oppression is a
multibinding system that puts queer and Two-Spirit Indigenous lives
deeply at risk. According to the centers for Disease control, for instance, even though the
numbers of HIV and AIDS diagnoses for American Indians and Alaska Natives in the united States
represent less than r percent of the total number of HIV/AIDS cases reptrted to CDC's HIV/AIDS Reporting
American Indians and Alaska
System, "[w]hen population size is taken into account,
Natives in zoo5 ranked third in rates of HIV/AIDS diagnosis."' According
to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1989 report on youth suicide, .,Gay and
Lesbian" youth are two to three times more likely to attempt suicide
than other youth, and suicide is the leading cause of death for GLBT
youth.'The cDC tracks suicide as the second leading cause of death
for American Ildian and Alaskan Native people from ages fifteen to
thirty-four, r.8 times higher than the national average. 3 Data compiled by
the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that "American Indians were victims of violent crime at about twice
Native women have the
the rate of blacks, whites or Asians during 1998," and that
highest rates of experiencing violence from an intimate partner in
the United States.+ Prison Justice, a Canadian activist organization, highlights stark statistics
from zoo5-zoo6: while Aboriginal people make up approximately 4 percent of the Canadian population,
they make Dp 24percent of admissions into provincial/territorial prison custody, and r8 percent of
admissions into federal custody. In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where Aboriginal people constitute
approximately 15-16 percent of the overall population, Aboriginal people make up 7r percent of the
The story
Manitoba prison population and79 percent of the prison population in Saskatchewan.:
that begins to emerge from these statistics, as limited and
problematic as such data might be, is not surprising: queer
Indigenous people experience multilayered oppression that
profoundly impacts our safety, health, and survival. What also
emerges is the reality that our activism and scholarship can't
pretend that there are easy fixes. While it is important to engage in
activism that interrupts moments of marginalization and oppression,
the lived experiences of queer and Two-Spirit Indigenous people
show us that we-as Indigenous people, as GLBTQz people, as
feminists, and as allies in numerous struggles-must engage in long-
term, multifaceted, decolonial activism and scholarship that
centralize analyses of, and resistance to, heteropatriarchal colonial
systems in all of their manifestations.
The phrase native is a form of metonymic freezing
which bounds people spatially to the land. This is a false
starting point which produces oppression turning the
kritik. The static relationship between subject position
and geographical location replicates the imperialist drive
towards the destruction of difference.

Appadurai 88 (Arjun, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at

the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, Putting Hierarchy
in its Place, Cultural Anthropology 3(1), p. 36-40//TR

On the face of it, an exploration of the idea of the "native" in anthropological discourse may not appear to have much to do with the
genealogy of the idea of hierarchy. But I wish to argue that hierarchy is one of an anthology of images in and through which
anthropologists have frozen the contribution of specific cultures to our understanding of the human condition. Such metonymic
freezing has its roots in a deeper assumption of anthropological thought regarding the boundedness
of cultural units and the confinement of the varieties of human conscious-ness within these boundaries. The idea of
the "native" is the principal expression of this assumption, and thus the genealogy of hierarchy needs to
be seen as one local instance of the dynamics of the construction of natives. Although the term native has a respectable antiquity in Western thought and
has often been used in positive and self-referential ways, it has gradually become the technical preserve of anthropologists. Although some other words
taken from the vocabulary of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators have been expunged from anthropological usage, the term native has
retained its currency, serving as a respectable substitute for terms like primitive, about which we now feel some embarrassment. Yet the term native,
whether we speak of "native categories," or "native belief-systems" or "native agriculture," conceals certain ambiguities. We sense this ambiguity, for
example, in the restricted use of the adjective nativistic, which is typically used not only for one sort of revivalism, but for revivalism among certain kinds
of population. Who is a "native" (henceforth without quotation marks) in the anthropological usage? The quick answer to this question is that the native is
a person who is born in (and thus belongs to) the place the anthropologist is observing or writing about. This sense of the word native is fairly narrowly,
and neutrally, tied to its Latin etymology. But do we use the term native uniformly to refer to people who are born in certain places and, thus, belong to
them? We do not. We have tended to use the word native for persons and groups who belong to those parts of the world that were, and are, distant from
the metropolitan West. This restriction is, in part, tied to the vagaries of our ideologies of authenticity over the last two centuries. Proper natives are
We exempt ourselves from this
somehow assumed to represent their selves and their history, without distortion or residue.
sort of claim to authenticity because we are too enamored of the complexities of our
history, the diversities of our societies, and the ambiguities of our collective
conscience. When we find authenticity close to home, we are more likely to label it folk than native, the former being a term
that suggests authenticity without being implicitly derogatory. The anthropologist thus rarely thinks of
himself as a native of some place, even when he knows that he is from somewhere. So
what does it mean to be a native of some place, if it means something more, or other, than being from that place? What it means is that
natives are not only persons who are from certain places, and belong to those places,
but they are also those who are somehow incarcerated, or confined, in those places.'
What we need to examine is this attribution or assumption of incarceration, of imprisonment ,or confinement. Why are some people
seen as confined to, and by, their places? Probably the simplest aspect of the common sense of anthropology to which this image
corresponds is the sense of physical immobility. Natives are in one place, a place to which explorers, administrators, missionaries, and
eventually anthropologists, come. These outsiders, these observers, are regarded as quintessentially mobile; they are the movers, the
seers, the knowers. The natives
are immobilized by their belonging to a place. Of course, when
observers arrive, natives are capable of moving to another place. But this is not
really motion; it is usually flight, escape, to another equally confining place. The slightly
more subtle assumption behind the attribution of immobility is not so much physical as ecological. Natives are those who are
somehow confined to places by their connection to what the place permits. Thus all the language of niches, of foraging, of material
skill, of slowly evolved technologies, is actually also a language of incarceration. In this instance confinement
is not
simply a function of the mysterious, even metaphysical attachment of native to
physical places, but a function of their adaptations to their environments. Of course,
anthropologists have long known that motion is part of the normal round for many groups, ranging from Bushmen and Australian aborigines, to Central
Asian nomads and Southeast Asian swidden agriculturalists. Yet most of these groups, because their movements are confined within small areas and
appear to be driven by fairly clear-cut environmental constraints, are generally treated as natives tied not so much to a place as to a pattern of places. This
is still not quite motion of the free, arbitrary, adventurous sort associated with metropolitan behavior. It is still incarceration, even if over a larger spatial
terrain. But the critical part of the attribution of nativeness to groups in remote parts of the world is a sense that their incarceration has a moral and
intellectual dimension. They are confined by what they know, feel, and believe. They are prisoners of their "mode of thought." This is, of course, an old
and deep theme in the history of anthropological thought, and its most powerful example is to be found in Evans-Pritchard's picture of the Azande,
trapped in their moral web, confined by a way of thinking that admits of no fuzzy boundaries and is splendid in its internal consistency. Although Evans-
Pritchard is generally careful not to exaggerate the differences between European and Azande mentality, his position sug-gests that the Azande are
especially confined by their mode of thought: Abovea ll, we have to be careful to avoid in the absence of native doctrine constructing a dogma which we
would formulate were we to act as Azande do. There is no elaborate and consistent representation of witchcraft that will account in detail for its workings,
nor of nature which expounds its conformity to sequences and functional interrelations. The Azande actualizes these beliefs rather than intellectualizes
them, and their tenets are expressed in socially controlled behavior rather than in doctrines. Hence the difficulty of discussing the subject of witchcraft
with Azande, for their ideas are imprisoned in action and cannot be cited to explain and justify action. [Evans-Pritchard193 7:82-83; emphasis mine] Of
course, this idea of certain others, as confined by their way of thinking, in itself appears to have nothing to do with the image of the native, the person
The link between the confinement of ideology and the idea of place is
who belongs to a place.
that the way of thought that confines natives is itself somehow bounded, somehow
tied to the circumstantiality of place. The links between intellectual and spatial confinement, as assumptions that
underpin the idea of the native, are two. The first is the notion that cultures are "wholes": this issue is taken up in the section of this
essay on Dumont. The second is the notion, embed-ded in studies of ecology, technology, and material culture over a century, that the
intellectual operations of natives are somehow tied to their niches, to their situations. They are seen, in Levi-Strauss's evocative terms,
as scientists of the concrete. When we ask where this concreteness typically inheres, it is to be found in specifics of flora, fauna,
topology, settlement patterns, and the like; in a word, it is the concreteness of place. Thus, the
confinement of native
ways of thinking reflects in an important way their attachment to particular places.
The science of the concrete can thus be written as the poetry of confinement. But anthropologists have always
known that natives are not always so incarcerated. The American anthropological
tradition, at least as far back as Boas, and most recently in the voices of Sidney Mintz (1985) and Eric Wolf (1982), has
always seen cultural traits as shared and transmitted over large cultural areas, as
capable of change, and as creating shifting mosaics of technology and ideology. The
French tradition, at least in that part of it with roots in Herder and Vico, and more recently in Mauss, Benveniste and Dumezil, has
always seen the links, at least of the Indo-European" linguaculture"( Attinasia nd Friedrich1 987), across many geographically
scattered places. Even in British anthropology, there have been minority voices, like those of Lord Raglan and A. M. Hocart, who have
seen that the morphology of social systems and ideologies is not confined by single, territorially anchored groupings. It is now
increasingly clear that in many in-stances where anthropologists believed they were observing and analyzing pristine or historically
deep systems, they were in fact viewing products of recent transregional interactions. Diffusionism,
whatever its
defects and in whatever guise, has at least the virtue of allowing everyone the
possibility of exposure to a world larger than their current locale. It is even more evident that in
today's complex, highly interconnected, media-dominated world, there are fewer and fewer native cultures left. They are op-pressed
by the international market for the objects once iconic of their identity, which are now tokens in the drive for authenticity in
metropolitan commodity cultures. They are pushed by the forces of development and nationalization throughout the world and are
attracted by the possibilities of migration( or refuge) in new places. Natives, as anthropologists like to imagine them, are therefore
rapidly disappearing. This much many will concede. But
were there ever natives, in the sense in which I
have argued the term must be understood? Most groups that anthropologists have
studied have in some way been affected by the knowledge of other worlds, worlds
about which they may have learned through migration, trade, conquest, or
indigenous narratives. As we drop our own anthropological blinders, and as we sharpen our ethnohistorical tools, we are
discovering that the pristine Punan of the interior of Borneo were probably a specialized adaptation of the larger Dayak communities,
serving a specialized function in the world trade in Borneo forest products (Hoffmann 1986); that the San of Southern Africa have
been involved in a complex symbiosis with other groups for a very long time (Schrire 1980); that groups in Melanesia have been
trading goods across very long distances for a long time, trade that reflects complex regional relations of supply and demand (Hughes
1977); that African "tribes" have been reconstituting and deconstructing essential structural principles at their "internal frontiers" for a
very long time (Kopytoff 1987). Even where contact with large-scale external forces has been, till recently, minimal, as with some
Inuit populations, some populations in lowland South America, and many Australian aboriginal groups, these groups have constituted
very complex "internal" mosaics of trade, marriage, conquest, and linguistic ex-change, which suggests that no one grouping among
them was ever truly incarcerated in a specific place and confined by a specific mode of thought (see, for example, Myers 1986).
Although assiduous anthropologists might always dis-cover some borderline examples, my general case is that natives, people
confined to and by the places to which they belong, groups
unsullied by contact with a larger world,
have probably never existed. Natives, thus, are creatures of the anthropological
imagination. In our dialogic age, this may not seem like a very bold assertion, but it ramifies in several directions. If
anthropologists have always possessed a large amount of information that has militated against the idea of the native, how have they
succeeded in holding on to it? How
have places turned into prisons containing natives? The
answer lies in the ways that places have been married to ideas and images, and here I
resume an argument initiated elsewhere (Appadurai 1986a). Anthropology has, more than many disciplinary discourses, operated
through an al-bum or anthology of images (changing over time, to be sure) whereby some feature of a group is seen as quintessential
to the group and as especially true of that group in contrast with other groups. Hierarchy in India has this quality. In the discourse of
anthropology, hierarchy is what is most true of India and it is truer of India than of any other place. In the subsequent sections of this
essay I shall show that ideas that become metonymic prisons for particular places (such that the natives of that place are inextricably
confined by them) themselves have a spatial history, in the evolving discourse of anthropology. Ideas and images not only travel from
place to place, but they periodically come into compelling configurations, configurations which, once formed, resist modification or
critique. By looking at Dumont's conceptualization of hierarchy in India, I shall explore the archaeology of hierarchy as an image that
confines the natives of India. In the last part of the article, finally, I shall propose a theory about the circumstances under which such
resilient configurationst end to occur in the history of anthropological discourse.

Justifies imperialism and turns the kritik

Gupta and Ferguson 92

(Akhil and James [Stanford and UC Irvine] Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 8-9)//TR

To illustrate, let us examine one powerful model of cultural change that at- tempts to relate dialectically the local to larger spatial
arenas: articulation. Artic- ulation models, whether they come from Marxist structuralism or from moral economy, posit
a primeval state of autonomy (usually labeled precapitalist which is then violated by global
capitalism. The result is that both local and larger spatial arenas are transformed, the local
more than the global to be sure, but not necessarily in a predetermined direction. This notion of
articulation allows one to explore the richly unintended consequences of, say, colonial capitalism, where loss occurs alongside
invention. Yet, by taking a preexisting, localized com- munity as a given starting point , it fails
to examine sufficiently the processes (such as the structures of feeling that pervade the
imagining of community) that go into the construction of space as place or locality in the
first instance. In other words, instead of assuming the autonomy of the primeval community, we need to examine how
it was formed as a community out of the interconnected space that always already existed .
Colonialism, then, represents the displacement of one form of interconnection by another . This
is not to deny that colonialism, or an expanding capitalism, does indeed have profoundly dislocating effects on existing societies. But
by always foregrounding the spatial distribution of hierarchical power relations, we can
better understand the process whereby a space achieves a distinctive identity as a place.
Keeping in mind that notions of locality or com- munity refer both to a demarcated physical space and to clusters of interaction, we
can see that the identity of a place emerges by the intersection of its specific involvement in a
system of hierarchically organized spaces with its cultural con- struction as a community or
locality. It is for this reason that what Jameson (1984) has dubbed postmodem hy-
perspace has so fundamentally challenged the convenient fiction that mapped cultures
onto places and peoples. In the capitalist West, a Fordist regime of ac- cumulation,
emphasizing extremely large production facilities, a relatively stable work force, and the
welfare state, combined to create urban communities whose outlines were most clearly
visible in company towns (Davis 1984; Harvey 1989; Mandel 1975). The counterpart of this in the international arena was
that multinational corporations, under the leadership of the United States, steadily ex- ploited the raw materials, primary goods, and
cheap labor of the independent na- tion-states of the postcolonial Third World. Multilateral agencies and powerful Western states
preached, and where necessary militarily enforced, the laws of the market to encourage the international flow of capital, while
national immigra- tion policies ensured that there would be no free (i.e., anarchic, disruptive) flow of labor to the high-wage islands in
the capitalist core. Fordist patterns of accu- mulation have now been replaced by a regime of flexible accumulation%:har- acterized by
small-batch production, rapid shifts in product lines, extremely fast movements ofcapital to exploit the smallest differentials in labor
and raw material costs-built on a more sophisticated communications and information network and better means of transporting
goods and people. At the same time. the indus- trial production of culture, entertainment, and leisure that first achieved some- thing
approaching global distribution during the Fordist era led. paradoxically, to the invention of new forms of cultural difference and new
forms of imagining community. Something like a transnational public sphere has certainly rendered any strictly bounded sense of
community or locality obsolete. At the same time. it has enabled the creation of forms of solidarity and identity that do not rest on an
appropriation of space where contiguity and face-to-face contact are para- mount. In the pulverized space of postmodernity, space has
not become irrele- vant: it has been reterretorialized in a way that does not conform to the experience of space that characterized the
era of high modernity. it is this that forces us to reconceptualize fundamentally the politics of community. solidarity, identity, and
cultural difference.

Perm: Do Both solves advantages while dismantling

institutional bias, net beneficial for indigenous people
Endorsing Churchills misappropriation of Native identity
is cultural genocide according to Churchill himself

Miller, 2005 (John J, March 28th, National Review, Honest injun? The
incidence of fake Indians is almost epidemic, p.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_5_57/ai_n13490964/pg_1
)

The latest phony Indian to be unmasked is Ward Churchill , the University of Colorado
professor who recently ruffled feathers for calling the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center "little Eichmanns" whose massacre was a "penalty befitting their participation in" global capitalism.
Churchill is an all-too-predictable product of the modern academy. He is a tenured "ethnic studies"
specialist, but he does not hold a doctorate in anything, and his scholarship, if it can be called that, is
riddled with errors and left-wing posturing. The man is a buffoon. Churchill can get away with so few
credentials and such a heap of sloppiness because he claims to speak on behalf of a disenfranchised
minority. The basis for this assertion rests on Churchill's ancestry, which he has variously described as
he has never provided any
three-sixteenths Cherokee and one-sixteenth Cree. Yet
documentary evidence on his background, which Indians commonly do to prove their
status within a tribe. He did gain membership to the Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in 1994, but it
was an associate membership that was temporarily available to people who aren't in fact Indian. (Bill
Clinton, who has said that his grandmother's grandmother was a Cherokee, is also an honorary member of
the Keetoowah.) "You can spot these phony baloneys across the continent," says Suzan Shown Harjo, a
Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee who first met Churchill about 15 years ago. "Right away, I could tell he
Churchill served in Vietnam--he has
was a faker because he refused to talk about his family."
Army records indicate that he mostly
boasted about going on dangerous jungle missions, but
drove trucks--and at the time he listed himself as "Caucasian ." He switched this to
"American Indian" in 1978, when he filled out an affirmative-action form as part
of his application to become a lecturer in Native American studies at Colorado. He
has maintained this identity ever since, though the only corroboration he can offer--apart from his obvious
fondness for the long-hair-and-dark-sunglasses look of a reservation activist--is his own word. [he
continues] Nobody likes a con artist, and it isn't difficult to find harsh critics of white
people who "play Indian" for personal gain . One of their most scathing detractors has
labeled Castaneda "the greatest hoax since Piltdown Man," called Andrews "an air-head 'feminist' yuppie,"
and branded Ruth Beebe Hill's Hanta Yo--yet another book of doubtful legitimacy--a "ludicrous
Taken together, these charlatans have "made a significant recent
performance."
contribution (for profit) to the misrepresentation and appropriation of
indigenous spirituality." What's more, they've "been tendered some measure of
credibility by the 'certified scholars' of American universities ." But that's not all. By
impersonating Indians and making them look like fools, these imposters are
guilty of "cultural genocide." That would seem to make them little
Eichmanns, too. The author of these words? Ward Churchill .
Churchills over-the-top rhetoric highlights his desire to
help himself at the expense of the Indians whose interests
he doesnt share his criticisms set back Native
empowerment

King, 2005 (Patti Jo [journalist and historian, bachelor's degree in

science in American Indian History and master's degree in History of the
American West], Questionable identity and questionable scholarship,
Indian Country Today, February 24, p.
http://journals.aol.com/cherokeedream40/ATsalagisDream/entries/2005/02/2
6/ward-churchill-a-manace-to-first-true-people-of-america/1043)

WardChurchill has convinced many people that he is the ultimate expert on Indian affairs, yet he has
neither the character nor the eloquence to lead . Throughout history, dynamic Indian
leaders have honed their skills on the experience of loss, devastation, and a sincere desire to find paths to
survival for future generations. Shunning pretension or self-aggrandizement, they excelled as leaders
because they had a common stake in the affairs of Indian country. As members of tribes, communities and
extended families, they stood to benefit or lose as a direct result of their leadership. They were respected
Churchill, a
because their people knew they did their best to make a positive contribution.
postmodernist,lacks a believable Native identity and family history. He can't
empathize with Indians because he has nothing at stake . Having appropriated
his Indian identity, he is unaffected by the commotion he causes when he
behaves outrageously. He utilizes postmodern techniques, plunging into
Indian matters he does not fully understand and attempting to represent
them. Sadly, the Indian community will suffer the consequences of his
recklessness again.
Churchill does not now, nor has he ever, represented Indians. His complex, overly-
academic rhetoric clarifies how little he has in common with Native people .
His acid tongue, dirty-mouthed sarcasm, self-important posturing, and preachy
fanaticism contribute nothing to the challenge Indians face to establish a
satisfying position in contemporary society. Churchill portrays Indians as hapless
victims, repressed and demoralized by the crafty American government.
These characterizations only serve to impede Indian social progress. He
combines hackneyed stereotypes, postmodern gibberish, and radical buzzwords to
coax naive individuals to accept his authenticity. Such characterizations are
the antithesis of empowerment. Now Churchill is trying to convince the unwitting public that his
current troubles stem from an infringement on his right to free speech. He also says that he is being
Claiming to be ''one-sixteenth
targeted by racist Indians because he is not enrolled.
Cherokee,'' he has opposed the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts Act, a law protecting Indian
artists from unfair counterfeit competition. His Indian claim further enabled him to secure
his lucrative teaching position (over $94,000 annually) at the University of Colorado, where he beat out
several fine Indian scholars for the coveted job. He claims to be Cherokee and Creek,
although the Okmulgee Creek Agency, the Muscogee Creek Nation and the
Cherokee Nation contend he is not a member and is not known among their
people. Nevertheless, non-Indian educators pay handsomely to hear him speak. If
placed in the same position, would other ethnic communities accept an
imposing white radical as their representative ? Would they remain silent while he
misrepresented their people? Identity theft is only the tip of the problematic iceberg. Free
speech is not the issue either. The issue is questionable scholarship. Churchill's historiography is
neither fair nor objective. It is extreme revisionism designed to promote his
suspicious agenda through academic fraud. Academic fraud is more than simple error: it encompasses false
attribution and fabrication of facts. A 1992 essay, ''Federal Indian Identification Policy,'' co-authored with his former wife,
Marie Annette Jaimes, has long concerned Indian legal scholars. It asserts the 1887 Dawes Allotment Act required
individuals to be one-half or more Indian to be eligible for land allotment. Jaimes chastises tribes for adopting Dawes blood
quantum requirements for tribal membership. Churchill has continuously berated tribes and enrolled Indians, viciously
referring to them as ''ethnic cleansers'' and ''racists'' for participating in blood-based tribal enrollment. He repeatedly
attributes his theories to Jaimes' blood quantum/Dawes Act claim in ''Federal Indian Identification Policy.'' Blood quantum,
however, is never mentioned in the Dawes Act. Such shoddy scholarship immediately raises a red flag. Are we to believe
that a man who has written dozens of books and nearly 100 essays - a foremost authority on Indians - has never read the
Dawes Allotment Act? The act is one of the most prevalent and important documents of American Indian legal history and
is brief and easy to read. Numerous other examples of his questionable scholarship have been exposed by historians,
political scientists, and Native scholars over the years. Churchill's lack of authenticity, sensitivity, and manipulative
rhetoric became apparent some 13 years ago. In retaliation against those who criticized him, he hurled insults and
accusations, often against Indian women. The University of Colorado was contacted on more than one occasion after his
erratic behavior became dangerously volatile. Yet Indian concerns fell on deaf ears. One department head said, ''What Mr.
Churchill's goal is the
Churchill does off-campus on his own time is his own business.''
disempowerment of American Indians. What better way to achieve this
objective than to masquerade as a member-advocate of the very group he
seeks to enfeeble?
His motivation remains a matter of speculation. Some believe he is a ''wannabe'' - a man of generic
he
ethnicity striving for authentication through the theft of a more ''exotic'' Indian identity. Others believe
is an opportunist who astutely positioned himself as a ''specialist'' in a field
with few experts and sketchy criteria for determining expertise .
D&G
 2AC
Postmodern alternatives like nomadism get appropriated
as utopian
JORIS 2006 (Pierre Joris, Professor of English at SUNY-Albany,
http://pjoris.blogspot.com/2006/07/theory-war-in-middle-east.html //D )

nomad
It doesn't come as a total surprise. On several occasions I have spoken to the fact that
thought (my own version in A Nomad Poetics, or Deleuze & Guattari's writings in A Thousand Plateaus)
was not some avant-garde panacea for radical poltics or poetry, was in
that sense, not necessarily a solution. In "Open Letter in Response to Adrien Clark's" (in A
Nomad Poetics) I wrote:The enemy (late global capitalism) has been thinking
nomadically for a long time & until we are able to think through that
one we will not be able to mount any successful counter-measures.
The multi-nationals (from oil to food & everything in-between) do not dwell, they move, here today, gone
tomorrow, elsewhere the day after: you cannot pin them down with some nineteen-century Marxist
scheme. The lure, the simulacrum they dangle in the face of the Volk is
that power has a home & that thats where the enemy is: fixed , in place,
say, in the Domus Blancus, the White House, and that therefore change will come by
changing the in-dweller in said domus. It just aint so, it just aint so. So in
that sense it obviously doesn't come as a surprise that the enemy is
reading and thinking through the same matters than "us." Still when a
friend send me the url for a site that carries an indepth essay on the use of (mainly) French theory by the
Israeli army in their rethinking of urban warfare and related tactical and strategic matters, I must say I
was taken aback by the thoroughness, ruthlessness and obvious
intelligence with which the appropriation of these ideas is being
performed. Below, a few excerpts from the essay,which you can read in full here, and which is
authored by Eyal Weizman, an architect, writer and Director of Goldsmiths College Centre for Research
Architecture. His work deals with issues of conflict territories and human rights.Contemporary military
At stake are the underlying
theorists are now busy re-conceptualizing the urban domain.
concepts, assumptions and principles that determine military
strategies and tactics. The vast intellectual field that geographer Stephen Graham has called
an international shadow world of military urban research institutes and training centres that have been
established to rethink military operations in cities could be understood as somewhat similar to the
international matrix of lite architectural academies. However, according to urban theorist Simon Marvin,
the military-architectural shadow world is currently generating more intense and well-funded urban
research programmes than all these university programmes put together, and is certainly aware of the
avant-garde urban research conducted in architectural institutions, especially as regards Third World and
There is a considerable overlap among the theoretical texts
African cities.
considered essential by military academies and architectural
schools. Indeed, the reading lists of contemporary military
institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special
emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari and Guy
Debord), as well as more contemporary writings on urbanism,
psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory.
If, as some writers claim, the space for criticality has withered away
in late 20th-century capitalist culture, it seems now to have found a
place to flourish in the military.
Makes military violence tolerable, pacifies citizens,
justifies imperialism
Weizman 2006 (Eyal Weizman is an architect, writer and Director of Goldsmiths
College Centre for Research Architecture. His work deals with issues of conflict
territories and human rights. The Art of War
http://www.frieze.com/feature_single.asp?f=1165 //DF)

In no uncertain terms, education in the humanities often believed

to be the most powerful weapon against imperialism is being
appropriated as a powerful vehicle for imperialism. The militarys use of
theory is, of course, nothing new a long line extends all the way from Marcus Aurelius to General Patton.
Future military attacks on urban terrain will increasingly be dedicated to the use of technologies developed
This is the new
for the purpose of un-walling the wall, to borrow a term from Gordon Matta-Clark.
soldier/architects response to the logic of smart bombs. The latter
have paradoxically resulted in higher numbers of civilian casualties
simply because the illusion of precision gives the military-political
complex the necessary justification to use explosives in civilian
environments. Here another use of theory as the ultimate smart
weapon becomes apparent. The militarys seductive use of
theoretical and technological discourse seeks to portray war as
remote, quick and intellectual, exciting and even economically
viable. Violence can thus be projected as tolerable and the public
encouraged to support it. As such, the development and dissemination
of new military technologies promote the fiction being projected into the
public domain that a military solution is possible in situations
where it is at best very doubtful.

Fluid theory allows military to justify and banalize their

actions while becoming more destructive
Weizman 2006 (Eyal Weizman is an architect, writer and Director of Goldsmiths
College Centre for Research Architecture. His work deals with issues of conflict
territories and human rights. The Art of War
http://www.frieze.com/feature_single.asp?f=1165 //DF)

theory helped the military

Although you do not need Deleuze to attack Nablus,
reorganize by providing a new language in which to speak to itself
and others. A smart weapon theory has both a practical and a
discursive function in redefining urban warfare. The practical or
tactical function, the extent to which Deleuzian theory influences
military tactics and manoeuvres, raises questions about the relation
between theory and practice. Theory obviously has the power to
stimulate new sensibilities, but it may also help to explain, develop
or even justify ideas that emerged independently within disparate
fields of knowledge and with quite different ethical bases. In
discursive terms, war if it is not a total war of annihilation
constitutes a form of discourse between enemies. Every military
action is meant to communicate something to the enemy. Talk of
swarming, targeted killings and smart destruction help the
military communicate to its enemies that it has the capacity to effect
far greater destruction. Raids can thus be projected as the more
moderate alternative to the devastating capacity that the military
actually possesses and will unleash if the enemy exceeds the
acceptable level of violence or breaches some unspoken
agreement. In terms of military operational theory it is essential never to use ones full destructive
capacity but rather to maintain the potential to escalate the level of atrocity. Otherwise threats become
meaningless.
When the military talks theory to itself, it seems to be about
changing its organizational structure and hierarchies. When it
invokes theory in communications with the public in lectures,
broadcasts and publications it seems to be about projecting an
image of a civilized and sophisticated military. And when the military
talks (as every military does) to the enemy, theory could be understood as a
particularly intimidating weapon of shock and awe, the message
being: You will never even understand that which kills you.

Deleuzian frameworks are counterproductive to effective

indigenous politics

Wuthnow 2k2 (Julie Wuthnow, a lecturer in the Department of Gender Studies at

the University of Canterbury. Deleuze in the postcolonial: On nomads and indigenous
politics Feminist Theory 2002; vol. 3 p. 183-184)
I begin with these starkly contrasting passages in order to give a sense of the wide gulf between the
perspectives that I will need to negotiate in placing Deleuzian theory and some versions of indigenous
politics in conversation with one another. Can they speak to one another at all? More specifically, are
indigenous political struggles helped or hindered by what might be called a Deleuzian anti-ontology? 1 I
Deleuzian frameworks are potentially counterproductive to
will argue that
effective indigenous politics and, moreover, that central notions of
Deleuzian thinking, such as nomad thought, can operate to enact
what Vandana Shiva has termed a politics of disappearance of local or
indigenous knowledge systems (Shiva, 1993: 9) and experiences, thereby
delegitimizing the politics that might arise out of those experiences
and ways of knowing.

Deleuze and Guattari renders local epistemologies as

peripheral, which disempowers effective indigenous
politics

Wuthnow 2k2 (Julie Wuthnow, a lecturer in the Department of Gender Studies at

the University of Canterbury. Deleuze in the postcolonial: On nomads and indigenous
politics Feminist Theory 2002; vol. 3 pp. 189-190)

[Deleuze and Guattaris] privileging of nomadic modes relies upon

an opposition between a central site of subjectivity and zones of
marginality. Thus their advocacy of a process of becoming minor
depends upon the erasure of the site of their own subject positions.
(Kaplan, 1996: 86) This erasure also has important implications for locating
the production of knowledge. More specifically, it marginalizes local
knowledges, that is, knowledges that are relegated to the periphery
of hegemonic epistemologies by virtue of their otherness to a
universalized West. Epistemologies might be rendered peripheral or
local by virtue of being generated by the wrong race, class or
gender; more significantly for this article, they are also marginalized by virtue of
emanating from the colonized other of the West. This is a theme that has been
explored in some depth in Gayatri Spivaks well-known essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), and Elspeth Probyn
(1990) draws heavily on this work in her discussion of the local. Probyn formulates a definition of location that begins to
draw out the significance of the politics of knowledge and its linkage to colonized discursive spaces. It
is . . .
through a process of location, of fixing statements in relation to
other established statements, that knowledge comes to be ordered.
It is through this process that the knowledges produced in locale are
denigrated as local, subaltern, and other. (1990: 185)The nomad cannot
simply define herself as outside of this political ordering of
knowledge and, through inattention to the implications of her own
positioning as another rendition of the universalized western
subject, the nomad perpetuates the hegemony of western ways of
knowing and being: [the] nomad . . . is posed as unthreatening,
merely passing through; however, his person has questionable
effects . . . the nomad camouflage[s] the theoretical problematic of
the ontological implications of Western subjecthood (1990: 184). Thus,
knowledges that could be characterized as local are marginalized,
adding further weight to the argument that Braidottis notion of the
nomadic subject disempowers effective indigenous politics.

D&G reaffirm sexist metaphors

Joff d/l 10/11/2007 The Possibility of an Anti-Humanist Anarchism, d/l:

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/anar/en/display/307

Furthermore, it can be argued that Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative Anti-

Oedipus enterprise was directed toward a rethinking and reconstruction of
ontology itself. The a naturalistic ontology ought to be put into parentheses
here. The traditional tools of ontology (being, object, qualities, pairs) are
replaced by Deleuze and Guattari with the concepts of planes, intensities,
flows, becomings, and couplings. Rigid binary oppositions (a chief example is
the man/woman dualism) are avoided and in their place we find "a continuum
of interacting embodied subjectivities". Yet, it is legitimate to inquire as to
whether a machinic ontology is necessarily gender neutral or nature
oppressive. Grosz and others have been quick off the mark to note the
potentially sexist metaphors employed by Deleuze and Guattari. The use of
machinic metaphors may well express a phallic drive whose obvious desire is
to plug into, couple up and oppressively connect up with everything it can
dominate.

Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary

differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.
Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or
oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking

Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question

of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
which is to say,
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.
Daoism
 2AC
Daoism turns into an opiate of the masses to justify
currently political forms of domination resulting in
catastrophe and fully participate in capitalist exploitation
Wenning 2011 (Mario, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Macau University
in China, and Humboldt Research Fellow, University of Frankfurt;
Comparative Philosophy, vol. 2. no. 2, Daoism as Critical Theory;
http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/a
rticle/view/101/96)\\AN

a second, perhaps more forceful strain of

Apart from the charge of primitive naturalism,
objections against Daoism's critical potential concerns what is seen
as the opportunistic strategy or set of techniques arising out of the
ethics of emulation. While the first group of critics object to Daoism's alleged primitivism, the
second group object to the proposed forms of emulation. This second strain of objections contends that
Daoism essentially reconciles actors to the pathological structures of
their age rather than empowering them to understand, oppose and,
ultimately, transform or abolish these structures. This critique
reflects a long tradition of accusing Daoism of promoting a
problematic form of quietism. Rather than resisting problematic
processes of change, they are said to accept these phenomena as
unchangeable. The best one can do, Daoists seem to suggest, is to
use what is problematic but here to stay to one's advantage . The enfent
terrible of contemporary philosophy Slavoi Zizek puts it as follows: The recourse to
Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament which definitely
work better than the desperate escape into old traditions: instead of trying to cope with
the accelerating rhythm of the technological progress and social
changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain
control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the
modern logic of domination - one should, instead, let oneself go, drift
along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the
mad dance of the accelerated process, a distance based on the
insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately
just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not
really concern the innermost kernel of our being... One is almost
tempted to resuscitate here the old infamous Marxist clich of
religion as the opium of the people, as the imaginary supplement of the terrestrial
misery: the Western Buddhist meditative stance is arguably the
most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist
dynamics, while retaining the appearance of mental sanity . If Max Weber
were to live today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic,
entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of the Global Capitalism.7 While Zizek agrees that Daoism is not a
contemporary appropriations of
form of primitivist romanticism, he argues that
Eastern thought, in particular Daoism, are a psychic symptom of
neoliberal capitalism rather than promising conceptual and practical
tools to understand and transform it. Rather than coming to terms
with the accelerating logic of late modern societies, Daoist patterns
of action, on Zizek's account, at best help to wander at ease within these
pathological structures. They keep up the illusion of equanimous
mental sanity in the midst of catastrophic madness.

Daoism still enables the butchering of animals

Barry Allen 2011 [books include Truth in Philosophy; Knowledge and
Civilization; and Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human
Experience. He teaches philosophy at McMaster University and is associate
editor of Common Knowledge for philosophy and politics] The Cloud of
Knowing: Blurring the Difference with China, d/l: project muse //jl

It may seem advisable to distinguish between tools and machines. If there

can be a dao of fishing, butchery, or carpentry, and if the practice of
these arts is an image of wu wei effectiveness, then perhaps there is
an important distinction between tools we "work" with our hands
and machines that "go" on their own. The stroke of a knife or the
draw of a plane can be spontaneous and highly effective. That
combination seems impossible for a water-driven saw, for instance,
[End Page 500] where the price of effectiveness is the exclusion of
spontaneity. How could anything be spontaneous and mechanical, effortless
and calculated? Hence the shame in using machines; doing so is a confession
that anything more subtle is beyond you. However, the distinction between
tools and machines is not so unproblematic as this argument assumes.
Historians of machinery find they have to dispense with it: tools are
machines, mechanically speaking.110

Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary

differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or

oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking

Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question

of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
 must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
poiesis)
in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
which is to say,
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.
Death Cult
 2AC
We do not fear death, we discuss our impacts for the
purpose of confronting death and engaging with its
prospect it is only by discussing death that we can define
its purpose and the true purpose and value of life

Gunaratna 82
Gunaratna Buddhist 1982 (V.F. Buddhist Reflections on Death
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/gunaratna/wheel102.html)

To the average man death is by no means a pleasant subject or talk for discussion. It is something dismal and
oppressive a veritable kill-joy, a fit topic for a funeral house only. The average man immersed as he is in the self, ever
seeking after the pleasurable, ever pursuing that which excites and gratifies the senses , refuses to
pause and ponder seriously that these very objects of pleasure and gratification will some day
reach their end. If wise counsel does not prevail and urge the unthinking pleasure-seeking man to consider seriously that death
can knock at his door also, it is only the shock of a bereavement under his own roof, the sudden and untimely death of a parent, wife
or child that will rouse him up from his delirious round of sense-gratification and rudely awaken him to the hard facts of life. Then
only will his eyes open, then only will he begin to ask himself why there is such a phenomenon as death. Why is it inevitable? Why
are there these painful partings which rob life of its joys? To most of us, at some moment or another, the spectacle of death
must have given rise to the deepest of thoughts and profoundest of questions. What is life worth,
if able bodies that once performed great deeds now lie flat and cold, senseless and lifeless? What is
life worth, if eyes that once sparkled with joy, eyes that once beamed with love are now closed forever, bereft of movement, bereft of
life? Thoughts such as these are not to be repressed. It is just these inquiring thoughts, if wisely pursued,
that will ultimately unfold the potentialities inherent in the human mind to receive the
highest truths. According to the Buddhist way of thinking, death, far from being a subject to be shunned and avoided, is
the key that unlocks the seeming mystery of life. It is by understanding death that we understand
life; for death is part of the process of life in the larger sense . In another sense, life and death are two
ends of the same process and if you understand one end of the process, you also understand the
other end. Hence, by understanding the purpose of death we also understand the purpose of life. It is
the contemplation of death, the intensive thought that it will some day come upon us, that softens the hardest of
hearts, binds one to another with cords of love and compassion, and destroys the barriers of caste,
creed and race among the peoples of this earth all of whom are subject to the common destiny of
death. Death is a great leveler. Pride of birth, pride of position, pride of wealth, pride of power must give way to the all-
consuming thought of inevitable death. It is this leveling aspect of death that made the poet say: "Scepter and crown Must tumble
down And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade." It is the contemplation of death that
helps to destroy the infatuation of sense-pleasure . It is the contemplation of death that destroys
vanity. It is the contemplation of death that gives balance and a healthy sense of proportion to our
highly over-wrought minds with their misguided sense of values. It is the contemplation of death that gives
strength and steadiness and direction to the erratic human mind, now wandering in one direction, now in another, without an aim,
without a purpose. It is not for nothing that the Buddha has, in the very highest terms, commended to his disciples the practice of
mindfulness regarding death. This is known as "marananussati bhavana." One who wants to practice it must at stated times, and also
every now and then, revert to the thought maranam bhavissati "death will take place." This contemplation of death is
one of the classical meditation-subjects treated in the Visuddhi Magga which states that in order to obtain the fullest
results, one should practice this meditation in the correct way, that is, with mindfulness (sati), with a sense of
urgency (samvega) and with understanding (ana). For example, suppose a young disciple fails to realize keenly that death can come
upon him at any moment, and regards it as something that will occur in old age in the distant future; his contemplation of death will be
lacking strength and clarity, so much so that it will run on lines which are not conducive to success. How great and useful is
the contemplation of death can be seen from the following beneficial effects enumerated in the Visuddhi Magga:
"The disciple who devotes himself to this contemplation of death is always vigilant, takes no
delight in any form of existence, gives up hankering after life, censures evil doing, is free from
craving as regards the requisites of life, his perception of impermanence becomes established, he
realizes the painful and soulless nature of existence and at the moment of death he is devoid of
fear, and remains mindful and self-possessed. Finally, if in this present life he fails to attain to Nibbana, upon the
dissolution of the body he is bound for a happy destiny." Thus it will be seen that mindfulness of death not only purifies
and refines the mind but also has the effect of robbing death of its fears and terrors , and helps one
at that solemn moment when he is gasping for his last breath, to face that situation with fortitude and calm. He is never
unnerved at the thought of death but is always prepared for it. It is such a man that can truly
exclaim, "O death, where is thy sting?" In the Anguttara Nikaya the Buddha has said, "Oh Monks, there are ten
ideas, which if made to grow, made much of, are of great fruit, of great profit for plunging into Nibbana, for ending up in Nibbana."
Of these ten, one is death. Contemplation on death and on other forms of sorrow such as old age, and disease,
constitutes a convenient starting point for the long line of investigation and meditation that will
ultimately lead to Reality. This is exactly what happened in the case of the Buddha. Was it not the sight
of an old man followed by the sight of a sick man and thereafter the sight of a dead man that made Prince Siddhattha, living in the lap
of luxury, to give up wife and child, home and the prospect of a kingdom, and to embark on a voyage of discovery of truth, a voyage
that ended in the glory of Buddhahood and the bliss of Nibbana? The marked disinclination of the average man to
advert to the problem of death, the distaste that arouses in him the desire to turn away from it
whenever the subject is broached, are all due to the weakness of the human mind, sometimes
occasioned by fear, sometimes by tanha or selfishness, but at all times supported by ignorance (avijja). The disinclination to
understand death, is no different from the disinclination of a man to subject himself to a medical
check-up although he feels that something is wrong with him. We must learn to value the
necessity to face facts. Safety always lies in truth. The sooner we know our condition the safer are
we, for we can then take the steps necessary for our betterment . The saying, "where ignorance is bliss it is folly
to be wise" has no application here. To live with no thought of death is to live in a fool's paradise .

Everyone must confront death key to solve suffering

Manivaso 10
, Buddhist studies @ Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University 2010 (Phramaha Pisit, THE
ANALYSTICAL STUDY OF MARA_ASSATI IN THERAVADA BUDDHISM
http://www.mcu.ac.th/userfiles/file/library1/Thesis/762.pdf

According to the Buddhist way of thought, everyone has to confront death without any
exemption, but if human beings know and understand the true meaning of death, death
shall no more be threatening. It is by understanding the death that we
understand the life, says V.F.Gunaratana. 3 He further points out that in another sense, life and death are two
ends of the same process and if we understand one end of the process, we also understand
the other. Therefore, in the Theravada Buddhist notion, death is just a natural phenomenon of
life, which has the basic condition as a compounded thing that will be split off at the final
stage. So, the meaning of death according to Theravada Buddhism is the state of not being
able to be re-combined again of body and mind (Rpa and Nma); indeed, the five aggregates (Pacakhandha)
4 . In other words, it is the separation of the five aggregates or the cessation of life elements in this life span. However, the reason why
death has become a problem or a cause of suffering is that the people do not understand the truth of life and its processes. Human
beings fill up their lives with compounded things and cling tightly to the idea of the self (Attnudihi). However, the nature of
compounded things does not give in to anybodys desire; therefore whenever desire goes against the truth of nature, suffering occurs
(Jtipi dukkh, maraapi dukkha).

Refusing to think about death causes us to be incapable

of eventually confronting it their deaths will be pitiful
and sad Binghamtons deaths will be joyous and
awesome

Manivaso 10
 (Phramaha Pisit, Buddhist studies @ Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University THE
ANALYSTICAL STUDY OF MARA_ASSATI IN THERAVADA BUDDHISM
http://www.mcu.ac.th/userfiles/file/library1/Thesis/762.pdf

It is accepted as a general truth that everybody fears death. 91 We fear death because we
crave for life with all our might. It is also a fact that we fear the unknown. We know least
about death; therefore we fear death for a duality of reasons. It seems reasonable to conjecture that the
fear of death, or the fear of harm to life, lurks at the root of all fear. Therefore each time we become frightened we
either run away from the source of fear or fight against it, thus making every effort to
preserve life. But we can do so only so long as our body is capable of either fighting or
running away from danger. On the contrary, when at last we are on the deathbed face to
face with approaching death, and the body is no longer strong enough for any protest, it is
very unlikely that we will accept death with a mental attitude of resignation . We will mentally try
hard to survive. As our yearning for life (tanh 92 ) is so strong, we will mentally grasp (updna 93 ) another viable place, as our
body can no longer support life. Once such a place, for example the fertilized ovum in a mother's womb, has been grasped, the
psychological process of life (bhva 94 ) will continue with the newly found place as its basis. Birth (jti 95 ) will take place in due
course. This seems to be the process that is explained in the chain of causation as: craving conditions grasping, grasping conditions
becoming or the process of growth, which in turn conditions birth. Thus the average man who fears death will necessarily take another
birth as his ardent desire is to survive. And when the inevitable death comes to them, imagine how they,
someone who never wanted to think about death, would deal with it . It would be very
pathetic, very pitiful indeed. Their final moments could be best summarized as Fearful,
restless and not knowing what to do, what would happen next, where they would be going
next. On the other hand, the people who always reflect on death would be fully equipped to
handle the final moment calmly and with a clear mind. They would not be shaken by fear of
separation. Moreover, they are most likely guaranteed to go to a good place in their next
reincarnation, because the Buddha himself has affirmed that, in our final moment, If ones
mind is clear and calm, one can be assured of going to a good place. 96

Fear is necessary to check extinction provides an active

consciousness which sustains peace
Futterman 94
J.A.H. Futterman, Former US nuclear weapons scientist, 1994, Obscenity and Peace:
Meditation on the Bomb, Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua,
www.dogchurch.org/books/nuke.html

But the inhibitory effect of reliable nuclear weapons goes deeper than Shirer's deterrence of adventurer-conquerors.
It changes the way we think individually and culturally, preparing us for a future we cannot now imagine. Jungian
psychiatrist Anthony J. Stevens states, [15] "History would indicate that people cannot rise above their
narrow sectarian concerns without some overwhelming paroxysm. It took the War of Independence and
the Civil War to forge the United States, World War I to create the League of Nations, World War II to create the United Nations
Organization and the European Economic Community. Only catastrophe, it seems, forces people to take the
wider view. Or what about fear? Can the horror which we all experience when we
contemplate the possibility of nuclear extinction mobilize in us sufficient libidinal energy to
resist the archetypes of war? Certainly, the moment we become blas about the possibility of
holocaust we are lost. As long as horror of nuclear exchange remains uppermost we can
recognize that nothing is worth it. War becomes the impossible option. Perhaps horror, the experience
of horror, the consciousness of horror, is our only hope. Perhaps horror alone will enable us to overcome the otherwise
invincible attraction of war." Thus I also continue engaging in nuclear weapons work to help fire that world-historical warning shot I
mentioned above, namely, that as our beneficial technologies become more powerful, so will our weapons technologies, unless
genuine peace precludes it. We must build a future more peaceful than our past, if we are to have a future at all, with or without
nuclear weapons a fact we had better learn before worse things than nuclear weapons are invented. If you're a philosopher, this
means that I regard the nature of humankind as mutable rather than fixed, but that I think most people welcome change in their
personalities and cultures with all the enthusiasm that they welcome death thus, the fear of nuclear annihilation of
ourselves and all our values may be what we require in order to become peaceful enough to
survive our future technological breakthroughs.[16]

Affirming survival doesnt devalue life life is complex

and malleable and can be celebrated even when it seems
oppressive

Fassin 10
James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton, as well as directeur dtudes at the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences
Sociales, Paris. (Didier, Fall, Ethics of Survival: A Democratic Approach to the Politics of Life
Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Vol
1 No 1, Project Muse)
Conclusion

Survival, in the sense Jacques Derrida attributed to the concept in his last interview, not only shifts lines that are too often hardened
between biological and political lives: it opens an ethical space for reflection and action . Critical
thinking in the past decade has often taken biopolitics and the politics of life as its objects . It has thus
unveiled the way in which individuals and groups, even entire nations, have been treated by powers, the market, or the state, during
the colonial period as well as in the contemporary era. However, through indiscriminate extension, this powerful
instrument has lost some of its analytical sharpness and heuristic potentiality. On the one hand, the
binary reduction of life to the opposition between nature and history, bare life and qualified life,
when systematically applied from philosophical inquiry in sociological or anthropological study, erases much of the
complexity and richness of life in society as it is in fact observed. On the other hand, the normative
prejudices which underlie the evaluation of the forms of life and of the politics of life, when
generalized to an undifferentiated collection of social facts, end up by depriving social agents of
legitimacy, voice, and action. The risk is therefore both scholarly and political. It calls for ethical attention. In fact, the
genealogy of this intellectual lineage reminds us that the main founders of these theories expressed tensions and hesitations in their
work, which was often more complex, if even sometimes more obscure, than in its reduced and translated form in the humanities and
social sciences today. And also biographies, here limited to fragments from South African lives that I have described and analyzed in
more detail elsewhere, suggest the necessity of complicating the dualistic models that oppose
biological and political lives. Certainly, powers like the market and the state do act
sometimes as if human beings could be reduced to mere life, but democratic forces,
including from within the structure of power, tend to produce alternative strategies that escape
this reduction. And people themselves, even under conditions of domination , [End Page 93] manage
subtle tactics that transform their physical life into a political instrument or a moral resource or an
affective expression. But let us go one step further: ethnography invites us to reconsider what life is or rather what human
beings make of their lives, and reciprocally how their lives permanently question what it is to be human. The blurring between what
is human and what is not human shades into the blurring over what is life and what is not life, writes Veena Das. In the tracks of
Wittgenstein and Cavell, she underscores that the usual manner in which we think of forms of life not only obscures the mutual
absorption of the natural and the social but also emphasizes form at the expense of life. 22 It should be the incessant effort of social
scientists to return to this inquiry about life in its multiple forms but also in its everyday expression of the human.

Doing things is good and is life-affirming

Todd May, Sept 2005, To Change the world, to celebrate

life, Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (5-6), p
SageJournalsOnline
And what happens from there? From the meetings, from the rallies, from the petitions and the teach-ins?
What happens next? There is, after all, always a next. If you win this
time end aid to the contras, divest from apartheid South Africa ,
force debt-forgiveness by technologically advanced countries there is always
more to do. There is the de-unionization of workers, there are gay rights, there is Burma, there are the Palestinians, the Tibetans.
There will always be Tibetans, even if they arent in Tibet, even if they arent Asian. But is that the only question: Next? Or is that just the
question we focus on? Whats the next move in this campaign, whats the next campaign? Isnt there more going on than that? After all,
engaging in political organizing is a practice, or a group of practices. It contributes to making you who you are. Its where the power is, and
where your life is, and where the intersection of your life and those of others (many of whom you will never meet, even if its for their sake
This moment when you are seeking
that youre involved) and the buildings and streets of your town is.

to change the world, whether by making a suggestion in a meeting or singing at a rally or

marching in silence or asking for a signature on a petition, is not a moment in which you
dont exist. Its not a moment of yours that you sacrifice for others
so that it no longer belongs to you. It remains a moment of your life,
sedimenting in you to make you what you will become, emerging out
of a past that is yours as well. What will you make of it, this moment? How will you be with
others, those others around you who also do not cease to exist when they begin to organize or to protest
The illusion is to think that this has nothing to do with you.
or to resist?
Youve made a decision to participate in world-changing. Will that be
all there is to it? Will it seem to you a simple sacrifice, for this small
period of time, of who you are for the sake of others? Are you, for
this moment, a political ascetic? Asceticism like that is dangerous. X
Freedom lies not in our distance from the world but in the
historically fragile and contingent ways we are folded into it, just as
we ourselves are folds of it. If we take Merleau-Pontys Being not as a rigid foundation or a
truth behind appearances but as the historical folding and refolding of a univocity, then our freedom
lies in the possibility of other foldings. Merleau-Ponty is not insensitive to this point. His elusive
concept of the invisible seems to gesture in this direction. Of painting, he writes: the proper essence of the visible is to have a layer of
invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence . . . There is that which reaches the eye directly, the frontal
properties of the visible; but there is also that which reaches it from below . . . and that which reaches it from above . . . where it no longer
participates in the heaviness of origins but in free accomplishments.9 Elsewhere, in The Visible and the Invisible, he says: if . . . the surface of
the visible, is doubled up over its whole extension with an invisible reserve; and if, finally, in our flesh as the flesh of things, the actual,
empirical, ontic visible, by a sort of folding back, invagination, or padding, exhibits a visibility, a possibility that is not the shadow of the actual
but its principle . . . an interior horizon and an exterior horizon between which the actual visible is a partitioning and which, nonetheless, open
indefinitely only upon other visibles . . .10 What are we to make of these references? We can, to be sure, see the hand of Heidegger in them.
There is an
But we may also, and for present purposes more relevantly, see an intersection with Foucaults work on freedom .

ontology of freedom at work here, one that situates freedom not in

the private reserve of an individual but in the unfinished character
of any historical situation. There is more to our historical juncture, as there is to a painting,
than appears to us on the surface of its visibility. The trick is to recognize this, and to
take advantage of it, not only with our thoughts but with our lives .
And that is why, in the end, there can be no such thing as a sad revolutionary. To seek to change
the world is to offer a new form of life-celebration. It is to articulate
a fresh way of being, which is at once a way of seeing, thinking,
acting, and being acted upon. It is to fold Being once again upon itself, this time at a new
point, to see what that might yield. There is, as Foucault often reminds us, no guarantee
that this fold will not itself turn out to contain the intolerable . In a
complex world with which we are inescapably entwined, a world we cannot view from above or outside,
there is no certainty about the results of our experiments. Our politics are constructed from the same
But to refuse to experiment
vulnerability that is the stuff of our art and our daily practices.
is to resign oneself to the intolerable; it is to abandon both the
struggle to change the world and the opportunity to celebrate living
within it. And to seek one aspect without the other life-celebration
without world-changing, world-changing without life-celebration is
to refuse to acknowledge the chiasm of body and world that is the
wellspring of both. If we are to celebrate our lives, if we are to change our world, then perhaps
the best place to begin to think is our bodies, which are the openings to celebration and to change, and
perhaps the point at which the war within us that I spoke of earlier can be both waged and resolved. That
is the fragile beauty that, in their different ways, both Merleau- Ponty and Foucault have placed before us.
The question before us is whether, in our lives and in our politics, we
can be worthy of it.
 1AR
Death imagery affirms life

Fox 85
Michael Allen Fox, Assoc. Prof Phil. @ Queens, 1985, Nuclear War: Philosophical
Perspectives, ed. Fox and Groarke, p. 127

There remains but one choice: we must seek a reduction of world tensions, mutual trust, disarmament, and peace.35 Security is not the
absence of fear and anxiety, but a degree of stress and uncertainty with which we can cope and remain mentally healthy. For security,
understood in this way, to become a feature of our lives, we must admit our nuclear fear and anxiety and identify the
mechanisms that dull or mask our emotional and other responses. It is necessary to realist that we cannot entrust security to
ourselves, but, strange as it seems and however difficult to accept, must entrust it to our adversary Just as the safety and security of
each of us, as individuals, depends upon the good will of every other, any one of whom could harm us at any moment, so the security
of nations finally depends upon the good will of other nations, whether or not we willingly accept this fact. The disease for which
we must find the cure also requires
that we continually come face to face with the unthinkable in
image and thought and recoil from it. 36 In this manner we can break its hold over us and
free ourselves to begin new initiatives. As Robert J. Lifton points out, confronting massive death
helps us bring ourselves more in touch with what we care most about in life. We [will then]
find ourselves in no way on a death trip, but rather responding to a call for personal and
professional actions and commitments on behalf of that wondrous and fragile entity we know as
human life.
Deep Ecology
 2AC
Selfhood turn: Deep ecology sacrifices the self to the
greater whole even while privileging the individual,
allowing for militarism and Nazism

Bookchin 1987 (Murray [Founder, Institute for Social

Ecology, Professor emeritus, Ramapo College of New
Jersey] Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge
for the Ecology Movement, Green Perspectives:
Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5, d/l:
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/s
ocecovdeepeco.html) //jl

Such flippant abstractions of human individuality are extremely

dangerous. Historically, a "self" that absorbs all real existential selves has
been used from time immemorial to absorb individual uniqueness and
freedom into a supreme individual who heads the State, churches of various
sorts, adoring congregations---be they Eastern or Western---and spellbound
constituencies, however much a "self" is dressed up in ecological,
naturalistic, and biocentric attributes. The Paleolithic shaman regaled in
reindeer skins and horns is the predecessor of the Pharaoh, the
institutionalized Buddha, and in more recent times Hitler, Stalin, and
Mussolini. That the egotistical, greedy, and soloist bourgeois self has always
been a repellent being goes without saying, and deep ecology as personified
by Devall and Sessions make the most of it. This kind of "critical" stance
is easy to adopt; it can even find a place in People magazine. But is there
not a free, independently minded, ecologically concerned, indeed idealist self
with a unique personality that can think of itself as different from "whales,
grizzly bears, whole rainforest ecosystems [no less!], mountains and rivers,
the tiniest microbes in the soil, and so on"? Is it not indispensable, in fact, for
the individual self to disengage itself from a pharaonic "Self," discover its own
capacities and uniqueness, indeed acquire a sense of personality, of self-
control and self-direction---all traits indispensable for the achievement of
freedom? Here, I may add, Heidegger and, yes, Nazism begin to grimace
with satisfaction behind this veil of self-effacement and a passive
personality so yielding that it can easily be shaped, distorted, and
manipulated by a new "ecological" State machine with a supreme
"SELF" embodied in a Leader, Guru, or Living God---all in the name of a
"biocentric equality" that is slowly reworked as it has been so often
in history into a social hierarchy. From Shaman to Monarch, from
Priest or Priestess to Dictator, our warped social development has
been marked by nature worshippers and their ritual Supreme Ones
who produced unfinished individuals at best and who deindividuated
the "self-in-Self" at worst, often in the name of the "Great Connected
Whole" (to use exactly the language of the Chinese ruling classes who kept
their peasantry in abject servitude, as Leon E. Stover points out in his The
Cultural Ecology of Chinese Civilization). What makes this Eco-la-la
especially sinister today is that we are already living in a period of
massive deindividuation---not because deep ecology or Taoism is making
any serious inroads into our own cultural ecology but because the mass
media, the commodity culture, and a market society are "reconnecting" us
into an increasingly depersonalized "whole" whose essence is passivity and a
chronic vulnerability to economic and political manipulation. It is not from an
excess of selfhood that we are suffering but of selfishness---the surrender
of personality to the security afforded by corporations, centralized
government, and the military. If selfhood is identified with a
grasping, "anthropocentric," and devouring personality, these traits
are to be found not so much among ordinary people, who basically
sense that they have no control over their destinies, as among the
giant corporations and State leaders who are plundering not only
the planet but also women, people of color, and the underprivileged.
It is not deindividuation that the oppressed of the world require, much less
passive personalities that readily surrender themselves to the cosmic
forces---the "Self" that buffet them around, but reindividuation that will
render them active agents in remaking society and arresting the growing
totalitarianism that threatens to homogenize us all as part of a Western
version of the "Great Connected Whole."

Disease turn: Deep ecology makes it impossible to solve

AIDS and other diseases, risking the survival of humanity
and the continual evolution of nature

Bookchin 1987 (Murray [Founder, Institute for Social

Ecology, Professor emeritus, Ramapo College of New
Jersey] Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge
for the Ecology Movement, Green Perspectives:
Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5, d/l:
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/s
ocecovdeepeco.html) //jl

We are also confronted with the delicious "and so on" that follows
the "tiniest microbes in the soil" with which our deep ecologists
identify the "Self." Here we encounter another bit of intellectual manipulation that marks the
Devall-Sessions anthology as a whole: the tendency to choose examples from God-Motherhood-and Flag
Why stop with the
for one's own case and cast any other alternative vision in a demonic form.
"tiniest microbes in the soil" and ignore the leprosy microbe, or the
yearning and striving viruses that give us smallpox, polio, and more
recently AIDS? Are they too not part of "all organisms and entities in
the ecosphere . . . of the interrelated whole . . . equal in intrinsic
worth," as Devall and Sessions remind us in their effluvium of Eco-la-
la? At which point, Naess, Devall, and Sessions immediately introduce a number of highly debatable
qualifiers, i.e., "we should live with a minimum rather than a maximum impact on other species" (75) or
"we have no right to destroy other living beings without sufficient reason" (75) or finally, even more
majestically, "The slogan of 'noninterference' does not imply that humans should not modify [!] some [!]
ecosystems as do other [!] species. Humans have modified the earth and will probably [!] continue to do
 One does not leave
so. At issue is the nature [!] and extent [!] of such interference [!]" (72).
the muck of deep ecology without having mud all over one's feet.
Exactly who is to decide the nature of human "interference" in first nature and the extent to which it can
be done? What are "some" of the ecosystems we can modify, and which ones are not subject to human
"interference"? Here again we encounter the key problem that Eco-la-la,
including deep ecology, poses for serious, ecologically concerned
people: the social bases of our ecological problems and the role of
the human species in the evolutionary scheme of things. Implicit in
deep ecology is the notion that a "humanity" exists that accurses the
natural world; that individual selfhood must be transformed into a cosmic "Selfhood" that
essentially transcends the person and his or her uniqueness. Even nature is not spared a
kind of static, prepositional logic that is cultivated by the logical
positivists. Nature in deep ecology and David Foreman's
interpretation of it becomes a kind of scenic view, a spectacle to be
admired around the campfire (perhaps with some Budweiser beer to keep the boys happy
or a Marlboro cigarette to keep them manly)---not an evolutionary development that
is cumulative and includes the human species, its conceptual powers of thought,
its highly symbolic forms of communication, and graded into second nature, a social and cultural
development that has its own history and metabolism with pristine first nature. To see nature as a
cumulative unfolding form first into second nature is likely to be condemned as anthropocentric---as
though human self-consciousness at its best were not nature rendered self-conscious. The problems that
deep ecology and biocentrism raise have not gone unnoticed in more thoughtful press in England. During a
discussion of "biocentric ethics" in The New Scientist 69 (1976), for example, Bernard Dixon observed that
no "logical line can be drawn" between the conservation of whales, gentians, and flamingoes on the one
hand and the extinction of pathogenic microbes like the small pox virus on the other. At which point God's
gift to misanthropy, David Ehrenfeld, cutely observes that the smallpox virus is an "endangered species" in
his The Arrogance of Humanism, a work that is so selective and tendentious in its use of quotations that it
One wonders what to do about
should validly be renamed "The Arrogance of Ignorance."
the AIDS virus if a vaccine or therapy should threaten its survival.
Further, given the passion for perpetuating the ecosystem of every
species, one wonders how smallpox and AIDS virus should be
preserved. In test tubes? Laboratory cultures? Or to be truly
ecological, in their native habitat, the human body? In which case, idealistic
acolytes of deep ecology should be invited to offer their own bloodstreams in the interests of "biocentric
Certainly, if "nature should be permitted to take its course," as
equality."
then plagues, famines, suffering,
Foreman advises for Ethiopians and Indian peasants,
wars, and perhaps even lethal asteroids of the kind that
exterminated the great reptiles of the Mesozoic should not be kept
from defacing the purity of first nature by the intervention of second
nature. With so much absurdity to unscramble, one can indeed get
heady, almost dizzy, with a sense of polemical intoxication.

Racism turn: Deep ecology is unabashedly racist both in

its ideology and implementation

Bookchin 1987 (Murray [Founder, Institute for Social

Ecology, Professor emeritus, Ramapo College of New
Jersey] Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge
for the Ecology Movement, Green Perspectives:
Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5, d/l:
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/s
ocecovdeepeco.html) //jl
The greatest differences that are emerging within the so-called ecology movement are between a vague,
formless, often self-contradictory, and invertebrate thing called deep ecology and a long-developing,
Deep ecology
coherent, and socially oriented body of ideas that can best be called social ecology.
has parachuted into our midst quite recently from the Sunbelt's bizarre mix of Hollywood
and Disneyland, spiced with homilies from Taoism, Buddhism, spiritualism, reborn Christianity, and in
some cases eco-fascism, while social ecology draws its inspiration from such outstanding
radical decentralist thinkers as Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and Paul Goodman, among many others
who have advanced a serious challenge to the present society with its vast
hierarchical, sexist, class-ruled, statist apparatus and militaristic history. Let us
face these differences bluntly: deep ecology, despite all its social rhetoric, has
virtually no real sense that our ecological problems have their
ultimate roots in society and in social problems. It preaches a gospel
of a kind of "original sin" that accurses a vague species called
humanity---as though people of color were equatable with whites,
women with men, the Third World with the First, the poor with the
rich, and the exploited with their exploiters. Deep ecologists see this
vague and undifferentiated humanity essentially as an ugly "anthropocentric" thing---
presumably a malignant product of natural evolution---that is "overpopulating" the planet, "devouring" its
resources, and destroying its wildlife and the biosphere---as though some vague domain of "nature"
stands opposed to a constellation of nonnatural human beings, with
their technology, minds, society, etc. Deep ecology, formulated largely by
privileged male white academics, has managed to bring sincere
naturalists like Paul Shepard into the same company as patently antihumanist and
macho mountain men like David Foreman of Earth First! who preach a gospel that humanity is some kind
of cancer in the world of life. It was out of this kind of crude eco-brutalism that Hitler, in the name of
"population control," with a racial orientation, fashioned theories of blood and soil that led to the transport
The same eco-brutalism now
of millions of people to murder camps like Auschwitz.
reappears a half-century later among self-professed deep ecologists
who believe that Third World peoples should be permitted to starve
to death and that desperate Indian immigrants from Latin America
should be exclude by the border cops from the United States lest
they burden "our" ecological resources.

Racism makes all forms of violence inevitable and must be

rejected in every instance

Memmi 2000 (MEMMI Professor Emeritus of Sociology @

Unv. Of Paris Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve
Martinot, pp.163-165) //jl-cl
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never
it is a struggle to be undertaken without
achieved, yet for this very reason,
surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward
racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not
in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial
part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To
accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear,
injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark
history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider
will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an
outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable
negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain
sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is,
and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the
ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we
cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true
that ones moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to
want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in
its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to
conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the
One cannot found a moral order, let
very negation. This is almost a redundancy.
alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the
exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and
domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious
language, racism is the truly capital sin.fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of
humanitys spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just
a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a
question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of
All things considered, we have an
the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments.
interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence
and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think
that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others
is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest.
One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society
contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat
others with respect so that they treat you with respect. Recall, says the bible, that you were once a
stranger in Egypt, which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger
It is an ethical and a practical
yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday.
appeal indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In
short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and
practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands
the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all.
If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict,
violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can
hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are
irresistible.

Deep ecology is incapable of solving forms of oppression

Morris 1995 (Nellie [Loriette] RE: deep ecology and

ecofem, Centre for Resource Management Lincoln
University) //jl

I believe the primary difference between deep ecology and ecofeminism is

that ecofeminist theory has surpassed deep ecology. Deep ecology (DE) has
had many important contributions to environmental ethics, ecofeminism has
simply built on those contributions. Just as radical environmentalism built on
theories of early conservationists like Leopold, Muir, Abbey, etc.; ecofeminism
has applied radical or socialist feminist critiques to radical environmentalism
and, in doing so, has corrected for some of the mistakes of its predecessors
or contemporaries. The main problem ecofeminists have with DE is that
it's not feminist. It doesn't take into consideration the systems
whereby all women, men of color, working-class or impoverished
men, queer men, differently abled men, non-human animals,
wilderness, etc. are all oppressed. Without addressing these
interconnections, DE is incomplete. In a sense one could say they
value on oppression over all others and, in doing so, they will be
unsuccessful in ending the oppression of non-human nature. This is
where over-population fits in. I don't believe ecofeminists have neglected the
issue, it's simply a symptom of larger social and economic problems--social
injustice and capitalist consumption to name two. Many DE's are excellent
environmental activists, some of whom are women. Ecofeminist theorists and
activists find it hard to work in "environments" with some of these sexist,
racist, specieist men and women. Ecofeminists are raising these issues. And,
personally I'd rather spend my time doing activism than arguing but,
it must be done.

Deep ecology cements the status-quo and allows for

oppression to continue unchecked

Harris d/l 9/10/2012 (Adrian [PhD researcher with a

background in environmental work and a strong interest
in environmental philosophy] Deep Ecology Critique,
d/l: http://www.thegreenfuse.org/deepcrit.htm) //jl

Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! which claims to draw inspiration from deep ecology, has
made several deeply misanthropic comments. "It is rather painful to read about some of the positions
taken by the Foreman faction in the E.F! Journal: for example, Foreman arguing that even a nuclear war
would not be that damaging to the Earth and would hasten the end of industrial society... and his remarks
elsewhere that we should "allow Ethiopians to starve"; Christopher Manes suggesting that one solution to
overpopulation would be to dismantle the medical technology designed to save lives, and of AIDS as
Nature's solution to overpopulation; and Reed Noss writing of genetic "deep ecology elite" as a "chosen
people" out to save the Earth (pp. 64, 68, 83-84, 92-3,101-3). George Sessions, Book Review: Martha Lee,
Earth First!. Trumpeter: 13, 4 (1996) Sessions adds that if such comments claim to draw on deep ecology
they show a misunderstanding of its philosophy. Murray Bookchin comments: "They are barely
disguised racists, survivalists, macho Daniel Boones and outright social
reactionaries who offer a vague, formless often self contradictory
and invertebrate [movement] and a kind of crude eco-brutalism
similar to Hitler's. Deep ecologists feed on human disasters,
suffering and misery...[and are guilty of thinking which]...legitimates
extremely regressive, primitivistic and even highly reactionary
notions." Kirkpatrick Sale, 'The cutting edge: deep ecology and its critics', The Nation, May 14, 1988
v246 n 19 p670 Deep ecology itself requires everyone to formulate their own interpretation, so it's difficult
to reject one persons position because it's uncomfortably reactionary. Do Dave Foremans ideas conform to
the Deep Ecology Platform? If so, he can legitimately claim to be part of the movement. Back to the
Deep ecology has little to say
questions Does deep ecology encourage oppressive politics?
about political equality, tending towards a conservative position that
supports the existing social and economic status quo. Edward Abbey is in
favor of stopping all immigration into the US by strengthening border forces and Dave Foreman has called
Such practical comments raise
for curbing immigration from Mexico and Central America.
important issues. If the population in a particular area becomes too
large according to the principles of deep ecology, who decides who
must leave and who may stay? Does the decision come from within, from a sense of
environmental altruism or from outside by coercion? "The flourishing of human life and cultures is
compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of non-human life requires
such a decrease." Deep Ecology Platform principle #5 Bill Devall is more specific. A reduction in the
birthrate must take place, 'especially in third world nations'. ('Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing
Deep Ecology', Green Print 1990) His choice is very odd given that the ecological impact of one American
child over the course of their lifetimes is equivalent to some 50 babies in Bangladesh or Namibia. America
is the first place that needs to depopulate and Devall's comments are ignorant at best and racist at worst.
Their first principle
Devall and Sessions do not question the distribution or ownership of land.
of land management is to "encourage agencies, legislators, property
owners and managers" to flow with natural processes. 'Deep Ecology: Living
as if Nature Mattered' p.145 Deep ecology is not concerned with who should
own land or whether land ownership is legitimate, but only with how
it is treated. At best deep ecology is apolitical, and though it claims
to be beyond such distinctions, many feel deep ecology tends
towards a right-wing perspective. Social ecologists and ecofeminists
agree that not enough analysis is done by deep ecology of the social
forces at work in the destruction of the biosphere.

Anthro turn: Deep ecology is anthropocentric

Grey, 93 (William, prof. @ University of Queensland,

taught at Australian National University, Temple
University, Philadelphia, and the University of New
England. Anthropocentrism and Deep Ecology,
Australiasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol 71, No 4 (1993),
pp. 463-475.)

My aim however is not to bury anthropocentrism, but to defend it, at least in

a qualified form. My claim is that if we attempt to step too far outside the
scale of the recognizably human, rather than expanding and enriching our
moral horizons we render them meaningless, or at least almost
unrecognizable. The grand perspective of evolutionary biology
provides a reductio ad absurdum of the cluster of non-
anthropocentric ethics which can be found under the label "deep
ecology". What deep ecology seeks to promote, and what deep
ecologists seek to condemn, needs to be articulated from a
distinctively human perspective. And this is more than the trivial
claim that our perspectives, values and judgements are necessarily
human.

The exploitation of nonhuman animals and maintaining

the human-nonhuman animal binary is the internal link to
every extinction scenario

Best et al 07 [Steven Best, Anthony J. Nocella, II, Richard

Kahn, Carol Gigliotti, and Lisa Kemmerer, Introducing
Critical Animal Studies, VOLUME V, ISSUE I,
http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-
content/uploads/2009/09/Introducing-Critical-Animal-
Studies-2007.pdf]
The aim of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) is to
provide a space for the development of a critical approach to
animal studies, one which perceives that relations between human
and nonhuman animals are now at a point of crisis which implicates
the planet as a whole. This dire situation is evident most
dramatically in the intensified slaughter and exploitation of animals
(who die by the tens of billions each year in the United States
alone); the unfolding of the sixth great extinction crisis in the
history of the planet (the last one being 65 million years ago); and
the monumental environmental ecological threats of global warming,
rainforest destruction, desertification, air and water pollution, and
resource scarcity, to which animal agriculture is a prime contributor.
 Perms
*Social Ecology Perm Shell

PERM: Do the plan as an outgrowth our participation in

the natural world. Perm solves best since using human
action to produce change can foster an appreciation of
nature.

Bookchin 1987 (Murray [Founder, Institute for Social

Ecology, Professor emeritus, Ramapo College of New
Jersey] Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge
for the Ecology Movement, Green Perspectives:
Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5, d/l:
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/s
ocecovdeepeco.html) //jl

Human society, in fact, constitutes a "second nature," a cultural artifact, out of "first
nature," or primeval nonhuman nature. There is nothing wrong, unnatural, or
ecologically alien about this fact. Human society, like plant and
animal communities, is in large part a product of natural evolution,
no less than beehives or anthills. It is a product, moreover, of the human species, a
species that is no less a product of nature than whales, dolphins, California condors, or prokaryotic cells.
Second nature is also a product of mind---of a brain that can think in a richly conceptual manner and
produce a highly symbolic form of communication. Taken together, second nature, the human species that
forms it, and the richly conceptual form of thinking and communication so distinctive to it, emerges out of
natural evolution no less than any other life-form and nonhuman community. This second nature
is uniquely different from first nature in that it can act thinkingly,
purposefully, willfully, and depending up on the society we examine,
creatively in the best ecological sense or destructively in the worst
ecological sense. Finally, this second nature called society has its
own history: its long process of grading out of first nature, of
organizing or institutionalizing human relationships, human
interactions, conflicts , distinctions, and richly nuanced cultural
formations, and of actualizing its large number of potentialities ---some
eminently creative, others eminently destructive. Finally, a cardinal feature of this
product of natural evolution called society is its capacity to
intervene in first nature---to alter it, again in ways that may be
eminently creative or destructive. But the capacity of human beings
to deal with first nature actively, purposefully, willfully, rationally, and one hopes
ecologically is no less a product of evolution than the capacity of large
herbivores to keep forests from eating away at grasslands or of
earthworms to aerate the soil. Human beings and their societies alter first nature at best
in a rational and ecological way---or at worst in an irrational and anti-ecological way. But the fact
that they are constituted to act upon nature, to intervene in natural
processes, to alter them in one way or another, is no less a product
of natural evolution than the action of any life-form on its
environment. In failing to emphasize the uniqueness, characteristics,
and functions of human societies, or placing them in natural
evolution as part of the development of life, or giving full, indeed
unique due to human consciousness as a medium for the self-
reflective role of human thought as nature rendered self-conscious,
deep ecologists essentially evade the social roots of the ecological
crisis. They stand in marked distinction to writers like Kropotkin who outspokenly challenged the gross
inequities in society that underpin the disequilibrium between society and nature. Deep ecology
contains no history of the emergence of society out of nature, a crucial development that brings social
theory into organic contact with ecological theory. It presents no explanation of---indeed, it
reveals no interest in---the emergence of hierarchy out of society, of classes out of hierarchy, of the State
the highly graded social as well as ideological
out of classes--in short,
development that gets to the roots of the ecological problem in the
social domination of women by men and of men by other men,
ultimately giving rise to the notion of dominating nature in the first
place.

Permutation is net-beneficial since separating humans

from nature makes it impossible to focus on the social
conditions responsible for problems in the first place,
while solving our offense against the alt alone

Bookchin 1987 (Murray [Founder, Institute for Social

Ecology, Professor emeritus, Ramapo College of New
Jersey] Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge
for the Ecology Movement, Green Perspectives:
Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5, d/l:
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/s
ocecovdeepeco.html) //jl

This marvel we call "nature" has produced a marvel we call homo sapiens---
thinking man, and more significantly for the development of society, thinking
woman, whose primeval domestic domain provided the arena for the origins
of a caring society, human empathy, love, and idealistic commitment. The
human species, in effect, is no less a product of natural evolution that
blue-green algae. To degrade that species in the name of antihumanism as
Miss Ann Thropy has done (using the coarse language of an unknown Earth
First! mountain man), to deny the species its uniqueness as thinking
beings with an unprecedented gift for conceptual thought, is to deny
the rich fecundity of natural evolution itself. To separate human
beings and society from nature is to dualize and truncate nature
itself, to diminish the meaning and thrust of natural evolution in the
name of a "biocentrism" that spends more time disporting itself with
mantras, deities, and supernature than with the realities of the
biosphere and the role of society in ecological problems.
Accordingly, social ecology does not try to hide its critical and
reconstructive thrust in metaphors. It calls "technological/industrial"
society capitalism, placing the onus of our ecological problems on
the living sources and social relationships that produce them, not on
a cutesy "Third Wave" abstraction that buries these sources in
technics, a technical mentality, or perhaps the technicians who work
on machines. Its sees the domination of women not simply as a
spiritual problem that can be resolved by rituals, incantations, and
shamanesses (important as ritual may be in solidarizing women into a
unique community of people) but in the long, highly graded, and subtly
nuanced development of hierarchy, which long preceded the
development of classes. Nor does it ignore class, ethnic differences,
imperialism, and oppression by creating a grab bag called Humanity
that is placed in opposition to a mystified Nature, divested of all
development.

*Do Both Perm Shell

PERM: Do Both. Permutation is net-beneficial since it

helps the working class get their hands on the levers of
power, which is essential to promoting radical ecological
awareness

Bari 1995 (Judy Revolutionary Ecology, Alarm, a journal

of revolutionary ecology, d/l:
http://www.judibari.org/revolutionary-ecology.html) //jl

A revolutionary ecology movement must also organize among poor

and working people. With the exception of the toxics movement and the
native land rights movement most U.S. environmentalists are white and
privileged. This group is too invested in the system to pose it much of a
threat. A revolutionary ideology in the hands of privileged people can
indeed bring about some disruption and change in the system. But a
revolutionary ideology in the hands of working people can bring that
system to a halt. For it is the working people who have their hands
on the machinery. And only by stopping the machinery of destruction
can we ever hope to stop this madness. How can it be that we have
neighborhood movements focused on the disposal of toxic wastes, for
example, but we don't have a worker's movement to stop the production of
toxics? It is only when the factory workers refuse to make the stuff, it is only
when the loggers refuse to cut the ancient trees, that we can ever hope for
real and lasting change. This system cannot be stopped by force. It is
violent and ruthless beyond the capacity of any people's resistance
movement. The only way I can even imagine stopping it is through
massive non-cooperation.
 No S!
The vagueness of deep ecologys alternative makes it
impossible to solve and allows AIDS to have as much
value as a human

Harris d/l 9/10/2012 (Adrian [PhD researcher with a

background in environmental work and a strong interest
in environmental philosophy] Deep Ecology Critique,
d/l: http://www.thegreenfuse.org/deepcrit.htm) //jl

Several of the points in the 'Deep Ecology Platform' are problematic

and there appear to be inconsistencies within the philosophy as a
whole. Because deep ecology requires everyone to formulate their own interpretation, people who
claim to be part of the movement hold incompatible viewpoints from each other. In my opinion the
main problem with deep ecology is it's vagueness : In attempting to allow for
openness to interpretation and personal intuition, deep ecology risks becoming vacuous. I shall outline
some of the main criticisms: Is deep ecology just inconsistent 'eco-la-la'? Is deep ecology misanthropic?
Does deep ecology encourage oppressive politics? Would a pre-technological tribal culture be better for the
Earth? Is deep ecology just inconsistent 'eco-la-la'? Murray Bookchin, the founder of the Social Ecology
movement criticizes "...the intellectual poverty of 'the father of ecology' and the silliness of the entire deep
ecology 'movement'". 'Deep Ecology and Anarchism', page 47. Bookchin describes Deep Ecology as 'eco
la-la'. He considers it to be half-baked New Age nonsense masquerading as philosophy. Although Bookchin
may be too dismissive, there are inconsistencies in deep ecology. Principle #3 of 'Deep Ecology Platform'
of deep ecology is that: "Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital
Deep ecologists generally count 'vital
needs." But what count as 'vital needs'?
needs' as those necessary for survival or that serve the goal of self-
realization. In practice this can mean eating meat, which Devall and Sessions
justify because 'mutual predation is a biological fact of life' (see Paul Shepherd, 'The Tender Carnivore and
the Sacred Game'). Many deep ecologists advocate hunting as a means of
staying in touch with the natural world, while Naess asserts that
human existence "necessitates some killing, exploitation and
oppression" ('Shallow and Deep Ecology', p.95). Principle #3 is based on the
notion of 'biocentric equality' which is central to deep ecology: All beings have equal intrinsic value.
Human beings have no greater value than any other creature, for we are
just ordinary citizens in the biotic community, with no more rights than amoebae or bacteria. Humans,
however, do have duties towards other beings, which requires us to
engage with the natural world in practical ways. But how much should we
interfere? Naess leave this question to be decided by 'local, regional and national circumstances and
cultural differences." The Trumpeter, 5, (1988), 139. Peter Marshall not unreasonably believes that "If that
is the case, the very notion of 'biocentric equality' has little content except as a slogan'". 'Natures Web', p
421.If all organisms are equal, then the AIDS virus has as much right
to exist as any human being. The principle of 'vital need' would allow humans to destroy
the virus, but it seems counterintuitive to suggest that a simple organism like a virus has a much right to
exist as a complex creature like a whale or an ecosystem like the Amazon Rainforest. Principle #2 of the
deep ecology platform is that: "Richness and diversity of life forms are values in themselves and contribute
to the flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth." Deep ecology also holds that 'Nature knows
best'. If these premises are both true, how do we account for the fact that natural processes like volcanic
Given that the Sun will
eruptions have severely reduced the diversity of life on Earth?
eventually destroy the Earth and all life on it, natural processes do
not appear to value life or species diversity. It is more plausible to
claim that these are purely human values which deep ecologists are
imposing on a romanticized concept of nature.
Deep ecology is incapable of producing action that can
allow their alternative to be realized

Bookchin 1987 (Murray [Founder, Institute for Social

Ecology, Professor emeritus, Ramapo College of New
Jersey] Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge
for the Ecology Movement, Green Perspectives:
Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5, d/l:
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/s
ocecovdeepeco.html) //jl
Whether this species, gifted by the creativity of natural evolution, can play the role of a nature rendered
self-conscious or cut against the grain of natural evolution by simplifying the biosphere, polluting it, and
The primary
undermining the cumulative results of organic evolution is above all a social problem.
question ecology faces today is whether an ecologically oriented
society can be created out of the present anti-ecological one. Deep
ecology provides is with no approach for responding to, much less
acting upon, this key question. It not only rips invaluable ideas like
decentralization, a nonhierarchical society, local autonomy, mutual aid, and communalism from
the liberatory anarchic tradition of the past where they have acquired a richly nuanced, anti-elitist , and
egalitarian content---reinforced by passionate struggles by millions of men and women for freedom. It
reduces them to bumper-sticker slogans that can be recycled for use by a macho mountain man like
These bumper-sticker slogans
Foreman at one extreme or flaky spiritualists at the other.
are then relocated in a particularly repulsive context whose contours
are defined by Malthusian elitism, antihumanist misanthropy, and a
seemingly benign "biocentrism" that dissolves humanity with all its
unique natural traits for conceptual thought and self-consciousness
into a "biocentric democracy" that is more properly the product of
human consciousness than a natural reality. Carried to its logical absurdity, this
"biocentric democracy'"---one might also speak of a tree's morality or a leopard's social contract with its
prey---can no more deny the right of pathogenic viruses to be placed in an Endangered Species list (and
The social
who places them there in the first place?) than it can deny the same status to whales.
roots of the ecological crisis are layered over with a hybridized,
often self-contradictory spirituality in which the human self, writ
large, is projected into the environment or into the sky as a reified
deity or deities---a piece of anthropocentrism if ever there was one,
like the shamans dressed in reindeer skins and horns---and abjectly
revered as "nature." Or as Arne Naess, the grand pontiff of this mess, puts it: "The basic
principles within the deep ecology movement are grounded in religion or philosophy" (225)---as though the
two words can be flippantly used interchangeably. Selfhood is dissolved, in turn, into a cosmic "Self"
precisely at a time when deindividuation and passivity are being cultivated by the mass media,
Finally, deep ecology, with its
corporations, and the State to an appalling extent.
concern for the manipulation of nature, exhibits very little concern
for the manipulation of human beings by one another, except
perhaps when it comes to the drastic measures that may be
"needed" for "population control."
Deep ecology doesnt solve for the environment

Harris d/l 9/10/2012 (Adrian [PhD researcher with a

background in environmental work and a strong interest
in environmental philosophy] Deep Ecology Critique,
d/l: http://www.thegreenfuse.org/deepcrit.htm) //jl

Deep ecology sometimes appears to idealize a the society of

indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes, but in reality many primitive
tribes are not especially ecocentric. Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice
and the Blade writes: "...many peoples past and present living close to
nature have all too often been blindly destructive of their
environment. While many indigenous societies have a great
reverence for nature, there are also both non-Western and Western
peasant and nomadic cultures that have overgrazed and
overcultivated land, decimated forests, and where population
pressures have been severe, killed off animals needlessly and
indifferently." Ken Wilber, 'Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. The Spirit of Evolution',
Shambhala, Boston, 1995, p. 167

Deep ecologys alternatives rely on models that were

highly hierarchal

Bookchin 1987 (Murray [Founder, Institute for Social

Ecology, Professor emeritus, Ramapo College of New
Jersey] Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge
for the Ecology Movement, Green Perspectives:
Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5, d/l:
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/s
ocecovdeepeco.html) //jl

If we look beyond the spiritual "Eco-la-la" (to use a word coined by a remarkable
ecofeminist, Chaia Heller), and examine the context in which demands like
decentralization, small-scale communities, local autonomy, mutual
aid, communalism, and tolerance are placed, the blurred images that
Sessions and Devall create come into clearer focus. Decentralism, small-scale
communities, local autonomy, even mutual aid and communalism are
not intrinsically ecological or emancipatory. Few societies were more
decentralized than European feudalism, which in fact was structured around small-
scale communities, mutual aid, and the communal use of land. Local autonomy was highly
prized and autarchy formed the economic key to feudal
communities. Yet few societies were more hierarchical. Looming over
medieval serfs, who were tied to the land by an "ecological" network of rights and duties that placed them
on a status only slightly above that of slaves, were status groups that extended from villeins to barons,
The manorial economy of the Middle
counts, dukes, and rather feeble monarchies.
Ages placed a high premium on autarchy or "self-sufficiency" and
spirituality. Yet oppression was often intolerable, and the great mass
of people who belonged to that society lived in utter subjugation to
their "betters" and the nobility. If nature-worship , with its bouquet of wood
sprites, animistic fetishes, fertility rites, and other such ceremonies, magicians, shamans and
shamanesses, animal deities, goddesses and gods that presumably reflect nature and its forces---if all,
taken together, pave the way to an ecological sensibility and society ,
then it is hard to understand how ancient Egypt managed to become
and remain one of the most hierarchical and oppressive societies in
the ancient world. The pantheon of ancient Egyptian deities is filled with animal and part-animal,
part-human deities with all-presiding goddesses as well as gods. Indeed, the Nile River, which provided the
the entire society
"life-giving" waters of the valley, was used in a highly ecological manner. Yet
was structured around the oppression of millions of serfs and
opulent nobles, a caste system so fixed, exploitative, and deadening
to the human spirit that one wonders how notions of spirituality can
be given priority over the need for a critical evaluation of society
and the need to restructure it. That there were material
beneficiaries of this spiritual Eco-la-la becomes clear enough in
accounts of the priestly corporations that "communally" owned the
largest tracts of land in Egyptian society. With a highly domesticated, spiritually
passive, yielding, and will-less population---schooled for centuries in "flowing with the Nile," to coin a
phrase---the Egyptian ruling strata indulged themselves in an orgy of exploitation and power for centuries.

Deep ecologys response to critics is reactionary and

reductive

Bookchin 1987 (Murray [Founder, Institute for Social

Ecology, Professor emeritus, Ramapo College of New
Jersey] Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge
for the Ecology Movement, Green Perspectives:
Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5, d/l:
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/s
ocecovdeepeco.html) //jl

The seeming ideological tolerance that deep ecology celebrates has

a sinister function of its own. It not only reduces richly nuanced
ideas and conflicting traditions to their lowest common
denominator; it legitimates extremely regressive, primitivistic, and
even highly reactionary notions that gain respectability because
they are buried in the company of authentically radical contexts and
traditions.

Technology and government are no better or worse than

the people who utilize them, the alternative an idealized
past is misplaced and will fail to solve environmental
problems
Trumbore 1996 (Samuel [rev] Unitarian Universalist
Fellowship of Charlotte County
"A Case Against Deep Ecology", d/l:
http://www.trumbore.org/sam/sermons/s624.htm) //jl

One of the biggest problems I've had with deep ecology is the
celebration of the good old days when indigenous hunter-gatherer
tribes covered a world which was a Garden of Eden overflowing with a cornucopia of abundance.
These tribes are celebrated for their harmonious relationship with
their environment and the spiritual world-view from which comes
much of their meaning and satisfaction. A kind of wisdom is posited in these tribes
which we supposedly have lost. Implied in the praise of indigenous peoples is the message that we should
cast off our suits and ties, don a loincloth and return to the jungle. The villain of course is technology, the
First, many primitive
apple of knowledge, which ejects us again and again from the Garden.
tribes were not and still are not terribly wise in being ecocentric.
Sam's rule is this: The good old days are rarely as good as we might wish they really were. Riane Eisler
(author of the Chalice and the Blade) is specific: "If we carefully examine both our past and present, we
see that many peoples past and present living close to nature have all too often been blindly destructive of
their environment. While many indigenous societies have a great reverence for nature, there are also both
non-Western and Western peasant and nomadic cultures that have overgrazed and overcultivated land,
decimated forests, and where population pressures have been severe, killed off animals needlessly and
indifferently. And while there is much we can learn today from tribal cultures, it is important not to
indiscriminately idealize all non-Western culturesFor clearly such tribal practices as cannibalism, torture,
and female genital mutilation antedate modern times.[3] Rene Dubos summarizes the available evidence,
"All over the globe and at all times in the past, men have pillaged nature and disturbed the ecological
equilibrium, usually out of ignorance, but also because they have always been more concerned with
immediate advantages than with long-range goals".[4] I think it is tragic for us to idealize
the past. Yes, let us learn from it, but with our superior knowledge we can create a better
it is
understanding which integrates old and new. Ken Wilber makes this point colorfully: My point is that
one thing to remember and embrace and honor our roots; quite
another to hack off our leaves and branches and celebrate that as
the solution to leaf rot.[5] This leads into my final critique of deep
ecology: its anti-industrial and therefore anti-technological bias. As
one who has spent a lifetime engaged with technology, I'm not quite ready to just toss it over the side of
There is no question that technology is complicit in the current
the boat.
rape of the environment. Without the machines, the forests couldn't be so easily leveled. Our
use of internal combustion engines to generate power is driving global warming through the emission of
The critique of
carbon dioxide. The modern weapons of war take a high toll on our environment.
technology is myopic, though, if it doesn't also enumerate the many
benefits of better food production, better health care, better
methods of transportation and communication which have improved
our lives. Imagine what old age would be like without the assortment
of medicines which manage medical conditions such as diabetes and
heart disease. The ability to replace a joint can greatly improve
quality of life. Technology is a tool no better or worse than the
person who uses it. A shovel can be used for landscaping or as a weapon for murder.
Factory automation can be used to improve the quality and
productivity of workers' jobs or to replace people with machines. This
was an area of concern for me as a former manufacturing engineer. One of the reasons I wanted to get out
of the world of engineering was because I saw our technical ability growing much faster than our ethics to
better use
guide its wise use. Rather than using my abilities to advance technology, I thought a
would be in the ethical domain as a minister working to see
technology used to serve the well-being of people rather than
exploit them. Technology such as is used in tracking animal and bird
migrations or cleaning up oil spills can be part of the solution to
reverse some of the damage we do and have done. Deep ecology is also
attempting to serve the well-being of the human and nonhuman alike by identifying what is of highest
value and naming the threats to these values. The critique you have heard this morning is of some of the
weaknesses of deep ecology's analysis and solutions, but not of its identification of the problems and
Whether we are enamored with technology or not,
assertion of values.
diversity and richness remain high values of the ecosystem that
should be cherished. The deep ecologists' concern for preservation
of wilderness is an important value we too should respect. By
valuing wilderness, we do not devalue people but rather elevate the
value of the species which can't coexist with us as neighbors.
Ecofem
 2AC
Alt Fails- Ecofeminists association of women with nature
reinforces patriarchy

Biehl 91
(Janet, Social ecology activist and the author of Rethinking Eco-feminist Politics. Rethinking
Ecofeminist Politics, p. 15-6) // ADI

Despite ecofeminism's allegedly "revolutionary" potential, some feminists (who are not
ecofeminists) have criticized ecofeminism and its closely associated cultural feminism for their
reactionary implications. Ecofeminist images of women, these critics correctly warn, retain the
patriarchal stereotypes of what men expect women to be . These stereotypes freeze women as
merely caring and nurturing beings, instead of expanding the full range of women's human
potentialities and abilities. To focus overwhelmingly on women's "caring nature" as the
source of ecologically necessary "values" easily leads to the notion that women are to
remain intuitive and discourages them from expanding their human horizons and
capacities. It is important to note that de Beauvoir flatly repudiated "the new femininity" such as
ecofeminism offers, criticizing its return to an enhanced status for traditional feminine values,
such as women and her rapport with nature, woman and her maternal instinct, woman and her
physical being ... This renewed attempt to pin women down to their traditional role, together
with a small effort to meet some of the demands made by women-that's the formula used to
try and keep women quiet. Even women who call themselves feminists don't always see through
it. Once again, women are being defined in terms of "the other," once again they are being
made into the "second sex." ... Equating ecology with feminism is something that irritates me.
They are not automatically one and the same thing at all. (emphasis added)" De Beauvoir's well-
placed emphasis on the "traditional role" assigned to women by male-created cultures is a
conclusion that can only be highly disconcerting to ecofeminism, for it was from this pioneer in
women's liberation that ecofeminists borrowed their basic concept of the "otherness" of women
and nature. That it is now women-and not men-who define women as "other" with nature is
a milestone in the passage in recent decades from a struggle for women's liberation to
assertions of mere female chauvinism in ecofeminism. The fact is that Western associations
of women with nonhuman nature-or as closer to nonhuman nature than men-were
enormously debasing to women. Ancient Greek culture excluded women from political life
because of their presumed intellectual inferiority; Aristotle wrote that their logos or reason "lacks
authority." Plato believed that in the origin of the two sexes, women result when men who do not
do well in their life on earth come back through transmigration of the soul as females." Euripides
in a fragment says that "woman is a more terrible thing than the violence of the raging sea, than
the force of torrents, than the sweeping breath of fire."" Semonides delivered a diatribe
comparing what he saw as various types of women to various animals. Ancient Roman law
regarded women as having a "levity of mind," and in Christian culture, Augustine saw women as
"weaker." Eve came to be seen as a temptress for her role in the Fall-in the words of the Christian
father Tertullian, "the gateway to hell." Aquinas, following Aristotle, regarded women as
"misbegotten" and defective. The association of women with nonhuman nature or as beings
closer to nonhuman nature has thus been immensely degrading for women, contributing to
untold misery in the lives of countless women in Western culture.

Even with a few levels of specification, essesntialization

ensures violent dichotomies
Twine 2001 (Richard What is Essentialism?, d/l:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/twine/ecofem/essentialism.ht
ml) //jl

Essentialism, in its most stripped down meaning refers to the belief that people and/or phenomenon
have an underlying and unchanging 'essence'. I like to work with a definition that refers to any statement
that seeks to close off the possibility of changeable human behaviour. The term essentialism is commonly
refers to the use of biological, physiological
used in three main ways. Firstly it
and, increasingly, genetic, causes as explanations for human social
behaviour. In this case little, if any, explanatory weight is given to psychological, sociological or
cultural explanations. An example would be to argue that men are more aggressive than women and that
this is inevitable due to hormonal differences. So the intention here is to use biology to argue that a
A second use of the term
particular social difference and/or behaviour is unchangeable.
essentialism is when generalised statements are asserted that make
no reference to cross-cultural differences or previous historical
variation. This is also sometimes called universalism. An example would be to state that men are
more visual then women, in all cultures and at all times. Against this a sociologist or anthropologist may
argue that the way we use our senses, and which ones we prioritise, is very definately something that
Thirdly, the term essentialism refers
varies between cultures and throughout history.
to when in everyday conversation or also in academic writing we
make use of unified concepts. This means when we talk of the
experiences, for example, of white disabled women. Now at first
glance this is better than simply making a generalisation about
'women' or the 'disabled' per se. However even when we introduce a
few levels of specification we still talk in a highly problematic way. In
other words, to use the above example, the experiences of white,
disabled, women is not unified but highly mixed or variable (or
'heterogeneous' to use a longer word) and is also likely to change over time due to
differing economic and cultural conditions. This third sort of essentialism is
tolerated more (certainly in acdemic writing) than the first two, but still remains problematic.

If they dont essentialize then we dont link

Mayer 1994 (Elizabeth [Illinois Wesleyan University] The

Power and the Promise of Ecofeminism, Reconsidered,
d/l: http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1007&context=phil_honproj) //jl

The second objection also attacks the claim that the women-nature
association requires that the dominations of women and nature be
ended at the same time, but for a different reason. This claim is
inconsisteht with ecofeminism's first claim, that the women-nature
association is purely historical and sociological. If the association
has been formed by sociological processes, then it should be able to
be taken apart in the same way. If it can be taken apart like this, then feminism and
ecology can proceed independently. If the link no longer existed, the two
dominations wouldn't be conceptually associated, and the two
theories would be dealing with separate problems. However, to say,
as ecofeminism does, that feminism and ecology are necessarily
dependent projects is to imply that the concepts of woman and
nature cannot be unJinked. This is to say that the association is not just historical or
sociological, but inherent in the concepts of nature and women. Let me show this in a way that makes the
contradiction most clear, where (1) and (2) are the claims identified as ecofeminism's central tenets, and
(2a) is a direct implication of (2): (1): A link formed by historical and (2): The domination of women and the
sociological processes exists between domination o'f nature can only be ended women and nature that
causes their together. twin dominations. (2a): This is because the link between women and nature cannot
be broken, Le. it is inherent. . There is a direct contradiction between claims (1) and (2a). Ecofeminism's
ecofeminism's two most central
explanation of the association is self-contradictory. So,
claims are contradictory, and the argument is thus internally inconsistent

Ecofeminism fails to account for its white middle-class

underpinnings

Sydee and Beder 2001 (Jasmin & Sharon Ecofeminism

and Globalism, d/l:
http://www.herinst.org/sbeder/envpolitics/ecofeminism.ht
ml) //jl
Further still, many women are concerned that the emphasis spiritual
ecofeminism places on an ethic for change ignores the effects and
power of capitalism in shaping the lives of women and shaping the
globe. Without this dimension, it is argued that solutions for change
remain too rooted in self-realisation and individual and community
change and prevent ecofeminism from coming to terms with the
socioeconomic relationships between North and South or internal
national ethnic relations.[13] White middle class ecofeminists fail to
realise that the affluence and lifestyle choices they are embracing
have been afforded to them through the continued exploitation of
the sisters in the South. Their (re)discovery is being sourced
through appropriating the knowledge and experiences of women still
treated as Other. Indigenous women, African-American women and
women from the South, it is argued, are still excluded, by material
economic forces, from any re-weaving that is occurring.

Ignoring race makes all forms of violence inevitable and

must be rejected in every instance

Memmi 2000 (MEMMI Professor Emeritus of Sociology @

Unv. Of Paris Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve
Martinot, pp.163-165) //jl-cl
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never
it is a struggle to be undertaken without
achieved, yet for this very reason,
surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward
racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not
in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial
part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To
accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear,
injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark
history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider
will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an
outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable
negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain
sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is,
and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the
ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we
cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true
that ones moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to
want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in
its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to
conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the
One cannot found a moral order, let
very negation. This is almost a redundancy.
alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the
exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and
domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious
language, racism is the truly capital sin.fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of
humanitys spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just
a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a
question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of
All things considered, we have an
the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments.
interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence
and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think
that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others
is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest.
One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society
contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat
others with respect so that they treat you with respect. Recall, says the bible, that you were once a
stranger in Egypt, which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger
It is an ethical and a practical
yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday.
appeal indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In
short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and
practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands
the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all.
If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict,
violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can
hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are
irresistible.

Ecofeminism relies of essentiaizations that keep

patriarchy alive

Deluca 1999 (Kevin Michael [Assistant Professor of Speech Communication

at the University of Georgia] Image Politics, New York, The Guilford Press]
p67-68
Many feminisms and environmentalisms have been animated by
essentializing visions of "woman" and "nature," respectively. These
tendencies to essentialize foundations converge in radical versions
of ecofeminism,6 in which not only are claims made that "there are important connections
between the oppression of women and the oppression of nature" and that "understanding the nature of
these connections is necessary to any adequate understanding of the oppression of women and the
oppression of nature" (Warren, 1987, p. 4), but, moreover, it is claimed "that the earth is
fundamentally feminine rather than masculine and that nature is
intrinsically feminine" (Oelschlaeger, 1991, pp. 3-9. 311). In such claims, the observation that
"women and nature have an age-old association-an affiliation that has persisted throughout culture.
language, and history" (Merchant, 1991, p. 258) is reduced to an initial connection fundamental to the
meanings of "woman" and "nature." For example, such a perspective leads Marti Kheel to argue it is out of
women's unique, felt sense of connection to the natural world that an ecofeminist philosophy must be
forged" (1990, p. 137), a unique connection fostered through Charlene's Spretnak's "'body para-I .'-
`reclaimed menstruation, orgasm, pregnancy, natural childbirth motherhood"' (Spretnak quoted in Kheel,
Such essentializing claims have been criticized as making
1990, p. 137).
anatomy Itmr D destiny, falling prey to patriarchal sex-role stereotyping,
universalize- culture-specific conceptual categories, and reinforcing
the m ire-nature binarism central to the domination of nature (Li, 1993;
Merchant, 1990; Oelschlaeger, 1991; Quinby, 1990; Stabile, 1994; Warren, 1987). This ecofeminist version
of difference feminism perpetuates a modern nature that limits what can be considered an environment
de-serving of protection, narrows what can be counted as environmental politics, and blocks necessary
coalitions across gender, race, and class lines. Perpetuating modern nature also reproduces the other
problematic aspects of modernism, including the Cartesian subject, scientific reason as the universal
method to foundational Truth, and linear progress. As Lee Quinby puts it, " Essentialist
ecofeminism speaks of a monovocal subject, Woman; of a pure essence, Femininity; of a fixed place,
Nature; of a deterministic system, Holism; and of a static materiality, the Body. Writings that give homage
echo masculinist
to the Goddess as a symbol of `the way things really are' . . .
prescriptions about the way things `really' are- and must always be "
(1990, p. 126). Even more ominous is that by "accepting (indeed, celebrating) the logic that posits a
special connection between women and nature, ecofeminist philosophies maintain hazardous ties with
anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist, and racist conservative ideologies" (Stabile, 1994, p. 61; Merchant,
1990, p. 102, echoes Stabile). Postmodern feminist Judith Butler is a particularly powerful critic of
difference or essentialist feminism. Her critique and her advice for political action offer directions for
environmentalists.

This turns their alt, uniquely increasing patriarchy from

the status-quo

Macgregor 2004 (Sherilyn Lecturer Keele University,

From Care to Citizenship: Calling Ecofeminism back to
Politics in Ethics & the Environment 9.1 pg. 56-84) ADI
BHB
It is my position that ecofeminists should see caring through less-than-rosy-glasses, as a paradoxical set of
practices, feelings, and moral orientations that are embedded in particular relations and contexts and
Revaluing care in the way many
socially constructed as both feminine and private.
ecofeminists seem to do results in an affirmation of gender roles
that are rooted in the patriarchal dualisms that all feminisms, on my
definition at least, must aim persistently to resist and disrupt . I support
my position by drawing on the work of some of the feminist philosophers, political economists, and political
the positive identification of women with caring
theorists who have argued that
ought to be treated cautiously for it obscures some of the negative
implications of feminized care and narrows our understanding of
women as political actors. In the first part of the discussion, I cast doubt on ecofeminist
ideas about the "feminine principle" by highlighting some of the critiques of care ethics made by feminist
moral philosophers. I then subject ecofeminist celebrations of caring labor to questions raised by feminist
political economists about its exploitation in globalizing capitalist societies. I also question whether claims
that women are empowered through their care-inspired eco-activism have been accompanied by a
sufficient consideration of feminist political transformation. That discussion leads into the final part of the
paper where I look to feminist theorists of citizenship to develop the argument that ecofeminists would be
better served by using the language of citizenship instead of the language of care to understand and
theorize women's engagement in ecopolitics.
Eco-Malthus/Ophuls
 2AC
No Link [Explain]
Futurism d/a- Their thesis is incorrect and reifies
institutionality by attempting to centralize resources and
the modes of production. This is a violent rendering of
politics that itself makes authoritarianism inevitable, only
a radical break from deference of politics to a steady
state will resolve the problems of the alternative
Means Perm Do Both
Perm do the Alt Without its teleology
No crunch- global population growth decline inevitable

McChesney and Overberg 12

(Ron McChesney is a Geographer with Three Scale Strategy and Research in Columbus, Ohio.
Ron received a PhD in Geography at The Ohio State University in 2008. Greg Overberg is a City
and Regional Planner with Three Scale Strategy and Research in Columbus Ohio. Greg received
a MA in City and Regional Planning at The Ohio State University in 2011., IS NEGATIVE
POPULATION GROWTH UPON US? DEATHS EXCEED BIRTHS IN ONE THIRD OF U.S.
COUNTIES,05/05/2012, http://www.newgeography.com/content/002812-is-negative-population-
growth-upon-us-deaths-exceed-births-one-third-us-counties)//TR

Population change has short run and long run effects. Short run effects include changes in fertility rates that can result from economic
fluctuations. For example, during a recession, couples may delay having children until economic conditions improve. Once job growth
has begun and expectations rise, birthrates can increase .The correlation is not perfect and other demographic factors could come into
play. Yet it seems increasingly true that for a rapidly increasing portion of the American
landscape, deaths will routinely exceed births. Indeed, total births in the USA peaked at 4,316,000 in 2007, before
dropping in the last four years. Recently released provisional birth data by the CDC (Center for
Disease Control) show that births in 2011 are preliminarily estimated to be 3,961,000, the lowest figure since 1999. Reviewing the
data month by month, we seem to be experiencing continued downward momentum this year. With deaths
hitting an all time high of 2,507,000 in 2011, the natural rate of increase for 2011 looks to have dropped to .0047 percent (slightly less
than half a percent per year). With the expectation that the worlds population will stabilize mid-
century, eventually every countrys population with few exceptions in Africa and elsewhere will stop
increasing. Deaths will exceed births in most countries, and future growth may become more a function of
shifting migration patterns.

D/a goes aff- centralizing power is the only cause of their

impacts

Liewher 3/25
(Dr. Frederick, Be Fruitful and Multiply: Time to Reject the Malthusian Lie
of the Population PlannersDr. Frederick Liewehr is an endodontist who teaches and works in
private practice. He converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in 1983, having been drawn
ineluctably to Christ's Church by the light of Truth. He is a member of St. Benedict parish in
Richmond, a Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus and a Cooperator of Opus
Dei.http://www.catholic.org/hf/family/story.php?id=50243)//TR
Sincethistreatisewaswrittenover200yearsago,youmaybewonderingwhenwearegoingtoexperience
thiscataclysm.Theanswerofcourseitthatwehavenotexperiencedit,andwedonothavetoexperience
it.Malthuswaspreytozerosumthinking,thesamethinkingthatisprevalentinmuchofleftistthought
today,"Ifyoumakemoremoneythanme,itisbecauseyouaretakingitawayfromme",notbecauseyour
economicactivitycreatedmorewealth.Inthiscase,ifthepopulationincreases,whywouldthefoodsupply
remainthesame?Whywouldn'tmorelandbecultivated,moreseedbeplanted,betterseedbedeveloped,
moreefficientfarmingmethodsbeemployed,andonandon?In1800,theworldpopulationwasabout1
billionpeople;todayitstandsatover7billion.Indeed,amajorproblemforus,andformuchofthe
developedworld,isobesity,notstarvation."But,"yousay,"starvationDOESexist;weseestarvingpeople
onthenewsallthetime.Yes,itdoes,butitisnotduetoalargepopulation.TheUSApopulationdensityis
28peoplepersquarekilometer,Japan'sis340,theNetherlands'is404,andHongKong'sis6396,and
Singapore'sisawhopping7,301.Thesefolksarenotstarving.Libyahasapopulationdensityof3.1,
Somalia'sis12,theSudan'sis15,andEthiopia'sis60,notanywhereapproachingthatofmostofEuropeor
Asia,yetwithachronicandrecurringproblemofstarvation.Clearlypopulationdensityisnottheproblem.
Therealproblemisthatfamineiscausedbygovernmentscivilwarsandcorruptionthatinterfereswith
thedistributionoffood.Absenceofpropertyrights,pricecontrolsandothersocialistschemesstarve
millionsunnecessarilyeveryyear.Somewillclaimthattheproblemistheenvironmentofthecountry,that
lackofarablelandortoomuchortoolittlerainfallorsomeothernaturallimitationsproducethese
recurrentproblems.Nocountryhasamonopolyongoodorbadclimateorothernaturalresources;manhas
theingenuitytoovercomenaturalobstaclestheDutchhavebeenusingdikesandwindmillsforhundreds
ofyears.OnehasonlytocompareHaititotheDominicanRepublic,twohalvesofthesameisland,tosee
theeffectofcorrupt government.

Genocide d/a- Their neo-Malthusian myths are false and

have been used to justify eugenics, mass sterilization, the
Holocaust, and the Cold War, ensures exclusionary
violence like identifying hibakusha or AIDS positives so
they can be eliminated, linking back to all our offense.

Empson 10
(UK-based Martin Empson is the author of Marxism and Ecology; Capitalism, Socialism and the
Future of the Planet, he is a lecturer and frequent contributor to International Socialism
Quarterly, Dispelling the Malthus myth, A Review of Fred Pearce, Peoplequake: Mass
Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash (Eden Project Books, 2010) Issue:
127 Posted: 25 June 10, http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=671&issue=127)//TR

In the 200 years since the Reverend Thomas Malthus first penned his tract An Essay on the Principle of Population the question of the
carrying capacity of the planet has repeatedly appeared. Most recently, mainstream debates around how to solve the question of
climate change have boiled down to the simplistic argument that there are too many people. James Lovelock for instance argues
that we are treating the planet so badly that we are likely to require a population crash to about one billion people before the world
can again live within its ecological means. The Optimum Population Trust, who support research into lower optimum population
sizes and campaign for a lower population in the UK, claim that human consumption of renewable
resources is already overshooting Earths capacity to provide. This argument fits perfectly with
Malthuss own beliefs. It would have been recognised by writers such as Paul Ehrlich who spent the 1960s warning the world
that its rapidly growing population would soon exceed the planets ability to provide. It is a recipe that ends up
blaming the poorest people for the worlds problems. The idea that a growing population
means a greater pressure on natural resources, which eventually exceeds planetary capacity,
is a simple common sense one. It is also wrong. Since Malthuss time, those who have followed in his footsteps have used such
arguments to justify the worlds unequal distribution of wealth and argue against the
possibility of social reform. Racism and scapegoating have flowed from the theory and have
lead to forced sterilisation programmes, abortion and anti-immigrant legislation . The
resurgence of these debates in the context of environmental crisis is a distraction from
discussions about the political and economic changes required to tackle global warming. It is
in this context that Fred Pearces latest book is such an important contribution. Pearce turns just about every perceived wisdom about
population on its head. From the publication of his first writings, Malthus ideas rapidly made it into the mainstream. Eugenicists
tacked on their ideas of racial superiority to Malthusian concerns and the resultant
poisonous mix made the perfect ideology to justify colonialism and empire. Malthus himself had
become the first professor of political economy, teaching a generation of future administrators of empire about the perils of
overpopulation and the pointlessness of charity. Charles Trevelyan, who oversaw the Irish Potato famine for the British
government, was a student of Malthus. The same ideas were at the back of Winston Churchills mind
when he called for the sterilisation of the feeble-minded. Between the First and Second
World Wars 60,000 imbeciles, epileptics and feeble-minded were compulsorily sterilised
in the US, there were tens of thousands of further victims in countries as diverse as Sweden
and Japan. The logic was taken to its brutal extreme by the Nazis, who sterilised half a
million people, though as Pearce points out, their policies were widely admired. In the post war period, Malthusian
ideas were very much part of the ruling ideology of the Cold War. In the early 1950s, the Rockefeller
Foundation was set up to ensure that industrial development was held back from countries like India until they had dealt with their
population problem. Senior figures in United Nations organisations and Western governments believed that aid shouldnt be given to
overpopulated countries, such as Japan, until they had reduced the numbers living there. But for leading figures in the
US administration at this time, concerns about overpopulation were not driven by a desire
to improve the lives of the worlds poorest. Rather they saw the issue as a strategic threat to
US dominance. One government report concluded that hungry people without enough land
to grow food were likely to be seduced by dreams of land reform. Such dreams could lead
to revolution, and something had to be done. In addition to the introduction of population control programmes,
groups like the Rockefeller Foundation funded research into crop improvementsthe green revolution. One of the problems for
Malthuss followers, is that time and again their predictions havent come true. Todays population of Britain is far in excess of what
was possible, according to Malthus. Billions of people did not starve to death in the developing world as Ehrlich had promised in the
1970s. The simple reason for this is the development of new and improved ways of producing food. The introduction of improved
varieties of wheat, rice and maize massively increased the amount of food that was grown. In the 30 years from 1963, food output
outstripped population growth by 36 percent in Asia as a whole, writes Pearce. In this light, he continues, the green
revolution and population control were both part of a fix to preserve the capitalist status
quo. Changes in farming brought other consequencesthe risks of relying on a few crop varieties, the environmental problems
caused by increased use of water as well as the consequences of over-reliance on pesticides. The green revolution hasnt led to an end
to hungerthough millions of people who might have starved to death can get food to eat. As Pearce points out, those who starve
today do so because they cant afford to eat, rather than a shortage of food. But for Pearce there is another unintended consequence.
Because the green revolution allowed greater crop yields, less people were needed to farm the land. This led to smaller families and
falling fertility levels in Asia. Pearce argues that falling fertility and crashing population are likely to be the real population problem
for the 21st century. In many parts of Europe we are already experiencing a major population crisis. If fertility rates stay the same in
countries like Italy and German native populations will fall by over 80 percent by the end of the century. Currently Europe is
producing about 6 million babies a year. Thats 2 million less than needed to maintain the population. The population of Russia is
dropping by half a million every year. Increasingly, richer countries will be relying on immigration from the developing world to keep
society running. But the developing world is also having fewer children. On current trends, world population is
likely to start falling within a generation for the first time since the Black Death. The reasons for this are complex.
Pearce highlights a number of factorsimproved access to contraception, for instance. He also notes how, when access to education
improves, women tend to have fewer children. But he also makes the point that when there is access to decent healthcare and
childcare, women are able to make the decision to have children. An ageing, shrinking population brings its own problems. Already in
France and Japan there are only two taxpaying workers to support each pensioner. In Italy the figure is as low as 1.3. Many
economies will increasingly rely on migrants to work, flying in the face of the anti-
immigrant rhetoric we currently are experiencing. But the conclusion that Pearce comes to is a positive one.
Although from an environmental point of view, he doesnt believe we should stop worrying. Population is not the key factor in
environmental destruction. What is important is the distribution of wealth. The poorest three billion or so people
on
the planet (roughly 45 percent in total) are currently responsible for only 7 percent of
emissions, while the richest 7 percent (about half a billion people) are responsible for 50
percent of emissions. Thus an increase in the population of the poorest areas of the world,
despite what we are told by some environmentalists, will make little impact on climate
change. The big question is how we change society in the richer world. Fredrick Engels summed up
Malthuss ideas simply: The earth is perennially overpopulated, whence poverty, misery, distress and immorality must prevail; that it
is the lot, the eternal destiny of mankind, to exist in too great numbers, and therefore in diverse classes, of which some are rich,
educated, and moral, and others more or less poor, distressed, ignorant and immoral. For Marx and Engels, arguments of
overpopulation hid a wider issue. They were a fig leaf covering racist ideas that justified the way
that the world was. Today questions of population are still distorted by myths and lies. And
they still serve to hide from us the wider question of how we must transform our own
societies to save the planet and its people. It is for these reasons that Fred Pearce has done socialists engaged in the
environmental movement, as well as those defending migrants and fighting racism, a tremendous service with this book.
Regimes of sustainable environment discourse frame the
Earth as nothing more than a standing reserve which,
instead of being exploited quickly, is preserved to be
rendered perpetually useful to humanity.

Luke 99
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University,1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 146-47

The application of enviro-discipline expresses the authority

of eco-knowledgeable, geo-powered forces to police the
fitness of all biological organisms and the health of their
natural environments. Master concepts, like survival or
sustainability for species and their habitats, empower these masterful
conceptualizers to inscribe the biological/cultural/economic
order of the Earths many territories as an elaborate array of
environments, requiring continuous enviro-discipline to
guarantee ecological fitness. The survival agenda, as Gates argues, applies
simultaneously to individuals, populations, communities, and ecosystems; and it applies simulta-
neously to the present and the future (Gates 1989: 148). When approached through this mind-set, the
Earth becomes an immense engine, or the human races
planet
ecological life-support system, which has with only occasional localised failures
provided services upon which human society depends consistently and without charge (Cairns 1995).
As this environmentalized engine, the Earth then generates ecosystem services, or those derivative
products and functions of natural systems that human societies perceive as valuable (Westmen 1978).
This complex is what must survive; human life will continue if such survival-promoting services
continue. They include the generation of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solar
energy, conversion of solar energy into biomass, accumulation/purification! distribution of water,
control of pests, provision of a genetic library, maintenance of breathable air, control of micro- and
macroclimates, pollination of plants, diversification of animal species, development of buffering
As an
mechanisms in catastrophes and aesthetic enrichment (Cairns 1995).
environmental engine, the planets ecology requires eco-
engineers to guide its sustainable use, and systems of green
governmentality must be adduced to monitor and manage
the system of systems which produce all these robust
services. Just as the sustained use of technology requires
that it be maintained, updated and changed periodically, so
too does the sustainable use of the planet require that we
not destroy our ecological capital, such as old-growth
forests, streams and rivers (with their associated biota), and other natural
amenities (ibid.3). Survival is the key value.

Entire industries are salivating at the thought of the alt

making consumption more environmentally-friendly is an
attractive label for consumers, allowing corporations to
further their control over the global environment by
painting themselves as responsible stewards.

Luke 99
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University,1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 141-42

ecologically more rational participation in

In some sectors or at a few sites,
some global commodity chains may well occur as a by-product of
sustainable development. Over-logged tropical forests might be saved for biodiversity-
seeking genetic engineers; over-fished reefs could be shifted over to eco-
tourist hotel destinations; over-grazed prairies may see bison return as a meat industry
animal. In the timespace compression of postmodern informa tional
capitalism, many businesses are more than willing to feed these
delusions with images of environmentally responsible trade , green
industrialization, or ecologically sustainable commerce, in order to create
fresh markets for new products. None the less, do these policies
contribute to ecologically sustainable development? or do they
simply shift commodity production from one fast track to another
slower one, while increasing opportunities for more local people to
gain additional income to buy more commodities that further accelerate
transnational environmental degradation? or do they empower a new
group of outside experts following doctrines of engagement to
intervene in local communities and cultures so that their geo-power
may serve Global Marshall Plans, not unlike how it occurred over and over again during
Cold War-era experiments at inducing agricultural development, industrial development, community
development, social development and technological development? Now that the Cold War is over, as the
does the environment simply substitute
Clinton/Gore green geopolitics suggests,
for Communism as a source and site of strategic contestation,
justifying rich/powerful/industrial states intervention in
poor/weak/agricultural regions to serve the interests of outsiders
who want to control how forests, rivers, farms or wildlife are used ?

Calculability d/a Authoritarianism is only inevitable in

the world of the alternative. Their approach renders
human populations as mere numbers, and is a form of
nihilistic futurism that locks in the status quo and makes
radical change impossible.

Bookchin 88
(Murray, American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology
movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist,
libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. Newsletter of the Green Program Project A LEFT
GREEN PUBLICATION The Population Myth 1)//TR

By the late seventies, this "debate" took a welcome breather -- but it has returned again in full bloom in the biological verbiage of
ecology. Given the hysteria and the exaggerated "predictions" of earlier such "debates," the tone today is a little calmer. But in some
respects it is even more sinister. We have not been forced to turn our oceans into real estate, nor have
we run out of oil, food, material resources -- or neo-Malthusian prophets. But we are
acquiring certain bad intellectual habits and we are being rendered more gullible by a new
kind of religiosity that goes under the name of "spirituality" with a new-styled paganism
and primitivism. First of all, we are thinking more quantitatively than qualitatively -- all talk
about "wholeness," "oneness," and "interconectedness" to the contrary notwithstanding. For example, when we are told that
the "population issue" is merely a "matter of numbers," as one Zero Population Growth writer put it, then
the vast complexity of population growth and diminution is reduced to a mere numbers
game, like the fluctuations of Dow stock-market averages. Human beings, turned into digits,
can thus be equated to fruitflies and their numbers narrowly correlated with food supply.
This is "following the Dow" with a vengeance. Social research, as distinguished from the Voodoo ecology
that passes under the name of "deep ecology" these days, reveals that human beings are highly social beings,
not simply a species of mammals. Their behavior is profoundly conditioned by their social
status, as people who belong to a particular gender, hierarchy, class group, ethnic tradition,
community, historical era, or adhere to a variety of ideologies. They also have at their
disposable powerful technologies, material resources, science, and a naturally endowed
capacity for conceptual thought that provides them with a flexibility that few, if any, nonhuman beings possess, not to
speak of evolving institutions and capacities for systematic group cooperation. Nothing, here, is more illusory than to "follow the
Dow." The bad intellectual habits of thinking out demographic -- or even "resource" -- issues
in a linear, asocial, and ahistorical manner tends to enter into all ecological problems,
thanks very much to the neo- Malthusians and to a "biocentrism" that equates people to nonhuman life-forms.
Secondly, by reducing us to studies of line graphs, bar graphs, and statistical tables, the neo-
Malthusians literally freeze reality as it is. Their numerical extrapolations do not construct
any reality that is new; they mere extend, statistic by statistic, what is basically old and
given. They are "futurists" in the most shallow sense of the word, not "utopians" in the best
sense. We are taught to accept society, behavior, and values as they are, not as they should
be or even could be. This procedure places us under the tyranny of the status quo and
divests us of any ability to think about radically changing the world. I have encountered very few
books or articles written by neo-Malthusians that question whether we should live under any kind of
money economy at all, any statist system of society, or be guided by profit oriented behavior.
There are books and articles aplenty that explain "how to" become a "morally responsible" banker, entrepreneur, landowner,
"developer," or, for all I know, arms merchant. But whether the whole system called capitalism (forgive me!), be it corporate in the
west or bureaucratic in the east, must be abandoned if we are to achieve an ecological society is rarely discussed. Thousands may rally
around "Earth First!"'s idiotic slogan -- "Back to the Pleistocene!" -- but few, if they are conditioned by neo-MaIalthusian thinking,
will rally around the cry of the Left Greens -- "Forward to an Ecological Society!" Lastly, neo-Malthusian thinking is
the most backward in thinking out the implications of its demands. If we are concerned,
today, and rightly so, about registering AIDS victims, what are the totalitarian consequences
about creating a Bureau of Population Control, as some Zero Population Growth wits
suggested in the early 1970s? Imagine what consequences would follow from increasing the
state's power over reproduction? Indeed, what areas of personal life would not be invaded
by slowly enlarging the state's authority over our most intimate kinds of human relations?
Yet such demands in one form or another have been raised by neo Malthusians on grounds
that hardly require the mental level to examine the Statistical Abstract of the United States.

Bad Scholarship d/a- Dont buy any of their analysis, it is

an intentional manipulation of statistics to justify
exclusionary racist politics. Our evidence is predictive and
their evidence cites the same eco-fascists like Ophuls who
have been saying this for 40 years

Bookchin 88
(Murray, American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology
movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist,
libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. Newsletter of the Green Program Project A LEFT
GREEN PUBLICATION The Population Myth 1)

This arithmetic mentality which disregards the social context of demographics is incredibly short-sighted. Once we accept without any
reflection or criticism that we live in a "grow-or-die" capitalistic society in which accumulation is literally a law of economic survival
and competition is the motor of "progress," anything we have to say about population is basically meaningless. The biosphere will
eventually be destroyed whether five billion or fifty million live on the planet. Competing firms in a "dog-eat-dog" market must
outproduce each other if they are to remain in existence. They must plunder the soil, remove the earth's forests, kill off its wildlife,
pollute its air and waterways not because their intentions are necessarily bad, although they usually are -- hence the absurdity of the
spiritualistic pablum in which Americans are currently immersed -- but because they must simply survive. Only a radical restructuring
of society as a whole, including its anti-ecological sensibilities, can remove this all commanding social compulsion -- not rituals, yoga,
or encounter groups, valuable as some of these practices may be (including "improving" our earning capacity and "power" to
command). But the most sinister feature about neo-Malthusianism is the extent to which it
actively deflects us from dealing with the social origins of our ecological problems -- indeed,
the extent to which it places the blame for them on the victims of hunger rather than those
who victimize them. Presumably, if there is a "population problem" and famine in Africa, it is
the ordinary people who are to blame for having too many children or insisting on living too
long-- an argument advanced by Malthus nearly two centuries ago with respect to England's poor. The viewpoint not only justifies
privilege; it fosters brutalization and de grades the neo-Malthusians even more than it degrades the victims of privilege. And frankly --
they often lie. Consider the issue of population and food supply in terms of mere numbers and we step on a wild merry-go-round that
does not support neo-Malthusian predictions of a decade ago, much less a generation ago. Such typically neo Malthusian
stunts as determining the "per capita consumption" of steel, oil, paper, chemicals, and the
like of a nation by dividing the total tonnage. of the latter by the national popula tion,such
that every man, women, and child is said to "consume" a resultant quantity, gives us a
picture that is blatantly false and functions as a sheer apologia for the upper classes. The steel
that goes into a battleship, the oil that is used to fuel a tank, and the paper that is covered by
ads hardly depicts the human consumption of materials. Rather, it is stuff consumed by all
the Pentagons of the world that help keep a "grow-or-die" economy in operation -- goods, I may
add, whose function is to destroy and whose destiny is to be destroyed. The shower of such
"data" that descends upon us by neo-Malthusian writers is worse than obscurantist; it is
vicious. The same goes for the shopping malls that are constructed that dump their toxic "con sumer goods" on us and the costly
highways that converge upon them. To ignore the fact that we are the victims of a vast, completely entrapping social order which only
a few can either control or escape from, is to literally deaden the political insight of ordinary people -- whose "wants," of course, are
always blamed for every dislocation in our ecological dislocations. On the demographic merry-do-round, the
actual facts advanced by many neo-Malthusians is no less misleading . In the West, particularly in
countries like Germany which the neo-Malthusian prophets of the late 1940s warned would soar in population well beyond food
supplies, birth rates have fallen beyond the national replacement rate. This is true of Denmark, Austria, Hungary, indeed, much of
Europe generally, including Catholic Italy and Ireland -- where tradition, one would expect, would make for huge families. So
traditions that foster the emergence of large, predominantly male families by which the high birth rates of India and China were
explained, are not frozen in stone. The U.S., which the more hysterical neo-Malthusians of some two decades ago predicted would be
obliged to live on oceanic rafts, is approaching zero population growth and, by now, it may be lower. Nor is food supply lagging
behind overall population growth. Cereal production rose by 12 percent since 1975, making it pos sible recently for even Bangladesh
to drastically reduce its grain imports. The markets of western Asia are being flooded by Chinese corn. Even "barren" Saudi Arabia is
selling off its accumulations of wheat, and, in Finland, farmers are so over loaded with surplus wheat that they are turning it into mink
fodder and glue. India, the so-called "worst case example," tripled its production of grain between 1950 and 1984. Its greatest problem
at present is not population growth but trans portation from grain-surplus areas to grain-shortage ones -- a major source of many
Indian famines in the past. Although Lester R. Brown of Worldwatch Institute divides the world "into countries where population
growth is slow or nonexistent and where living conditions are improving, and those where population growth is rapid and living
conditions are deteriorating or in imminent danger of doing so" one might easily conclude by the mere juxtaposition of Brown's
phrases that declining living conditions are due solely to increasing population. Not so -- if one closely looks at even Brown's data as
well as other sources. How much of the disparity between population growth and bad living conditions is due in Bangladesh, India,
and Pakistan, for example,largely to patterns of land ownership? In southern Asia, some 30 million rural households own no land or
very little, a figure that represents 40 percent of nearly all rural households in the subcontinent. Similar figures are emerging from
African data and, very disastrously, Latin America. Land distribution is now so lopsided in the Third World
in favor of commercial farming and a handful of elite landowners that one can no longer
talk of a "population problem" without relating it to a class and social problem. It would take
several volumes to untangle the mixed threads that intertwine hunger with landownership, material improvements with declining
population growth, technology with food production, the fragility of familial customs with the needs of women to achieve full
personhood, internal civil wars (often financed by western imperialists) with famines -- and the role of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund with patterns of food cultivation. Westerners have only recently gained a small
glimpse of the role of the IMF and World Bank in producing a terrible famine in the Sudan
by obliging the country to shift from the cultivation of food in areas of rich soil to the cul
tivation of cotton. This much must be emphasized: if the "population issue" is indeed the
"litmus test" of one's ecological outlook, as the top honcho of ''Earth First!", David Foreman, has declared, then it
is a wildly scrambled bundle of social threads, not a Voodoo ecology talisman. Greens,
ecologically oriented people, and radicals of all kinds will have to unravel this bundle with
an acute sense of the social, not by playing a numbers game with human life and clouding
up that social sense with thoroughly unreliable statistical extrapolations and apologias for
cor porate interests. Nor can human beings be reduced to mere digits by neo-Mal thusian
advocates without reducing the world of life to digits --- at least without replacing a decent
regard for life, includ ing human life, with a new inhuman form of eco-brutalism.

Their centralization doesnt solve as long as the mindsets

still there- means you should reject authoritarianism
wholesale and reject the capitalist mindset by voting aff

Bookchin 88
(Murray, American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology
movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist,
libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. Newsletter of the Green Program Project A LEFT
GREEN PUBLICATION The Population Myth 2)//TR

would the grow-or-die

The importance of viewing demography in social terms becomes even more apparent when we ask:
economy called capitalism really cease to plunder the planet even if the world's population
were reduced to a tenth of its present numbers? Would lumber companies, mining concerns,
oil cartels, and agribusiness render redwood and Douglas fir forests safer for grizzly bears if
- given capitalism's need to accumulate and produce for their own sake - California's
population were reduced to one million people? The answer to these questions is a categorical no.
Vast bison herds were exerminated on the westem plains long before the plains were settled by farmers or used extensively by
ranchers--indeed, when the American population barely exceeded some sixty million people. These great herds were not crowded out
by human settlements, least of all by excessive population. We have yet to answer what constitutes the
"carrying capacity" of the planet, just as we lack any certainty, given the present predatory
economy, of what constitutes a strictly numerical balance between reduced human numbers
and a given ecological area. All the statistics that are projected by demographers today are heavily conditioned by various
unspoken values, such as a desire for pristine "wilderness" or for mere open land, a pastoral concept of nature, or a love of cultivated
land. Indeed, human taste has varied so widely over the centuries with respect to what
constitutes "nature" that we may well ask whether it is ever "natural" to exclude the
human species - a distinct product of natural evolution - from our conceptions of the natural
world, including so-called "pristine" wilderness areas. This much seems reasonably clear: a "wilderness" that
has to be protected from human intervention is already a product of human intervention. It is no more "wild" if it has to be guarded
than an aboriginal culture is truly authentic if it has to be shielded from the impacts of "civilization." We have long since left behind
the remote world in which purely biological factors determined evolution and the destiny of most species on the planet. Until
these problematic areas that influence modern thinking on demographics are clarified and
their social implications - indeed, underpinnings - are fully explored, the Malthusians are
operating in a theoretical vacuum and filling it with extremely perilous ideas . Indeed it is a
short step from writing anti-Semitic letters to Jewish furriers in the name of "animal
rights" to scrawling swastikas on Jewish temples and synagogues. Eco-mystics, eco-theists, and deep
ecologists create a very troubling situation when they introduce completely arbitrary factors into discussions on demographics. "Gaia"
is whatever one chooses to make of "Her": demonic avenger or a loving mother, a homeostatic mechanism or a mystical spirit; a
personified deity or a pantheistic principle. In all of these roles, "She" can easily be used to advance a misanthropic message of species
self-hatred--or worse, a hatred of specific ethnic groups and cultures - with consequences that cannot be foreseen by even "Her" most
loving, well-meaning, and pacific acolytes. It is this utterly arbitrary feature of eco- mystical and eco-theistic thinking, often divested
of social content, that makes most New Age or "new paradigm" discussions of the population issue not only very
troubling but potentially very sinister.
Fem
 2AC
The Neg is an uncritical approach to gender oppression.
Instead of resisting white capitalism masculinity from a
third world feminist lens they reproduce the same first
wave white feminism-putting white women on a pedestal
while their white male counterpart enslaves and rapes
Third World populations.

Darrel Enck-Wanzer, 2012 (Gender Politics, Democratic Demand and Anti-

Essentialism in the Young Lords Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Assistant
Professor of Communication Studies. He is a scholar of race and public culture with a particular
interest in Latin@ studies, coloniality, and critical rhetorical theory.)

Careful to recognize that womens oppression cannot be totalized

through the discursive field of capitalism (No we cant blame this totally on
capitalism, it is a thing that goes way back to the tribes), Guzman points out the
difference between the oppression of white, middle-class women
and Third world women. The thing with the white women is that
they have been on a pedestal, right ; however, with Third World women
the problem has been that the white man has put the white women
on a pedestal, and then messed around with Third World women
(Young Lords Party and Abramson, 1971, p. 46). While this quotation belies a bias toward
compulsory heterosexuality, both in the actions of white men and in the epistemology that
forms Guzmans critique of white, capitalist masculinity, it also indicates
an attention to the intersectionality of oppressions absent from
what he calls Womens Liberation ;16 that is, Guzmans statement
demonstrates a practical consciousness of the way race, class, and
gender intersect to produce oppressive conditions greater than the
sum of its parts. This oppression has further implications for his own
masculinity, Guzman acknowledges, because the white cat has also
helped turn around the brothers into a thing where to prove their
manhood, to prove that they are like that white person, they go
around oppressing sisters (Young Lords Party and Abramson, 1971, p.46). What we
see here is an internalization of argument from the PPW; or, more accurately, we see the
internalization of the PPWs critique through the outward manifestation of Guzmans discourse.
If this critique of the intersectionality of oppression sets a background upon which Guzman
acts, what is most interesting is the direction in which Guzmans argument goes. Following the
formation and success of the womens caucus in the Lords, a gay and lesbian caucus started
meeting with the aim of getting their voices hear. These discussions had a tremendous impact
of Guzman and the anti-essentialist outlook of the Lords. Since Im talking about
sexism, Guzman writes, the second thing that made perhaps a greater
impact on us was when we first heard about Gay Liberation (Young Lords Party and
Abramson, 1971, p.46). As one can imagine, the same machismo that
reinforced boundary-defining discourses about women (calling them
whores, etc., if they acted out of place) also informed discourses about gays
and lesbians. Theres this whole thing about faggots, you know, and queers and this and
that. From the time you were a kid your folks told you the worst think you could be was gay
(Young Lords Party and Abramson, 1971, p. 46). Guzman and the Lords confronted
this attitude rooted in compulsory heterosexuality and began to
rethink the implications of being gay or lesbian.
The NEGs discussion on masculinity is bankrupt. Without
a strategy that resists and destroys machismo, there will
continue to be a fracturing in Latin@ movements.

Darrel Enck-Wanzer, 2012 (Gender Politics, Democratic Demand and Anti-

Essentialism in the Young Lords Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Assistant
Professor of Communication Studies. He is a scholar of race and public culture with a particular
interest in Latin@ studies, coloniality, and critical rhetorical theory.)

In his only entry in Palante: Young Lords Party, Perez demonstrates a key critical sensibility that
is symptomatic of the Lords praxis in what I call the second movement of the Revolution
within the revolution. Perez begins his contribution with a critique of machismo, not
masculinity, writing, In our community machismo is something that is a
particular problem. Its one of the trademarks of Latin culture. It is
that exaggerated sense of manhood that constantly must be proven
in a number of different ways (Young Lords Party and Abramson, 1971, p.53,
emphasis in original). Like the women in the Lords, what he calls attention
to is not masculinity generallysome might argue, in fact, that even the
women Lords embraces a particular performance of masculinity in
order to resist male oppression and get their demands met (e.g., seeing
crying as a normal form of weakness and avoiding it when they were being beaten by men in
martial arts training)but the specific problem of racist-sexist-classist
machismo for Latinos. As something to be proven, machismo is a
performance that works itself out in the most insidious ways;
through acts of physical aggression against men and women,
through the erection of strict gender roles, and through certain
aggressive verbal discourse. Furthermore, machismos aggressions were
normalized, explained by men as a natural thing (Young Lords Party and Abramson, 1971, p.
54). Perez, like the Lords women critiqued machismo for being counter-
revolutionary and a hindrance to their struggle for social justice
multiple equalities. One particularly pointed example of his critique is worth quoting at
length: In the context of confronting machismos normalization, Perez writes: Weve talked
about all kinds of things, like the fact that brothers dont know how to talk about sisters. Words
like broad and chick are negative termsagain, they take away the humanness of the
people that youre applying them to and make them into objects. Of course, no brother would
like to be referred to as, Thats my stud, or something like that. Instead of saying
manpower, were trying now to use the word peoplepower, cause were not only talking
about menwere talking about brothers and sisters. This isnt an organization of
just men. At first people said, well, its just words. Terminology
doesnt mean anything, you know, its how you really feel. We had
to break that down. Words do show an attitude, and if you want to
change that attitude, you have to begin by changing the words that
youre using to describe people (Young Lords Party and Abramson 1971,
p. 54). Framed in terms of dealing with problems of interpersonal
communication the men were having among themselves, Perez
advanced some profound points regarding the importance of
language. First he rehearsed the now familiar critique of sexist
language as propping up objectifying relations. Second, he
underscored the practical political moves of de-sexing terms like
manpower because they discursively excluded women from the ranks.
Equality, through Perezs perspective, is a position that must be
advances in all aspects of the Lords activism, including the specific
language that they use.
Give Back the Land K
 2AC
Sequencing D/A: Hegemonic paranoia must be revealed
and critiqued to clear the space for their K in the first
place- McClintock says that paranoia becomes so strong
because of the way we fail to question the base of our
reasoning, which is geared towards seeking conflict and
displaying military might. This paranoia would swamp the
alt- *alt specific stuf*
They have no way to determine who is or is not an
Indigenous to return the land to, which means (a) the land
never gets returned; (b) they have to essentialize the
identity of indigenous populations, destroying self-
identification; or (c) is a voting issue because they never
specify the specific implementation of plan.
Historicity d/a- Their alternative of impossible realism
embodied in their Churchill evidence ignores historicity
and makes it impossible to challenge power relations

Beller 2k1
(Jonathan L. [visiting assistant professor of history of
consciousness and literature, University of California at
Santa Cruz] Third Cinema in a Global Frame: Curacha,
Yahoo!, and Manila by Night, d/l: muse) //jl
This relationship in which generalized disembodiment gives rise to generalized visuality (as we now can call the logistics of seeing) is
the violation of the real. This phrase means the violation that is the Real (the violation of closure in representation, by a reality
churning in excess of its signifiable limitsa violation not, in my view, an ontological condition of the signifier but a historical one)
and also the violation of the reality principle by forces that overload its function and thus the function of the subject. The impact of
images is not merely formal; we have more than a genre, realism, violated by a mutation of reality itself. As my discussion of Curacha
shows, subjectivity itself (the sustainability of the subject form) is violated materially. Thus, as in classical realism, the
rationality of capitalist society is not intelligible (or at least legible for the subject) simply logically or
structurally via the concept, but affectively, as intensity, sensibility, or viscerality. Only in an apprehension of the
conversion of material relations into image relations and of image relations into material
relations, that is, only by grasping the inseparability of visual and material organization,
might one fully utilize [End Page 343] the intellect as a political pathway to the province of the
image. In Curacha, only in exceeding reality and the realism that is Manila, one might have a chance to see Manilato
grasp it as an image machineotherwise, one is left with an impossible realism caught in an anachronistic
metaphysics and unable to register the historico-technological shift in the social fabric. In
other words, it is necessary that those tacky magical-realist moments break the conventions of realism to register a shift in
the dispensation of reality itself. Power is unrealthat is, it is the unreality foisted on the
disempowered by the tyranny of image-capital. This is the postdictatorship shift I mentioned, a change in the
modality of social organization that can be expressed as a becoming-image of the world or a becoming-world of the image. As the real
violates subjectivities, not only through intervention, but also through absolute pulverization of their expectations of normative
narrativity in life, conventions of realism must also be violated if they are to express this transformation. Those tacky hallucinations in
Curacha achieve their gaudiness only because they will not turn a profit. They cannot be validated by reality and
are left to express the unrealized aspirations of subalterns . Thus they are images of third cinema, of third
cinema in a global frame.

Monumentalizing d/a they monumentalize a lost

indigenous culture and read Indian history as obituary.
This causes what Vizenor calls manifest manners and
Baudrillard calls viral difference we force the other into
our preconcieved frame so that we can know, understand,
and interact with them more smoothly, so that there is no
resistance from those living Indian people.

Vizenor 94
Gerald Vizenor (be afraid, be very afraid). Manifest Manners. 1994. Page 8.

Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and other masters
of manifest manners in the nineteenth century, and earlier, represented tribal cultures as the
other to them "Language did the capturing, building Indian society to a future of
certain extinction,': wrote Larzer Ziff in Writing in the New Nation. "Treating living Indians as
sources for a literary construction of a vanished way of life rather than as
members of a vital continuing culture, such writers used words to replace
rather than to represent Indian reality ." The simulations of manifest manners
are treacherous and elusive in histories; how ironic that the most secure simulations are
unreal sensations, and become the real without a referent to an actual tribal
remembrance. Tribal realities are superseded by simulations of the unreal,
and tribal wisdom is weakened by those imitations, however sincere. The
pleasures of silence, natural reason, the rights of consciousness, transformations of the marvelous, and the
pleasure of trickster stories are misconstrued in the simulations of dominance ; manifest

manners are the absence of the real in the ruins of tribal representations.
Those who "memorialized rather than perpetuated" a tribal presence and
wrote "Indian history as obituary" were unconsciously collaborating "with those bent
on physical extermination," argued Ziff. "The process of literary annihilation would be checked only when Indian writers
began representing their own culture."

Noble Savage d/a- Their evidence essentializes Natives

and makes them into a wilderness theme park for your
enjoyment- reject their scholarship

Grande 4
Sandy Grande. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. 2004. Page 92-
93.

Indeed, various critical

scholars have revealed essentialism as an integral part of the overall project of
domination working to hold American Indian s (and other subaltern peoples) to the polemical and creative
needs of whites. With respect to Native peoples, Deloria argues that the predominant image of the American
Indian the nature-loving, noble savage persists to serve the whitestream need to escape the
deadening effects of modernity. He writes: [Whites] are discontented with their society, their
government, their religion, and everything around them and nothing is more appealing than to cast aside all
inhibitions and strive back into the wilderness, or at least a wilderness theme park, seeking the
nobility of the wily savage who once physically fought civilization and now, symbolically at least, is prepared to do it
the wilderness theme park describes the propensity of
again. Deloria's somewhat cynical reference to
whitestream America to satisfy its need for authenticity via climate-controlled, voyeuristic
tours through the lives and experiences of authentic peoples . In this instance, discontented whites
maintain psychological control over the overconsumption of modern society by requiring Indians
to remain nature-loving primitives. The parasitic relationship between whitestream desire, capitalist imperatives, and
American Indians does not end here. Indeed, while the American Indian intellectual community has managed to wrest a degree of
control over the question of who is Indian, is has yet to muster the capability to fetter the powers of capitalism. Thus, the impact of
capitalist desire on the intellectual sovereignty of indigenous peoples remains significant, particularly in the academy. For example,
indigenous scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lyn questions why the same editors and agents who solicit her life
story also routinely reject her scholarly work. She writes: [W]hile I may have a reasonable understanding why a
state-run university press would not want to publish research that has little good to say about America's relationship to tribes I am
at a loss as to explain why anyone would be more interested in my life story (which for one thing is quite unremarkable. The
explanation, of course, is that the marketable narrative is that which subscribes to the whitestream notion
of Indian as romantic figure, not Indian as a scholar and social critic a predisposition that works to favor
cultural/literary forms of indigenous writing over critical forms. As Warrior observes, the current discourse is more
interested in the Charles Eastman [Sioux] who grew up in a traditional Sioux home than in the Charles
Eastman who attended Mark Twain's seventieth birthday party of who read a paper at the First Universal Races
Conference with W.E.B. Dubois.

Returning the land wont solve the racism that already

exists in the status-quo since even after the dissolution of
the government those with power and resources will still
spread white supremacy.
The focus on the geographical location of imperialism re-
entrenches the spatial norms of imperial practices.
Spanos 9 William V., Disclosing Enclosure, symploke Vol 17, Numb 1-2, 2009

Edward W. Saids Orientalism, first published in 1978, radically changed the terrain of literary scholarship and criticism.
Whereas earlier scholarship and criticism (including an innovative deconstructionist perspective) focused on the textuality
of the literary text, that inaugurated by Saids seminal study came to focus on its worldliness. To put this change more
specifically, Said decisively disclosed the Orientalismof the Western literature , especially the
canonical novel, and literary scholarship and criticism, which is to say, their productive complicity with Western imperialism: the political
Said inaugurated the field, now global in scope, that has
domination of the land of the Orient. In so doing,
come to be called postcolonial studies: a comparativist philological/critical perspective
that is committed not only to the historical task of exposing the Eurocentrism of the
Western canonical tradition that justified the global colonial project, but also the present,
postcolonial, task of resisting neocolonialtransnational capitalistversions of
domination. This development in literary critical studies has on the whole been culturally and sociopolitically
productive, as the massive public campaign of the right to obliterate Saids legacy testifies. Given the preeminent
role that the theme of geographyspecifically, conquered and dominated land (Greek Ge)
plays in it, however, it is ironic that this postcolonial discourse has so overdetermined
the (disciplinary) site of thepolitics of imperial or colonial conquest and domination that it
has marginalized, if not entirely, obliterated both the ontological origins of Western
imperialism and the effect of [End Page 307] this imperialist mode of perception on
humanitys comportment towards the landthe ecos. I mean specifically Western
imperialisms provenance in a metaphysical interpretation of being (the perception of physis,
including the earth, from above) and its hierarchical binarist logic (Identity vs. difference), on the
one hand, and its consequent reification or spatialization (territorialization) of the temporal
dynamic of the land, on the other. Robert P. Marzecs book An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From
Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie is an important contribution to postcolonial studies precisely because he attends to both these neglected
realities of the Western imperial project by way of an analysis of the enormously consequential history of the enclosure movement in
England. I am referring to that onto-eco-politico-logical momentum, simultaneous with and analogous to the emergence of the classificatory
system of knowledge production, inaugurated by the enclosing and regulation of the open Commons, that enabled the formation of the
British national identity (empirical individuality), the British nation (a bourgeois, property-rights oriented people) and, by extension, the
British empire (the administered underdeveloped foreign world). In what follows, I will focus on the importance
of Marzecs scholarship on land, inhabitancy, and empire not only as it pertains to the
complicity between this domestic British enclosure movement vis a vis the ecos, cultural
production (particularly the novel) and the British imperial project, but also to the effort,
based on this critical analysis, to think the positive possibilities of the prior open and
nomadic inhabitancy, which it was the purpose of the enclosure acts and imperialism to
demonize and repress or accommodate by way of the enclosure of the Commons and in
the name of freedom. Marzecs book, the first of a projected two volume treatise on inhabitancy, constitutes an intervention in
the debates over the question of postcolonialism as it pertains to the history of the British novel. Claiming that postcolonial
critiques of empire lack a sustained thematization of what he takes to be the nexus of
culture and colonizationthe comportment of human beings to the land they inhabitthis
book traces the transformative effects of the long history of the Enclosure Movement on the British subject, the British national identity
(culture), and the British imperial project. Indeed, one of the books distinctive features is its reliance on the historical records of the
Enclosure Movement as well as on the enormous archive on British agricultural history inaugurated by Daniel Defoes A Tour Through the
Whole Island of Great Britain (17241726), institutionalized by Arthur Young in the next century, and brought to its apogee by such
historians of British agriculture as Alan Everitt and Joan Thirsk, among many others, to establish the context for reading the rise and
development of the British novels from Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett, through Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, E. M.
Forster, and D. H. Lawrence to Salman Rushdie.

Perm Do Both
Perm Do the Alt Without their Teleology
The Queer Indigenous body suffers in ways unaccountable
by simple decolonization movementsAIDS and other
erotic subjectivities are rejected and ignored. Only a
queering of indigenous knowledge can alter these modes
of oppression

Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and

Scott Lauria Morgensen 11
(: The Revolution is For Everyone: lmagining an
Emancrpatory Future through Queer lndigenous Critical
Theories in Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical
Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature)

Queer Indigenous peoples boldly choose to love and be true to

our desires, dreaming for moments of emancipation from colonial
rule. We look into a horizon of death to make a life for ourselves, despite the
overwhelming hopelessness that can be part of our lived
experiences' Colonialism, poverty, homophobia, displacement,
suicide' and rejection by our families and communities are parts of
our lives' This is not said to perpetuate notions of tragic victimry that so often haunt writing about
Indigenous peoples' Instead, it is said to point out the material and political
conditions That Native GLBQTz people experience under
colonization, including colonization's accompanying systems of
heteropatriarchy, gender regimes, capitalism, ableism, ageism, and
religious oppression. lndigenous queer critiques offer a mode of
analysis that more complexly facilitates an understanding of these
entwined systems so that they can be interruPted. Colonial oppression is a
multibinding system that puts queer and Two-Spirit Indigenous lives
deeply at risk. According to the centers for Disease control, for instance, even though the
numbers of HIV and AIDS diagnoses for American Indians and Alaska Natives in the united States
represent less than r percent of the total number of HIV/AIDS cases reptrted to CDC's HIV/AIDS Reporting
 American Indians and Alaska
System, "[w]hen population size is taken into account,
Natives in zoo5 ranked third in rates of HIV/AIDS diagnosis."' According
to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1989 report on youth suicide, .,Gay and
Lesbian" youth are two to three times more likely to attempt suicide
than other youth, and suicide is the leading cause of death for GLBT
youth.'The cDC tracks suicide as the second leading cause of death
for American Ildian and Alaskan Native people from ages fifteen to
thirty-four, r.8 times higher than the national average. 3 Data compiled by
the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that "American Indians were victims of violent crime at about twice
Native women have the
the rate of blacks, whites or Asians during 1998," and that
highest rates of experiencing violence from an intimate partner in
the United States.+ Prison Justice, a Canadian activist organization, highlights stark statistics
from zoo5-zoo6: while Aboriginal people make up approximately 4 percent of the Canadian population,
they make Dp 24percent of admissions into provincial/territorial prison custody, and r8 percent of
admissions into federal custody. In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where Aboriginal people constitute
approximately 15-16 percent of the overall population, Aboriginal people make up 7r percent of the
The story
Manitoba prison population and79 percent of the prison population in Saskatchewan.:
that begins to emerge from these statistics, as limited and
problematic as such data might be, is not surprising: queer
Indigenous people experience multilayered oppression that
profoundly impacts our safety, health, and survival. What also
emerges is the reality that our activism and scholarship can't
pretend that there are easy fixes. While it is important to engage in
activism that interrupts moments of marginalization and oppression,
the lived experiences of queer and Two-Spirit Indigenous people
show us that we-as Indigenous people, as GLBTQz people, as
feminists, and as allies in numerous struggles-must engage in long-
term, multifaceted, decolonial activism and scholarship that
centralize analyses of, and resistance to, heteropatriarchal colonial
systems in all of their manifestations.
The phrase native is a form of metonymic freezing
which bounds people spatially to the land. This is a false
starting point which produces oppression turning the
kritik. The static relationship between subject position
and geographical location replicates the imperialist drive
towards the destruction of difference.

Appadurai 88 (Arjun, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at

the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, Putting Hierarchy
in its Place, Cultural Anthropology 3(1), p. 36-40//TR

On the face of it, an exploration of the idea of the "native" in anthropological discourse may not appear to have much to do with the
genealogy of the idea of hierarchy. But I wish to argue that hierarchy is one of an anthology of images in and through which
anthropologists have frozen the contribution of specific cultures to our understanding of the human condition. Such metonymic
freezing has its roots in a deeper assumption of anthropological thought regarding the boundedness
of cultural units and the confinement of the varieties of human conscious-ness within these boundaries. The idea of
the "native" is the principal expression of this assumption, and thus the genealogy of hierarchy needs to
be seen as one local instance of the dynamics of the construction of natives. Although the term native has a respectable antiquity in Western thought and
has often been used in positive and self-referential ways, it has gradually become the technical preserve of anthropologists. Although some other words
taken from the vocabulary of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators have been expunged from anthropological usage, the term native has
retained its currency, serving as a respectable substitute for terms like primitive, about which we now feel some embarrassment. Yet the term native,
whether we speak of "native categories," or "native belief-systems" or "native agriculture," conceals certain ambiguities. We sense this ambiguity, for
example, in the restricted use of the adjective nativistic, which is typically used not only for one sort of revivalism, but for revivalism among certain kinds
of population. Who is a "native" (henceforth without quotation marks) in the anthropological usage? The quick answer to this question is that the native is
a person who is born in (and thus belongs to) the place the anthropologist is observing or writing about. This sense of the word native is fairly narrowly,
and neutrally, tied to its Latin etymology. But do we use the term native uniformly to refer to people who are born in certain places and, thus, belong to
them? We do not. We have tended to use the word native for persons and groups who belong to those parts of the world that were, and are, distant from
the metropolitan West. This restriction is, in part, tied to the vagaries of our ideologies of authenticity over the last two centuries. Proper natives are
We exempt ourselves from this
somehow assumed to represent their selves and their history, without distortion or residue.
sort of claim to authenticity because we are too enamored of the complexities of our
history, the diversities of our societies, and the ambiguities of our collective
conscience. When we find authenticity close to home, we are more likely to label it folk than native, the former being a term
that suggests authenticity without being implicitly derogatory. The anthropologist thus rarely thinks of
himself as a native of some place, even when he knows that he is from somewhere. So
what does it mean to be a native of some place, if it means something more, or other, than being from that place? What it means is that
natives are not only persons who are from certain places, and belong to those places,
but they are also those who are somehow incarcerated, or confined, in those places.'
What we need to examine is this attribution or assumption of incarceration, of imprisonment ,or confinement. Why are some people
seen as confined to, and by, their places? Probably the simplest aspect of the common sense of anthropology to which this image
corresponds is the sense of physical immobility. Natives are in one place, a place to which explorers, administrators, missionaries, and
eventually anthropologists, come. These outsiders, these observers, are regarded as quintessentially mobile; they are the movers, the
seers, the knowers. The natives
are immobilized by their belonging to a place. Of course, when
observers arrive, natives are capable of moving to another place. But this is not
really motion; it is usually flight, escape, to another equally confining place. The slightly
more subtle assumption behind the attribution of immobility is not so much physical as ecological. Natives are those who are
somehow confined to places by their connection to what the place permits. Thus all the language of niches, of foraging, of material
skill, of slowly evolved technologies, is actually also a language of incarceration. In this instance confinement
is not
simply a function of the mysterious, even metaphysical attachment of native to
physical places, but a function of their adaptations to their environments. Of course,
anthropologists have long known that motion is part of the normal round for many groups, ranging from Bushmen and Australian aborigines, to Central
Asian nomads and Southeast Asian swidden agriculturalists. Yet most of these groups, because their movements are confined within small areas and
appear to be driven by fairly clear-cut environmental constraints, are generally treated as natives tied not so much to a place as to a pattern of places. This
is still not quite motion of the free, arbitrary, adventurous sort associated with metropolitan behavior. It is still incarceration, even if over a larger spatial
terrain. But the critical part of the attribution of nativeness to groups in remote parts of the world is a sense that their incarceration has a moral and
intellectual dimension. They are confined by what they know, feel, and believe. They are prisoners of their "mode of thought." This is, of course, an old
and deep theme in the history of anthropological thought, and its most powerful example is to be found in Evans-Pritchard's picture of the Azande,
trapped in their moral web, confined by a way of thinking that admits of no fuzzy boundaries and is splendid in its internal consistency. Although Evans-
Pritchard is generally careful not to exaggerate the differences between European and Azande mentality, his position sug-gests that the Azande are
especially confined by their mode of thought: Abovea ll, we have to be careful to avoid in the absence of native doctrine constructing a dogma which we
would formulate were we to act as Azande do. There is no elaborate and consistent representation of witchcraft that will account in detail for its workings,
nor of nature which expounds its conformity to sequences and functional interrelations. The Azande actualizes these beliefs rather than intellectualizes
them, and their tenets are expressed in socially controlled behavior rather than in doctrines. Hence the difficulty of discussing the subject of witchcraft
with Azande, for their ideas are imprisoned in action and cannot be cited to explain and justify action. [Evans-Pritchard193 7:82-83; emphasis mine] Of
course, this idea of certain others, as confined by their way of thinking, in itself appears to have nothing to do with the image of the native, the person
The link between the confinement of ideology and the idea of place is
who belongs to a place.
that the way of thought that confines natives is itself somehow bounded, somehow
tied to the circumstantiality of place. The links between intellectual and spatial confinement, as assumptions that
underpin the idea of the native, are two. The first is the notion that cultures are "wholes": this issue is taken up in the section of this
essay on Dumont. The second is the notion, embed-ded in studies of ecology, technology, and material culture over a century, that the
intellectual operations of natives are somehow tied to their niches, to their situations. They are seen, in Levi-Strauss's evocative terms,
as scientists of the concrete. When we ask where this concreteness typically inheres, it is to be found in specifics of flora, fauna,
topology, settlement patterns, and the like; in a word, it is the concreteness of place. Thus, the
confinement of native
ways of thinking reflects in an important way their attachment to particular places.
The science of the concrete can thus be written as the poetry of confinement. But anthropologists have always
known that natives are not always so incarcerated. The American anthropological
tradition, at least as far back as Boas, and most recently in the voices of Sidney Mintz (1985) and Eric Wolf (1982), has
always seen cultural traits as shared and transmitted over large cultural areas, as
capable of change, and as creating shifting mosaics of technology and ideology. The
French tradition, at least in that part of it with roots in Herder and Vico, and more recently in Mauss, Benveniste and Dumezil, has
always seen the links, at least of the Indo-European" linguaculture"( Attinasia nd Friedrich1 987), across many geographically
scattered places. Even in British anthropology, there have been minority voices, like those of Lord Raglan and A. M. Hocart, who have
seen that the morphology of social systems and ideologies is not confined by single, territorially anchored groupings. It is now
increasingly clear that in many in-stances where anthropologists believed they were observing and analyzing pristine or historically
deep systems, they were in fact viewing products of recent transregional interactions. Diffusionism,
whatever its
defects and in whatever guise, has at least the virtue of allowing everyone the
possibility of exposure to a world larger than their current locale. It is even more evident that in
today's complex, highly interconnected, media-dominated world, there are fewer and fewer native cultures left. They are op-pressed
by the international market for the objects once iconic of their identity, which are now tokens in the drive for authenticity in
metropolitan commodity cultures. They are pushed by the forces of development and nationalization throughout the world and are
attracted by the possibilities of migration( or refuge) in new places. Natives, as anthropologists like to imagine them, are therefore
rapidly disappearing. This much many will concede. But
were there ever natives, in the sense in which I
have argued the term must be understood? Most groups that anthropologists have
studied have in some way been affected by the knowledge of other worlds, worlds
about which they may have learned through migration, trade, conquest, or
indigenous narratives. As we drop our own anthropological blinders, and as we sharpen our ethnohistorical tools, we are
discovering that the pristine Punan of the interior of Borneo were probably a specialized adaptation of the larger Dayak communities,
serving a specialized function in the world trade in Borneo forest products (Hoffmann 1986); that the San of Southern Africa have
been involved in a complex symbiosis with other groups for a very long time (Schrire 1980); that groups in Melanesia have been
trading goods across very long distances for a long time, trade that reflects complex regional relations of supply and demand (Hughes
1977); that African "tribes" have been reconstituting and deconstructing essential structural principles at their "internal frontiers" for a
very long time (Kopytoff 1987). Even where contact with large-scale external forces has been, till recently, minimal, as with some
Inuit populations, some populations in lowland South America, and many Australian aboriginal groups, these groups have constituted
very complex "internal" mosaics of trade, marriage, conquest, and linguistic ex-change, which suggests that no one grouping among
them was ever truly incarcerated in a specific place and confined by a specific mode of thought (see, for example, Myers 1986).
Although assiduous anthropologists might always dis-cover some borderline examples, my general case is that natives, people
confined to and by the places to which they belong, groups
unsullied by contact with a larger world,
have probably never existed. Natives, thus, are creatures of the anthropological
imagination. In our dialogic age, this may not seem like a very bold assertion, but it ramifies in several directions. If
anthropologists have always possessed a large amount of information that has militated against the idea of the native, how have they
succeeded in holding on to it? How
have places turned into prisons containing natives? The
answer lies in the ways that places have been married to ideas and images, and here I
resume an argument initiated elsewhere (Appadurai 1986a). Anthropology has, more than many disciplinary discourses, operated
through an al-bum or anthology of images (changing over time, to be sure) whereby some feature of a group is seen as quintessential
to the group and as especially true of that group in contrast with other groups. Hierarchy in India has this quality. In the discourse of
anthropology, hierarchy is what is most true of India and it is truer of India than of any other place. In the subsequent sections of this
essay I shall show that ideas that become metonymic prisons for particular places (such that the natives of that place are inextricably
confined by them) themselves have a spatial history, in the evolving discourse of anthropology. Ideas and images not only travel from
place to place, but they periodically come into compelling configurations, configurations which, once formed, resist modification or
critique. By looking at Dumont's conceptualization of hierarchy in India, I shall explore the archaeology of hierarchy as an image that
confines the natives of India. In the last part of the article, finally, I shall propose a theory about the circumstances under which such
resilient configurationst end to occur in the history of anthropological discourse.

Justifies imperialism and turns the kritik

Gupta and Ferguson 92

(Akhil and James [Stanford and UC Irvine] Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 8-9)//TR

To illustrate, let us examine one powerful model of cultural change that at- tempts to relate dialectically the local to larger spatial
arenas: articulation. Artic- ulation models, whether they come from Marxist structuralism or from moral economy, posit
a primeval state of autonomy (usually labeled precapitalist which is then violated by global
capitalism. The result is that both local and larger spatial arenas are transformed, the local
more than the global to be sure, but not necessarily in a predetermined direction. This notion of
articulation allows one to explore the richly unintended consequences of, say, colonial capitalism, where loss occurs alongside
invention. Yet, by taking a preexisting, localized com- munity as a given starting point , it fails
to examine sufficiently the processes (such as the structures of feeling that pervade the
imagining of community) that go into the construction of space as place or locality in the
first instance. In other words, instead of assuming the autonomy of the primeval community, we need to examine how
it was formed as a community out of the interconnected space that always already existed .
Colonialism, then, represents the displacement of one form of interconnection by another . This
is not to deny that colonialism, or an expanding capitalism, does indeed have profoundly dislocating effects on existing societies. But
by always foregrounding the spatial distribution of hierarchical power relations, we can
better understand the process whereby a space achieves a distinctive identity as a place.
Keeping in mind that notions of locality or com- munity refer both to a demarcated physical space and to clusters of interaction, we
can see that the identity of a place emerges by the intersection of its specific involvement in a
system of hierarchically organized spaces with its cultural con- struction as a community or
locality. It is for this reason that what Jameson (1984) has dubbed postmodem hy-
perspace has so fundamentally challenged the convenient fiction that mapped cultures
onto places and peoples. In the capitalist West, a Fordist regime of ac- cumulation,
emphasizing extremely large production facilities, a relatively stable work force, and the
welfare state, combined to create urban communities whose outlines were most clearly
visible in company towns (Davis 1984; Harvey 1989; Mandel 1975). The counterpart of this in the international arena was
that multinational corporations, under the leadership of the United States, steadily ex- ploited the raw materials, primary goods, and
cheap labor of the independent na- tion-states of the postcolonial Third World. Multilateral agencies and powerful Western states
preached, and where necessary militarily enforced, the laws of the market to encourage the international flow of capital, while
national immigra- tion policies ensured that there would be no free (i.e., anarchic, disruptive) flow of labor to the high-wage islands in
the capitalist core. Fordist patterns of accu- mulation have now been replaced by a regime of flexible accumulation%:har- acterized by
small-batch production, rapid shifts in product lines, extremely fast movements ofcapital to exploit the smallest differentials in labor
and raw material costs-built on a more sophisticated communications and information network and better means of transporting
goods and people. At the same time. the indus- trial production of culture, entertainment, and leisure that first achieved some- thing
approaching global distribution during the Fordist era led. paradoxically, to the invention of new forms of cultural difference and new
forms of imagining community. Something like a transnational public sphere has certainly rendered any strictly bounded sense of
community or locality obsolete. At the same time. it has enabled the creation of forms of solidarity and identity that do not rest on an
appropriation of space where contiguity and face-to-face contact are para- mount. In the pulverized space of postmodernity, space has
not become irrele- vant: it has been reterretorialized in a way that does not conform to the experience of space that characterized the
era of high modernity. it is this that forces us to reconceptualize fundamentally the politics of community. solidarity, identity, and
cultural difference.

Alt Fails- need specific targeted movements instead of

impossible realism
Zizek 12 (More ideas from Slavoj iek, Slavoj iek, Ph.D., is a senior researcher at the
Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a visiting professor at a number of
American Universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York
University, University of Michigan). Slavoj iek recieved his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Ljubljana
studying Psychoanalysis. He also studied at the University of Paris. Slavoj iek is a cultural
critic and philosopher who is internationally known for his innovative interpretations of
Jacques Lacan, http://bigthink.com/ideas/45126)//TR

My advice would be--because I don't have simple answers--two things: (a) precisely to start thinking. Don't get caught into
of the
this pseudo-activist pressure. Do something. Lets do it, and so on. So, no, the time is to think. I even provoked some
leftist friends when I told them that if the famous Marxist formula was, Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time
is to change it . . . thesis 11 . . . , that maybe today we should say, In the twentieth century, we maybe tried to change the world too
quickly. The time is to interpret it again, to start thinking . Second thing, Im not saying people are
suffering, enduring horrible things, that we should just sit and think , but we should be very careful
what we do. Here, let me give you a surprising example. I think that, okay, its so fashionable today to be disappointed at President
Obama, of course, but sometimes Im a little bit shocked by this disappointment because what did the people expect, that he will
introduce socialism in United States or what? But for example, the ongoing universal health care debate is an
important one. This is a great thing. Why? Because, on the one hand, this debate which taxes the very roots of
ordinary American ideology, you know, freedom of choice, states wants to take freedom from us and so on. I think this
freedom of choice that Republicans attacking Obama are using, its pure ideology. But at the same time, universal health care
is not some crazy, radically leftist notion . Its something that exists all around and functions basically relatively
well--Canada, most of Western European countries. So the beauty is to select a topic which touches the
fundamentals of our ideology, but at the same time, we cannot be accused of promoting an
impossible agenda--like abolish all private property or what. No, its something that can be done and is done
relatively successfully and so on. So that would be my idea, to carefully select issues like this where we do stir up
public debate but we cannot be accused of being utopians in the bad sense of the term.
ALT MAKES LOGICAL JUMPS- In round rejection of the
USFG ignores political reality- its not independent action
but a transformation of the discourse around Federal
policies that must be changed- imagining the US off the
planet ignores that nuclear waste and mines ALREADY
EXIST- the only way to change the discursive and material
problems surrounding nuclearism are to mobilize public
response for policies
BEST WAY TO SOLVE THE ALT- The most ethical way of
dealing with political realities is through transparent
policymaking that takes accountability and creates
collective justice GIVING A VOICE TO THE VOICELESS-
solving the kritik better than utopianism
Parkins & Haluza-DeLay 11 (John R. Parkins, Associate Professor of Sociology,
Department of Rural
Economy, University of Alberta and Randolph Haluza-DeLay, Associate Professor of Sociology,
The Kings University College, Edmonton, Alberta, The Social and Ethical Considerations of
Nuclear Power Development, April 2011,
http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/103237/2/StaffPaper11-01.pdf)

Based on these qualities of risk issue management, Leiss goes on to describe the basic competencies of
risk issue management for institutions. These competencies are briefly outlined below (p. 288). 1.
Accepting responsibility this involves accepting the legitimacy of a risk controversy such
as nuclear power. Rather than dismissing risk perception as
uninformed or misguided, risk issue management would
involve meaningful interactions with the public and accepting
responsibility and obligations to understand and address risks
that are represented within the public sphere as opposed to
dismissing them as unfounded. 2. Addressing uncertainties recalling the persistent
public perception of nuclear power risk as dreadful, unknowable and uncontrollable, these aspects of
Managing the
uncertainty are a fundamental challenge when dealing with this risk issue. 3.
science/policy interface the science policy interface involves
a willingness to take responsibility for engaging with the
public in a timely fashion and in representing the complexity of
scientific evidence, and historical experiences with nuclear
power in other parts of the world. 4. Communicating risks appropriately the
tendency within traditional risk management institutions is to announce and defend the development of a
risky technology, and then invest considerable resources in marketing the risky decision to the public. In
contrast, appropriate risk communication involves longer-term dialogue about risks that are fair, open and
well informed. Further to this last point, Leiss calls for the development of an arms-length agency to
facilitate the science policy interaction and to support this longer-term dialogue regarding the merits of a
risky technology. Put directly, those actors should surrender control over the process of consensus building
for risk understanding, as well as the risk messages themselves that 33 emerge from that process. These
tasks should be entrusted to independent and credible third parties who are capable of demonstrating to
the wider public that they can be trusted to create a fair, informed, and disinterested forum for these risk
Decision-making about nuclear energy will
dialogues (Leiss 2001, p. 291).
weigh various notions of what is good, and use a variety of
ethical principles and social science research conclusions.
Information will have to be collection to determine whether the facts and projections align with the
principles. Key among these principles and the public
consultations, procedures, dialogue and decision-making is if
these processes themselves are ethical, that is, if they are
open, transparent, fulfilling the principles of participatory
equity and so on. Harm and benefit, and their distribution, collective goods and
justice are other key principles to be used in the dynamic
process of deciding on the ifs and hows of nuclear energy
production. Technical, economic and social facts will provide additional insights for use in ongoing
analysis of the extent of nuclear development.
Heidegger
 2AC
Sequencing D/A: Hegemonic paranoia must be revealed
and critiqued to clear the space for their K in the first
place- McClintock says that paranoia becomes so strong
because of the way we fail to question the base of our
reasoning, which is geared towards seeking conflict and
displaying military might. This paranoia would swamp the
alt- *alt specific stuf*
Alt collapses politics and enables the worst atrocities
turning it

Biskowski 95
[Lawrence J. professor of political theory and political economy at the University of Georgia,
Politics versus Aesthetics: Arendt's Critiques of Nietzsche and Heidegger, The Review of
Politics, Vol. 57, No. 1, Winter 1995, pg 59-89]

Although Arendt considered Heidegger to be perhaps the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, she always objected to
the political dangers and deformations inherent in this emphasis on the self. Heidegger's philosophy led him away
from the common, public world and directed his gaze inward toward the self.67 But this could
not help but distort his political judgment, which must take its bearings from the public world. Instead, as we have
seen, Heidegger associates the public world with inauthentic existence, a pernicious form of socialization, and a falling away from true
Being. In fact, Arendt says, he dismisses all those modes of human existence which rest on the fact that
Man lives together in the world with his fellows. To put it historically, Heidegger's Self is an ideal which has
been working mischief in German philosophy and literature since Romanticism. In Heidegger this arrogant passion to be a self has
contradicted itself; for never before was it so clear as in his philosophy that this is probably the one being which Man cannot be.6
Without the world as a source of political and moral orientation, the self and its death become Heidegger's central concern: Only in the
realization of death, which will take him away from the world, has Man the certainty of being himself...in other words, the essential
character of Man's Being is determined by what he is not, his nothingness...Death may indeed be the end of human reality; at the same
time it is the guarantee that nothing matters but myself. With the experience of death as nothingness I have the chance of devoting
myself exclusively to being a Self, and once and for all freeing myself from the surrounding world.69 For Arendt, on the contrary,
authentic existence is never isolated in this egoistic way but rather exists only in acknowledgment of and communication with others.
It can develop only in the togetherness of human beings in the common, public world. The sort of fascination with the
self advocated by Heidegger leaves one disconnected from the multiform, multiperspectival
reality of the political world. Among its consequences are a failure to comprehend political
events , poor judgment , and a peculiar form of political irresponsibility . Arendt first develops this
theme in Rahel Varnhagen where the not altogether different Romantic cult of interiority is criticized. The
turn inward
toward the self made Rahel and the intellectuals and artists in her circle blind to political
reality .70 Similarly, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt sees romantic self-fascination as contributing to the general
conditions which made the twentieth century mass movements and their horrors possible.71 A resurgent romanticism in intellectual
life may be symptomatic of a general playfulness of modern thought in which almost any opinion can gain ground temporarily. No
real thing , no historical event, no political idea was safe from the all-embracing and all-
destroying mania by which these first literati could always find new and original
opportunities for new and fascinating opinions.72 This playfulness, which certainly has its advocates among today's
literati, is one manifestation of the general condition of world-alienation which appears as a persistent theme in much of Arendt's
work. Whatever the undoubted aesthetic, agonistic, or expressivist aspects or moments of action (which Arendt recognizes and
emphasizes, particularly in contradistinction to instrumental rationality and those philosophies and worldviews which tend to reduce
history and human life to a mere process), she makes clear that action and politics cannot be reduced to or even thought of merely in
terms of aesthetic self-expression: "Human plurality, the faceless 'They' from which the individual Self splits to be itself alone is
divided into a great many units, and it is only as a member of such a unit, that is, of a community, that men are ready for action."73
These communities and their institutions depend for continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the same
means that brought them into being...[U]tter dependence upon further acts to keep it in existence marks the state as a product of
action.74 Finally, Arendt tells us, "the inspiring principle of action is love of freedom, and this both in the negative sense of freedom
from oppression and in the positive sense of the establishment of Freedom as a stable, tangible reality."75 Precisely this is the task of
politics. But Heidegger's turn inward and away from the political world has a pedigree that goes beyond romanticism. Arendt
consistently maintained that even though Heidegger rivals Nietzsche as a critic of the philosophical tradition, he too shares its general
regard for "the incomprehensible triviality" of the common, public world, the only escape from which is withdrawal "into that solitude
which philosophers since Parmenides and Plato have opposed to the political realm."76 Indeed, Heidegger no less than Plato
personified to Arendt what might be called the professional thinker, and succumbed to the characteristic temptations of the
profession.77 Arendt makes clear that all thinking requires some measure of aloofness, seclusion, and distance from the world,78 but
this characteristic is amplified and expanded in Heidegger's philosophy. In Dasein, thinking and being alive fold in on one another and
become one.79 Authentic existence requires thinking, which in turn requires distance from "the they" and everyday life.
Immersion in everyday life constitutes and requires withdrawal from true Being. For
Heidegger, not unlike Plato, thinking requires one to leave the cave of worldly affairs. But as we have
seen, Arendt suggests that such
a departure may result in a loss of moral-practical orientation .80 And
this constitutes in the end perhaps the best explanation of why Heidegger's awesome ability
to think did not prevent him from evil-doing in the form of his support for the Nazis.81
Heidegger eventually turned away from the emphasis on self-assertion and Dasein's "ownmost" state of being found in Being and
Time.8 As Arendt tells the story, Heidegger's intense study of Nietzsche led him to see even his own previous philosophy as having
been motivated by a form of will to power.83 Still concerned that instrumental rationality, science, and technology degraded Dasein by
reducing everything to presence-at-hand, he came to see his own philosophy as "enframed" in the very same refusal to let beings be at
the heart of the Western technological worldview he so detested. The new alternative Heidegger formulated was a Zen-like attitude or
disposition of serene, gliding aloofness-Gelassenheit-in which state thinkers would refrain from attempting to impose their own will
on beings (whether through technology or even through arguing for "ownmost" or "most authentic" modes of being). Thus, like
Nietzsche, Heidegger eventually repudiates the will, a capacity Arendt sees as necessary for action and
freedom. But more significantly, Heidegger's turn or reversal leaves him as alienated from politics
and the common, public world as before. From the point of view of Arendtian politics, Heidegger has merely
exchanged one form of world-alienation (glorification of self-assertion and extrication from "the they") for another (a regarding of the
world simply as an object of contemplation). Arendt shares with the early Heidegger the notion that to be in the world is to be a locus
of understanding, possibility, and freedom in the midst of a surrounding texture of meaning and significance. For the early Heidegger,
however, the world serves primarily as a medium for the aesthetic expression of the self. After his Kehre, the world became something
primarily to be regarded with serene, disinterested, contemplative wonder. This marked a return to the origins of philosophy in
thaumazein. But philosophy and politics are not the same; the latter requires active engagement
with the world , at least if the world is to be a fit home for mortal beings endowed with the
capacity for action and the possibility of freedom.

Aff is a d/a to the alt- Their ontology props up Nazism

perpetuating genocide- Heideggers notion of Being
treats the tradition and the Volk as the defining moral
horizon against which action must be tested and so it is a
type of chauvinist morality. Heidegger accepts the idea
that autonomous action involves laying down a law that
can be universalized, but drops this universal component
and substitutes it with a demand that the legislated rules
apply to his Volk only ; this underwrites Nazism by
rationalizing and enabling ethical mass murder and
genocide
And technological thought is too engrained- human nature

Riis 11
Carlsberg Research Fellow and Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Science Studies at
Roskilde University, Ph.D. from Albert-Ludwigs-Universitt Freiburg (Sren, 8 February 2011,
Towards the origin of modern technology: reconfiguring Martin Heideggers thinking,)
** Gestell (or sometimes Ge-stell) is a German word used by twentieth century German philosopher Martin
Heidegger to describe what lies behind or beneath modern technology.[1]

Moreover, Heidegger maintains: Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are in themselves are defined ontologico-
categorially.47 According to Heideggers fundamental phenomenology, which he unfolds in detail in Being and Time and reaffirms a
decisive part of in The Question Concerning Technology, nature is primally revealed in its usability and
serviceability-for-; that is to say, nature is a resource long before the actual rise of modern and
ancient technology, namely simultaneously with the very origin of human beings. That something is
primordially revealed in its usability and serviceability-for- does not imply that it is actually used or serves accordingly, but that
it is revealed as standing ready to be utilized in the corresponding context. As such, it is revealed as standing-reserve. This, for
example, also corresponds to the empirical fact that prehistoric humans settled close to woods and rivers. In these areas they
always had stockpiles of timber, power for transportation, and easy access to drinking water. Based on
The Question Concerning Technology and completed through references to Being and Time, we now have an interpretation of the
origin of the essence of modern technology, which traces back the characteristic revealing of das Gestell to the beginning of
humankind.48 This does not imply that prehistoric technology is identical with contemporary technology; rather the third genealogy of
the rule of das Gestell suggests that when we still more primally try to consider the origin of the
challenging revealing characterizing the rule of das Gestell , we in fact rediscover that it is
connected to being human. The rule of das Gestell has challenged humans as long as they
have existed. In this sense, humans first and foremost exist under the rule of das Gestell.49
This also entails a revision and precision of Heideggers renowned formula characterizing the
world-connectedness of human existence: being-in-the-world . Based on the comparison of The Question
Concerning Technology and Being and Time, human existence is better described as being-under-the-
spell-of-das-Gestell. Trying to understand the various more-or-less explicit accounts of the origin of the rule of das Gestell in
The Question Concerning Technology and the resulting ambiguity is not just an exercise, nor only a way to criticize Heidegger.
Rather, it is a way to better understand the nuances and layers in Heideggers thinking concerning technology and to warn against a
short-sighted saving from an alleged danger. If the challenging revealing of nature, which characterizes the rule of das Gestell is
taken seriously, then we cannot avoid it just by revolutionizing our technology, instead, we must revise our very human existence.

No Impact- Life is always valuable

Torchia 2
(Professor of Philosophy, Providence College, Phd in Philosophy, Fordham College (Joseph,
Postmodernism and the Persistent Vegetative State, The National Catholic Bioethics
Quarterly Summer 2002, Vol. 2, No. 2,
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/torc/torc_01postmodernismandpvs1.html) //TR

Ultimately, Aquinas' theory of personhood requires a metaphysical explanation that is rooted in an understanding of the
primacy of the existence or esse of the human person. For humans beings, the upshot of this position is clear: while human
personhood is intimately connected with a broad range of actions (including consciousness of oneself and others), the definition
of personhood is not based upon any specific activity or capacity for action, but upon the primacy
of esse. Indeed, human actions would have neither a cause nor any referent in the absence of a stable, abiding self that is rooted in
the person's very being. A commitment to the primacy of esse, then, allows for an adequate recognition of the importance of actions in
human life, while providing a principle for the unification and stabilizing of these behavioral features. In this respect , the human
person is defined as a dynamic being which actualizes the potentiality for certain behavior or operations unique to his or her
own existence. Esse thereby embraces all that the person is and is capable of doing. In the final analysis, any attempt to
define the person in terms of a single attribute, activity, or capability (e.g.,
consciousness) flies
in the face of the depth and multi-dimensionality which is part and parcel of personhood
itself. To do so would abdicate the ontological core of the person and the very
center which renders human activities intelligible . And Aquinas' anthropology, I submit, provides an effective
philosophical lens through which the depth and profundity of the human reality comes into sharp focus. In this respect,
Kenneth Schmitz draws an illuminating distinction between "person" (a term which conveys such hidden depth and
profundity) and "personality" (a term which pertains to surface impressions and one's public image).40 The preoccupation with the
latter term, he shows, is very much an outgrowth of the eighteenth century emphasis upon a human individuality that is understood in
terms of autonomy and privacy. This notion of the isolated, atomistic individual was closely linked with a subjective focus
whereby the "self" became the ultimate referent for judging reality . By extension, such a
presupposition led to the conviction that only self-consciousness provides a means of validating any claims to personhood and
membership in a community of free moral agents capable of responsibilities and worthy of rights. In contrast to such an isolated
and enclosed conception (i.e., whereby one is a person by virtue of being "set apart" from others as a privatized entity),
Schmitz focuses upon an intimacy which presupposes a certain relation between persons. From this standpoint, intimacy is
only possible through genuine self-disclosure, and the sharing of self-disclosure that allows for an intimate knowledge of the
other.41 For Schmitz, such a revelation of one's inner self transcends any specific attributes or any
overt capacity the individual might possess.42 Ultimately, Schmitz argues, intimacy is rooted in the unique act of
presencing, whereby the person reveals his or her personal existence. But such a mystery only admits of a metphysical explanation,
rather than an epistemological theory of meaning which confines itself to what is observable on the basis of perception or sense
experience. Intimacy, then, discloses a level of being that transcends any distinctive properties. Because intimacy has a unique
capacity to disclose being, it places us in touch with the very core of personhood. Metaphysically speaking, intimacy is
not grounded in the recognition of this or that characteristic a person has, but rather in the
simple unqualified presence the person is.

Perm: Do both. Net Benefit is Ontology- Perm allows you

to respect the ways that even modern technology can
provide meaning and respect being

Feenberg 2k
Andrew FEENBERG Philosophy @ San Diego State 2K in Technology and the Good Life? Eds.
Eric Higgs, Andrew Light and David Strong p. 312-313

In conclusion I would like to return briefly to Heidegger's critical account of our times to see how it stands up to the theory I have
presented. For Heidegger modern technology is stripped of meaning by contrast with the meaningful tradition
we have lost. Even the old technical devices of the past shared in this lost meaning. For example, Heidegger shows us a jug
"gathering" the contexts in which it was created and functions (Heidegger 1971). The concept of gathering resembles Borgmann's
notion of the "focal thing." These concepts dereify the thing and activate its intrinsic value and manifold connections with the human
world and nature. Heidegger wants to show us the way back to another mode of perception that belongs to
the lost past or perhaps to a future we can only dimly imagine. In that mode we share the earth with things rather
than reducing them to mere resources. Perhaps a redeemed techne will someday disclose the potentiality of what is
rather than attempting to remake the world in the human image. The undeniable insight here is that every making must also include a
letting be, an active connection to what remains untransformed by that making. This is Heidegger's concept of the "earth" as a
reservoir of possibili- ties beyond human intentions. In denying that connection the technocratic conception of technology defies
human finitude. The earth, nature, can never become a human deed because all deeds presuppose it (Feenberg 1986, chap. 8). Yet I
would like to share David Rothenberg's interpretation, according to which Heidegger 'would also want us to recognize that our contact
with the earth is technically mediated: what comes into focus as nature is not the pure immediate but what lies at the limit of techne
(Rothenberg 1993, 195 if.). Despite occasional lapses into romanticism, this is after all the philosopher who placed readiness-to-hand
at the center of Dasein's world. The cogency of Heidegger's critique thus ultimately comes down to
whether technology is fundamentally Promethean. Only then would it make sense to demand
liberation from it rather than reform of it. It is true that the dominant ideology, based on a narrow functionalism, leaves
little room for respect for limits of any kind. But we must look beyond that ideology to the realities of modern
technology and the society that depends on it. The failure of Heidegger and other thinkers in the
humanistic tradition to engage with actual technology is not to their credit but reveals the boundaries
of a certain cultural tradition." Beyond those boundaries we discover that technology also
"gathers" its many contexts through secondary instrumentalizations that integrate it to the world around it.
Naturally, the results are quite different from the craft tradition Heidegger idealizes , but nostalgia is
not a good guide to understanding technology. When modern technical processes are brought
into compliance with the requirements of nature or human health, they incorporate their
contexts into their very structure, as truly as the jug, chalice, or bridge that Heidegger holds out as
models of authenticity. Our models should be such things as reskilled work, medical practices that
respect the person, architectural and urban designs that create humane living spaces , computer designs
that mediate new social forms. These promising innovations all suggest the possibility of a general
reconstruction of modern technology so that it gathers a world to itself rather than reducing its
natural, human, and social environment to mere resources. It is now the task of philosophy of technology
to recognize that possibility and to criticize the present in the light of it.
Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary differences in loving
strife maximizes critical collaborative politics that
respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end, I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or

oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking

Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question

of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
which is to say,
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.
 V2L
No Impact to the Kritik and evaluate ours first- Their ev
ignores that the value is in being itself- their isolation of
value to life being degraded forgets the most important
part of Being- thats Torchia
And-Always a value to life theory does not change
intrinsic value

Graham 99
(Phil, professor of communication and culture - Queensland University of Technology, 1999,
Heidegger's Hippies, p. 12)
Thereisnoproblemofthesubject,justasthereisnoglobalsociety;thereisonlythemassamnesiaof
utopianpropaganda,thestrainsofwhichhavehistoricallyaccompaniedrevolutionsincommunicationtechnologies.Each
personsidentityis,quitesimply,theirsubjectiveaccountofauniqueandobjectivehistoryof
interactionswithintheobjectivesocialandmaterialenvironmentstheyinhabit,create,andinherit.Theidentityofeach
personistheirmostintimatehistoricalinformation,andtheyareitsmaterialexpression:eachpersonisarecordof
theirownhistoryatanygiventime.Thus,eachpersonisarecognisablymaterial,identifiableentity:an
identity.Thisistheircondition.Peoplearenottheoreticalentities;theyarepeople .Assuch,theyhave
anintrinsicidentitywithanintrinsicvalue.Noamountoftheoryorpropagandawillmakeitgo
away.
 AT Zimmerman
Turn: Waiting for a new ontology is a strategy that dooms
us to nuclear omnicide and makes extinction inevitable

Santoni 85
(Ronald E., Phil. Prof @ Denison, Nuclear War, ed. Fox and Groarke, p. 156-7)//TR

To be sure, Fox sees the need for our undergoing certain fundamental changes in our thinking, beliefs, attitudes, values and
Zimmerman calls for a paradigm shift in our thinking about ourselves, other, and the Earth.
But it is not clear that what either offers as suggestions for what we can, must, or should do in the
face of a runaway arms race are sufficient to wind down the arms race before it leads to
omnicide. In spite of the importance of Foxs analysis and reminders it is not clear that admitting our (nuclear) fear and anxiety
to ourselves and identifying the mechanisms that dull or mask our emotional and other responses represent much more than
examples of basic, often-stated principles of psychotherapy. Being aware of the psychological maneuvers that keep us numb to nuclear
reality may well be the road to transcending them but it must only be a first step (as Fox acknowledges), during which we
Simultaneously act to eliminate nuclear threats, break our complicity with the arms race, get rid of arsenals of genocidal weaponry,
and create conditions for international goodwill, mutual trust, and creative interdependence. Similarly, in respect to Zimmerman: in
spite of the challenging Heideggerian insights he brings out regarding what motivates the arms race, many questions may be raised
about his prescribed solutions. Given our need for a paradigm shift in our (distorted) understanding of ourselves and the rest of
being, are we merely left to prepare for a possible shift in our self-understanding ? (italics mine)? Is
this all we can do? Is it necessarily the case that such a shift cannot come as a result of our own will? and work but only
from a destiny outside our control? Does this mean we leave to God the matter of bringing about a paradigm shift? Granted our
fears and the importance of not being controlled by fears, as well as our anthropocentric leanings, should we be as cautious as
Zimmerman suggests about out disposition to want to do something or to act decisively in the face of the current threat? In spite
of the importance of our taking on the anxiety of our finitude and our present limitation, does it follow that we should be willing for
the worst (i.e. an all-out nuclear war) to occur? Zimmerman wrongly, I contend, equates resistance with denial when he says that
as long as we resist and deny the possibility of nuclear war, that possibility will persist and grow stronger. He also wrongly
perceives resistance as presupposing a clinging to the order of things that now prevails. Resistance connotes opposing, and
striving to defeat a prevailing state of affairs that would allow or encourage the worst to occur. I submit, against Zimmerman, that
we should not, in any sense, be willing for nuclear war or omnicide to occur. (This is not to suggest that
we should be numb to the possibility of its occurrence.) Despite Zimmermans elaborations and refinements his Heideggerian
notion of letting beings be continues to be too permissive in this regard. In my judgment, an
individuals decision not to act against and resist his or her governments preparations for
nuclear holocaust is, as I have argued elsewhere, to be an early accomplice to the most horrendous
crime against life imaginable its annihilation. The Nuremburg tradition calls not only for a new way of thinking,
a new internationalism in which we all become co-nurturers of the whole planet, but for resolute actions that will sever our
complicity with nuclear criminality and the genocidal arms race, and work to achieve a future which we can no longer assume. We
must not only come face to face with the unthinkable in image and thought (Fox) but must act
now - with a new consciousness and conscience - to prevent the unthinkable, by cleansing the earth of
nuclear weaponry. Only when that is achieved will ultimate violence be removed as the final
arbiter of our planets fate.
Hillman
 2AC
Turn- we dont try to end all warfare, we target paranoia
to prevent useless, falsely assumed to be inevitable wars:
the 1AC clears the space for legitimate warfare

The Role of the Ballot is to vote for the team that best
renders inoperative the exception that founds the topic
in an ontological imperialist binary, a biopolitical
suspension that seeks war to the competitive death

Spanos11 (William, Professor at Binghamton University,

The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception
Herman Melvilles Billy Budd, Sailor, p 162-163)//pg
Melvilles politics, Billy Budd implies, is, in fact, akin to Schmitts antiliberal
existentialism insofar as he espouses, against the dehumanizing violence
that inheres in Americas hubristic exceptionalist redemptive
errand in behalf of humanity at large, a certain kind of
irresolvable antagonism between politically imbalanced human
groupings (the populace and the ships officers, the preterite and the
elect, the multitude and the national people) and, therefore, calls for
continual decisionexistential choicehowever difficult that may
be. But there the similarity with Schmitt ends. For Schmitt (and for the
American exceptionalists, as President George W. Bushs post9/11 State of
the Union speech and Huntingtons Who Are We? testify), the friend (the
us) in the secular friend/ enemy binary is, in actual practice, like
the identity vis--vis difference of metaphysics on which this binary
is ultimately founded (political theology), ontologically prior to the
enemy (the them). It is, therefore, a sacred principle that
authorizes the latters extermination, as Schmitts commitment to the
Nazis idea of the nation-state makes clear. For Melville, on the other hand,
as opposed to the American exceptionalist (as Captain Veres inexorable
commitment to the sovereign higher cause is intended to bear witness), '
the theologically ordained friend/foe opposition is rendered
inoperative by way of his denying it a metaphysical (theological or
naturalized supernatural) status. In decentering this Sacred/ profane
binary, to put it positively, Melville transforms the opposition
understood as war to the death into a radically secular (i.e., profane),
intimate antagonism, a never-ending dialectical belongingness of
opposites in which the agonic play of the two always already
produces differences that enhance and enrich the identityless
identities of each. At the site of thinking, Heidegger, following
Heraclitus, aptly called this paradoxical creative relationship a
loving strife (Auseinandersetzung).( But it is, I think, Edward Said,
who, in thinking the deracinated and exilic condition precipitated
by the fulfillment of the incorporative logic of Western imperialism ,
constellates this ontological relationship into the cultural/political
context and, in so doing, suggests most resonantly what the
forgotten, but very much alive, Melville of Billy Budd was intuiting
at the end of his exilic life in his genealogical meditation on the
itinerary of the benign logic of exceptionalism, the itinerary that
ends in the violence of the state of exception: [I]t is no exaggeration
to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and
opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has shifted from
the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its
unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation
today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and
artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between
homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are
indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can
see the complete consort dancing together contrapuntally

It is the hubristic messianic American initiative that

abrogates democratic laws in favor of martial law while
being hidden under political modernity that creates the
camp and endless war.

Spanos11 (William, Professor at Binghamton University,

The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception
Herman Melvilles Billy Budd, Sailor, p 141-145)//pg

In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist bombing of the twin

towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September
11, 2001, President George W. Bush, in his capacity as commander
in chief of U.S. armed forces (not as president), declared his war on
terror, thus inaugurating a political momentum that, in the
following years of his administration, bore witness to the virtual
usurpation of political power by the U.S. governments executive
branch from the Congress and the Supreme Court, a momentum
undertaken with the tacit, if not wholehearted, consent of the 142
other two branches of government!and, it should not be forgotten, the
ventriloquized media. The Bush administration did not only declare
Americas war on terror in the name of homeland security. It also
undertook this war against an unidentifiable (stateless) enemy, by
way of its doctrine of preemptive wars, to unilaterally invade
alien politiespolities it represented as harboring terrorists and
therefore categorically identified as rogue states that
threatened the peace of the worldand then, in the name of
Americas messianic exceptionalist ethos, to employ its enormous
militarily might to impose American-style democracies on them in
behalf of world peace. That is to say, the Bush administration
understood the American homeland as global in scope and its war
on terror as a war intended to protect this global homeland." In
the revolutionary process of the eight years of the Bush
administrations tenure in office, the horrendously negative
consequences, both abroad and at home, of this hubristic American
global initiative became increasingly manifest. Abroad, to invoke
only the most obvious of these, the United Statess arrogant
unilateral will to impose American-style democracies (regime
change) on Afghanistan and Iraq has culminated in its suspension
of international law and the precipitation of seemingly unending
civil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have borne witness not only to
the killing and maiming of untold numbers of innocent civilians but
also, as in the case of the Vietnam War, to the uprooting of untold
numbers of noncombatants and their transformation into
populations of homeless refugees. Further, instead of diminishing
the threat of terrorism, this hubristic messianic American initiative
to recreate the world in its image has exacerbated its potential, not
least, by way of its violation of international law (the abrogation of
habeas corpus, torture, and the obscenely inhumane practice
euphemistically called extraordinary rendition by its
perpetrators). At home, the war on terror launched by the Bush
administration in the name of homeland security has borne witness to
the production of a pervasive climate of fear; the increasing conduct
of government by secrecy and the falsification of historical reality;$
the invasion of privacy by the executive branch; racial profiling; the
branding of the undocumented as potential terrorists; the
precipitation of the informer mentality; and, not least, the
manipulation of the presidency by Claggart-like functionaries
whose purposes are other than enhancing the public good. That all
these lawless foreign and domestic initiatives of the executive
branch of the American Exceptionalism and the State of Exception after 9/11
143 United Statesand their imperial and anti-democratic consequences
have not been a matter of accident, but of a systematic effort by the
presidency and the Justice Department has been made
frighteningly manifest by the recent publication by the Barack
Obama administration of the secret (illegal) plans drawn up and
forcibly legalized by the Presidents Office of Legal Council (John
C. Yoo, Jay Bybee, Robert J. Delahunty et al.), and, in response to the
urgings of Carl Rove, principal advisor to the president; Dick
Cheney, vice-president of the United States; and Donald Rumsfeld,
secretary of defense, among others, adopted by the Bush
administration in the aftermath of 9/11. Based on the dubious
assumption of the reality of a state of national emergency, it was a
legal initiative, that gave the president the absolute authority
(plenary executive powers)to deploy the military within the United
States for the purpose of policing its citizenry (in violation of the Fourth
Amendment and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878);' to censor the media
(i.e., annul the First Amendment); to represent any American citizen as
an enemy combatant and to hold him or her in custody
indefinitely and without recourse to the law; and to flout any
international treaty, which is to say, to arrest, torture (use enhanced
methods of interrogating detainees), and to render citizens of other
countries to third-party jurisdictions.( In declaring a war on
terror in the wake of 9/11, that is to say, the Bush presidency tacitly
abrogated democratic law (the Constitution) in favor of establishing
martial lawthe sovereign lawless law of the state of exception
all, ostensibly, in the name of protecting the well-being of the
abstractionor, to appropriate Giorgio Agambens more precise
terms, the secularized sacred)the United States, a motive
variously called self-defense, national security, domestic
security, and homeland security. And insofar as the force that
threatened the United States was an amorphous and nameless
enemyan enemy without an identifiable uniform and not associated with a
stateit could be said that the Bush administrations unilateral declaration
of war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11 was also a tacit
announcement that rendered the state of exception permanent. It
has been primarily this momentous domestic/global initiative on the
part of the U.S. executive branchepitomized by the obscenely
banal phenomenon now called alternatively Abu Ghraib or
Guantnamothat has reawakened the dormant memory of the
Nazi concentration camps and the all too belated but welcomed
interest of contemporary intellectuals 144 the exceptionalist state
and the state of exception in the question of the state of exception as it
pertains to modern democracies. I am referring, above all, to the important
work inaugurated by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer by way of his retrieval
of Michel Foucaults, Hannah Arendts, Walter Benjamins, Theodor Adornos
and, from a different perspective, the German National Socialist political
theorist Carl Schmitts writing on this most urgent question of our precarious
contemporary occasion, specifically, to his claim that Western
democracies, epitomized by the United States, are grounded in an
ontology in which the state of exceptionand the campis
latent. It is not my purpose in this brief concluding chapter on Melvilles Billy
Budd to undertake a fullscale rehearsal of Agambens (and others) richly
resonant and highly complex philological and historical analysis of the state
of exception or to spell out his chilling representation of the polyvalent
cultural and sociopolitical effects of its normalization in modernity. It will
suffice, for my purpose, to say that, according to Agamben, the biopolitical
(onto)logic informing the democratic nation-states achieves its
fulfillmentits limit situationin the permanent universalization of
the concentration camp and its thanatopolitics (killing humans with
immunity), however extreme such a characterization of the modern
polity may seem: Along with the emergence of biopolitics, we can
observe a displacement and gradual expansion beyond the limits of
the decision on bare life, in the state of exception, in which
sovereignty consisted. If there is a line in every modern state
marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision
on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no
longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly
distinct zones. This line is now in motion and gradually moving into
areas other than that of political life, areas in which the sovereign
is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the
jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the
priest. . . . From this perspective, the [concentration] campas the
 pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is
founded solely on the state of exception)will appear as the hidden
paradigm of the political space of modernity.!! With this general
diagnosis of contemporary political space, I basically agree.!" What I do
want to interrogate, however, is the tendency of the contemporary
discourse on the state of exceptiona tendency deriving American
Exceptionalism and the State of Exception after 9/11 from its
unilateral appeal to Carl Schmitts diagnosis of the modern liberal European
nation-state (particularly the Weimar Republic)to universalize the state
of exception at the expense of its particular local manifestations.
More specifically, I want to point out this discourses failure to
discriminate between the self-understanding of American
democracy, on the one hand, and the modern democracies of
Europe, on the other, a failure that, though it does not delegitimize
its judgment, does, in its oversimplification, miss something
fundamental about the source of the elusive power of the state of
exception in its contemporary global American democratic
setting.

Psychoanalysis can only be meaningful as a tool for

political analysis if its used to understand how identity is
always already socially located based upon race and
sexuality; otherwise it reproduces the same violent
illusions of identity

Kondo 2000 (Dorinne [is Professor of Anthropology and American

Studies and Ethnicity and Director of Asian American Studies at the
University of Southern California.] (Re)Visions of Race:
Contemporary Race Theory and the Cultural Politics of Racial
Crossover in Documentary Theatre, d/l: muse) //jl
I would argue that given Smith's own interventions in American theatre, the situation is more hopeful
than she suggests. Indeed, her analysis precisely locates the progressive potential in plays such as House Arrest, Twilight, and Fires in the Mirror. Her words serve as critical appraisal of US theatre, as
This challenge
she challenges theatre artists to take on urgent social issues and to see the space of theatre and the actor's body as sites where subversive interventions can be staged.

to American theatre resonates with Smith's approaches to acting and to narrative structure. Her acting
theories disperse and thematize processes of subject formation, and her plays deconstruct narrative
convention. "The idea of the centrality of any actor's psyche--I don't understand that. When I get interested in an interview is when I see how complicated a person is, the very moment
when I think I can never capture this." 25 Instead her concern is, "So what is in the world around you?" 26 And in refocusing attention on the world, this

technique also refigures what counts as a play and, perhaps most significantly, refigures whose
stories belong onstage, authorizing all of us, no matter what race, gender, age, nationality, class,
or sexual orientation, to take center stage. Tellingly, Smith's plays refuse linear narrative structure and refuse to enshrine a central protagonist, instead
according careful attention to each character. This nonlinear, decentered structure contests conventions of the well-made play, with its through line, its positing of a central protagonist who embarks

By inviting spectators into identification and then

on a journey characterized by a narrative arc.

problematizing that identification, Smith's cross-racial and cross-gender

representation problematizes notions of stable subject-positions, highlighting
instead the forging of those positions in matrices of power and history. Her technique, and
the genre of documentary theatre generally, challenge notions of authorship and art as the product of the exalted imagination of individual creative genius. 27 [End Page 98] Even given these
. Psychoanalytic feminist critic Ann
interventions, however, there is the open question of the effects of critique within our episteme of liberal humanism

Pellegrini offers another perspective on Smith's performances, emphasizing processes of

identification in spectatorship and the problematic of sameness and difference, resonating with
Smith's own account. Fires in the Mirror can no more assure a perfect fit between Smith's characters and her spectators, in all their diversity, than Smith can achieve a perfect
match between herself and the women and men she is performing, than any "I" can close the gap between me and not-me. . . . Perhaps the resistances--a term I intend in both its psychoanalytic and
political registers--to Smith's performances derive, in part, from a frustrated desire for the same. The nearness of Smith's near-image is not near enough. Nor ever finally far enough. . . . It does
 Pellegrini insightfully details
matter--to the one who speaks and the ones who listen--whose body is the sight, and not just the reciter, of speech. 28 Here

the processes of psychoanalytic identification in Lacanian registers and

suggests that Smith's work offers the potential to revise psychoanalytic theory
much as did early feminist theory, by demonstrating that Freudian and Lacanian
formulations are historically situated and always already gendered and
racialized. Pellegrini argues for psychoanalytic theory as a key method for
destabilizing binaries and as a pervasive feature of modernity and
postmodernity. Intervening in the site of theory is one kind of important
political battle, and Pellegrini makes claims for the political and ethical weight
of her analysis, arguing that an analysis of processes of identification are
central to a political project of what she calls identification politics. However, in ways
that I think are all too common in psychoanalytic feminist readings, the question for Pellegrini seems ultimately to be "How
As a
can Smith help us to refine psychoanalytic theory," or, more generally, "What can race do for psychoanalysis?"
woman of color, I have a different question. Rather, I would want to know how theorizing--even
as it describes a site where we must intervene--advances us in our work toward
social transformation. What can psychoanalysis do for struggles to combat
racial oppression? How can the elucidation of mechanisms of identification help us in our battles over
representation and in our struggles to make alliance? The articulation of the project in terms of
sameness and difference is, I would suggest, both inevitable and problematic. Pellegrini
ends her discussion of cross-race performance by invoking "the nerve of this double vision--to look in the mirror and behold
The poststructuralist psychoanalytic theory
at once difference and common humanity." 29
Pellegrini deploys is suspicious of the trope of the human, while recognizing the
strategic necessity to deploy that trope at certain moments. Here I want to
underline Smith's own cogent analysis of the persistence of race as a social
force as a counter to the power of hegemonic liberal humanist discourse that
remains all too ready to recuperate the invocation of a "difference"
counterposed to a "common humanity" as a reinscription of substance-attribute
metaphysics and power-evasive tropes of the universally human. The critique of
essentialism fails unless it goes beyond invocations of difference, and instead
takes account of the continuous, [End Page 99] persistent, and insidious workings of
power along the axes we label race, gender, and sexuality.

Psychological accounts of pathology and narcissism in

relation to Latinos and race perpetuates racialized
violence and makes social justice impossible

Bergner 2009 (Gwen [is an associate professor of English at West

Virginia University] Black Children, White Preference: Brown v.
Board, the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem, d/l: muse) //jl

the cultural role of psychology to give us an interpretive frame for racism that
This legal landmark merges with
is consistent with the "creed of our time," that is, with the "'romance' of American
psychology." This "romance" makes "Americans today . . . likely to measure personal and civic experience according
to a calculus of mental and emotional health'self-esteem' in the current vernacular" rather than "whether our society lives
up to its reputation of democracy and equality, ideals that appear increasingly abstract, difficult to grasp, and remote from
In other words, we prefer to see our social problems as
the dilemmas of daily life."110
psychological rather than political, and the doll test facilitates this interpretation. It presents a
melodramatic tableau, blending children (the "innocent" victims of racism) and
dolls (the quintessential marker of childhood fantasy)while leaving the
perpetrators invisible (and the spectator guiltless). Given the symbolic significance of dolls to
our cultural construction of childhood (a significance we can trace in the impassioned call for black dolls during the 1970s
and continued debates about the tyranny of Barbie on girls' gender and ethnic identities), the visible and volatile mix of
children, dolls, and seeming self-hatred facilitates a sympathetic liberal response. Brown's Fiftieth Anniversary and the Ills of
As evidence that a sympathetic response does not necessarily
Public Education
translate into progressive racial politics, witness the significant and worsening
racial achievement [End Page 353] gap in education. The failure of legislation from the civil rights era to produce real
racial equality is evident in popular commentary marking the fiftieth anniversary of Brown in 2004. A raft of newspaper and magazine articles, exhibits, and
interdisciplinary academic conferences celebrated its key contribution to the civil rights movement but lamented Brown's "failure to live up to its promise," that is, to
deliver educational equality for African Americans.111 Progressive critics and educators rightly called attention to the de facto segregation currently operating in
many school systems, wherein "the vast majority of poor children are relegated to an inferior education" measured by less-educated and less-trained teachers, large
classes, a curriculum stripped down to the three Rs, not enough textbooks, and deteriorating buildings.112 But others noted the persistent "academic achievement
gap [that] separate[s] Black and Latino students from their white and Asian counterparts,"113 a gap that is not confined to poor urban areas and that pertains within
the middle classes and integrated school systems.114 These often divergent lines of debate indicate the fraught relationship between two measures of educational
equality: opportunity versus achievement. Desegregation, it seems, delivered neither. Though educators and politicians continue to wrangle over the constituent
conditions of equal opportunity, most recently in relation to the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" policy,115 until we eliminate the achievement gap, the
"promise" of Brown will remain unfulfilled. No doubt disparities of educational resources between poor, urban, and largely minority populations and their more affluent
even the inconsistent and contradictory social
suburban counterparts contribute to the achievement gap. But

science research suggests that, beyond resources and integration, cultural

constructions of race affect black children's academic success. Race, the
findings indicate, affects education in two ways: in bias against African
American students (more severe discipline, lower teacher expectations, curricular and testing bias) and,
possibly, in the psychic attitudes and cultural practices of some black children and
parents (parenting practices, perception that academic success means acting white, fear of upholding racial stereotypes through academic failure).116 In
fact, some school districts, including those in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Mount Vernon, New York, have improved black and Latino achievement by instituting
multipronged approaches that address all three factors of financial resources, racial bias, and student motivation.117 Despite such examples of local success, there is
no consensus among politicians, educators, policymakers, and social scientists about how to equalize public education. And not only does the achievement gap persist
despite ameliorative, if inadequate, measures aimed at eliminating it, such as charter [End Page 354] schools, multicultural curricula, and standardized testing; it
has increased since the late 1980s.118 The lack of consensus is not surprising given the complex racial politics of education and ongoing opposition to integration and
Moreover, social science research on inequality has produced a
affirmative action.

plethora of piecemeal and often conflicting data on racial identity and

education. There is, then, a lack both of political commitment to equality and of
coherent research to guide policy. Within this contentious and confused policy
landscape, even progressive responses to the achievement gap reflect the
tension between material and discursive approaches. For example, the Nation's May 2004 issue
"Brown at 50" focuses primarily on material issues of resource inequality and de facto segregation, largely omitting mention
of cultural factors contributing to education inequality.119 We can understand the contributors' reluctance to take on
discursive aspects of racial formation, including how psychic processes of
identification affect academic success. Such discussions smack of stereotyping and
blaming the victim. There's good reason to worry that any attention to the psychology of education
might just weaken the claim for more resources and fuel specious but resilient
arguments of blacks' inherent inferiority such as those propagated by the infamous "bell curve" or the
"culture of poverty" paradigm associated with the Moynihan Report.120 But it is worth surmounting
liberal squeamishness on this count to address education inequality
comprehensively. We cannot achieve racial equality by neatly separating the
political and economic from the social and psychological. Neoliberals and neoconservatives
have mounted effective resistance to race-conscious policies of equalization, in part, by calling for African Americans to
exhibit "personal responsibility" and, ironically, by labeling policies such as affirmative action both "antidemocratic" for
We are still
giving preference to minorities and "racist" for operating through the "soft bigotry of low expectations."
struggling to mount an effective campaign against the now popular belief that
race-conscious policies provide special treatment and enable pathological psychologies.
It therefore behooves us to enlist more flexible conceptions of hybrid racial
identity in developing effective strategies for the evolving racial projects of
social justice.
Their frame of realism is not inevitable 9/11, berlin wall,
etc all prove focus on states as coherent entities is long
gone, we need to break away from conventional frames to
allow our analysis to keep up with changes in world their
dogmatic adherence to realism only distracts us from
changing global conditions

Busser 6
York Centre for International and Security Studies, PhD Cand. @ McMaster University, 2006
(Mark, The Evolution of Security: Revisiting the Human Nature Debate in International Relations, August,
Online: http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP40-Busser.pdf)

Unfortunately for Bradley Thayer, evolutionary arguments do not provide a simple and
incontestable ontological and epistemological foundations for revitalized realism. Since
arguments like Thayers draw on controversial scientific branches of sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology, which arguably assume the basic features of human nature they
seek to prove, the conclusions for political theory remain almost as scientifically arbitrary
as Morgenthaus assumption of an animus dominandi. In framing the problematic of their exploration, many
of these arguments assume an individualistic and egoistic human nature and question how
political relations might arise out of the mechanical dynamics of self-interest. As Mary
Clarks work demonstrates, this ignores important factors in the evolutionary development
of the human being. Since interpersonal, cultural, political ,and social influences have had a
large role in shaping the evolution of humans and our primate relatives, it is not such a
simple task to explain human nature based on rational actor models and mathematical
calculations. In contrast to the sociobiology and evolutionary psychologys depiction of human nature as biologically
determined, Clark argues that it is a societys construction of a story of human nature that
affects how people will imagine ways to live together, fulfilling basic human needs or not.
Biology is not destiny, she seems to argue, but what we believe about our biology threatens to
become our destiny if we allow it. This highlights the possibility that seemingly universal
traits like competition, aggression and egoism might be contingent on the weight we lend
them and not biologically determined. If we have a choice in the matter, it is possible to begin
conceiving of political possibilities for global social orders that do not depend on a
combative and competitive engagement with Others. In turn, this allows a reconsideration of
the conceptual lens through which to view security . If it is not programmed into our genes to be intolerant,
ethnocentric, and aggressive, then we can find ways to abandon the traditions that have normalized
such behaviours. Following Jim George and David Campbell, perhaps a new conception of
international relationships would serve better than the current paradigm, which is based on
traditional views of an aggressive and competitive human nature. It may be that, as Clark suggests,
conflict can only be mitigated when basic human needs are met. Doing so, it seems, would require a rethinking of how differences are
engaged with, interpreted and reconciled in both international and local societies. If we humans are not biologically destined to draw
lines between ourselves and others, then it is possible for us to escape conceptions of security that necessitate aggression against, or
protection from, outsiders. Perhaps the security long sought after in international relations will come
not from making societies secure from difference, but making difference secure within and
between states.

Their evolutionary arguments have no descriptive power-

they make logical leaps from individual actions to group
behavior and is littered with fallacies
Goodwin 10
(Professor at University of Ottawa, Evolution and Anarchism in International Relations: The Challenge of
Kropotkins Biological Ontology, Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2010 39: 417 )//TR

Thayers justification for applying evolutionary theory to Realism is to provide a verifiable

theoretical framework to reinvigorate the tradition. [67] To explain egoism, Thayer invokes
Dawkins selfish gene theory, which reduces the level of analysis to the gene as a self-
interested replicator.[68] Domination is explained through the biological production of dominance hierarchies in
competitive situations where particular individuals in groups achieve greater access to resources; and, the ubiquity of this model of
social organization in the animal kingdom suggests a generalisable principle of hierarchy that may contribute to an organisms level of
fitness.[69] This, he argues, accounts for human allegiance to the state, ideology and institutions[70].[71] Thayer offers three
characteristics of evolutionary theory that provide a better foundation for realism than the theological or metaphysical arguments
advanced by Niebuhr or Morgenthau: firstly, it meets Hempels criteria for Deductive-Nomological models of science and also holds
true to Poppers principle of falsification, secondly, it is widely accepted by the scientific community as a valid explanation for human
evolution, and thirdly, it supports the offensive realist position that, in the competitive environment of international anarchy, states
naturally seek to dominate one another.[72] These three characteristics of his epistemological foundation for realism can be criticized
within the scope of the argument I have presented above[73]; however, in keeping with the ontological thematic presented above it is
more instructive to highlight that his epistemological claims pre-determine his ontological primary to be at the individualor even
genelevel. It should come as no surprise that, true to his realist theoretical orientation, Thayer freely abstracts his
individualistic ontology up to the state level and can posit that interactions among states
existing in conditions of anarchy lead to conflict. It is in this notion of predetermined behaviour in anarchy
that concerns me most. Anarchy is a widely misconstrued term. It is often analogized with chaos in lay parlance[74], and the
implications from this semantic treatment connote a natural state of conflict. IR theorists, such as Waltz, rarely make the same mistake
of analogizing anarchy with chaos; however, the ontological assumptions they use analyze the phenomenon of anarchy in the
international system come to the same connotative conclusions that anarchy leads to disorder. Ashley argues that the concept of
anarchy has been given foundational truth status in International Relations, despite the nature of its arbitrary construction; the
discourse and ontology of the anarchy problematique is always in the process of being imposed.[75] Yet, it is in line with this
imposed political construction that the dichotomy of inside/outside and domestic/international arises, where it is incumbent upon the
sovereign to maintain order against the naturalized disorder outside of territorial boundaries.[76] Yet, Helen Milner is unconvinced of
the central importance of the concept of anarchy in understanding international politics.[77] Her arguments surround the ambiguity of
the term, and its tendency to reinforce the division between international and domestic politics. This division is analytically unhelpful
on heuristic grounds, insofar as it paints International Relations as a sui generis field where international politics is seen as unique
one is less likely to use the hypotheses, concepts, and questions about politics developed elsewhere.[78] Instead, Milner posits
anarchy to be a lack of perceived legitimacy in a centralized authority which regulate the
relations among political entitiesa definition that can be applied domestically and
internationally. However, Milner also stresses the value of the concept of interdependence in understanding relations among
states. Strategic interdependence, as she argues, serves to secure for an actor what he or she
wants through cooperation with others.[79]There are no preconditions of equality among the actors; thus, it is
conceptually independent from her definition of anarchy. Indeed, power relations operate separately from interdependence and one
cannot determine the extent of [actor] interdependence from the degree of hierarchy/anarchy present in their relationship.[80]
Interdependence is so integral in understanding political relations, however, that Milner notes that the contributors to Cooperation
Under Anarchy implicitly use the notion of strategic interdependence in iterated PD games despite their lack of acknowledgement of
its fundamental nature to the actors represented in their models.[81] While Milner acknowledges the crucial nature of including
notions of interdependence in political analysis, she stops short of problematising the root and logical consequences of
interdependence. Thus, interdependence becomes unquestioned in the same way as the assumptive causal force of anarchy
necessitating conflict. In addition, Milners interpretation of the form interdependence takes, namely the strategic interdependence of
cooperation among actors predicated on their respective individual benefits, takes the individual unit as its core ontological
assumption. However, to probe the root cause of such integral interdependence is to begin to form
an understanding of the imperative nature of sociality and the ontological implications of
this imperative social interaction. Where interdependence is as important to understanding
politics as hierarchical relationships, then ontology becomes the primary question of
political analysis at both the domestic and international levels. However, there has been a stunning silence
of anarchist voices in helping to interpret what anarchy in IR is really about. Anarchism is a social philosophy above all, and anarchy,
as it is conceived of in Anarchism, is typified by free association.[82] In stark contrast, the anarchy in IR is not free
associationit is humans brought together under mutually incommensurable and
irreconcilable legal and authoritative frameworks known as states . As already noted, in Anarchist
philosophy it is near universally accepted that society precedes the state, but the free associations of society occur on a day-to-day
basis despite the looming presence of the statemorally, economically and militarilyin the lives of humans. This should encourage
us to consider the larger sociological implications that result from coercive legal frameworks at the state level. Namely, it is
through the codification and blanket application of specific modalities of cooperation that
forces individuals to cooperate in a restricted manner . Thus, Anarchism applied to IR begins its critique by
problematising the State. Reading into the ontological assumptions of Kropotkins style of Anarchism, both through his scientific and
political writings, provides us another way to consider how social interactions have taken place in our evolutionary past(s) and how
they might occur today. Adopting this holistic ontology also provides social possibilities. The holistic ontology assumes
that social interaction is both inevitable and necessary; thus, this provides a palette on
which an infinite number of social forms may be tried and tested. It is from our cognizance
of the processes of social forms that we can change them. Based on this ontology , MAT then
encourages us to shift our analytical focus from questions of how to achieve cooperation to
questions of what is the best way to cooperate. This transition from ontology, to
epistemology and ultimately to praxeology occurs sequentially.

Prefer our interpretation it takes into account group

cooperation- good science says youre wrong

Goodwin 11
(Professor at University of Ottawa, Presented at the 2011 Political Studies Association Annual Conference,
Biological Fatalism: The Politics of (De)Naturalising Conflict and(De)Problematising Cooperation)//TR

Theories produced by the scientific enterprise cannot be elevated above reproach this is so because,science, itself is necessarily
fallibist (Wight, 2006). This applies to not only the conclusions of themethodologies applied, but also to their interpretations.
Science generates and is generated by theoretical frameworks , which can be, in turn,
dependent on the cultural dimensions in which scientists find themselves . These theoretical
frameworks are employed to understand the complexities of reality in aparsimonious way. One way to facilitate parsimony and
disseminate scientific theories is the rhetoricaluse of metaphor. Metaphors provide a more digestible, simplified form for public
consumption. However,metaphors may act as a double-edged sword in this respect assisting in the explication of complextheories
(and their subsequent ramifications), but also confining interpretation of the metaphor to thecultural current in which it has been
generated. Darwins law of natural selection , within the grandernarrative of evolution, is not above these rhetorical
shackles. In the case of Darwins theory, Todes (1989) argues that Darwins prose was rich with metaphors,and one of those key
metaphors was the struggle for existence . Title of the third chapter of On theOrigin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life , the struggle for existence was a term used to contextualize the novel
concept of naturalselection, and juxtapose against artificial selection (1989: 8).While Darwin, himself, admitted the
complexity of interrelationships in nature represented by the struggle for existence
metaphor, he tended to diminish the impact of the environment on organisms, and instead
emphasized the relations between them. Indeed, Todes notes that Darwin described the Face of Nature as being a
surface packed with ten thousand sharp wedges when one is pummelled, anotherrelents. This zero-sum view of nature was due to
his perception of the natural world as a superfecundand plenitudinous entangled bank where overpopulation continually weighed
against the amount of resources (10).The Malthusian corollary to this perception of overpopulation was inter-organism
competition,but more specifically, competition between like forms. The words struggle and competition were used synonymously
by Darwin throughout Origin , along with vivid images of nature as war and being thegreat battle for life (11). Darwin hesitated to
elucidate the role of evolution with humans in Origin , but wrote extensively about the struggle for existence among humans in The
Descent of Man . Todes arguesthat this was due to the ideological outlook [he shared with] his class, circle, and family
anideological outlook firmly entrenched in Malthusian-inspired bourgeois world views (13).Russian intellectuals at the time
reacted negatively to this metaphor they saw it as the bold-face introduction of
Malthusianism and the British capitalist penchant for competition into evolutionary
theory.A mong the Russian camps reaction was to give a fragmented account of the struggle for existence as itfunctions in
nature; they concluded that the most Malthusian-inspired conclusions that Darwin drewupon those being overpopulation producing
conflict and the corollary of intraspecific competition tended to be exaggerated (Todes, 1989). The Russian camp rejected the
rhetoric surrounding the strugglefor existence metaphor, the population arithmetic of crude Malthusianism, the emphasis on intra-
speciesconflict. By today s standards, the dynamics of social systems are not given to replicate the Malthusianneo-classical
economic logic of supply vs. demand. The Malthusian assumptions are grounded in aconstant state of equilibrium within a closed
social system of a determinable resource supply.One particular Russian naturalist, Peter Kropotkin, launched the most
trenchant critique of theMalthusian bias in natural selection (1902). This critique centred
on his attempt to repudiate the axiom of competition among the members of the same
species. In place of this naturalised competition, Kropotkinsought to highlight the importance of naturalised cooperation which he
termed Mutual Aid. Mutual Aid Theory Peter Kropotkin, a former Russian prince, was a geographer, naturalist and anarchist. He
renounced hisroyal title after witnessing the disparity of wealth between the aristocrats and peasants of Tsarist Russia.His tumultuous
life was typified by revelatory expeditions to document geological and biologicalphenomena, imprisonment for his political
affiliations and declarations, and banishment from severalcountries (Morris, 2004).His most noted scientific work, Mutual Aid , was
first published as a series of five articles in response to T.H. Huxleys 1888 article in The Nineteenth Century , The Struggle for
Existence in HumanSociety. In that article, Huxley characterised the natural world as being on about the same level as agladiator s
show[where] the stronge st, the swiftest, and the cunningnest live to fight another day[and] no quarter is given (Huxley, 1888).
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution was laterconsolidated into book form for publication in 1902.While Mutual Aid was, itself, a
scientific work, it also had profound political implications in the same way that Huxleys article did. Huxley gave biological support
by way of natural selection to a Hobbesian-inspired conflict-ridden social order ; however, Kropotkin s Mu tual Aid Theory sketched
anegalitarian cooperation-contingent social order. These opposing perspectives of the natural social orderrepresented the classical
liberal and anarchist perspectives, respectively. Each perspective made its ownimplicit and expl icit political justifications based on
these biological insights. In the case of Huxleys re -telling of natural selection, an inherent state of conflict would require authority to
keep warringindividuals in check classical social contract theory. In contr ast to this, Kropotkin s Mutual Aid Theory
required no outside authority to enforce order since competition was the normal state of
affairs for mostliving organisms, especially humans Mutual Aid thus influenced subsequent anarchist social theory
viii ;and, Kr opotkin was well aware of the political implications of his theory: And how false, therefore, is the view of those who
speak of the animal world as if nothing were to be seen in it but lions and hyenasplunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh of their
victims! One might as well imagine that the whole of human life is nothing but a succession of war massacres ( 1902: 44).Much as
the name suggests, Mutual Aid Theory posits that organisms, in the face of harshecological conditions, engage in mutualism, as
opposed to competition, to ensure their survival. Glassman(2000) reduces Kropotkins Mutual Aid Theory into three principles: 1)
organisms struggle against theharsh conditions of their ecology, 2) species that engage in cooperation to overcome the difficulties
posedby their ecologies are successful, and 3) egoism becomes detrimental when cooperation is so crucial tosurvival (392). This
mutualism is based on a deep-seated instinct of solidarity, and Kropotkin dismissedthe idea
that mere emotions drove the practice of mutual aid. He writes: It is a feeling infinitely
wider than love or personal sympathy an instinct that has been slowly developed among
animals and men inthe course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals
and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and
the joys they can find in social life ( 1902: 11).Prior to the formation of his political convictions, Kropotkin was a
successfully practicingscientist and had been on several expeditions to the harsh Siberian wilderness (Todes, 1989: 123). Inaddition,
he wrote more than 50 articles for the Recent Science section of The Nineteenth Century on scientific subjects as widely varied as
the spectral analysis of stars, the experimental morphology of plants, the evolution of the eye, and artificial diamonds (125). On his
expeditions to Siberia, he observed that the sparsely populated forests of eastern Russia offered little support to Malthusian fears of
overpopulation. In reality, it was the harsh climate of Siberia and the reaction of the animals to this that led him to formulate his
theory. Where food resources were scarce, Kropotkin observed migration to occur ratherthan
intraspecific competition. He considered the act of migration itself to be a reflection of the enormous trust that individuals
of a species must have in each other, and this was derived from their inherent sociability (Kropotkin, 1902).

They mistake realism for international relations- its a

confused amalgam of multiple distinct narratives that
arent objective but deeply political- their perceptions of
international relations inevitably break down and fail

Heath 7
(Amelia, Professor at Newcastle University, Re-examining Core Concepts of Classical Realism: E.H. Carr,
Hans Morgenthau and the Realist Agenda, http://turin.sgir.eu/)//TR

The circumstance of ontological security created by the polemics of the Inter-Paradigm Debate in
International Relations
the culmination of the need for group identity and the need for epistemological legitimacy
led to the creation of Kenneth Waltzs structural neo-realism. In a struggle for identity,
rather than reconcile the narrative break that occurred between realists during the New
Great Debate, structural neo-realism merged all realist theorists together in one unified
heading without narrative reconciliation. The consequences of this realist unification without narrative
reconciliation for IR are that the classical/traditional narrative has been repetitively overlooked, causing an inconsistency in the legacy
realism as well as the large-scale misunderstanding and misinterpretation of classical and traditional realists such as E.H. Carr and
Hans Morgenthau. The narrative break between classical/traditional realism and scientific
realism, the reconciliation of which never occurred, both supports and sheds further light
on arguments made by other authors attempting to clarify misconceptions of political
realism in contemporary IR. Richard Ashley (1981) draws from John Herz (1976), by introducing the Habermasian
dialectical notion that differing practical and technical interests drive thinkers to 23 form the various statements that comprise political
realism (Ashley 1981: 208). Ashley acknowledges the obvious discrepancy between thinkers such as Morgenthau and thinkers such as
Waltz. Such interests are only the surface-level of a deep inconsistency noted between writings of classical/traditional authors and
contemporary perceptions of those authors as influenced by neo-realism. An additional criticism of neo-realism is that the important
roles of history and of ideas in the classical tradition have been misrepresented (or, indeed, not represented at all). Ashley (1984), Cox
(1981), and Walker (1987) argue for the reassessment of a historical approach to classical realism. Walker (1987), especially, connects
notions of historicity and historical circumstance with notions of temporality, change, and progress in classical realism. Williams
(2004, 2005) summarizes the consequences of a misconceived classical realism by neo-realism as an
eschewed view of morality, a reduction of freedom to determinacy, an ignorance of domestic
politics, and a denied possibility of progress. 28 Furthermore, Behr (2005, Forthcoming) and Williams (1996) put
philosophical arguments against contemporary perceptions of classical realism into theoretical context by re-examining key elements
of structural neo-realism such as anarchy and state autonomy through the classical realism of Thomas Hobbes. Findings
suggest that neo-realist anarchy and autonomy are predicated on a false notion that state
autonomy automatically ensures anarchy on the international level . 29 In fact, as is an above argument
of this paper, though state autonomy ensures a lack of moral authority at the international level, it does not mean there is a lack of
authority and governance all together. As is argued by Morgenthau and emphasized by Williams (2004), politics is its own, separate
sphere in which authority and governance come in the form of power. The most alarming consequence of the misconception of
classical and traditional realism is that the modern form of realism (neo-realism and its successors) at and as the centre of
International Relations (Der Derian 1995: 4) facilitates the view that neo-realism has come to represent IR itself, a view which also
excludes all alternative viewpoints and conflicting narratives from the discourse. Overcoming this view of neo-realism and truly
understanding IR as a discourse requires an understanding of the role of pouvoir-savoir in IR historical development and theoretical
creation. First, it must be acknowledged that political realism is not a unified approach to international politics that has developed
teleologically throughout history. Realism, before the First World War, did not exist, but was a scattered mass of occasionally
overlapping philosophical and political propositions. E.H. Carr brought these overlapping propositions together in order to examine
the historical role of power in politics. Traditional realists continued Carrs narrative of power, while scientific realists broke apart to
form a new and methodologically improved narrative. Contrary to the neo-realist implication, these two
narratives have never been, and indeed cannot be, reconciled. Political realism is not one
whole viewpoint, or narrative within the IR discourse. In the wake of post-modernism and
the advent of critical approaches to IR it is possible to see that, rather than by teleology, the
creation of structural neo-realism, and the view of political realism as a unified whole, has
been shaped by the power struggles within the discipline. The mutual enwrapping, interaction, and
interdependence of power and knowledge (Gordon 1980: 233) within International Relations has meant that dominant approaches, or
the groups with power, often dictate knowledge, which has manifested itself in non-discursive forms such as political institutions. In
other words, 25 polemics have dictated accepted and dominant narrative viewpoints of reality and, in turn, accepted and dominant
narrative viewpoints of reality have come to shape the institutions and mechanisms by which international politics is conducted.
Examples of this can be seen in structural neo-realist manifestations in American Foreign Policy both economic and political
during and since the Cold War. The US, especially in the later part of the twentieth century, believed in and acted according to its own
hegemony as influenced by such notions of great powers and structural balances from structural neo-realism. A first instance of
this can be seen in the protectionist tendencies of American trade policy, and the ways in which those protectionist tendencies have
shaped international trade agreements in the GATT and, later, the WTO. As US hegemony has shaped the multilateral trade
agreements of the WTO, it has also dictated the terms of international trade and multilateralism has become merely a euphemism for
the consensual international support of the hegemonic states own interests (Sen 2003). 30 Similarly, US perceptions of hegemony and
a protectionist mentality have influenced US-UN relations since the Cold War. It has been noted that the US has been both
ambivalent and often negative toward the UN promotion of values over interests (Malone 2003). The result of such wavering
support of the UN from the US often led to a UN power vacuum, and the dependence of the UN on the US in cases of international
crisis. Perhaps no one person in IR has understood the pouvoir-savoir circumstance better than E.H. Carr, whose Twenty Years Crisis,
as this paper attempts to explain, portrays the role of power in politics as a direct consequence of
circumstance, development and understanding of societal formation throughout history . As
more recent critical, postmodern, and constructivist

Despite the belief that psychoanalysis can be used to

explain racialization such approaches result in
ethnocentric violence

Sedinger 2002 (Tracey [is associate professor of English at

the University of Northern Colorado and coordinator of
the women's studies program. ] Nation and
Identification: Psychoanalysis, Race, and Sexual
Difference, d/l: muse) //jl
Given the theoretical and analytic successes of psychoanalytic
explorations of subjectivity, a number of contemporary identity
theorists have suggested that psychoanalysis might also offer a
rigorous, nonessentialist account of how individuals become
racialized social subjects. But efforts to use psychoanalytic concepts
to theorize race have confronted a history of elision, ethnocentrism,
and theoretical chauvinism, most evident in early efforts to apply
psychoanalytic theory to non-Western cultures and therefore
buttress its claims to universality (for examples, see Jones; Rheim; Mannoni).
Insofar as psychoanalysis describes subjectivation, its canonical
texts have tended to focus primarily on sexual difference (which most
recent critics have interpreted as gender acquisition) and secondarily on sexuality, as
they are constituted and problematized within a specifically
European, bourgeois, and modern "family romance" (Butler 1993, 181; Abel,
185). Several scholars have suggested that the foreclosure of race has
actually enabled the psychoanalytic theorization of sexual
difference. 1 Consequently, many theorists have argued that psychoanalysis is too
much implicated within European, racist, and colonialist institutions ,
that, in fact, "Oedipus (the ur-paradigm of psychoanalysis) is the figure of (universal) colonization par
excellence" (Iginla, 32; see also Tate, 54-57, 59-60; Carr). Or as Mary Ann Doane has suggested,
"Psychoanalysis can . . . be seen as a quite elaborate form of
ethnographyas a writing of the ethnicity of the white Western
psyche" (211). And efforts to overcome the traditional psychoanalytic
elision of race are often marked by assumptions that implicitly
relegate racialization to a secondary moment in subject formation. 2
Given the persistence of psychoanalysis's privileging of sexual
difference, it is clear that race cannot be "added" to sexual
difference in [End Page 42] psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivation; too
often, such efforts are marred by an unexamined tendency to assign
sexual difference some priority, even if only temporal. Other efforts
to appropriate psychoanalytic discourse for explanations of
racialization have resorted to analogy, using feminist psychoanalytic explanations of
the construction of gendered identities as a model for explanations of racialized identities. The
tendency to model race on gender is evident both in those
theoretical articulations of race that depend primarily on
identification as the psychic process by which identity is secured and
subjectivity given content, as well as those that rely on
performativity. As an example, I turn to an excellent rereading of Joan Riviere's essay on the
masquerade. As both Jean Walton and Ann Pellegrini have pointed out, feminist analyses of Riviere's essay
have ignored the racial difference that figures so prominently in the fantasies that she records. Her patient,
who grew up in the American Deep South, repeatedly fantasizes that she is the "victim" of attacks by black
men: "if a negro came to attack her, she planned to defend herself by making him kiss her and make love
to her (ultimately so that she could then deliver him over to justice)" (Riviere, 37). In general, Riviere does
not remark upon the pervasiveness of racial difference, perhaps because, as Pellegrini and Walton note, in
Riviere's scheme it is little more than a trope for a more fundamental sexual difference (Walton, 226-32;
Riviere therefore views this fantasy as yet another
Pellegrini, 137-38).
example of her patient's habit of propitiating powerful men. But
given the weight of institutionalized racism in the United States, it
doesn't make much sense to compare these fantasied black men to
privileged white professionals. Walton therefore suggests a new and ingenious reading of
these fantasies, routed through Lacan's "The Meaning of the Phallus." She rejects Riviere's reading of the
attacker as yet another father figure and suggests, "By fantasizing a black man, Riviere's patient is calling
upon a figure whose relation to the phallus, as signifier of white male privilege in a racialized, patriarchal
society, is as tenuous as her own" (229). In delivering the black man up to justice, the patient offers up a
phallus in order to escape retribution. These fantasies therefore record a struggle over the phallus, which
designates symbolic positions (as opposed to biological realities), and therefore, for Walton, the exercise of
political and economic power. [End Page 43] Certainly, Walton's rereading of Riviere's analysis is both
But I am uncomfortable with viewing the phallus, in
important and salutary.
its Lacanian mode, as a signifier of "white male privilege." If, as in Riviere's
original essay, possession of the penis results from identification and implies the imaginary castration of
the other with whom the subject identifies, the penis becomes an extremely scarce commodity, while
identification is reduced to its most aggressive and assimilationist aspects. Despite her move to
a more sophisticated Lacanian reading (in which the penis is replaced by the phallus),
Walton's essay continues this trend. Kaja Silverman and Daniel Boyarin produce, I
think, similar readings of the phallus and its relation to racialization. Silverman argues that racist
discourses repeatedly define black masculinity as a "surplus" in
relation to white masculinity (e.g., the myth of the black rapist, the giant black phallus,
etc.) that "threatens to erase the distinction between him [the black
man] and the white woman" (Silverman 1996, 31). Boyarin argues that both
racial (in this case, Jewish) and sexual identity derive from a castration
analogous to circumcision, which makes the sign of racial identity,
the Jew's circumcised penis, almost identical to the sign of sexual
difference, the woman's lack of a penis (Boyarin 1995, 216-17). These efforts
confront me with two problems. First, if the phallus is the signifier of
some prior material reality (the distribution of political and economic power), not
having the phallus becomes the common term that defines a variety
of subject positionsgender and race in this case. Gender is
implicitly treated as if it were conceptually analogous to race, as if it
were one in a series of subject positions or various identities (race, class,
gender, sexual orientation, etc.) as mapped onto axes of power and oppression,
including the oppressive systems of racism, capitalism, patriarchy,
compulsory heterosexuality, etc. (de Lauretis, 2). Reading the relations
between man and woman, black and white, colonizer and colonized
as a series of binary oppositions denoted by possession of the
phallus or the lack thereof promotes an understanding of the
disparate social relations that make up the social field as organized
around a center (white male privilege) and series of hegemonized
others ("whose relation[s] to the phallus . . . [are] as tenuous as her own" [Walton, 229]). As a
consequence, sexual difference's difference from racial difference is
erased. Moreover, Walton, Pellegrini, et al. short-circuit the distance and difference between the
psychic [End Page 44] and the social, and end up foregrounding the imaginary. The phallus no longer
marks sexual difference in the psychoanalytic field, but rather social identities that reflect the distribution
Gender and race therefore become
and circulation of power in some prior Real.
something acquired through the process of identification and are
assigned positive content, which too often means that subjectivity is
reduced to its material, cultural, or social determinants (e.g., Butler 1990,
60-65; Fuss 1995, 10). But is identification really the motor behind gender and race acquisition? If the
phallus is the privileged term in the psychoanalytic paradigm, does it enable the construction of
identifications such that both gendered and racial/ethnic collectives are formed?
Lanza
 2AC
People arent particles death is real

Myers 9
(Morris Myers 9, biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, 12-10-2009,
The dead are dead,
Pharyngula,http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/the_dead_are_dead.php)//TR

But then Lanza goes on to babble about quantum physics and many-worlds theory. Although
individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling - the 'Who am I?'- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the
brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can
neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other? Consider an experiment that was
recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past.
Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It
turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the
observer, make, it is you who will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories and universes
transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting either this or that
result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it's still the same battery or agent responsible for the
projection. I have heard that first argument so many times, and it is facile and dishonest. We are not just "energy". We
are a pattern of energy and matter, a very specific and precise arrangement of molecules in movement.
That can be destroyed. When you've built a pretty sand castle and the tide comes in and washes it
away, the grains of sand are still all there, but what you've lost is the arrangement that you worked to
generate, and which you appreciated. Reducing a complex functional order to nothing but the
constituent parts is an insult to the work. If I were to walk into the Louvre and set fire to the Mona
Lisa, and afterwards take a drive down to Chartres and blow up the cathedral, would anyone defend my actions by
saying, "well, science says matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, therefore, Rabid Myers did no harm,
and we'll all just enjoy viewing the ashes and rubble from now on"? No. That's crazy talk. We also wouldn't be
arguing that the painting and the architecture have transcended this universe to enter another, nor would such a pointless claim
ameliorate our loss in this universe. The rest of his argument is quantum gobbledy-gook. The behavior
of subatomic particles is not a good guide to what to expect of the behavior of large bodies. A
photon may have no rest mass, but I can't use this fact to justify my grand new weight loss plan;
quantum tunnelling does not imply that I can ignore doors when I amble about my house. People are
not particles! We are the product of the aggregate behavior of the many particles that constitute our
bodies, and you cannot ignore the importance of these higher-order relationships when talking about
our fate.

Lanzas hypothesis of quantum consciousness is

nonsensical

Stenger 92
Victor J. Stenger, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, 1992, The Myth of
Quantum Consciousness, online:
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Quantum/QuantumConsciousness.pdf

Quantum mechanics is called on further to argue that the cosmic field, like Newtons aether, couples to the
human mind itself. In Robert Lanzas view, that field is the universal mind of all humanity - living, dead,
and unborn. Ironically, this seemingly profound association between quantum and mind is an artifact, the
consequence of unfortunate language used by Bohr, Heisenberg and the others who originally
formulated quantum mechanics. In describing the necessary interaction between the observer and what is being
observed, and how the state of a system is determined by the act of its measurement, they inadvertently left the impression that human
consciousness enters the picture to cause that state come into being. This led many who did not understand the
physics, but liked the sound of the words used to describe it, to infer a fundamental human
role in what was previously a universe that seemed to have need for neither gods nor
humanity. If Bohr and Heisenberg had spoken of measurements made by inanimate instruments rather than observers, perhaps
this strained relationship between quantum and mind would not have been drawn. For, nothing in quantum mechanics requires human
involvement. Quantum mechanics does not violate the Copernican principle that the universe cares not a whit about the human race.
Long after humanity has disappeared from the scene, matter will still undergo the
transitions that we call quantum events . The atoms in stars will radiate photons, and these
photons will be absorbed by materials that react to them . Perhaps, after we are gone, some of our
machines will remain to analyze these photons. If so, they will do so under the same rules of quantum mechanics that operate today.
Mann
 2AC
Mann admits that his criticism links to himself. Means no
chance of solving for the harms he outlines through his
criticism.

Mann 99 (Paul Mann, PhD in English Literature, focuses on Literary

criticism, a pretty smart guy overall. From the Preface of Masocriticism
ISBN: 0-7914-4031-1) // RJG Who Else?

Whatever the surface occasion of each of these essays, one would

do well to keep in mind that the frame within which all of these
matters are addressed remains masocriticism. It is not that I intend
to introduce anything so laughable as a school of masocriticsm. (In
any case, it already exists; there is no other critical school .) On the
contrary, and despite the considerable logic brought here against such a hope, my sole and
self-canceling purpose is to invent its therapy, to dissipate the
disease, to put masocriticism to end. The book has no other end
than its ending. Its undersong is thus the well-known complaint of the obsessional: If
only this thought would end and another take its place! Precisely the
lyrics of a repetition. And the notion of repetition is itself so
recurrent here as to mark the place of yet another symptom. Perhaps
then it would have been better to repeat, nothing but repeat, the same essay. So would death have
appeared.
Noble Savage
 2AC
While not ideal, use of noble savage imagery can
challenge aristocratic European ideals

Champagne 6/4/2012 (Duane, Noble Savages, Noble

Nations, d/l:
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/06/04/n
oble-savages-noble-nations-116027) //jl

Considered from our 21st century standpoint, the term noble savage
is patronizing and condescending. But if the phrase itself leaves
something to be desired, the thoughts behind it are somewhat more
complex. From at least the time that Michel de Montaigne wrote his famous essay Of Cannibals in
1580, Western intellectuals have debated the merits of so-called primitive societies. Montaigne took the
high road of moral relativism, finding just as much savagery in the conduct of his contemporary Europeans
as in that displayed by denizens of the New World. One calls barbarism whatever he is not accustomed
to, he concluded. Another early reference comes in John Drydens play The Conquest of Granada (1672),
which advocated shucking off the veneer of civilization: I am as free as Nature first made man, Ere the
From this lyrical
base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
expression there emerged a line of thought that emphasized the
social and political freedom of Indigenous Peoples and their direct
sustenance by and relations with nature. Eventually, after explorers
began encountering Indigenous Peoples in the course of their
voyages westward, the vision of the noble savage became a means
of critiquing the class-based, aristocratic and politically absolutist
states that held sway in many European countries. Philosophers began talking
about individual freedoms in terms of the political practices of the indigenous communities. Europeans
found that the consensus-based political processes of Indigenous Peoples were strikingly different from
their own system of political centralization and control of power and wealth, in which few people voted or
could wholly express their views with complete impunity. This passage from Fnelons Adventures of
Telemachus (1699) sums up that attitude admirably: We abhor that brutality which under the specious
names of ambition and glorydesolates the Earth, and destroys mankind. We prize nothing but health,
frugality, liberty, freedom, and vigor both of body and of mind; we cultivate only the love of virtue, the fear
those who defended the European political and
of the gods. By contrast,
social status quo countered with the blood-stained image of the
primitive savage. In his classic treatise Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes said that the authority
and control of absolute monarchy was essential because the life of Indigenous Peoples was solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short. People in the state of nature, Hobbes argued, were engaged in a war of all
Indigenous
against all if they did not have an absolutist monarch around to command order.
Peoples, though, had social and political governments for thousands
of years before Hobbes was born. Benjamin Franklin, who knew Indians well, observed
that Having frequent occasions to hold public councils, they have acquired great order and decency in
However, as European and American interests
conducting themselves.
turned to acquiring indigenous lands and moving farther west,
images of primitive or bloody savages became more prominent as a
means of justifying the subordination of Indian government and
appropriation of Indian land and resources. It is therefore ironic that the cultures
and political visions of Indigenous Peoples were forged well before the arrival of Europeanswho then
appropriated selected aspects of indigenous political understanding by enshrining the noble savage. As it
is, most indigenous nations did not have a tradition of surviving through political repression or economic
marginalization. There was no central cultural vision that the people sought to escape political domination.
Indigenous nations had specific territories and were usually formed through consensus-based means.
Indeed, indigenous communities generally believed that their
origins, powers, goals, and purposes came not from brute strength
or realpolitik, but from the spirit world. Indigenous nations did not
subordinate their beliefs to other nations or empires. Indigenous nations
were autonomous, had specific national spiritual beliefs, were consensus driven, and politically egalitarian.
And in those cases when an empire like that of the Aztecs arose, the subordinated nations were highly
Thus, there is more to the two words noble savage
resentful and rebellious.
than meets the eye. When Europeans regarded indigenous nations
as noble, they meant to convey that they were not subordinated to
hierarchical political rule by a centralized government, ruling class
or other nation. Little did they suspect, though, that the roots of
indigenous political autonomy lay deeply ingrained in the original
spiritual instructionsand that behind their glib moniker was a long
history and tradition of personal and national autonomy as a
spiritually ordained way of being.

Our plan functions as a reframing of responsibility

towards Native Americans necessary to solve for the
violent imperialism of status quo politics
Schwab 06
[Gabriele, Writing against memory and forgetting Literature and Medicine 25.1 (2006) 95-121]
Human beings have always silenced violent histories. Some histories, collective and personal, are so violent
we would not be able to live our daily lives if we did not at least temporarily silence them. A certain amount of splitting is conducive
to survival. Too much silence, however, becomes haunting. Abraham and Torok link the formation of the crypt with
silencing, secrecy, and the phantomatic return of the past. While the secret is intrapsychic and indicates an internal psychic splitting, it
can be collectively deployed and shared by a people or a nation. The
collective or communal silencing of
violent histories leads to the transgenerational transmission of trauma and the specter of
an involuntary repetition of cycles of violence. We know this from history, from
literature, and from trauma studies. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, for example, Hannah Arendt writes about the
"phantom world of the dark continent."5 Referring to the adventurers, gamblers, and criminals who came as luck hunters to South
Africa during the gold rush, Arendt describes them as "an inevitable residue of the capitalist system and even the representatives of an
economy that relentlessly produced a superfluity of men and capital" (189). "They were not individuals like the old adventurers," she
continues, drawing on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "they were the shadows of events with which they had nothing to do"
(189). They found the full realization of their "phantomlike-existence" in the destruction of native life: "Native life lent these ghostlike
events a seeming guarantee against all consequences because anyhow it looked to these men like a 'mere play of shadows. A play of
shadows, the dominant race could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of incomprehensible aims and needs'" (190).
When European men massacred these indigenous peoples, Arendt argues, they did so without
allowing themselves to become aware of the fact that they had committed murder. Like
Conrad's character [End Page 100] Kurtz, many of these adventurers went insane. They had buried and
silenced their guilt; they had buried and silenced their humanity. But their deeds came
back to haunt them in a vicious cycle of repetition. Arendt identifies two main political devices for
imperialist rule: race and bureaucracy. "Race . . . ," she writes, "was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any
longer exist, and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow-man and no people for another
people" (207). While
the genocide of indigenous peoples under colonial and imperial rule was
silenced in a defensive discourse of progressing civilization, it returned with a vengeance.
Race and bureaucracy were the two main devices used under fascism during the
haunting return to the heart of Europe of the violence against other humans
developed under colonial and imperial rule. The ghosts of colonial and imperial
violence propelled the Jewish holocaust, Arendt shows. In a similar vein, in Discourse on
Colonialism, Aime Cesaire talks about the rise of Nazism in Europe as a "terrific
boomerang effect."6 He argues that before the people in Europe became the victims of
Nazism, they were its accomplices, that "they tolerated that Nazism before it was
inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until
then, it [had] been applied only to non-European peoples" (36). Cesaire continues, "Yes, it would be
worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to
reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the
twentieth century that without being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler
inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon" (36, Cesaire's italics). This is as close as we can come to
the argument that, until they face the ghosts of their own history and take responsibility
for all the histories of violence committed under their rule, Europeans encrypt the ghost
of Hitler in their psychic life. Cesaire's statement also contains an argument about what Ashis Nandy calls "isomorphic
oppressions," that is, about the fact that histories of violence create psychic deformations not only in
the victims but also in the perpetrators.7 No one colonizes innocently, Cesaire asserts, and no
one colonizes with impunity either. One of the psychic deformations of the perpetrator is
that he turns himself into the very thing that he projects onto and tries to destroy in the
other: "[T]he colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the
other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends
objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I
wanted to point [End Page 101] out" (41, Cesaire's italics).8 What Cesaire calls the "boomerang effect" emerges
from a dialectics of isomorphic oppression that as a rule remains largely unacknowledged
and relegated to the cultural unconscious. Together with the ghost effect that emerges
from the silencing of traumatic memories, this boomerang effect increases the danger of
the repetition and ghostly return of violent histories. What do we have to offset such a
vicious circle of violent returns? Many victims emphasize testimony, witnessing, mourning, and reparation. Many
theories, including psychoanalysis, concur with this assumption.
NYU Rights Malthus
 2AC
Alt fails- Ophuls conflates science and interpretation in
his deep-eco

HINCHMAN 89
(Lewis and Sandra, Philosophers Clarkson University and St. Lawrence University, authors of
many books on topics including Ecology, Hegel, Hanna Arendt, etc, Deep Ecology and the
Revival of Nature, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 42, No.3, September, p201-2 )//AR

However, the environmental movement has been less successful in thinking through the implications of its own victories.
If environmen- talists could increase their influence over policy-making and eventually shape society as they wished, what
What would an ecologically sensitive world look like,
changes would ensue?
and how would its inhabitants live? These are questions that intersect with the
traditional subject matter of political philosophy. They do not suggest that environmen- talists ought to
the movement's root assumptions and the
become utopians, but merely that
ultimate ends of its program need clarification. In addressing such issues, we wish to
offer a reinterpretation of certain trains of thought already well established in environmentalist literature. We take as our
departure point the observations and experiences of a long line of sojourners in nature, who have struggled to articulate a
vision of what humans could become if only they acknowledged the accumulated wisdom of the natural world and shaped
their lives in accord with it. We argue that the appropriate conceptual system for clarifying the aims and rationale of
ecological politics is a modernized version of the classical "natural right" tradition as under- stood by Aristotle and his
successors. Of course, most defenders of strong pro-ecology positions would initially demur, since Aristotle's anthropo-
many environmental thinkers
and logocentrism are anathema to them. Nevertheless,
unwittingly have resurrected two key ideas of classical right: that there is
an "order" in nature providing normative standards for evaluating
laws, actions and policies, and that people would live in the best
possible manner, attaining the happiness appropriate for members of
their species, by embodying this natural order in not only their institutions,
but their whole existence. A fusion of ecological and classical
natural right arguments, however, can succeed only if important
changes are made in both . The classical position must be shorn of its hierarchical
component, in light of which nature, and even "inferior" people, are subjected to the rule of "rational" man.
And environmentalists , for their part, must distinguish more clearly
between the descriptive-scientific and the interpretive-ethical
components of their theories. The so-called "Deep Ecologists" ' .
(..footnote #1 here..) Determining who should or should not be considered a Deep Ecologist is
admittedly a difficult task.
Deep Ecology, after all, is not a formal organization to which one applies
is instead a
for membership and in which orthodoxy and apostasy can be sharply defined; it
philosophical orientation shared by persons of many different
degrees of radicalism, some of whom might even reject the Deep
Ecology label as the best shorthand description of their views.
Nevertheless, one can identify a number of prominent
environmentalists as sympathetic to the Deep Ecological viewpoint .
Among academics , the movement has attracted representatives from many disciplines:
profssional philosophers (e.g., Arne Naess, Morris Berman, George Sessions, and in some moods William Leiss),

social scientists (Lynn White, Jr., William Ophuls , E. F. Schumacher), and natural scientists
(Amory Lovins, Rene Dubos, and Barry Commoner). Deep Ecological principles also have been embraced by journalists
and essayists (Kirkpatrick Sale, Edward Abbey, Jeremy Rifkin), naturalists (Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez), poets (Gary Snyder,
Robinson Jeffers), organic farmers (Wendell Berry), and political theoreticians and activists (including militant supporters of
"ecoguerilla" organizations like Greenpeace and Earth Firstl, and Green Party members and sympathizers the world over).
(.. end footnote) have traveled farthest toward the natural right
position.

The desire to leave nature alone is part of a nostalgic

longing for a nonexistent mythic past without human
interference

Heller 99
Chaia, faculty member of the Institute for Social Ecology, Ecology of Everyday Life,
googlebooks

Ecological awareness of the planet peaked in 1972 when astronauts first photographed the planet, revealing thick furrows of smog
encasing a blue and green ball. The world is dying', became the common cry as the planet, personified as 'Mother Earth',
captured national, sentimental attention. Nature became rendered as a victimized woman, a Madonna-like
angel to be idealized, protected, and 'saved' from society's inability to restrain itself. Decades
later, we still witness popular expressions of the desire to protect 'nature'. As we observe each April on Earth Day,
politicians, corporate agents, and environmentalists take their annual leap into the
romantic, ecological drama, becoming 'eco-knights' ready to save helpless "lady nature'
from the dragon of human irresponsibility. The cult of romantic love, which emerged first in the twelfth century
poetry of the French troubadours of Longuedoc, still provides a cauldron of images and metaphors for today's depictions of nature.1
Contemporary Western representations of 'mother nature' emerged out of this "cult of the
romantic" tradition based on a dialectic between an heroic savior and an ideal lover. Indeed, the
metaphors and myths used to discuss ecological problems often find their origins within romantic literature. Yet despite its association
with love, romanticism often shows its cool side when it surfaces within ecological discourse . While
often expressing a desire to protect 'mother nature', it may ignore the social and political struggles of marginalized peoples. In
particular, romantic ecology fails to challenge the ideologies and institutions of social domination that legitimize social injustice.
Instead of challenging institutions and ideologies of domination within society in general, romantic ecology too often points
its sword toward abstract dragons such as 'human nature', 'technology', or 'western
civilization', all of which are held responsible for slaying "Lady Nature.*' In turn, romantic
ecology often veils a theme of animosity toward marginalized groups under a silk cloak of
idealism, protection, and a promise of self-constraint . It not only refuses to make social
liberation a priority, but in some cases, actually holds the oppressed responsible for the
destruction of the natural world.

The impact is the most horrible racist atrocities of human

history

Bookchin 88
(Murray, Newsletter of the Green Program Project A LEFT GREEN PUBLICATION The
Population Myth 1)
The"populationproblem"hasaPhoenixlikeexistence:itrisesfromtheashesatleast
everygenerationandsometimeseverydecadeorso.Thepropheciesare
usually
thesamenamely,that
humanbeingsarepopulatingtheearthin"unprecedentednumbers
"and"
devouring"
its
resourceslikealocustplague.InthedaysoftheIndustrialRevolution,ThomasMalthus,acravenEnglishparson,
formulatedhisnotorious"lawofpopulation"whichassertsthatwhilefoodsuppliesexpandonlyarithmetically,populationsoars
geometrically.Onlybywars,famines,anddisease(Malthusessentiallyargued)cana"balance"bestruck
betweenpopulationandfood supplies
.Malthusdidnotmeanthistobeanargumenttofosterhumanwelfare;itwas
anunfeelingjustificationfor
theinhuman
miseries
inflictedonthemassofEnglishpeople
bylandgrabbing
aristocratsandexploitative"
industrialists."Truetothemeanspiritedatmosphereof
thetimes,Malthusopposedattemptstoalleviatepovertybecausetheywould remove
the
limits
imposedon"populationgrowth"byprolongingthelivesofthepoor.Malthus'"law"entered
intoDarwin'sexplanationofevolutionandreemergedfrombiologyas"socialDarwinism
."Propoundedvigorously
intheU.S.andEnglandagenerationlater,thistheoryreducedsocietytoa"jungle,"ineffect,inwhicha"lawofsurvivalofthefittest"
justifiedthewantonplunderingoftheworldbythewealthyorthe"fittest,"whilethelaboringclasses,dispossessedfarmers,and
ThirdWorld"savages"werereducedtopenury,presumablybecausetheywere"unfit"to
survive.Thearroganceofbankers,industrialists,andcolonialistsinthe"GildedAge"attheturnofthecenturywhodinedonlavish
dishes,whilestarvedbodieswerecollectedregularlyinthecitystreetsofthewesternworld all
testifiedtoaharshclasssystemthatinvoked"naturallaw"tojustifytheopulenceenjoyed
bytherulingfewandthehungersufferedbytheruledmany.Barelyagenerationlater,Malthusianism
acquiredanexplicitlyracistcharacter.Duringtheearlytwenties,when"AngloSaxon"racismpeakedintheU.S.against"darker"
peopleslikeItalians,Jews,andsocalled"EasternEuropeans"thenotionof"biologicalinferiority"ledtoexplicitlyexclusionaryim
imigrationlawsthatfavored"northernEuropeans"overother,presumably"subhuman"peoples.Malthusianism,nowprefixedwitha
"neo"torenderitmorecontemporary,thoroughlypermeatedthislegislation.PopulationintheU.S.hadtobe"controlled"and
American"cultural"(read:racial)purityhadtoberescuedbeitfromthe"YellowPeril"ofAsiaorthe"DarkPeril"oftheLatinand
Semiticworlds.Nazismdidnothavetoinventits
racialimageryofsturdy"Aryans
"whoare
beleagueredby"subhuman"darkpeople,particularlyJews.Hitlersawhimselfasthe
protectorofa"northernEuropeanculture"from"Hebraicsuperstitions, "tousethejuicylanguage
ofacontemporarywellknownArizonawritera"cultural"issuethatwasriddledbyfascistsociobiology.FromHitler's
"northernEuropean"viewpoint,Europewas"overpopulated"andthecontinent'sethnic
groupshadtobesiftedoutaccordingtotheirracialbackground.Hencethegaschambers and
crematoriumsofAuschwitz,theexecutionsquadsthatfollowedtheGermanarmyinto
Russiainthesummerof1941,andthesystematicandmechanizedslaughter
ofmillionsina
spanofthreeorfouryears.
 1AR NYU Malthus: Growth S!
Even if consumerism was the cause of environmental
destruction renouncing it gives up on innovation and
causes extinction
Land 9 PhD, philosopher and economist at the Thunen Institute in Bollewick. (Rainer, A
New Paradigm: The New Deal of the 1930s,
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/10/30/18627196.php)

Renouncing on economic development would not be a way out because it would sanction the
status quo. The environmental problems existing today and unsolvable without another type of industry will
continue and cause the death of todays humanity . Renouncing on economic development would
mean renouncing on the future technologies with which environmental destruction could be
avoided and environmental problems at least partly repaired. Renouncing on growth urged again and again would also not be a
solution. The current path of population growth will lead to a stabilization of the world population at
nine to ten billion people by 2050 (currently seven billion). Renouncing on increased production of food, consumer goods
and services meant less and less had to be consumed per capital year after year. Thus people of developed countries must lose more
and more so people in the third world can win. At the end everyone suffers distress. The only alternative is a new combination of
development and growth, an economic development where growing production goes along with declining resource consumption
(energy, raw materials and emissions) and environmentally compatible industry arises. Renouncing on development and
renouncing on growth would be fatal like growth without development or development without growth. The
alternative is another path of economic development, growth based on another principle of
economic development and invention and extension of a new type of industry. If such a change of
direction occurs, a greater investment boom and development push would occur than the boom after the Second World War that led to
the genesis of Fordist participation capitalism.
Psychoanalysis
 2AC
Psychoanalysis cant explain international politics

Sharpe 10 (lecturer, philosophy and psychoanalytic studies, and Goucher, senior

lecturer, literary and psychoanalytic studies Deakin University (Matthew and Geoff, iek and
Politics: An Introduction, p. 182 185, Figure 1.5 included) //TR

Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms? It is remarkable that, for all the criticisms of ieks political Romanticism, no one
has argued that the ultra- extremism of ieks political position might reflect his untenable attempt to
shape his model for political action on the curative final moment in clinical psychoanalysis.
The differences between these two realms, listed in Figure 5.1, are nearly too many and
too great to restate which has perhaps caused the theoretical oversight. The key thing is
this. Lacans notion of traversing the fantasy involves the radical transformation of peoples
subjective structure: a refounding of their most elementary beliefs about themselves, the world, and sexual
difference. This is undertaken in the security of the clinic, on the basis of the analysands voluntary desire to overcome
their inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties. As a clinical and existential process, it has its own independent importance and authenticity.
The analysands, in transforming their subjective world, change the way they regard the objective, shared
social reality outside the clinic. But they do not transform the world. The political relevance of
the clinic can only be (a) as a supporting moment in ideology critique or (b) as a fully- fl edged model of politics, provided that
the political subject and its social object are ultimately identical. Option (b), ieks option, rests on the idea, not only of a
subject who becomes who he is only through his (mis) recognition of the objective sociopolitical order, but whose
traversal of the fantasy is immediately identical with his transformation of the socio- political
system or Other. Hence, according to iek, we can analyse the institutional embodiments of this Other using psychoanalytic
categories. In Chapter 4, we saw ieks resulting elision of the distinction between the (subjective) Ego Ideal and the (objective)
Symbolic Order. This leads him to analyse our entire culture as a single subjectobject, whose
perverse (or perhaps even psychotic) structure is expressed in every manifestation of contemporary life. ieks decisive political-
theoretic errors, one substantive and the other methodological, are different (see Figure 5.1) The substantive
problem is to equate any political change worth the name with the total change of
the subjectobject that is, today, global capitalism. This is a type of change that can only mean equating politics with
violent regime change, and ultimately embracing dictatorial government, as iek now frankly avows (IDLC 41219). We have seen
that the ultra- political form of ieks criticism of everyone else, the theoretical Left and the wider politics, is that
no one is sufficiently radical for him even, we will discover, Chairman Mao. We now see that this is because
ieks model of politics proper is modelled on a pre- critical analogy with the total transformation of a
subjects entire subjective structure, at the end of the talking cure. For what could the
concrete consequences of this governing analogy be? We have seen that iek equates the individual fantasy with the
collective identity of an entire people. The social fantasy, he says, structures the regimes inherent transgressions: at
once subjects habitual ways of living the letter of the law, and the regimes myths of origin and of identity. If political action
is modelled on the Lacanian cure, it must involve the complete traversal in Hegels terms, the
abstract versus the determinate negation of all these lived myths, practices and habits. Politics must involve the periodic
founding of entire new subjectobjects. Providing the model for this set of ideas, the fi rst iekian political subject was Schellings
divided God, who gave birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time (IDLC 153; OB 1448). But can the
political theorist reasonably hope or expect that subjects will simply give up on all their
inherited ways, myths and beliefs, all in one world- creating moment? And can they be legitimately
asked or expected to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they will only retrospectively see, after they have acceded to the
Great Leap Forward? And if they do not for iek laments that today subjects are politically disengaged in unprecedented
ways what means can the theorist and his allies use to move them to do so?
No Impact- The violence associated with the lack is
created by the blind assumption that air is empty which
ignores that we are in constant connection through the
movement of air, light, and particles

Oliver 1
(Kelly Oliver- Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at SUNY Stony Brook, where she is
currently Chair of the Philosophy Department, the look of love hypatia vol 16 no. 3)//TR

What makes this transition from vision to visions, from eye to I, possible? Why does this visible physical image in the mirror give rise
to an invisible psychic image? I want to argue that, for Lacan, it is the empty space or gap between the body
of the infant and its mirror image that opens up the space of visions or the inner world . Lacan
maintains that the infant's ego or sense of agency is developed in relation to its mirror image, which sets up the ideal ego (Lacan
1977b, 2). The discrepancy between the ideal and reality leaves the subject with an inevitable
sense of alienation and frustration. This discrepancy is the result of the fact that the image is always elsewhere, cut off
from the infant's body. This cut prefigures Lacan's insistence that the real is impossible or forever
cut off from the realm of images or symbols (1977a, 276-67). At a fundamental level, however, this split
between the real and the imaginary or symbolic returns to the empty space between body
and image, which produces the first sense of alienation in the mirror stage. In a sense, by imagining the empty space
between the infant and the mirror, it seems that Lacan's analysis creates the very split between the
inner and outer worlds that his theory attempts to reconnect with the mirror stage as threshold. If Lacan's
analysis of the misrecognition in the mirror stage is dependent upon the gap or empty space between the body and its image, this is
because the gap or empty space is seen as a void or abyss that permanently separates "us"
from our "object," even if this object is our own image or another self-consciousness. Lacan's analysis of misrecognition
(which is always the flip side of recognition--doesn't misrecognition suppose that something could be recognized but isn't?) supposes
that we are fundamentally separated from others and objects because of the empty physical space between us, which can only be
bridged by vision (1977b, 1-6). Yet it is the presupposition that vision operates across distance and
separation that creates this gap in the first place. So, vision is imagined as a sense that inaugurates an abyss,
which is in fact created by the faulty presupposition that vision traverses empty space. Space, after all, is not empty and
there is no physical gap between the infant and his mirror image. The infant, the mirror,
and his image inhabit the same world of air, light, heat, and the continual movement of
matter that keeps them in constant connection.

Perm do both: Spanos argues dissolving disciplinary

differences in loving strife maximizes critical collaborative
politics that respond to instrumentalist policymaking
Spanos 8 (William, Distinguished Professor of Literature/Baller, American Exceptionalism
in the Age of Globalization-The Spector of Vietnam, p. 248-249//TR)

The purpose of this book, both the theoretical chapters and those that interpret literary texts about
the Vietnam War, has not only been to identify and name this anxiety-
provoking specter, but also to retrieve from the oblivion to which, in
the aftermath of 9/11, the monumentalist dominant culture in
America has attempted, finally in vain, to bury it. More precisely,
its purpose has been to bring this wars irresistible spectrality to
corporeal presence in behalf of soliciting (in the Derridian sense of the word) the
second Bush administrations representation and justification of its war on
terrorand its unrelenting will, as the president insistently puts this narratological structure of
attitude, to stay the course in the face of a situation that is increasingly coming to resemble the
I have relied heavily on certain fundamental
Vietnam quagmire.To achieve this end,
aspects of the destructuring thought of a number of poststructuralist
theorists, above all Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Louis
Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Gayatri Spivak, and
Edward Said. But this reliance on poststructuralist theory, it needs to be emphasized, has been
strategically heretical. Rather than attending meticulously to the differences
that distinguish one theory from another, as both the theorists and their
commentators have done more or less universally and disablinglyI have attended
primarily to what they have in common and to what I take to be the
epochal historical circumstancesthe more or less simultaneous coming to the end
(fulfillment and demise, in the sense of decentering) of philosophy and imperialismthat contributed to
that commonality. And this is not only because the obsessive practice of
distinguishing has left the disciplinary (compartmentalizing)
structure of knowledge production of modernitythe alienating mechanism of
divide and conquerintact and, in so doing, has minimized its political
effectivity, if not, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and, in a different way, Timothy
Brennan, have claimed, rendered these theories complicitous with the very
regime of truth they have wanted to oppose . It is also, and primarily,
because such attention to the relationality of the various
perspectives of poststructuralist theory, in collapsing the arbitrarily
imposed boundaries between the sites of knowledge production
(the disciplines), reveals beingand its representationsto be an indissoluble
continuum, that, however unevenly at any particular historical
conjuncture, ranges from being as such (the ontological), the subject (the
epistemological), and the ecos (the biological), through gender identities and
relations, the family, race, and class, to economic, cultural, military,
social, domestic political, and international or global formations . This
multiple critical orientation, it has seemed to me, renders visible, in a way
that no disciplinary perspective can, the kind of realities that the
gaze of the empirical or instrumentalist problematic of the political
leaders who decided to intervene in Vietnam, the bureaucrats in the
Pentagon who planned the war, the military and cultural missions
that conducted it, were blind to and, despite the self-destruction of this gaze in that
epochal decade, the American political leaders who decided to undertake
preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, the bureaucrats
who have envisioned and planned them, and the military and
cultural missions that are executing them continue to be blind to. In
attempting to achieve my purpose in this book, I have relied on what Edward Said[s] long ago
called a secular critical approach to the representations of the Vietnam War during and after its non-
a worldly criticism that
ending endif by secular criticism he means, as I think he does,
not only rejects a religious but also an anthropological transcendental
signified or natural supernaturalism, not only a theo-logos, but an
anthropo-logos, if, that is, his well-known criticism of poststructuralist
theory is intended, not as a rejection, but as a manifestation of the betrayal of its
initial collaborative critical possibilities.

Only the perm solves- Engaging one facet of inequality or

oppression only replicates the harm- only the multiple
approach of the perm can solve the hegemonic modes of
thinking
Spanos, (William V., [Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton] The Question
of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the
Shadow of Metaphysics, Boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) Pg. 169)//GUY

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that
belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being , this
reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world picture ,
which is to say, in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
the
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand
utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is
not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics, or patriarchy, or
racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued independently remain
trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant discourse. In
the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent manifestations
the interregnum, rather,
of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to
prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending
Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-
ended agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all
those postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil
incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be
conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is to say on all self-
righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the physical and
spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.

Recognizing our guilt through our desire to follow a moral

law is the best way to act in accordance with
psychoanalytical principles

Sinthome 6/2006 [Professor/Psychoanalyst ] Lacanian

Ethics and the Superego, d/l: larval-subjects.

Lacan is
In seminar 7 Lacan raises the question of how guilt should be dealt with in the clinical setting.
clear in emphasizing that guilt should neither be ignored, nor should
the analyst seek to persuade the analysand that she is not really
guilt. According to Lacan, if the analysand feels guilt, experiences guilt, or
acts in such a way as to indicate unconscious guilt or designs to be punished
and lose the very things that are precious to oneself, then this is because the
analysand is guilty. The whole problem is to discover what, precisely, the
analysand is guilty of. In point of fact, this guilt is not irrational at all
from the Lacanian perspective, but refers to something real
ethically. Part of analysis consists in determining what this infraction refers to. Of what is the
analysand guilty? The analysand herself is often perplexed by her guilt. She feels guilty all the time, yet
cannot see that she's done anything wrong. She experiences guilt even over her thoughts, without acting
on these thoughts. An examination of the actual actions she's doing in the present seem to do little good in
alleviating the feelings of guilt and self-punishing actions, as these events and situations in the present are
only occasions for satisfying one's guilt, they are not the cause of one's guilt. The mental gymnastics occur
A somewhat standard understanding of guilt
in relation to Lacan's answer to this question.
assumes that we experience guilt precisely when we have desires or engage
in acts that are contrary to the moral law. Thus, for instance, this view would suggest that
the woman feels guilty because, perhaps, she has fantasies of killing her boss that are contrary to the
moral teachings according to which she was raised. If she could simply get rid of these thoughts, then she
would no longer experience guilt. Under a cereal box reading of Freud, the superego
would be the moral agency irrationally commanding that we obey certain
moral prohibitions, producing guilt even when we merely think thoughts
contrary to the moral law. Analysis would then consist in progressively coming to recognize the
irrationality of this superego, so as to escape its sadistically demanding nature. Nothing could be
more contrary to this cereal box version of psychoanalysis that
Lacan's conception of guilt and the superego. Where the cereal box
version of psychoanalysis claims that we experience guilt through
the real or imagined violation of the moral law, Lacan argues that,
"From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is
having given ground relative to one's desire" continued on next page
continued from previous page (Seminar 7, 319). If the man leaves the webpage linked to pornography
open in his workplace office where everyone and anyone can see it, then this is indicative of a desire for
If the woman experiences
punishment signifying that somehow he has given way on his desire.
others as judging her and wanting to reject her, then this is a trace of guilt
indicating that she has given way on her desire. If one constantly
experiences persecutory thoughts informing one how awful he is,
how horrible he is, how he's doomed to failure, and so on, then
these are indications that one has given ground on one's desire. From
the popular psychoanalytic perspective the solution might seem to be one
simply of ignoring these irrational thoughts. However, as Freud taught, the
repressed is always accompanied by a return of the repressed. If I ignore
these thoughts, they return as experiences of others persecuting
and judging me, or in self-destructive actions unconsciously
designed to bring me the punishment called for by the betrayal of
my desire. We can thus see how far Lacan is from the notion that
guilt is a product of having desires contrary to the moral law. In
point of fact, it is the moral law itself that produces guilt by leading
us to give ground relative to our desire. Yet paradoxically, desire
itself is the moral law. Thus, for instance, Antigone follows her
desire in burying her brother and going to her own death, i.e.,
following the moral law.

Psychoanalysis supports heterosexism and patriarchal

violence

Gardiner 1992 (Judith [Departments of English and

Women's Studies University of Illinois at Chicago]
Review: Psychoanalysis and Feminism: An American
Humanist's View, Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2. (Winter, 1992),
pp. 437-454, d/l: jstor)

Not all feminists were convinced that psychoanalysis could be rehabilitated. The
antipsychoanalytic views Mitchell decried are still prominent, especially among
radical feminists; they condemn its theory and despise its practice, seeing it as part
of the ideological apparatus that oppresses women. Moreover, they claim that it
manipulates and deprecates women and reinforces heterosexuality and patriarchy.
Mary Daly gleefully demonstrates that the word "therapist" can be read as "the/
rapist," and she blames psychoanalysts for "blaming the mother" for everyone else's
problems.' Andrea Dworkin calls Freud a pornographer: in "real life" and in Freudian
theory, she claims, "men use the penis to deliver death to women who are, literally,
in their genitals, dirt to the men."6 This literalism reads metaphors as facts and
opposes the psycho-analytic view of fantasy as a permanent and powerful
component of adult life. Radical feminists applaud psychoanalytic rebels such as
Jeffrey Masson who denounce Freud for giving up his early conviction that neurotic
women had been sexually abused and replacing it with a theory based on the girls'
unconscious incestuous fantasies.'

Heterosexism results in violence and war

Tatchell 5/26/1999 (Peter [Journalist & Gay Activist]

Homophobia As a Weapon of War, Outcast No 2, d/l:
http://www.petertatchell.net/international/homophobia.ht
m)
the cultural war against queers - and between
The military war against Slobodan Milosevic may be over, but
queers continues. In the nations of the former Yugoslavia, peace for lesbian and gay people
remains, at best, ambiguous and uncertain, both politically and personally. Sex, love and
friendship between Serbs, Kosovars, Bosnians and Croats is, to say the least, difficult - even dangerous. Ethnic hatred still
runs deep and the memory of recent genocide lingers vividly. Gay life in the Balkans is not as we, in Britain, know it.
Guns are more common than condoms. Lovers may be military torturers. Cruising is a
minefield of ethnic animosity and violence, When Kosovar and Bosnian Muslims are circumcised
and Serbs are not, picking up the wrong man can have frightening consequences. In his book, Serbian Diaries (GMP,
1996), a gay Belgrade university lecturer, writing under the pseudonym Boris Davidovich, tells the tale of a friend, Branko, who was nearly
murdered by a member of the Serb special forces. During the conflict in Bosnia, Branko met the soldier while visiting his brother at the
Belgrade Army Hospital. After wild, passionate sex, the Serb special forces agent suddenly noticed Branko was circumcised and went beserk.
Grabbing a gun from under the pillow, he put it to Branko's head and threatened to blow out his brains, accusing him of being "Muslim scum".
It was only Branko's quick-witted ability to convince him otherwise that saved his life - such are the perils of gay sex in the fratricidal strife of
the jingoistic, hysterical patriotism
the ex-Yugoslavia. As we saw on the battlefields of Kosovo - and previously Bosnia
of wartime can turn routine homophobia into something even more sinister and evil.
The Balkan bloodbath was no exception. Home-sadism became a weapon of war.
While the rape of women was widely reported in the press, the rape of male prisoners
passed almost without mention. Why?
The widespread sex abuse of men has been publicly acknowledged by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson. What
motivated journalists to suppress information about these monstrous sex crimes? The media did, after all, report every other inhumanity with
a reasonable degree of honesty and impartiality.
Accounts collected by UN observers from ethnic Albanian refugees and former detainees confirm that many male prisoners were raped at gun-
point and sexually tortured under interrogation by Serb forces in Kosovo. In some conquered villages, Serb soldiers rounded up the men and
boys, stripped them naked, and forced the boys to fellate their fathers, and the fathers to sodomise their sons. These are the rarley reported
homophobic humiliations of the terror in the Balkans. The Belgrade-based gay rights movements, Arcadia and the Campaign Against
Homophobia, say the Nato bombing strengthened Serbian nationalism, which is notorious for its strong streak of anti-gay machismo. There
is no place for queers in the nationalist vision. Homosexuals are dismissed from the Yugoslav
armed forces on the grounds of "abnormality". Serbia's patriotic hero is the virile, masculine soldier defending his family and homeland.
Those perceived to be weak, effeminate and unmanly are vilified as traitors and fifth
columnists. During the war, some Serb television stations denounced homosexuality as a "perversion" and "disorder" that is alien to
Serbian culture, accusing gays of subverting national defence. Western governments, such as the British, were condemned by sections of the
manipulation of anti-
state-controlled press as "homosexual", and homosexuality was caricatured as a "western disease". This
gay sentiment for propaganda purposes led to a sharp rise in homophobic violence
and police harassment. "Anyone who does not fit the standard model of the strong
man defending his native land until the last drop of blood, is a possible victim of
discrimination, ranging from verbal insults to physical violence and even murder",
according to Dusan Maljkovic, a 23 year old gay activist in Belgrade. He reports police raids on gay venues and cruising places, and the
compilation of police files on known or suspected homosexuals. Even worse, the Serbian version of skinhead gangs - the dizelasi - are
targeting gays in their violent attacks on "social decadence". Homophobia is also a political weapon. The Civic
Alliance of Serbia is the only movement that has spoken out in support of lesbian and gay human rights. Most other parties and factions use
allegations of homosexuality to discredit their opponents. Anti-war students have denounced President Slobodan Milosevic with the chant
"Slobo is a faggot". The rightist deputy prime minister, Vojislav Seselj, is pilloried by left- wingers as the "Serbian Ernst Rohm" (a reference to
Extreme nationalist-fascist parties advocate the "extermination" of gays
the gay Nazi chief).
to cure the "homosexual sickness". During the western bombing raids, anti-Nato
demonstrators in Belgrade carried placards with the slogans: "Clinton, Blair &
Schroeder = Fags".
Psychoanalysis conflation of universal subjecthood with
the subjecthood of excluded bodies ignores other forms of
difference that have been violently arbitrated

Carr 1998 (Brian [President, Behavioral Health Associates;

Director, Bio-Behavioral Medicine Service, St. Mary of the
Plains Hospital, Lubbock, Texas] At the Thresholds of the
"Human": Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Replication of
Imperial Memory, Cultural Critique, No. 39. (Spring,
1998), pp. 119-150)

We must be more nuanced here about the conditions of livability: exclusion from the
scene of subjecthood is not always on the order of death proper. Symbolic
designification has more regularly, in its more historical and colonial dimensions,
installed a condition of what Orlando Patterson, referring to African American slaves
in the U.S., calls "social death." Patterson's paradoxical framing of the "socially dead"
allows us to think more critically in the context of psychoanalysis, specifically about
how "death" operates within the social and how excluded bodies are rendered dead
at the level of sociosymbolic signification. Here, evacuation from a symbolics of
bourgeois subjecthood (and its attendant logic of sexual difference) marks a
"condition" not analogous to an always nostalgic story about the imaginary "stuff" of
a presymbolic subject or a body prior to the enjoining governance of phallic
differentiation. That is, bodies excluded from subjecthood in the context of colonial
rule should not be conflated with the psychoanalytic notion of the sexually
undifferentiated pre-subject, ones whose (pre)history can never be rescued.
It is the conflation of these two types of exclusion-and the temporal/historical logics
they each marshal-which has rendered the question of race and psychoanalysis so
seemingly impossible. As told from a dehistoricized psychoanalysis, sexual difference
qualifies the bourgeois human for life and failure to be successfully interpellated
within its logic of differentiation results in a certain kind of impossibility for linguistic
and social survival. However, the historicity of the human is a weighty factor, one
that violently harbors a set of derelictions whose ability for survival has not always
been governed directly on the order of sexual difference. Here, the exclusion of the
subaltern from the domain of the human-a process which, as Spillers suggests,
necessitates an "ungendering" at the level of bodily integrity-is not the same as the
foreclosure within the human subject of which psychoanalytic theory speaks. We
have a different question of degree or order here. At the site of the first type of
exclusion, there exists a life, regardless of its systematic erasure as a subject,
whereas at the other we have the presymbolic "nothingness" accessed only from the
vantage of a particular subject already made and for which, as Butler rightly
suggests, we can have no accurate account. To live the categorical do-main of an
always politically produced site of symbolic unlivability is to occupy in social time and
place that supposed slot of unimaginable and impossible existence whose
foundational "lack" is not on the same order as that of "the" subject.
Where psychoanalysis has met its failure in thinking about race has been precisely
with respect to the subaltern as that subject whose very erasure constitutes its only
access to elite cultural intelligibility. The subaltern in the United States-in this case
the African American captive under slavery-is a body systematically de-signified
within the sociosymbolic structure of sexual difference and, thus, a body converted
and convertible to captive "flesh." It becomes almost impossible here to speak of a
condition of subalternity without speaking as if one is designating a human subject in
its sexually differentiated terms, precisely because the register of the subject is only
directly legible as sexed. Joining the notion of the Subaltern Studies model of the
subaltern with that of Spillers's notion of a captive "ungendering," we confront the
paradox of linguistic subjecthood at its social limit in U.S. history: how to speak of a
"body," a "subject," or a "human" when these are all categorically destroyed in/as the
condition of the slave's "degendered" subalternity?

Infighting within sects of psychoanalysis recreate

polarized debates

Gardiner 1992 (Judith [Departments of English and

Women's Studies University of Illinois at Chicago]
Review: Psychoanalysis and Feminism: An American
Humanist's View, Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2. (Winter, 1992),
pp. 437-454, d/l: jstor)

Psychoanalytic theorists from various camps denounce one another as

essentialist or biologistic while asserting that their own theories are more
cultural. Such arguments are unnecessarily polarized. Biological facts, too,
are amenable to social change, and causes do not require isomorphic
solutions: my social spectacles easily remedy my biological myopia. De-
fending her theories, Chodorow differentiates them from orthodox Freudianism with
its "normatively generated, essentialist, and absolutist views of gender and sexuality"
(Chodorow, 195). For Toril Moi, how-ever, Chodorow's "deep-seated cultural (as
opposed to biological) essentialism reintroduces age-old patriarchal beliefs in a
specific female nature, ... fails to theorize the difficult construction of subjectivity and
sexual difference, . . . and ends up idealizing the pre-oedipal mother-child relationship
without being able to offer a coherent account of the role of the father, the Law, or
repression in the construction of the subject."16 In these debates, terms often
define outcomes: for example, "the Law" of the father belongs to those who
"theorize" it, and others may not offer a "coherent account" of concepts
they do not adopt. The advantage of Lacanian theory for feminists, its apologists
propose, is that it "allows feminists to affirm the bisexuality of all speaking subjects . .
. or to de-construct the notions of male and female altogether" since such notions no
longer depend on a biological base." Conversely, Chodorow deprecates Lacanian
theory as a "logical argument about the structure of language" impervious to
empirical evidence (190). Flax warns that "La-can's texts are best read as a
phenomenology of what it is like to be confined within the narcissist's universe" (93),
whereas she thinks culture is "masculine, not as the effect of language but as the
consequence of actual power relations" (103). Sprengnether adds that the Lacanians
locate the feminine in a position of subversion, but one always within "a larger
structure of containment" (195).

Lacans psychoanalytic nihilism destroys its potential for

change

Stimmel 2004 (Barbara Book Reviews: Review of The

Dead Mother: The Work of Andr Green, Division of
Psychoanalysis APA, d/l:
http://www.division39.org/pub_reviews_detail.php?
book_id=82)
He believed that something had to be done given that psychoanalysis was heavily
under the sway of American ego psychology with its emphasis on adaptation. Green
offered a focused rebuttal, by replenishing our appreciation of the Freudian
imperatives of drives, negation, sexuality, and object relationships. The biological
roots of the mind are the underpinnings of Greens work as he repeatedly confronts
the restrictions of narrowing schools of thought, especially the destructive impact of
Lacans psychoanalytic nihilism, which threaten to ignore these sina qua non of
Freudian psychoanalysis. Yet all the while, Green responds to and capitalizes on
emerging ideas as dialectical mechanisms for his own Freudian elaborations. Two
English (rather than French!) analysts are essential mainstays of these developments
Bion and Winnicott.

Psychoanalysis is unable to deal with race due to its

privileging of sexual difference

Carr 1998 (Brian [President, Behavioral Health Associates;

Director, Bio-Behavioral Medicine Service, St. Mary of the
Plains Hospital, Lubbock, Texas] At the Thresholds of the
"Human": Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Replication of
Imperial Memory, Cultural Critique, No. 39. (Spring,
1998), pp. 119-150)

Many critics are skeptical of the methodological deployment of psychoanalysis in a

racial frame, claiming that inasmuch as psychoanalysis takes sexual difference as the
primary figuration of any and all difference it remains unequipped to theorize race.5
In part, such a claim is absolutely true. After all, it is Freud who says the "contrast"
between "masculine" and "feminine" "dispositions" "has a more decisive influence
than any other upon the shaping of human life" (Three Essays 85). But it is the
historicity of Freud's designation "human life" which are my concern as I theorize the
relations between a psychoanalytic machinery of sexual difference (through which
the bourgeois human is supposedly made) and the systematically dehumanized un-
subject. As Freud's gesture betrays, psychoanalysis is concerned with the "shaping of
human life," not with the colonial projects by which bodies are systematically
dehumanized. And though many critics would defend psychoanalysis for its antihumanist tendencies-
claiming that psychoanalysis is not about the primacy of the human at all inasmuch as it, particularly in its
Lacanian register, refuses to grant the subject its unfettered autonomy -we might do well to
question how it is that an antihumanist project systematically refuses to think the
historically dehumanized.6 This tension between an amnesiac antihumanism and the
racially dehumanized marks a set of internal fractures within psychoanalysis itself,
exposing an exclusionary formulation of racial difference at the center of a
psychoanalytic explanatory logic.

The sense of yearning and desire is inherent in any action

or politics, proving the K cant solve our plan

Figlio 04 (Karl [professor and director at the center of

psychoanalytic studies at the university of essex]
Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Self-Awareness of
Society, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 9, 87-104)
The yearning for community needs to be sustained in a situation of plurality.
But individuals and societies get mired in frustration, which pushes for action.
Sectors crystallize out, which facilitates action and the projective restoration
of narcissim. Plurality goes by the board. This process, however, is inherent
in any action. We need, therefore to shift our view from worrying about
imperfections in the political process or in the ethical self-awareness of a
society, to the process of restoration. The individual, a society, a political
process, either succumb to the drive for narcissistic perfrection or strive to
make things better, as in Bions narcissism vs social-ism (Bion, 1962, p. 118).

Psychoanalysis maintains hegemonic imperatives that

replicate colonial difference

Carr 1998 (Brian [President, Behavioral Health Associates;

Director, Bio-Behavioral Medicine Service, St. Mary of the
Plains Hospital, Lubbock, Texas] At the Thresholds of the
"Human": Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Replication of
Imperial Memory, Cultural Critique, No. 39. (Spring,
1998), pp. 119-150)
In working these two poles of difference and exclusion, we meet again the limits of a psychoanalytic
confrontation with racial difference. When Freud (as well as much of feminist psychoanalytic theory)
calls white femininity a "dark continent" as a way to invoke the epistemological limit
that white femininity poses for psychoanalysis, he both exposes and levels off what
are two different modalities of exclusion.24 For Mary Ann Doane, the "dark continent"
trope shows up the "crucial difference that white women constitute an internal
enigma . . . while `primitive' races constitute an external enigma" for the
epistemological guarantees of psycho-analysis (212). The difference Doane flags between
an "internal" and "external" "enigma" is precisely the difference of colonial
difference-being situated as internal to bourgeois rational modes of human difference
is not the same thing as being installed at the limits of rational order where bourgeois
(sexual) difference dissolves into the categorically nonhuman site of racialized
embodiment. Thus, white femininity may be troped as racial difference in
psychoanalysis and feminist film theory as a way to register its difference, but the
mechanics of that troping is itself evidence of the difference between what Rachel calls
"being in the Business" (or Doane's "internal" difference) and being situated at the very
threshold of the human. For Rachel, inauguration into a bodily logic of sexual difference
is precisely that modality by which en-trance to the human is made possible-it is the
bourgeois line of symbolic intelligibility-and it is no accident that she is the only
replicant who lives. What is at stake in thinking about the transmutation of Rachel's
racialized condition as non-subject to (hetero)sexed subject is a rethinking of the
symbolic as a formation which is not totalizing in its reach, but hegemonic in its
imperatives. Perhaps the most forceful articulation of the hegemonic status of psychoanalysis's ex-
planatory logic has been made by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their infamous methodological
attack, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. For Deleuze and Guattari: [I]t is not at the weakest
point-the primitives-that Oedipus must be attacked, but at the strongest point, at the level of the strongest
link, by revealing the degree of disfiguration it implies and brings to bear on desiring-production, on the
syntheses of the unconscious, and on the libidinal investments in our cultural and social milieu. Not that
Oedipus counts for nothing in our society: we have said repeatedly that Oedipus is demanded, and
demanded again and again; and even an at-tempt as profound as Lacan's at shaking loose from the yoke
of Oedipus has been interpreted as an unhoped-for means of making it heavier still and of resecuring it on
the baby and the schizo. (175) In Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion that Oedipus be "at-tacked at the
strongest point," they turn the critical energy away from how a psychoanalytic paradigm (and its figuration
of the oedipal scene) hits its explanatory limit at the sight of the racialized body-what they call the
"primitive"-and more toward an investigation of how the limits of Oedipus inheres in the fact that it is
"demanded again and again." By situating oedipalization as a demand, they refuse to read
it nonhegemonically, asking instead how it functions as a "disfiguralizing" imperative
located fully within "our cultural and social milieu." 25 As I have been suggesting, this is
precisely the kind of "demand" to which Rachel must respond. The desiring exchange between
her and Deckard involves an interpellating call which, made fully within a scene of
extracted consent, reveals the very hegemonic nature of sexed symbolic
signification.

Psychoanalysis focus on becoming human fails to account

for those bodies who have become dehumanized

Carr 1998 (Brian [President, Behavioral Health Associates;

Director, Bio-Behavioral Medicine Service, St. Mary of the
Plains Hospital, Lubbock, Texas] At the Thresholds of the
"Human": Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Replication of
Imperial Memory, Cultural Critique, No. 39. (Spring,
1998), pp. 119-150)
Can we not learn to "see" race in psychoanalysis, despite its eclipsed and coded status? This article broaches the already
solidifying question of race and psychoanalysis through the latter's most overdetermined production, that figure whose
Where psychoanalysis offers us an
tropic status is so foundationally occluded: the "human"
elaborate narrative of the human subject's develop-mental
"becoming"-what we might call its humanization-this article turns to
this same narrative to find a more ghastly underside: the story of
the racialized subject's dehumanization.Critical theorists have been telling the story of
humanism's demise for some time now, highlighting particularly the displaced epistemological security of the human
subject's claim to knowledge and identity.' However, in the often celebratory rendering of the "post"-human, we have
It is
been seduced by a peculiar amnesia, one which seems incapable of theorizing the figure of the dehumanized.
precisely this figure-that racialized non-subject whose access to the
representational status of the "human" subject is fundamentally
halted-which seems so routinely evacuated in the governing logic of
the posthuman's liberatory promise.2 Indeed, we might argue, via Spillers, that the
first-order erasure of "race" from psycho-analysis and its attendant
story of the human's emergence persists in contemporary
formulations of the post- or anti-human.

Psychoanalysis glosses over power differentiations and

replicates the patriarchal power of capitalism

Gardiner 1992 (Judith [Departments of English and

Women's Studies University of Illinois at Chicago]
Review: Psychoanalysis and Feminism: An American
Humanist's View, Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2. (Winter, 1992),
pp. 437-454, d/l: jstor)

Progressive and democratic political values shape such revaluations of

psychoanalysis into conversation and theory into process, but I think we need
to be wary of letting process become our most important product. That is, the
emphasis on process may denote a certain despondency about results and
about continuing to theorize if you believe there are no definitive meanings ,
values, or even theories. Moreover, process is not intrinsically progressive but is,
instead, congruent with the advanced consumer capitalism many feminists
want to displace. Within psychoanalysis, the process that matters is that of
the transference, defined by Moi as "the process whereby the patient transfers earlier traumas and
reactions, whether real or imaginary, on to the analyst," and countertransference then is "the analyst's
Moi argues that this relationship is not
more or less unconscious reactions" (Moi, 197).31
one of the doctor's patriarchal power because the doctor listens rather than
speaks, and she describes the patient's monologue as part of a reciprocal,
egalitarian relationship that confounds gender stereotypes because it
"radically questions and displaces traditional notions of subject-object
relationships" (Moi, 198). Transference and countertransference turn each analytic session "into a
space where the two participants encounter each other in the place of the Other, in language" (Moi, 197).
Each psychoanalysis allows an escape from the relations of subject and
object and therefore of masculine and feminine and from the "patriarchal
tyranny of thought by sexual analogy" (Moi, 198). Such accounts gloss over the
power differentials that pervade paid psychoanalysis in actual practice and
seem especially congenial to literary critics who decipher people and
literature in analogous ways. Wyatt says her book "is about the possibilities for change" through
private practices like "reading, writing, sexual intimacy, and creative work" that develop in people new
ways of thinking and hence facilitate their ability to change society (Wyatt, 1). Hirsch's study uses familial
analogies to structure the historical stages of women's fiction, and she treats "both motherhood and
daughterhood as story-as narrative representation of social and subjective reality and of literary
convention" (Hirsch, 10). Literature thus shows us more clearly than other social forms exactly what
shapes the social stories that shape us. Moving from nineteenth-century plots in which women try to flee
patriarchal constraints but long for fraternal comrades, Hirsch sees in modernism a conflicted daughterly
quest for autonomy and for maternal love. Only in the present is the mother-daughter narrative sometimes
capable of being resolved so that the mother's voice may at last be heard.

Kritik alternatives are only legitimate when theyre

dispositional

Reciprocity Condo makes neg a moving target, shifting

debate in the rebuttals, kills fairness and education by
preventing in-depth discussion

Ground Cant hold them to offense- devastates perm

ground which is the best way to test competitiveness-
justifies intrinsic and severance perms. Thus Perm: do the
kritik

Dispo Solves Aff has the ability to test the competiveness

without losing offense, means no risk of 2AC strat or time
skew.

Voter for the reasons above- 2AC strat skew is in-round

abuse

Evaluate theory with competing interpretations its the

only check against arbitrary self-serving interpretations.
You should default to the middle ground psychology is
good FOR PEOPLE but empirical studies prove you cant
scale it up to explain IR or revolutionary politics

Epstein 10 (senior lecturer in government and IR University of Sydney

(Charlotte, Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international
politics, European Journal of International Relations XX(X) 124)

To be clear, thismove is not intended to deny the intimate links between discourse and subjectivity.
The earlier foray into Lacanian thought served precisely to underline the centrality of discourse to both the making and
subsequent analysis of the subject. But by the same token it also drew out what is required to wield the discourse
approach effectively in IR. Indeed Lacans analysis emphasizes the sheer complexity
of the dynamics of a highly individual phenomenon (identity), and consequently the
difficulties in taking this level as the starting point for analysing all other levels at which
identity is politically at play.13 As the discipline that positions itself at the highest level of analysis (the supranational), IR
cannot maintain its focus at the level where some of the finer debates around subjectivity take
place (see for example, Butler, 1997). The issue here is one of disciplinary specificity, or, in other words,
equipping IR for what it wants to do; and the solution proposed is one of suspension or bracketing. To restate this
important point differently, at the individual level, subjectivities and subject-positions remain coextensive. The distinction between
subject-positions and subjectivities becomes operative once the analysis shifts beyond the individual level. This distinction thus offers
a theoretically cogent way of studying identity while bracketing some of its more unwieldy dimensions that may, moreover, not be
pertinent at the levels at which IR casts its focus. It renders the discourse approach operative for IR, because it makes it possible to
study state identities, without having to presume that states have feelings, or indeed enter into questions of how much exactly are they
like people, or what kind of selves do they possess. What the discourse approach analyses, then, is the ways in which actors
crucially, whether individuals or states define themselves by stepping into a particular subject-position carved out by a discourse. In
taking on the I/we of that discourse, actors identities are produced in a very specific way. In doing so, they are establishing them-
selves as the subjects of particular discourses, such as the anti-whaling discourse, and thereby marking themselves as anti-whalers.
How, then, do discursive subject-positions differ from Wendts (1999: 227229) role identities, where the actor is similarly seen as
stepping into institutionalized roles (such as professor and student)? The crucial difference is that the concept of subject-
position does not harbour any assumption about any primordial self supporting these roles.
Importantly, this is not to say that the self does not exist that the professor or student have no selves but
simply that the concept is not relevant to the analysis of the discursive construction of identity,
especially when taken to the interstate level.
 1AR Psycho-A: No S!
Psychoanalysis fails for several reasons
a) NO MECHANISM- An individual overcoming a fantasy
is incongruous with policy making- the neg cant
assume the entire world is going to overturn their
beliefs with the ballot- means no risk they solve the
kritik- thats Sharpe
b) LOGICAL INCONSISTENTCY- The neg equating the
state with the self has no relevance or basis this is
a leap of logical faith unaccounted for by their kritik-
if they cant justify that equation they dont have an
internal link to their impacts or solvency- terminal
defense- thats Epstein
c) NO DESCRIPTIVE POWER

Sharpe 10
lecturer, philosophy and psychoanalytic studies, and Goucher, senior lecturer, literary and
psychoanalytic studies Deakin University,
(Matthew and Geoff, iek and Politics: An Introduction, p. 186)

So here is the force of the second, methodological component to ieks untenable erasure of the difference between politics and
psychoanalysis. By looking at the contemporary world as a contemporary subjectobject in need of the theorists liberating
psychoanalysis, iek is unable to make a series of key sociotheoretical distinctions long
recognised in political and socialtheoretical literature on complex societies. The key one of these, as
we saw in Vanishing Mediations, is the distinction between the lifeworld of subjects (their lived world of meanings
wherein a psychoanalytic ideology critique can be highly informative) and the media- steered
subsystems principally the economy- - whose workings demand an objectifying social-
scientific analysis, not a psychoanalytic account. The problem iek elides, in the words of his own
teacher Althusser, is that modern post- traditional societies are a complex totality of relatively autonomous instances in
Althussers thinking, the economy, the ideological and the political instances. Then there is the question of which instance or level
might be the predominant one in any particular historical regime. One practical consequence of this theoretical observation is that the
peoples or potentials that might be either symptomatic or particularly vital at one level (say, the ideological level)
may be either well integrated or wholly disempowered at the other levels.

d) METHODOLOGY FAILS- Cant explain complex

sociopolitical events

McDermott 11
et al., professor of political science Brown University
(Rose, Applying Psychology to International Studies: Challenges and Opportunities in
Examining Traumatic Stress, International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 12 Iss. 2, May)

Concern about the external validity (that is, generalizability) of applying psychological constructs to real-world situations is a
fundamental issue that has long been noted as problematic, as Irving L. Janis noted over 40 years ago (1958). The gold
standard for research in psychology is the laboratory experiment. These setting are often
dissimilar to real-world political situations in multiple ways, including the distilled nature of the
hypothetical laboratory situation as well as the nature of the sample population, which is often comprised of college undergraduates.
Also, psychological studies are dissimilar to real-world political situations in their operationalization of variables, which are often
assessed by simple behaviors, such as choosing from an inventory of foreign policy choices in reaction to a news report in a study of
fictional warring nations (Beer, Sinclair, Healy, and Bourne 1995). Such psychological research also tends to be dissimilar to real-
world situations in its setting (often occurring within a laboratory in a psychology department of a university), timeframe (typically
examining behavior occurring within a period of less than an hour), number of actors (often involving as few as two or three), and
motivations of the participants (often for a modest payment or course credit). However, such laboratory studies also offer the
control of the independent variables in ways that cannot be replicated in the
benefit that they allow for
complex real-world cases. Such control offers unrivalled possibilities for drawing accurate
analysis of
causal inferences. Political science often offers a way to test the external validity of ideas established in psychological
laboratory experiments within real-world contexts. Increasingly, political scientists and psychologists have combined some of the
strengths of rigorous experimental methods in the context of either embedded nationally representative surveys (Kuklinski,
Sniderman, Knight, Piazza, Tetlock, Lawrence, and Mellers 1997) or in field experiments both within the United States (Gerber and
Green 2000) as well as abroad (Habyarimana, Humphreys, Posner, and Weinstein 2007). However, the question of the value of
laboratory vs field experimentation, like the larger issue of internal as opposed to external validity which it reflects, extends beyond
questions of generalizability to incorporate ethical concerns as well. Even the most sophisticated experimental designs in a laboratory
cannot come even close to generating the kind of traumatic experience that a person would endure if they were to lose a loved one in a
war, nor should such a replication ever be sought. However, as a result, scientists ability to approximate the real-world
experiences of something like, say, traumatic stress will be necessarily limited to either lesser forms of induced stress, or the
study of those who have endured such events in their real lives. In the latter case, questions of self-selection and
unknown pre-morbid experiences and vulnerabilities will always complicate the analysis and limit the degree
of generalizability to the larger population we seek to characterize. Methods outside of the laboratorysuch as surveys
are frequently used in applying psychological and political constructs to international issues and can also incorporate
experimental manipulations that allow for control of the independent variables (for example, Koopman, Snyder, and Jervis
1990; Kuklinski et al. 1997). However, every methodological approach has its limitations, with the
findings yielded by surveys also brought into question because of possible biases in sampling due to large numbers of potential
respondents who refuse to participate and possible biases in the responses (for example, social desirability) that can affect the internal
validity of the results. The application of psychological interpretations to analyzing actual political cases is not without
limitations. Inevitably, methodological limitations raise concerns in using any available methodology to
apply psychological perspectives to real-world situations in the international context.

This is overwhelmingly, empirically true

Boettcher 4
(professor of political science and pubic administration North Carolina State University, William A, The
Prospects for Prospect Theory: An Empirical Evaluation of International Relations Applications of Framing
and Loss Aversion, Political Psychology, Vol. 25, No. 3)

Unfortunately, the process through which decisions are framed remains poorly understood. We lack a theory of framing
because the psychologists have yet to give us one and we have failed to develop one on our own (rare attempts are discussed
below). Despite a decade of work exploring prospect theory empirically, there has been little
progress in developing clear and consistent criteria for simply identifying the frame used by a particular
decision-maker (or group of decision- makers). Although we have happily borrowed intuitively compelling notions
such as reference points, gain/loss coding, preference reversals, and loss aversion, we have failed to specify the scope
conditions that may limit the applicability of prospect theory within our field of study. In part, this may be due to a
lack of familiarity with (or understanding of) recent research on prospect theory in other fields; but it also stems from a reluctance to
test prospect theory using experiments that mimic real world decisions. These experiments are difficult to
construct and costly to execute, and they sometimes produce inconclusive (or even worse, incoherent)
results. Nonetheless they are absolutely necessary, because they provide an empirical foundation
and practical road map for more ambitious adventures.
Queer Ecology
 2AC
Queer ecology disempowers real-world alternatives and
displaces individual responsibility

Garrard 2010 (Greg, How Queer is Green? in Hypatia

vol. 18 no. 1-2) // ADI BHB
queer ecocriticism is seriously hobbled by its origins in
If
deconstructive and performativity theory, its potential political
destinations currently hover somewhere between murky and seriously worrying.
Extending Butler's preoccupation with drag into the ecopolitical sphere,
Mortimer-Sandilands proposes a green version, arguing for "an
exaggerated performance of a normalized environmental body, a
parodic repetition of the increasingly intrusive codes of eco-managerialism," 71 although I suspect that
only the privileged class that presently benefits from those
"intrusive codes" will find it funny. More broadly, she advocates shifting
"away from proliferating rituals of fortification and toward a more
thoroughly critical ecological politics,"72 and espouses the radical
democratic decentralization of both environmental-knowledge
production and decision making, raising questions of NIMBYism and
the role of scientific expertise in the process.

This creates a direct trade-off with advancing gay rights,

ultimately making the situation worse for the people
actually on the ground instead of the academy

Smith 2008 (Ralph, professor of Department of

Communication Missouri State University, Queer Theory,
Gay Movements, and Political Communication) // ADI

In the view of some critics, queer theory has produced a series of

adverse effects on gay politics, redirecting attention from the
materiality of actual social conditions to language, from the
disruption of bodies through violence to the disruption of
homophobic performance. The claim is made that interest is drawn
away from perennial questions in gay politics which truly matter,
e.g., assimilation v. minority group, insider politics v. confrontation,
and contention over issue selection, to questions which have only rarely been asked.
More specifically, queer theory erases gay identity, thereby
weakening social justice and civil rights movements, creating a
sense of futility about achieving amelioration of conditions for
sexual minorities and strengthening the sense of division already
endemic among gay advocates. In the view of some critics, queer
theory enhances misunderstanding between the ivory tower and the
street, between academics, who should be among the
spokespersons for gay interests, and gay activists and their
constituencies. Queer theory is also faulted for failing to recognize that politics is a part of culture,
even popular culture, just as much as performance art and sit-coms. Finally, by its emphasis on
individualism and on the creation of self through consumption practices, queer theory drains the pool of
those who might become committed to achieving a common good. Among the ways in which queer
theory could be amended and extended to make it more useful for communication of political issues and
programs is greater concern with the material world and with a politics which entails real causes and risks.
This would involve recognition that diversity includes uneven progress ( by geographical location and local
culture) in consciousnesses, audiences, and issues. Such a move would emphasize the necessity for
adapting messages to individuals who are barely modern, let alone postmodern. More attention might be
paid to close scrutiny of an historical record which, in its specifics, could reveal an empowering historical
and cultural continuity in gay/lesbian communities. Modification of approach should also include attending
to gay political identity as a counterpart to attacking homophobic regimes of regulation, concentrating on
building project identities no less than identities of resistance. Because of the work of queer theorists, such
an identity may well be more inclusive, i.e., less well patrolled in order to maintain impermeable
boundaries. Queer politics, at its best, would be intersectional in the sense that it organizes around
There is strong need to translate central ideas of queer
multiple identities.
theory into a language which can be understood by intelligent and
experienced people outside the academy who have not enjoyed
years of leisure to study Lacan and Foucault. Such translative efforts
might well be useful substitutes for yet more obscure expositions of
works already impenetrable. Underlying such efforts to reach
beyond the characteristic subject matter and style of queer theory
might be a reduction of the high level of dogmatism which now
characterizes all sides in the debate over queer theory.

Queer ecology doesn't translate to a real socio-ecological

relationship, because nature is always subordinated to
the goals of queering

Garrard 10 [Greg Garrard is the author of Ecocriticism

(2004), as well as numerous essays on environmental
literature and ecocritical theory. He is chair of the
Association for the Study of Literature and the
Environment (UK and Ireland), managing editor of Green
Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, and a popular conference
keynote speaker. In 2006 he was awarded a National
Teaching Fellowship for his work on education for
sustainable development. He is a senior teaching fellow at
Bath Spa University, Configurations > Volume 18,
Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010, How Queer Is Green?] // ADI
Jorge Luis Borges's brilliant conflation of represented and real, referential and reflexive, animate,
inanimate, and ananimate animals inspired Michel Foucault to interrogate the discursive construction of
"the order of things," and it stands conveniently as the ur-text of the taxonomic anti-realism that runs
through queer ecology. At the most general level, "queer" itself represents and encapsulates a kind of
intellectual Maoism, a perpetual revolution of categories and types. As Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird
assert in Queering the Non/Human: "The unremitting emphasis in queer theoretical work on fluidity, ber-
inclusivity, indeterminacy, indefinability, unknowability, the preposterous, impossibility, unthinkability,
unintelligibility, meaninglessness and that which is unrepresentable is an attempt to undo normative
entanglements and fashion alternative imaginaries."9 [End Page 76] Rhetorically, queer theory
unceasingly (and rather tediously) negates "stable categories" and enthuses over subversive or
amorphous exceptions toor, as they are always seen, transgressions ofallegedly fixed distinctions. It
is perhaps unsurprising that a pioneer of queer ecocriticism, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, declares "an
almost phobic dislike of taxonomy,"10 which she applies to attempts to categorize her as an ecofeminist,
but which seem to be shared much more generally within this insurgency-within-an-insurgency. It is not as
if ecocritics at any stage of the enterprise have been unaware that nature is a problematic social construct
(in some way, in some sense, to some degree), nor have they been blind to the inter-articulation of this
construct with gender, racial, and (to a lesser degree) sexual discriminations. Queer theory, though,
introduces a radical new level of skepticism toward "nature" and its presumed taxonomies. Greta Gaard's
"Toward a Queer Ecofeminism" is an early contribution to what is now orthodox ecocritical theory, that
"liberating women requires liberating nature, the erotic, and queers."11 Unlike the new wave of queer
ecology with its scientific reference-points, Gaard draws mainly upon historical evidence to buttress what is
really a structuralist argument linking oppressively hierarchical dualisms such as male/female,
culture/nature, reason/emotion, hetero/ homosexual, and others, which she hopes to confront by
"embracing the erotic in all its diversity and building coalitions for creating a democratic ecological culture
based on our shared liberation."12 It is a laudable ambition, certainly, but not necessarily well founded
theoretically or empirically. For one thing, while the ecofeminist analysis of the persistent (and usually
demeaning) association of women and nature is, with some biased selection of sources, defensible,13 it is
clear that queers have consistently been condemned as "against nature" in Western homophobic culture.
Gaard admits as much, but [End Page 77] then suggests that "nature is devalued just as queers are
devalued,"14 which is not the case: queers allegedly violate the "natural order" according to which, often
in other contexts, humans are meant to dominate nature, this time in the everyday sense of the nonhuman
environment and its denizens. Gaard's argument depends, then, on an equivocation between two of Kate
Soper's three meanings of nature: sexual oppression relies upon a vicious theological and ideological
inflection of the "realist" sense of the word, while the nature that is subjected to modernizing and colonial
conquest is the "lay" or "surface" sense.15 Empirically, it seems unlikely that one would find any
correlation between metrics of sexual liberation in a society (taking, say, levels of homophobic persecution
or, conversely, gay marriage and civil rights) and those of environmental impact, like carbon emissions
(thinkCanada and Australia). So although the conceptual isomorphism
discussed by Gaard and others is popular, intriguing, and perhaps
politically motivating, queer ecologists need more evidence that "an
ideology in which the erotic, queer sexualities, women, persons of
color, and nature are all conceptually linked"16 translates into real
socio-ecological relationships. Ecofeminists like Gaard have long been skeptical of nature
in that ideological sense of "natural order"; the innovation of queer ecology is to draw upon scientific
evidence to queer nature in the ordinary, lay sense. It is a complex movement: subverting the ideological
fiction of a heteronormative natural order, queer ecologists deploy examples from the (queer) natural
world, which are then read back into a transformed natural order reread as always already queer. The
initiative enjoys an atmosphere of bracing radicalism: whereas ecocritics always sought to highlight the
ambivalence of nature, as well as its historicity, Morton's Ecology without Nature damns ecocriticism tout
court as "too enmeshed with the ideology that churns out stereotypical ideas of nature to be of any
The leftist alternative is "ecocritique," which, like queer theory,
use."17
"thoroughly examines how nature is set up as a transcendental,
unified, independent category. Ecocritique does not think that it is
paradoxical to say, in the name of ecology itself: 'down with
nature!'"18 However, while it is clear [End Page 78] that queer needs
green, to avoid the ethical dead-end of repetitive aporetic gestures,
its reflex of reflexivity, it is not obvious that green needsor indeed
stands to benefit fromqueer. Furthermore, while the queer critique
of organicism is salutary on properly ecological grounds, and the
dismantling of spurious sexual hierarchy desirable on moral
grounds, queer ecology's opportunistic appropriation of biology
frequently misrepresents both science and the philosophical
assumptions that guide it.

Queer Ecology threatens the premise of both biodiversity

and destroys the meaning of anthropogenic extinction

Garrard (Greg, Professor of English at Bath Spa University

2010, How Queer is Green, Configurations, Volume 18,
Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010, pp. 73-96 DS) // ADI
queer ecology is con-spicuously
The most serious problem, though, is that
threatening to conservation politics. In the United States, the
species is, rightly, the taxonomic level protected by the
Endangered Species Act, which is why there have been both com-plex scientific and legal
arguments in particular cases and vitupera-tive criticism of the act from the American Right. As Sterelny
and Griffiths observe, species have a very important role in biology as

score-keeping devices, as indices of the effects of evolutionary

and ecological processes. 65 The notion of biodiversity would lose
all its considerable rhetorical force, as would the very meaning of

an anthropogenic extinction event, were the queer subversion of

the species concept to gain currency, while the figure of interspecies geniality that
Morton proposes, the amorphous Levinasian ethical construct the strange stranger, would probably not
stand up to cross-examination by oil and logging company lawyers. the
Where clear conflicts occur,
queer commitment to transgres-sion seems to outweigh concerns
about conservation, as, for exam-ple, in the case of intersex animals thought to be affected by
estro-genic pollution. Roughgarden states that [a]lthough a recent report on intersexes among
cetaceans raises the spectre of pollution caus-ing genital deformity, the early reports on intersexes
predate danger-ous levels of pollution. Perhaps cetaceans are on their evolutionary way to the state that
hermaphrodite fish have already attained.

Their alt forgoes concerns about conservation of distinct

species, subordinating them to queer subversion

Garrard 10 [Greg Garrard is the author of Ecocriticism

(2004), as well as numerous essays on environmental
literature and ecocritical theory. He is chair of the
Association for the Study of Literature and the
Environment (UK and Ireland), managing editor of Green
Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, and a popular conference
keynote speaker. In 2006 he was awarded a National
Teaching Fellowship for his work on education for
sustainable development. He is a senior teaching fellow at
Bath Spa University, Configurations > Volume 18,
Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010, How Queer Is Green?] // ADI

The most serious problem, though, is that queer ecology is

conspicuously threatening to conservation politics. In the United
States, the species is, rightly, the taxonomic level protected by the
Endangered Species Act, which is why there have been both complex
scientific and legal arguments in particular cases and vituperative
criticism of the act from the American Right. As Sterelny and
Griffiths observe, "species have a very important role in biology as
'score-keeping devices,' as indices of the effects of evolutionary and
ecological processes."65 The notion of biodiversity would lose all its
considerable rhetorical force, as would the very meaning of an
anthropogenic "extinction event," were the queer subversion of the
species concept to gain currency, while the figure of interspecies geniality that Morton
proposes, the amorphous Levinasian ethical construct "the strange stranger," would probably not stand up
to cross-examination by oil and logging company lawyers. Where clear conflicts occur, the queer
commitment to transgression seems to outweigh concerns about conservation, as, for example, in the case
Roughgarden states that
of intersex animals thought to be affected by estrogenic pollution.
"[a]lthough a recent report on intersexes among cetaceans raises
the spectre of pollution causing genital deformity, the early reports
on intersexes predate dangerous levels of pollution. Perhaps
cetaceans are on their evolutionary way to the state that
hermaphrodite fish have already attained ."66 [End Page 91] Since the St. Lawrence
beluga report dates from 1994, however, her laudable determination to depathologize intersexuality
wherever possible seems to have led to complacency in this instance.

Queer ecology perpetuates racist undertones

Gaard 2011 (Greta, professor of English at University of

Wisconsin-River Falls and a community faculty member in
Women's Studies at Metropolitan State University, Twin
Cities, Green, Pink, and Lavender: Banishing Ecophobia
through Queer Ecologies, Ethics & the Environment,
Volume 16, Number 2, Fall 2011, pp. 115-126) // ADI
Among them, perhaps one of the most important questions is how ecoqueer theory will develop once it
moves beyond this initial collective articulation from primarily Anglo-American scholars.
As Andil
Gosines essay pointedly asks, is the production of queer ecology
a decidedly Euroamerican project? and is the privileging of
Euroamerican stories of environmentalism even for the purpose of
critical examinationcomplicit with the agendas of empire, and
American imperialism in particular? (166). Instead of separating
the queer subject from the racialized-as-nonwhite subject and
effectively disappearing the non-white queer, as well as the
diasporic subject, Gosine suggests a special focus on the
constitution of the non-white queer subject...[as] a more insightful
project of queer ecology (167). As the first book-length volume to establish the
intersections of queer theory and environmentalisms at such depth, the publication of Queer Ecologies
has decisively created a rich field for further research. May the Lesbian Rangers be our guides!

Makes all forms of violence inevitable and must be

rejected in every instance

Memmi 2000 (MEMMI Professor Emeritus of Sociology @

Unv. Of Paris Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve
Martinot, pp.163-165) //jl-cl
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never
it is a struggle to be undertaken without
achieved, yet for this very reason,
surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward
racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not
in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial
part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To
accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear,
injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark
history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider
will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an
outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable
negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain
 The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is,
sense the entire human condition.
and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the
ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we
cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true
that ones moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to
want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in
its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to
conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the
One cannot found a moral order, let
very negation. This is almost a redundancy.
alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the
exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and
domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious
language, racism is the truly capital sin.fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of
humanitys spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just
a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a
question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of
All things considered, we have an
the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments.
interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence
and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think
that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others
is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest.
One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society
contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat
others with respect so that they treat you with respect. Recall, says the bible, that you were once a
stranger in Egypt, which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger
It is an ethical and a practical
yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday.
appeal indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In
short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and
practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands
the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all.
If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict,
violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can
hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are
irresistible.

Not in implementation since affluent white gays and

lesbians take over queer movements, pushing out
questions of race

Ryan 07, (Maura, Professor of Sexuality and Social

Movements at U Florida, "Queer Internal Colonialism:
Aiding Conquest Through Borderless Discourse" Paper
presented at the annual meeting of the American
Sociological Association, TBA, New York, New York City
Online <PDF>. 2010-06-04 from
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p183033_index.html) //
ADI

queer internal
In a queer context, the first criteria might be rephrased to say that
colonialism includes a voluntary relationship between the
dominant and subordinate group via entrance into the queer
community, but where the dominant group members assert
themselves as the representatives of the community and where
subordinate group members cannot successfully make their
needs visible to dominant group members or members outside
the group. The second criteria might be paralleled to the white
queer erasure, if not the destruction, of the specific needs of
queer people of color. Finally, racism, both in overt and covert manifestations, is woefully
present in the queer community. Certainly, for white queer people to be a
dominant group, they would need to be a group that enjoyed
the rights of full citizenship participation, which they do not.
However, within gay enclaves, gay and lesbian organizations, and
national positioning of GLBT rights issues, affluent white gays and
lesbians have been dominant in relation to GLBT people of color
and experience greater social privileges outside of the gay
community. Because of external forces of institutionalized
discrimination outside the gay community, white gays are able to
marginalize queers of color within gay communities and through a
racist discourse that attempts to legitimize affluent white gays as
normal citizens, it reifies the larger U.S. internal colonialism of
people of color in a more general fashion.

Alt fails K cant overcome biology you cant queer

beyond the species barrier

Garrard 2010 (Greg, How Queer is Green? in Hypatia

vol. 18 no. 1-2 accessed via Project Muse) // ADI
While no extant species concept seems likely to prevail unchallenged, the relative preeminence of the
phylogenetic approach is reflected in the way that the field in question is more often known today as
Some theories, such as Niles Eldredge and Steven Jay Gould's
"systematics" than "taxonomy."
even treat species themselves as units of selection,
punctuated equilibrium,
with population-level characteristics that are "visible" to
evolutionary pressures.59 As Jody Hey suggests, perhaps the "species problem" itself is more a
consequence of the varied and contradictory work biologists require of the concept than a strictly
biological question: "The species problem is caused by two conflicting motivations; the drive to devise and
deploy categories, and the more modern wish to recognize and understand evolutionary groups." 60 Even
the queer theorists' favorite biologist Roughgarden is a strict adaptationist,
despite her heterodox challenge to sexual-selection theory, and would agree with the conclusion of
Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths's critical survey of the question that "the division of
organisms into species is an objective feature of the living world ."61 As
they point out, while individual differences within species, and within
lineages, may be small and accumulated over long periods of time
("turtles piled on turtles," as Haraway has it), populations can change very quickly
due to a disease outbreak, dramatic topographic change, or a new
predator. Since both biological and ecological species concepts
assess the isolation of populations, the problem of gradualism in
individual differences is irrelevant: populations demonstrably have
properties that could not be ascribed to individuals, such as (ironically in
this context) variability and sexual reproduction.62 So the breathless
enthusiasm among queer theorists for specially selected instances
of maximum fluidity is at wild variance both with the routine
assumptions of biologists and the closely interrogated concepts
delineated by philosophers of biology. The problem is, simply, that while
first-wave ecocritics were apt to find corroboration of their organicist assumptions in Clementsian or
queer ecocritics are conversely too keen to identify
equilibrium ecology,
instances of biological subversion of categories as typical, rather
than the structure and stability63 studied quite generally by
ecologists and evolutionary biologists. In attempt to ward off organicism and cut-price
holism, I have advocated a moratorium on the use of "symbiosis" in ecocriticism; 64 I am now tempted to
suggest some neologisms that would underline the indissociability of competition and cooperation,
conservation and subversion in biology: "coopetitive" and "conversive" anyone? Ugly words, but they
might prove serviceable.

Perm: Do Both. Even if the perm still links we must

accept these contradictions as part of coalition building
for queer ecology to be successful while still using the
needed pragmatism to create change

Garrard 2010 (Greg, How Queer is Green? in Hypatia

vol. 18 no. 1-2, d/l:
http://bathspa.academia.edu/GregoryGarrard/Papers/2004
62/How_Queer_is_Green) //jl
Greta Gaards Toward a Queer Ecofeminism is an early contribution to what is now orthodox ecocritical
Unlike the new
theory: that liberating women requires liberating nature, the erotic, and queers.
wave of queer ecology with its scientific reference-points, Gaard
draws mainly upon historical evidence to buttress what is really a
structuralist argument linking oppressively-hierarchical dualisms
such as male / female, culture / nature, reason / emotion, hetero /
homosexual and others, which she hopes to confront by embracing
the erotic in all its diversity and building coalitions for creating a
democratic ecological culture based on our shared liberation. It is a
laudable ambition, certainly, but not necessarily well founded theoretically or empirically. For one thing,
while the persistent (and usually demeaning) association of women and nature is, with some biased
selection of sources, defensible, it is clear that queers have consistently been condemned as against
nature in Western homophobic culture. Gaard admits as much, but then suggests that nature is devalued
just as queers are devalued, which is not the case: queers allegedly violate the natural order according
to which, often in other contexts, humans are meant to dominate nature in the everyday sense of the
nonhuman environment and its denizens. Gaards argument depends, then, on an equivocation between
two of Kate Sopers three meanings of nature: sexual oppression relies upon a vicious theological and
ideological inflection of the realist sense of the word, while the nature that is subjected to modernizing
and colonial conquest is the lay or surface sense. Empirically, it seems unlikely that one would find
any correlation between metrics of sexual liberation in a society (taking, say, levels of homophobic
persecution or, conversely, gay marriage and civil rights) and those of environmental impact, like carbon
So although the conceptual isomorphism
emissions (think: Canada and Australia).
discussed by Gaard and others is popular, intriguing and perhaps
politically motivating, queer ecologists need more evidence that an
ideology in which the erotic, queer sexualities, women, persons of
color, and nature are all conceptually linked translates into real
socio-ecological relationships.
 AT: Queer Theory
1. K already exists in the status-quo, which means (a)
were not the cause of it so you dont reject us; and
(b) that a neg ballot cant solve since its just the
status-quo.
5. Queer thought accomplishes nothing. It spends its
whole time name-dropping and examining ad nausea the
minutia of grammar it cannot produce true change for the
very material suffering of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and
Transgender bodies in the world.
Smith 2008 (Ralph, professor of Department of Communication Missouri
State University, Queer Theory, Gay Movements, and Political
Communication)
Because of its recent academic high profile, queer theory has been subjected to extensive criticism.
queer theorists, in their radical nominalism,
Included in these criticisms is that
ignore the material world of actual persons and relationships,
preferring instead to focus on grammatical and semantic analysis of
texts and on conditions of reception-consumption, thereby drawing
attention away from economic inequity and actual relations of
exploitation. Critics charge, moreover, that, despite or because of its
historicism, queer theory transforms changes in fashion into major
shifts in epistemology, thereby obscuring continuity in human
experience across time and cultures, thus denying gay men and
lesbians the benefit of a history and a universality arguably well
grounded in reality. Further, by ignoring politics for other aspects of
culture, queer theorists may elevate cross-dressing heavy metal
performances, for example, to the same importance as Supreme
Court decisions. Queer theory is also criticized for avoiding the reality of core identities by
transforming them into mere subjectivities, thereby departing from human experience and intuition.
Presentation of queer theory, so another indictment runs, is
incestuous in citation, dogmatic in thought, and impenetrable in
style and vocabulary. Canonical texts of queer studies by Foucault,
Lacan, Derrida, Butler, and Sedgwick are repetitively redescribed
with increasing obscurity not required for works already remarkably
obscure. Major lacunae in thought are papered over by repetitive
assertion of formulary phrases advanced as dogma. Incredibly
convoluted sentences are often studded with recondite words,
neologisms, and familiar words used unfamiliarly.
6. PERM: We need to combine methods in order to
address the language aspects queer discusses, but also
addresses the very material problems of modern queer
body.
Smith 2008 (Ralph, professor of Department of Communication Missouri
State University, Queer Theory, Gay Movements, and Political
Communication)
Among the ways in which queer theory could be amended and
extended to make it more useful for communication of political
issues and programs is greater concern with the material world and
with a politics which entails real causes and risks. This would involve
recognition that diversity includes uneven progress ( by geographical location and local culture) in
consciousnesses, audiences, and issues. Such a move would emphasize the necessity for adapting
messages to individuals who are barely modern, let alone postmodern. More attention might be paid to
close scrutiny of an historical record which, in its specifics, could reveal an empowering historical and
Modification of approach should also
cultural continuity in gay/lesbian communities.
include attending to gay political identity as a counterpart to
attacking homophobic regimes of regulation, concentrating on
building project identities no less than identities of resistance.
Because of the work of queer theorists, such an identity may well be
more inclusive, i.e., less well patrolled in order to maintain
impermeable boundaries. Queer politics, at its best, would be
intersectional in the sense that it organizes around multiple
identities. There is strong need to translate central ideas of queer theory into a language which can
be understood by intelligent and experienced people outside the academy who have not enjoyed years of
leisure to study Lacan and Foucault. Such translative efforts might well be useful substitutes for yet more
obscure expositions of works already impenetrable. Underlying such efforts to reach beyond the
characteristic subject matter and style of queer theory might be a reduction of the high level of dogmatism
We may be moving
which now characterizes all sides in the debate over queer theory.
inescapably toward a post-gay, post-human, and post-post future. In
the meantime, we must continue to develop queer theories which
mobilize political support for people who love and/or have sexual
relations with persons of the same sex, or who have "gender-
discrepant" minds/bodies and behaviors, or who are, for whatever
reasons, frequently minoritized and marginalized. We deserve the
protection of Enlightenment ideals of justice, even if they are only
constructs. We must strive to extend to sexual minorities the
benefits of rational thought processes, no matter how regulative,
that should be used to protect all persons who are victims of
oppression, coercion, and deprivation.

7. Net-benefit: Queering means breaking down the binary

frames of reference and moving beyond the either/or
stance that competition creates. Combine the Kritik with
the affirmative to create realistic change while affirming
queerness.
Ronald 04, MA in Gender Studies from the University of
Leeds
Lee, Reading as Act of Queer Love: The Role of Intimacy in the Readerly
Contract Journal of International Womens Studies, 5.2, Googlescholar.
Although it may be useful to debate the notion of a queer reader and
the problems inherent in this identification, I wish to instead to
concentrate upon the possibility of using queering itself as an
active strategy for rethinking and reordering readerly possibility;
here, it becomes an activity that allows us to rethink binary
frames of reference. I propose that this strategy manifests
mainly through the reader/text encounter where re-
imagining this encounter is one method of moving beyond
an oppositional either/or stance. Through the activity of
queering, the reader/text encounter could be reinvented,
made strange and its conventional framework undermined.
By this I mean by concentrating upon reconfiguration of the
oppositional stance, reader/text, re-imagining it as a different
sort of relationship, one less competitive and tense, instead
more inclusive and mutual. Here, a queer charge may also be
detected in an awareness of how confidently we label what an
encounter between may involve. Such a concentration upon the
relationship (or rather the relationship potential) of reader/text,
and its openness to being queered also operates to
foreground the nature of desire in all textual liaisons.
Simultaneously, rethinking relationships between may also lead us
to emphasise the position and possibility of the other. Perhaps it
is this queer approach that may most effectively be mined for a new
readerly discourse regarding difference?

8. Queer thought accomplishes nothing. It cannot produce

true change for the very material suffering of Gay,
Lesbian, and Transgender bodies in the world.
Smith 2008 (Ralph, professor of Department of Communication Missouri
State University, Queer Theory, Gay Movements, and Political
Communication)
Because of its recent academic high profile, queer theory has been subjected to extensive criticism.
queer theorists, in their radical nominalism,
Included in these criticisms is that
ignore the material world of actual persons and relationships,
preferring instead to focus on grammatical and semantic analysis of
texts and on conditions of reception-consumption, thereby drawing
attention away from economic inequity and actual relations of
exploitation. Critics charge, moreover, that, despite or because of its
historicism, queer theory transforms changes in fashion into major
shifts in epistemology, thereby obscuring continuity in human
experience across time and cultures, thus denying gay men and
lesbians the benefit of a history and a universality arguably well
grounded in reality. Further, by ignoring politics for other aspects of
culture, queer theorists may elevate cross-dressing heavy metal
performances, for example, to the same importance as Supreme
Court decisions. Queer theory is also criticized for avoiding the reality of core identities by
transforming them into mere subjectivities, thereby departing from human experience and intuition.
Presentation of queer theory, so another indictment runs, is
incestuous in citation, dogmatic in thought, and impenetrable in
style and vocabulary. Canonical texts of queer studies by Foucault,
Lacan, Derrida, Butler, and Sedgwick are repetitively redescribed
with increasing obscurity not required for works already remarkably
obscure. Major lacunae in thought are papered over by repetitive
assertion of formulary phrases advanced as dogma. Incredibly
convoluted sentences are often studded with recondite words,
neologisms, and familiar words used unfamiliarly.

9. Queer theory fails to escape the heteronormative

nation-state
Smith 2010, teaches in media and cultural studies at the University of
California, Riverside
Andrea; teaches in media and cultural studies at the University of California,
Riverside. Queer Theory and Native Studies 16.1-2
The question arises, then, why is settler colonialism so seriously undertheorized in queer studies, even
within queer of color critique? One possibility may be that [End Page 58] queer studies has not considered
the possibility of alternative forms of nationalism that are not structured by nation-states. To be fair, queer
theory does offer strong critiques of the heteronormativity of the nation-state as well as the
heteronormativity of the citizen, particularly the U.S. citizen. Puar's and Gopinath's work demonstrates how
the noncitizen, particularly in the figure of the refugee or the
immigrant, queers the state's heteronormativity. Berlant also looks
at how queer activist groups within the United States attempt to
reconfigure citizenship within the current nation-state and even to
question the "censoring imaginary of the state." 66 Muoz similarly gestures to
"beyond" the current political system when he says, "Our charge as spectators and actors is to continue
disidentifying with this world until we achieve new ones." 67 Thus, queer theorists seem to exhibit some
At the same time, queer theory seems to
desire to think beyond the nation-state.
lapse back into presuming the givenness of the nation-state in
general, and the United States in particular. For instance, Berlant contends: "It
must be emphasized . . . that disidentification with U.S. nationality is
not, at this moment, even a theoretical option for queer citizens. . . .
We are compelled, then, to read America's lips. What can we do to
force the officially constituted nation to speak a new political
tongue?"68 This statement curiously occludes the struggles of many
indigenous peoples who have articulated themselves as belonging to
sovereign nations rather than as being U.S. citizens. The reason for this
occlusion can be found in another statement: Berlant contends that Native peoples "have long experienced
69
simultaneously the wish to be full citizens and the violence of their partial citizenship." She collapses
Native peoples into the category of racial minority rather than recognize them as colonized peoples
struggling against a settler state.

10. Queer theory focuses in the individual; this makes

hinders community and makes it more difficult to effect
change and identify with others.
Yep, Lovaas, and Elia, Professors @ San Francisco University, 2003.
(Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, p.
45, )
On the other hand, queer theorists are criticized for their
neglect of community organizing, based on a shared
 identity, to promote social change. Kirsch (2000), for
example, argues that instead of focusing on specific areas of
oppression and strategies to change them, queer theory
focuses on the individual as a site of change. Such a move
insulates individuals and hinders community building. In
other words, collective identities and power in numbers
are politically effective. Collective identities require clear
membership boundaries, that is, discrete in-group/out-
group distinctions (Gamson, 1997). Kirsch (2000) cautions us
that queer theory, with a focus on individual self-
expression, might actually be harmful to people by making
it more difficult to identify with others. Queer theory,
Kirsch vociferously argues, needs to be refocused to take
into account the realities of everyday life in a capitalist
world system. This means an end to academic posturing,
where obfuscation is more valued than strategies for
recognition and community-building (2000, p. 123).

11. Queering is disadvantageous to queers. Queering

thrives on blurring boundaries and being unpredictable
while challenging cultural norms. In terms of a
relationship it would make many people insecure. It
would also disadvantage them socially.
Elia, Professor @ San Francisco University, 2003. (John, Journal of
Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, pp. 80-81)
At a very practical level, it could be extraordinarily difficult, if
not downright disadvantageous, to be in a queer
relationship. Queer thrives on blurring boundaries, being
uncontained and unpredictable, and, at the same time,
challenging dominant cultural norms regarding romantic and
sexual relationships. This is quite a challenge. Another thing to
consider is that a queer relationship would necessarily lack
the security and anchor that are features of so many
relationships. For some individuals, such a relationship
construction would constantly keep them on edge and
insecure. Such a radical departure from the usual,
mainstream relationship construction could potentially
disadvantage queers socially in terms of reputation, job
security, custody rights of children, material benefits that
are usually afforded to those in normalized relationships,
and so on.
12. Queer theory is an inaccessible discipline excluding
the everyday queer body.
Smith 2008 (Ralph, professor of Department of Communication Missouri
State University, Queer Theory, Gay Movements, and Political
Communication)
In the view of some critics, queer theory has produced a series of adverse effects on gay politics,
redirecting attention from the materiality of actual social conditions to language, from the disruption of
bodies through violence to the disruption of homophobic performance. The claim is made that interest is
drawn away from perennial questions in gay politics which truly matter, e.g., assimilation v. minority
group, insider politics v. confrontation, and contention over issue selection, to questions which have only
rarely been asked. More specifically, queer theory erases gay identity, thereby weakening social justice
and civil rights movements, creating a sense of futility about achieving amelioration of conditions for
In the
sexual minorities and strengthening the sense of division already endemic among gay advocates.
view of some critics, queer theory enhances misunderstanding
between the ivory tower and the street, between academics, who
should be among the spokespersons for gay interests, and gay
activists and their constituencies. Queer theory is also faulted for failing to recognize
that politics is a part of culture, even popular culture, just as much as performance art and sit-coms.
Finally, by its emphasis on individualism and on the creation of self through consumption practices, queer
theory drains the pool of those who might become committed to achieving a common good. Among the
ways in which queer theory could be amended and extended to make it more useful for communication of
political issues and programs is greater concern with the material world and with a politics which entails
real causes and risks. This would involve recognition that diversity includes uneven progress ( by
geographical location and local culture) in consciousnesses, audiences, and issues. Such a move would
emphasize the necessity for adapting messages to individuals who are barely modern, let alone
postmodern. More attention might be paid to close scrutiny of an historical record which, in its specifics,
could reveal an empowering historical and cultural continuity in gay/lesbian communities. Modification of
approach should also include attending to gay political identity as a counterpart to attacking homophobic
regimes of regulation, concentrating on building project identities no less than identities of resistance.
Because of the work of queer theorists, such an identity may well be more inclusive, i.e., less well patrolled
in order to maintain impermeable boundaries. Queer politics, at its best, would be intersectional in the
There is strong need to translate
sense that it organizes around multiple identities.
central ideas of queer theory into a language which can be
understood by intelligent and experienced people outside the
academy who have not enjoyed years of leisure to study Lacan and
Foucault. Such translative efforts might well be useful substitutes
for yet more obscure expositions of works already impenetrable.
Underlying such efforts to reach beyond the characteristic subject
matter and style of queer theory might be a reduction of the high
level of dogmatism which now characterizes all sides in the debate
over queer theory.

TURN: A. Queer Ecology threatens the premise of both

conservation politics and biodiversity and destroys the
meaning of anthropogenic extinction
Garrard Professor of English @ Bath Spa University 2010 (Greg, How Queer is
Green , Configurations, Volume 18, Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010, pp. 73-96 DS)
queer ecology is con-spicuously
The most serious problem, though, is that
threatening to conservation politics. In the United States, the
species is, rightly, the taxonomic level protected by the
Endangered Species Act, which is why there have been both com-plex scientific and legal
arguments in particular cases and vitupera-tive criticism of the act from the American Right. As Sterelny
and Griffiths observe, species have a very important role in biology as

score-keeping devices, as indices of the effects of evolutionary

and ecological processes. 65 The notion of biodiversity would lose
all its considerable rhetorical force, as would the very meaning of

an anthropogenic extinction event, were the queer subversion of

the species concept to gain currency, while the figure of interspecies geniality that
Morton proposes, the amorphous Levinasian ethical construct the strange stranger, would probably not
stand up to Where clear conflicts occur, the
cross-examination by oil and logging company lawyers.
queer commitment to transgres-sion seems to outweigh concerns
about conservation, as, for exam-ple, in the case of intersex animals thought to be affected by
estro-genic pollution. Roughgarden states that [a]lthough a recent report on intersexes among
cetaceans raises the spectre of pollution caus-ing genital deformity, the early reports on intersexes
predate danger-ous levels of pollution. Perhaps cetaceans are on their evolutionary way to the state that
hermaphrodite fish have already attained.

B. Species loss outweighs all

Tobin 90 (Richard Tobin, THE EXPENDABLE FUTURE, 1990, p. 22 )
Norman Meyers observes, no other form of environmental degradation
is anywhere so significant as the fallout of species. Harvard biologist
Edward O. Wilson is less modest in assessing the relative consequences of
human-caused extinctions. To Wilson, the worst thing that will happen to
earth is not economic collapse, the depletion of energy supplies, or
even nuclear war. As frightful as these events might be, Wilson
reasons that they can be repaired within a few generations. The one
process ongoingthat will take millions of years to correct is the
loss of genetic and species diversity by destruction of natural
habitats.
Rasch/Schmitt
 2AC
No Link: The negative misrepresents Schmittian politics-
Schmitts theories did not include the unregulated
destruction of the enemy but a way of respectful co-
existence.
Their alternative justifies the status quos unregulated
killing of the inhuman terrorist- only the affirmatives
move toward multipolarity and respect for the other
allows for a Schmittian nomos to emerge.
Rupturing status-quo epistemology allows us to overcome
the friend/enemy binary
Spanos11 (William, Professor at Binghamton University,
The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception
Herman Melvilles Billy Budd, Sailor, p 162-163)//pg
Melvilles politics, Billy Budd implies, is, in fact, akin to Schmitts antiliberal existentialism insofar as he
espouses, against the dehumanizing violence that inheres in Americas
hubristic exceptionalist redemptive errand in behalf of
humanity at large, a certain kind of irresolvable antagonism
between politically imbalanced human groupings (the populace and the
ships officers, the preterite and the elect, the multitude and the national people) and, therefore,
calls for continual decisionexistential choicehowever difficult
that may be. But there the similarity with Schmitt ends. For Schmitt (and for the American
exceptionalists, as President George W. Bushs post9/11 State of the Union speech and Huntingtons
the friend (the us) in the secular friend/ enemy
Who Are We? testify),
binary is, in actual practice, like the identity vis--vis difference of
metaphysics on which this binary is ultimately founded (political
theology), ontologically prior to the enemy (the them). It is, therefore, a
sacred principle that authorizes the latters extermination, as
Schmitts commitment to the Nazis idea of the nation-state makes clear. For Melville, on the other hand,
as opposed to the American exceptionalist (as Captain Veres inexorable commitment to the sovereign
' the theologically ordained friend/foe
higher cause is intended to bear witness),
opposition is rendered inoperative by way of his denying it a
metaphysical (theological or naturalized supernatural) status. In decentering this
Sacred/ profane binary, to put it positively, Melville transforms the
opposition understood as war to the death into a radically secular
(i.e., profane), intimate antagonism, a never-ending dialectical
belongingness of opposites in which the agonic play of the two
always already produces differences that enhance and enrich the
identityless identities of each. At the site of thinking, Heidegger,
following Heraclitus, aptly called this paradoxical creative relationship a
loving strife (Auseinandersetzung).( But it is, I think, Edward Said, who, in
thinking the deracinated and exilic condition precipitated by the
fulfillment of the incorporative logic of Western imperialism ,
constellates this ontological relationship into the cultural/political
context and, in so doing, suggests most resonantly what the
forgotten, but very much alive, Melville of Billy Budd was intuiting at
the end of his exilic life in his genealogical meditation on the
itinerary of the benign logic of exceptionalism, the itinerary that
ends in the violence of the state of exception: [I]t is no exaggeration to say
that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and
ravages of imperialism, has shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture
to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and
whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains,
between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed
counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see the complete consort dancing
together contrapuntally

Raschs understanding of violence and conflict leaves

both undefined, preventing its use as a successful
political tool

Andrew Norris 2004 Review of Sovereignty and its Discontents: On the

Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political, Constellations, Volume
13, Issue 1, Pages 125-136, d/l:
http://www.politicalreviewnet.com/polrev/reviews/CONS/R_1351_0487_044_10
05852.asp

If Rasch suggests as much it is in part because of the drive to reify

the political and hence to reify what opposes it. Rasch is ambivalent about how
far he wants to go here. On the one hand, he argues that Schmitt, in contrast to Agamben and Habermas,
correctly identifies the "logic" of the political (27, 59, 92, 106). "Schmitt's focus is not on violence as such,
but on establishing the logical possibility of legitimate political opposition"; and "the possibility that
difference could be taken to the point of violent conflict is the necessary condition for legitimate political
Rasch argues that the assertion of "the primacy
opposition" (13). On the other,
of the political" "merely registers a pragmatic insight , namely, that assuming
incommensurable conflict as an ineradicable feature of social life leads to more benign human intuitions
than the impossible attempt to instantiate the shimmering City of God" (17). But the latter
pragmatic claim would seem to call for less work on Schmitt and Weber's analysis of
conceptual conflict and more work like that called for by Dewey on the relative success of
actual institutions and practices. It is not surprising, then, that the emphasis here - as in
similar studies of the political - is placed upon the "logical" claim. However, pitching his
claims at this level of abstraction commits Rasch to a level of
generality that will leave some readers skeptical. Consider, for
instance, the claim, cited above, that authentic conflict logically
requires the possibility of violence. This does not seem to be true of
marital strife or disagreements in faculty meetings; and an appeal to
the logic of conflict does nothing to distinguish these conflicts from
those manifestations of "difference" that do demand this possibility.
[6] Rasch runs into similar problems when he moves to discussing
the logical necessity of Schmitt's sovereign decision. Here he
appropriates Russell's well-known paradox of the barber who shaves
all and only those men in the village who do not shave themselves.
The paradox here is that if the barber does not shave himself, he
does not fulfill the first condition, while if he does shave himself, he
does not fulfill the second. Rasch argues that this exemplifies the logical limitations of the
"rational" perception of order, as it shows that, "for the law of the excluded middle to operate, it must be
the excluded middle, neither true nor false." The decision for logic is itself a logically ungrounded decision
and hence, correctly understood, supports the decisionist critique of logic (92). "In a word, the barber is
sovereign.... [T]he sovereign is simply the name given to a logical effect" (90). But in his eagerness to
 Rasch overlooks the empirical
provide a logical basis for Schmitt's model of sovereignty,
assumptions built into his analysis. The barber's paradox assumes that there is a
barber who shaves all and only the villagers who do not shave themselves. But, as many have noted, there
may be no such barber, and if there is, it may be a woman.[7]

War is not part of human biology

NYT November 11, 2003 War: It's not inevitable (NYT) Is War Our Biological
Destiny? d/l: http://notes.kateva.org/2003/11/war-its-not-inevitable-nyt.html

Admittedly, war making will be a hard habit to shake. "There have been very few
times in the history of civilization when there hasn't been a war going on somewhere," said Victor Davis
a brief
Hanson, a military historian and classicist at California State University in Fresno. He cites
period between A.D. 100 and A.D. 200 as perhaps the only time of
world peace, the result of the Roman Empire's having everyone, fleetingly, in its thrall.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have found evidence of
militarism in perhaps 95 percent of the cultures they have examined
or unearthed. Time and again groups initially lauded as gentle and peace-loving the Mayas, the !
Kung of the Kalahari, Margaret Mead's Samoans, eventually were outed as being no less bestial than the
A few isolated cultures have managed to avoid war for long
rest of us.
stretches. The ancient Minoans, for example, who populated Crete
and the surrounding Aegean Islands, went 1,500 years battle-free ; it
didn't hurt that they had a strong navy to deter would-be conquerors.

War is not inevitable

Bennett Gordon 2009 War Is Not Inevitable, Utne, d/l:

http://www.utne.com/Science-Technology/War-Is-Not-Inevitable.aspx

People assume that war is inevitable, and that war always has been
and always will be a part of the human experience. Science is now
proving that is wrong. A growing number of experts are now
arguing that the urge to wage war is not innate, John Horgan writes for the
New Scientist, and that humanity is already moving in a direction that
could make war a thing of the past. War is an effect of lifestyle more than any innate
warring tendencies, according to some anthropologists. Brian Ferguson of Rutgers University thinks that
war first seeped into human culture when we stopped our nomadic
lifestyle and shifted to a more settled, agrarian way of life. Individual
aggression has always existed, but group warfare is more of a response to environmental conditions, like
scarcity, rather than any innate biological need. Atomic bombs, high-tech weaponry, and the ongoing
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan could lead people to think that society is getting more war-like, but
experts believe that humans are actually moving toward a more peaceful world. Violent deaths were far
more likely when people fought with clubs and spears than they are today. Most conflicts now consist of
Experts have called these more
guerilla wars, insurgencies and terrorism, Horgan writes.
recent conflicts, the remnants of war.

There is an irreconcilable social conflict within politics in a

liberal democracy but that does not mean that it is a
fruitless struggle Peaceful co-existence is possible across
any line.
Schapp 2004 (Andrew, Univ. of Melbourne, Assuming Responsibility in the
Hope of Reconciliation, Borderlands E-Journal, vol. 3, no. 1)
In The State and Revolution,
Lenin (1999: 16) writes that the state "arises
where, when and insofar as class antagonisms objectively cannot be
reconciled". Indeed, the existence of the state "proves that the class
antagonisms are irreconcilable". He quotes Engels: as the "product of a society at a certain
state of development" the state is "the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble
contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.
But in order that these antagonismsmight not consume themselves
in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly
standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it
within the bounds of order" (in Lenin 1999: 16). Far from being an organ for
the reconciliation of conflict, the state is "the creation of order, which
legalises and perpetuates" oppression by 'moderating the conflict'
between rulers and ruled (Lenin 1999: 16). 5. The central question with which
modern political philosophy has been preoccupied is: how can citizens peacefully
coexist in a society within which individuals and groups have
competing interests and divergent values? Rather than seeking to
reconcile these conflicting values and interests, liberal philosophers
justify the state by appealing to a reciprocity of interests among
citizens in primary social goods (such as life, liberty and property) that
are necessary for pursuing their plural conceptions of the good life.
These primary social goods are public in the sense that they can only be collectively secured. But they are
common only in the thin sense that every individual can be supposed to have a private interest in them as
In distributing these basic
a means for pursuing his/her particular conception of the good.
goods to its citizens, the liberal state is supposed to function as an
impartial mediator, ensuring fairness in citizens dealings with one
another by upholding the rule of law. 6. Marxists and liberals are in
agreement, then, about the irreconcilability of social conflict. However,
whereas liberals take the conflict of values and interests to be inevitable, Marxists view the conflict to be
the product of the organisation of society in the interests of some against others. On this account, the
liberal state upholds the values and interests of the ruling class, in fact, despite its legitimation, in law, as
impartial mediator. The Marxist solution to the irreconcilability of class conflict is, of course, revolution: the
seizure of power by the oppressed in order to create a classless society. In such a society there would no
longer be a need for the state (or, indeed, for politics or justice) since there would be a true harmony of
interests among citizens. This is a reconciliation of sorts but one that most people are likely to find
discomforting, given the history of actually existing socialism in the twentieth century.

Schmitts articulation of the state of exception does not

go far enoughthe state of exception actually allowed the
Nazis to rise to power. It is through the use of this
constant state of emergency that global civil war
emerges. The negatives line in the sand actually
produces the dehumanizing conditions in which the
holocaust occurred.
AGAMBEN State of Exception 2005

The essential contiguity between the state of exception and sovereignty was established by Carl Schmitt in
his book Politische Theologie (1922). Although his famous definition of the sovereign as he who decides
there is still no
on the state of exception has been widely commented on and discussed,
theory of the state of exception in public law, and jurists and
theorists of public law seem to regard the problem more as a
quaestio facti than as a genuine juridical problem. Not only is
such a theory deemed illegitimate by those authors who
(following the ancient maxim according to which necessitas legem non
habet [necessity has no law]) affirm that the state of necessity, on
which the exception is founded, cannot have a juridical form,
but it is difficult even to arrive at a definition of the term given
its position at the limit between politics and law. Indeed,
according to a widely held opinion, the state of exception
constitutes a point of imbalance between public law and
political fact (Saint-Bonnet 2001, 28) that is situatedlike civil war, insurrection and
resistancein an ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the
intersection of the legal and the political (Fontana 1999, 16). The question of
borders becomes all the more urgent: if exceptional measures are the result of
periods of political crisis and, as such, must be understood on
political and not juridico-constitutional grounds (De Martino 1973,320),
then they find themselves in the paradoxical position of being
juridical measures that cannot be understood in legal terms,
and the state of exception appears as the legal form of what
cannot have legal form. On the other hand, if the law employs the exceptionthat is the
suspension of law itselfas its original means of referring to and encompassing life, then a theory of the
state of exception is the preliminary condition for any definition of the relation that binds and, at the same
It is this no-mans-land between public
time, abandons the living being to law.
law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life,
that the present study seeks to investigate. Only if the veil
covering this ambiguous zone is lifted will we be able to
approach an understanding of the stakes involved in the
differenceor the supposed differencebetween the political
and the juridical, and between law and the living being. And perhaps
only then will it be possible to answer the question that never ceases to reverberate in the history of
Western politics: what does it mean to act politically?
Rand
 2AC
Ayn Rands Objectivism is a racist / classist ideology
disguised as the opposite, where she condemns racism in
the same paragraph that she distinguishes between poor
white trash and their intellectual betters.

Ayn Rand September 1963 [Philosopher, creator of Objectivism] The

Objectivist Newsletter, from The Virtue of Selfishness, d/l:
http://freedomkeys.com/ar-racism.htm //be
These are not two different claims, of course, but two applications of the same basic premise. The
question of whether one alleges the superiority or the inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has
Like every other form of
only one psychological root: the racist's sense of his own inferiority.
collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for
automatic knowlege -- for an automatic evaluation of men's characters that
bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment
-- and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem). To
ascribe one's virtues to one's racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which
The overwhelming
virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them.
majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal
identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and
who seek the illusion of a "tribal self-esteem" by alleging the
inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern
racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor
white trash than among their intellectual betters.

Rand further displays the inconsistency of her philosophy

in her dehumanizing remarks of Arab people and her
support for tribal-like support for Israel, a mindset that
lead us to the problems of the status quo.
Ayn Rand 1979 [Philosopher, creator of Objectivism] Ayn Rand on Israel
and the Middle East, from the television show Donahue, response to an
audience members statement Id like to know your opinion on the United
States foreign policy and what is happening in the Middle East right now.
d/l: http://freedomkeys.com/ar-racism.htm //be

I think the United States foreign

Right now I'm not sure we know what's happening.
policy has been disgraceful for years - for decades - I would say
roughly since the New Deal and in part even before that. But, if you
mean whose side should one be on, Israel or the Arabs, I would
certainly say Israel because - because its the advanced,
technological, civilized country amidst a group of almost totally
primitive savages who have not changed for years and who are
racist and who resent Israel because its bringing industry,
intelligence, and modern technology into their stagnation.
Speaking for Others
 2AC
Not speaking for others means we can retreat into our
privileged life styles- retreating from speaking about
others means political actions over such events never
occurs.

Linda Alcoff (, The Problem with Speaking For Others, Cultural Critique No.
20. Winter 1991-1992 p. 5-32 http://links.jstor.org/sici?
sici=08824371%28199124%2F199224%290%3A20%3C5%3ATPOSFO%3E2.0.CO
%3B2-0

Now, sometimes I think this is the proper response to the problem of speaking for others, depending on
We certainly want to encourage a more receptive
who is making it.
listening on the part of the discursively privileged and discourage
presumptuous and oppressive practices of speaking for . But a
retreat from speaking for will not result in an increase in receptive
listening in all cases; it may result merely in a retreat into a
narcissistic yuppie lifestyle in which a privileged person takes no
responsibility for her society whatsoever. She may even feel justified
in exploiting her privileged capacity for personal happiness at the
expense of others on the grounds that she has no alternative.
However, opting for the retreat response is not always a thinly veiled
excuse to avoid political work and indulge one's own desires.
Sometimes it is the result of a desire to engage in political work
without engaging in what might be called discursive imperialism.
The major problem with such a retreat is that it significantly
undercuts the possibility of political effectivity.

Speaking for others is critical because all locations are

connected and not speaking allows the domination and
exploitation to continue.

Linda Alcoff (, The Problem with Speaking For Others, Cultural Critique No.
20. Winter 1991-1992 p. 5-32 http://links.jstor.org/sici?
sici=08824371%28199124%2F199224%290%3A20%3C5%3ATPOSFO%3E2.0.CO
%3B2-0

This problem is that Trebilcot's position, as well as a more General retreat position, presumes an
ontological configuration of
it assumes that one can
the discursive context that simply does not obtain. In particular,
retreat into one's discrete location and make claims entirely and
singularly based on that location that do not
range over others, that one can disentangle oneself from the
implicating networks between one's discursive practices and others'
locations, situations, and practices. (In other words, the claim that I can
speak only for myself assumes the autonomous conception of the self in
Classical Liberal theory-that I am unconnected to others in my authentic self
or that I can achieve an autonomy from others given certain conditions.) But
there is no neutral place to
stand free and clear in which one's words do not prescriptively affect
or mediate the experience of others, nor is there a way to decisively
demarcate a boundary between one's location and all others. Even a
complete retreat from speech is of course not neutral since it allows
the continued dominance of current discourses and acts by omission
to reinforce their dominance.

We must resist not speaking for others- mistakes lead to

greater education and a better resistance to domination.
Not speaking means that we are not responsible for our
words even though they effect all.

Linda Alcoff (, The Problem with Speaking For Others, Cultural Critique No.
20. Winter 1991-1992 p. 5-32 http://links.jstor.org/sici?
sici=08824371%28199124%2F199224%290%3A20%3C5%3ATPOSFO%3E2.0.CO
%3B2-0

Thus, the attempt to avoid the problematic of speaking for by

retreating into an individualist realm is based on an illusion, well-
supported in the individualist ideology of the West, that a self is not
constituted by multiple intersecting discourses but consists in a
unified whole capable of autonomy from other s. It is an illusion that I can
separate from others to such an extent that I can avoid affecting them. This may be the intention of my
speech, and even its meaning if we take that to be the formal entailments of the sentences, but it will not
be the effect of the speech, and therefore cannot capture the speech in its reality as a discursive practice.
When I "speak for myself" I am participating in the creation and
reproduction of discourses through which my own and other selves
are constituted. A further problem with the retreat response is that it
may be motivated by a desire to find a method or practice immune from criticism. If I speak only
for myself it may appear that I am immune from criticism because I am not making any claims that
If I am only speaking for myself I have
describe others or prescribe actions for them.
no responsibility for being true to your experience or needs. But
surely it is both morally and politically objectionable to structure
one's actions around the desire to avoid criticism, especially if this
outweighs other questions of effectivity. In some cases perhaps the motivation is not
so much to avoid criticism as to avoid errors, and the person believes that the only way to avoid errors is
to avoid all speaking for others. However ,
errors are unavoidable in theoretical
inquiry as well as political struggle, and moreover they often make
contributions. The desire to find an absolute means to avoid making
errors comes perhaps not from a desire to advance collective goals
but a desire for personal mastery, to establish a privileged
discursive position wherein one cannot be undermined or challenged
and thus is master of the situation. From such a position one's own
location and positionality would not require constant interrogation
and critical reflection; one would not have to constantly engage in
this emotionally troublesome endeavor and would be immune from
the interrogation of others. Such a desire for mastery and immunity
must be resisted.
The kritik risks silence, which is infinitely worse. Some
appropriations are good
Kleinman and Kleinman 96 (Arthur and Joan. The appeal of experience; the dismay of
images: Cultural appropriations of suffering in our times, Daedalus. Winter 1996. Vol.125, Iss. 1; pg. 1-24
pgs)

It is necessary to balance the account of the globalization of commercial and professional images
with a vastly different and even more dangerous cultural process of appropriation: the totalitarian
state's erasure of social experiences of suffering through the suppression of images. Here the
possibility of moral appeal through images of human misery is prevented, and it is their absence
that is the source of existential dismay. Such is the case with the massive starvation in China from 1959 to 1961. This
story was not reported at the time even though more than thirty million Chinese died in the aftermath of the ruinous policies of the
Great Leap Forward, the perverse effect of Mao's impossible dream of forcing immediate industrialization on peasants. Accounts of
this, the world's most devastating famine, were totally suppressed; no stories or pictures of the starving or the dead were published. An
internal report on the famine was made by an investigating team for the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. It was
based on a detailed survey of an extremely poor region of Anwei Province that was particularly brutally affected. The report includes
this numbing statement by Wei Wu-ji, a local peasant leader from Anwei: Originally there were 5,000 people in our commune, now
only 3,200 remain. When the Japanese invaded we did not lose this many: we at least could save ourselves by running away! This year
there's no escape. We die shut up in our own houses. Of my 6 family members, 5 are already dead, and I am left to starve, and I'll not
be able to stave off death for long.(30) Wei Wu-ji continued: Wang Jia-feng from West Springs County reported that cases of eating
human meat were discovered. Zhang Sheng-jiu said, "Only an evil man could do such a thing!" Wang Jia-feng said, "In 1960, there
were 20 in our household, ten of them died last year. My son told his mother 'I'll die of hunger in a few days.'" And indeed he did.(31)
The report also includes a graphic image by Li Qin-ming, from Wudian County, Shanwang Brigade: In 1959, we were prescheduled to
deliver 58,000 jin of grain to the State, but only 35,000 jin were harvested, hence we only turned over 33,000 jin, which left 2,000 jin
for the commune. We really have nothing to eat. The peasants eat hemp leaves, anything they can possibly eat. In my last report after I
wrote, "We have nothing to eat," the Party told me they wanted to remove my name from the Party Roster. Out of a population of 280,
170 died. In our family of five, four of us have died leaving only myself. Should I say that I'm not broken hearted?(32) Chen Zhang-
yu, from Guanyu County, offered the investigators this terrible image: Last spring the phenomenon of cannibalism appeared. Since
Comrade Chao Wu-chu could not come up with any good ways of prohibiting it, he put out the order to secretly imprison those who
seemed to be at death's door to combat the rumors. He secretly imprisoned 63 people from the entire country. Thirty-three died in
prison.(33) The official report is thorough and detailed. It is classified neibu, restricted use only. To distribute it is to reveal state
secrets. Presented publicly it would have been, especially if it had been published in the 1960s, a fundamental critique of the Great
Leap, and a moral and political delegitimation of the Chinese Communist Party's claim to have improved the life of poor peasants.
Even today the authorities regard it as dangerous. The official silence is another form of appropriation. It
prevents public witnessing. It forges a secret history, an act of political resistance through keeping
alive the memory of things denied.34 The totalitarian state rules by collective forgetting, by
denying the collective experience of suffering, and thus creates a culture of terror . The absent
image is also a form of political appropriation; public silence is perhaps more terrifying than being
overwhelmed by public images of atrocity. Taken together the two modes of appropriation delimit
the extremes in this cultural process.(35) Our critique of appropriations of suffering that do harm does
not mean that no appropriations are valid. To conclude that would be to undermine any attempt to
respond to human misery. It would be much more destructive than the problem we have identified; it would
paralyze social action. We must draw upon the images of human suffering in order to identify
human needs and to craft humane responses.
Speed Bad K
 2AC
1. Counter-Interpretation: Taglines and analytic
arguments should be read at conversation speed
with the taglines. Cards can be read fast as long as
they provide written transcripts of the evidence.

2. Our counter-interpretation solves all of their offense

since

(a) It means everyone can understand the

arguments were making while enabling us to enter
more qualified evidence into the round.
(b) The written transcript can be read faster than
any debater can read while maintaining near 100%
comprehension

James McNair d/l 3/20/2010 What is the Average Reading Speed and the Best Rate of
Reading?, d/l: http://ezinearticles.com/?What-is-the-Average-Reading-Speed-and-the-Best-Rate-of-
Reading?&id=2298503

a goal of 500 - 800 wpm is an excellent

For a person interested in increasing his abilities,
target. At this rate it is possible to get through large quantities of work in
a short time and maintain a comprehension level of about 75% or more. This is an excellent level of
comprehension and probably more than adequate for any of your required purposes. Compare this to the average
reading rate of adults (200 - 250 wpm), where their comprehension level is only half or slightly more of the material
800 - 1000 wpm would be an outstanding achievement. In order
they have read.
to have reached this level, an individual may have invested in an excellent
speed reading course and practiced speed drills. Believe it or not,
comprehension at this level is also outstanding, reaching levels of 100% or
very close to 100%.
 3. Our counter-interpretation also solves all the reasons
for why speed is good, which will be the other two
pages of the debate since it still allows the use of
speed in debate.
4. They have no interpretation, which means they have
no bright-line over what constitutes too fast or what
can be read at what speed. Competing
interpretations is the only way to avoid arbitrary
judge intervention and self-serving bars of exclusion,
making it impossible to respond.
5. Role of the Ballot: Vote for the team that makes the
better arguments that you can understand.
6. Our role of the ballot solves all their offense since it
means you vote for the team that makes the most in-
depth argumentation. It also subsumes our counter-
interpretation since if you can understand the
argument you should adjudicate it.
7. Role of the Debater: Debaters should go slow when
debating students who would be excluded otherwise.
Weve debated them before and they go fast, which
means their arguments are not based on their own
exclusion thats proven by them breaking at
tournaments prior to this one. This also solves all
their offense by enabling inclusion while allowing for
slower and faster education.
8. No solvency for their argument since the signal has
been sent in prior rounds at this tournament by them
and it has not slowed down debate. Their example of
Patrice hasnt solved anything since Army debaters
go fast is every other round and he still thinks its a
stupid argument.
EXCLUSION
1. Their exclusion and education arguments are in a
double-bind because if speed undermined our ability
to get in-depth education slow debaters would be
able to win more often by making more in-depth
arguments at a slower speed with better analysis.
2. Ting Ting Tam, Maryam Belly, and Xiong Ni are all
successful Binghamton debaters who were ESL and
went fast. They have no empirical example
otherwise and even their anecdotal evidence is by no
means representative of all ESL students.
3. Some exclusion is inevitable in all activities. Debate
is more inclusive than most and enables its place for
slow debaters who make fewer smarter arguments to
win debate rounds.
4. Sending a signal in the round when we made an
effort to slow down is a form of exclusion since it
excludes debate rounds where all the debaters want
to go fast. The only burden for inclusion of people
who cant speak fast is to slow down in the rounds
theyre in. Debaters already do this for judges who
make the request.
5. The President of our University attended a Varsity
debate at our tournament in 2007 and said she
enjoyed the activity and thought it was amazing at
how fast students were able to internalize and
respond to arguments intelligently. Outsiders dont
need to understand every word to walk away with
the value of it.
6. Speed fights exclusion since it developed in response
to the McCarthy era where debates were attended by
large audiences. Speed was introduced to decrease
audience involvement to stop government insiders
from taking names and silencing the radical voices of
the debate community. Keeping debate fast allows
for more talk of dissent since it means we can test
our advocacy in a community safe from surveillance.
Absent this anti-government and anti-cap arguments
could disappear along with those that speak them.
 7. Their use of tokenizing others who are excluded, like
ESL students is an act of speaking for others that is
uniquely violent
EDUCATION

1. Speed fosters more in-depth education given time

constraints because we can talk about more things
from various perspectives. One off-case debates do
that at high speed, and even 1NC strategies of seven
off foster a breadth of education over the effects of
the plan.
2. Speed helps students advance in life since it makes
taking timed tests easier, while enabling quick
response time that helps in interviews and daily
conversation.
3. Good word economy is also good education. It
eliminates repetitive argumentation and improves
precise conversation and education.
4. Someone who runs quick can also walk. Just because
we speak fast doesnt mean we cant slow down and
be just as effective. Being able to speak and read
fast enables fast debaters to absorb more of the
literature base while researching instead of only
researching one or two limited arguments.
5. Stopping talking about the substance of the debate
to reject us instead of asking us to slow down
undercuts the topic-specific education we tried to
focus on. Even if theyre right on all their claims,
rejecting us instead of forcing us to limit down our
arguments this round undermines the education they
want.
6. Speed reading is real world and fosters better policy
making.Without this skill it would be impossible for
Congress to read the full text of bills

Angie Drobnic Holan 10/7/2009 Speed-reading the health care reform bill?, d/l:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/oct/07/speed-reading-health-
care-reform-bill/
How long would it take someone to read the entire health care bill? We asked
the experts. With the massive health care bill about to come to the House and Senate, members of Congress are
arguing about a reading assignment: How long should they have to read a bill that could be 1,000 pages long?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has promised 72 hours three days for a final bill to be available
online before a vote. Centrist Democratic senators have asked Majority Leader Harry Reid for guarantees of 72
hours for bills in the Senate. But that hasn't pleased some Republicans. "Three days is an
embarrassment," said Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. "It shows how embarrassed these Democrats are of their
bill. They know this health care bill is radioactive with the American public and if they give the American public
more than three days to read this bill, all hell might break loose and they might never get this bill actually passed
and done." She suggested three months would be a more appropriate time for review. Bachmann's comments bring
up a good point: How long is long enough to read the health care bill? We read the entire House
version when it came out in July. Certainly, at just over 1,000 pages, it was long. At times, it was
exceedingly boring. We took frequent Diet Coke breaks. Day passed into night, then day, then night, then ...
memory fails. We're sorry to report that we didn't think to time how long we took. So to explore Bachmann's
comment, we wanted a back-of-the-envelope estimate of how much time it might take the average person to
literally read the text of the bill. A computer program told us the House bill weighed in at
163,000 words. The average adult, meanwhile, can read passages aloud at an average rate of 154 words
per minute, according to a 2003 measurement of basic adult literacy by the U.S. Education Department's National
Center for Education Statistics. At that rate, the average person would need about 18 hours to read the bill aloud.
So if you had the three days Pelosi would guarantee, you'd only have to spend six hours per day reading the bill.
The estimates we found for
Most people, though, can read faster when they're reading silently.
adult readers ranged from 200 to 400 words per minute. At those rates, a
person could conquer the bill in seven to 13 hours. Let's say that you're a
better-than-average reader, though even a speed reader. We spoke with Bonnie James, the president of
Advanced Reading Concepts, an organization that teaches speed reading to students at weekend courses and in
graduates of her classes can read, on average,
corporate settings. James said that
anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 words per minute. At that rate, you could
read the bill in about two or three hours.
Taoism
 2AC
Taoism cannot possibly justify a negative ballot because it
can't justify anything. This is a dictionary definition of the
critique linking to itself and it certainly doesn't preclude
acting to alleviate suffering

Seymour No Date
Richard, Tao and morality, Taoism.net, The Supplement.
[Online] http://sites.google.com/site/taoismnet/home/supplement/tao-and-morality) Accessed 09.16.11)

But what is Taoisms position? Taoism

doesnt have a position on anything, exactly. There are many
schools of thought within Taoism and they dont all agree. We are all, though, familiar with
the Tao Te Ching, so lets look there. It is true that chapter two tells us that when the world sees beauty as beauty,
ugliness arises and that when it sees good, evil arises. What it is not saying is that by recognising good as good, bad things are made to
happen; or that when bad things happen, we should not consider them so. If we see a man attacking a woman in a
street, her suffering is very real. It does not take us to create it as a concept before what is
happening to her becomes wrong. By not passing judgment we are not disallowing a neutral
situation to escalate. The fear and pain she feels is real. Not real only in comparison to their
opposite states, but real as a natural consequence of what is happening to her . The first of Lao
Tzus three treasures, which he talks about in chapter sixty-seven, is compassion. We feel compassion for any living thing we sense is
suffering. We have evolved empathy as a very powerful tool and for the vast majority of us who possess it we cannot help but feel, in
some way, the pain of another. That is how our ancestors knew to help another and how, when they needed help, there were those able
to recognise that fact and reach out a hand. But even when we recognise the suffering of another, what
does it say in the Tao Te Ching that we should do? Does the idea of non-interference , which the
Tao Te Ching promotes, guide us to do nothing? Some would have you believe it does. But non-
interference, when spoken of by Lao Tzu, clearly does not mean do nothing. I say clearly
because he suggests non-interference as a way to take the world. And in chapter seven he
says that it is through selflessness that sages achieve their goals . Very obviously, Lao Tzu is
not against us doing things. He does, though, have advice about how to go about it. In chapter
thirty-eight he outlines a hierarchy of enlightened action. At the very top is high virtue, which, he says, is not virtuous. That is, those
who possess the highest form of virtue are not trying to be virtuous. High virtue, he says, takes no contrived action and acts without
agenda. In the case of our woman who is being attacked, ideally, we should help her because she needs help, not because helping her
is a good thing to do. We ought to act without contrivance or agenda. Of course, contriving to help and having our own agenda for
doing so is still good for the woman, but for Lao Tzu this is righteousness on our part and we should be aiming higher. The moral
question becomes more tricky when we examine other belief systems and cultures. In some cultures, if a girl is raped, her father, rather
than seek to comfort her, make her feel safe and seek justice, will, instead, kill her for bringing shame upon her family. Do we have
the right to say this is wrong? Moreover, is it for us to try to stop it? Were used to other cultures having different morals. Mostly, we
respect them and leave them to it. But what does it say to us as human beings that someone, essentially the same as our sisters and
daughters, is being made to suffer in this way when our empathy is triggered? And what does it say to us as Taoists when we feel
compassion for the girls situation? Perhaps we should ask not what right we have to interfere, but, rather, what right do we have to
not? Does compassion stop at boundaries of culture and religion? Or does it just recognise human suffering when it sees it? As
Taoists, we have to ask ourselves is it right for us to say we are right? Are notions of right
and wrong so blurred in Taoism that we cannot ever be sure which is which? Lao Tzu did
not give us a list of good things and bad things. He told us only that sages just know. We are
not sages, but if we do as he says and not contrive to interfere but, instead, listen to our
hearts and act accordingly then we can do no more. By remembering that the Tao is the protection of the
unkind person as well as the treasure of the kind; by taking the watercourse way; by being selfless, we can emulate the
sages. The same sages who themselves took their cue from the Tao; who would give food to a hungry man, not because it was the
good thing to do, but because he was hungry, and moved on; who would help someone who was suffering
because the suffering of others struck at their humanity . Ultimately it is up to each of us to
decide matters of right and wrong and how to respond to the suffering of others. Taoism
wont tell us what to do, but nor does it provide excuses for us to do nothing.
Their refusal to address possible catastrophes in the
world is more of an attempt of escaping from realities ---
its more productive to work to remove the causes of fear
and suffering

Gyatso 3
Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Internationally renowned teacher and author of 19 books on
spirituality, 2003
Tharpa Publications, http://www.tharpa.com/uk/background/dealing-with-fear.htm

According to Buddhism, there is unhealthy fear and healthy fear. For example,
when we are afraid of something that cannot actually harm us - such as spiders -
or something we can do nothing to avoid - such as old age or being struck down
with smallpox or being run over by a truck - then our fear is unhealthy, for it serves
only to make us unhappy and paralyze our will. On the other hand, when someone
gives up smoking because they are afraid of developing lung cancer, this is a
healthy fear because the danger is real and there are constructive steps they can
take to avoid it. IT CONTINUES However, right now we need the healthy fear that
arises from taking stock of our present situation so that we can resolve to do
something about it. For example, there is no point in a smoker being scared of dying
of lung cancer unless there is something that he or she can or will do about it, i.e. stop
smoking. If a smoker has a sufficient fear of dying of lung cancer, he or she will
take steps to kick the habit. If he [or she] prefers to ignore the danger of lung cancer,
he [or she] will continue to create the causes of future suffering, living in denial and
effectively giving up control. Just as a smoker is vulnerable to lung cancer due to
cigarettes, it is true that at the moment we are vulnerable to danger and harm, we
are vulnerable to ageing, sickness, and eventually death, all due to our being trapped in
samsara the state of uncontrolled existence that is a reflection of our own
uncontrolled minds. We are vulnerable to all the mental and physical pain that arises
from an uncontrolled mind-such as the pains that come from the delusions of
attachment, anger, and ignorance. We can choose to live in denial of this and
thereby give up what control we have , or we can choose to recognize this
vulnerability, recognize that awe are in danger, and then find a way to avert the
danger by removing the actual causes of all fear (the equivalent of the cigarettes) -
the delusions and negative, unskillful actions motivated by those delusions. In this
way we gain control, and if we are in control we have no cause for fear. A
balanced fear of our delusions and the suffering to which they inevitably give rise
is therefore healthy because it serves to motivate constructive action to avoid a real
danger. We only need fear as an impetus until we have removed the causes of our
vulnerability through finding spiritual, inner refuge and gradually training the mind.

Taoism is reliant upon strong notions of individuality and

autonomy
Christine M. E. Guth 2000 [an independent scholar, is the author of Art, Tea,
and Industry: Masuda Takushi and the Mitsui Circle (1993)] Charles
Longfellow and Okakura Kakuzo: Cultural Cross-Dressing in the Colonial
Context, positions: east asia cultures critique 8.3 (2000) 605-636, d/l:
project muse //jl

Following his forced resignation from the school in 1898, Okakura reiterated in other sartorial idioms both
his growing disengagement from modernity and his conviction that the true artist lives an artistic life,
becoming increasingly notorious for bizarre dress and behavior.43 Already in Boston in 1886 Okakura had
insisted on dressing outside the Japanese and American social conventions of his day as a way of making
The persona of the transcendent Taoist
visible his status as as exceptional man.
sage, or kijin, on whom he now began to model himself, made this
self-image more [End Page 625] explicit. His image of the Taoist sage,
however, was highly personal and elastic and embraced elements of
the Buddhist recluse as well as Romantic ideals of artistic autonomy.
The Taoist costumes in which he had himself photographed were equally eclectic, ranging from formal
Chinese robes to a hooded tunic, and to a fishing outfit complete with sheepskin cape and brimless cap
Okakura held Taoism in particularly high esteem because of its
(fig. 14).
contributions in the realm of aesthetics and its emphasis on
individuality.44 In cloaking himself in the mantle of the kijin, he was embracing a paradigm of
exceptionalism, creativity, and sociopolitical resistance with deep roots in Chinese and Japanese culture.45
In the earlier Edo period, sinophilic artists including Ike no Taiga and Ito Jakuchu had self-consciously
constructed [End Page 626] their public personae in this mold. The eighteenth-century eccentric Baisao Ko
Yugai, the Japanese Zen monk regarded as the founder of the Chinese-style tea ceremony (sencha) was
also noted for adopting Taoist garb.46

Seeing Taoism as an answer to Western values re-

entrenches Orientalism
R. John Williams 2011 [is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University]
The Chinese Parrot: Techn-Pop Culture and the Oriental Detective Film,
d/l: project muse //jl

That Heidegger was dabbling in orientalism while writing "The Question Concerning Technology" is
interesting, even if (after beginning, and then almost immediately giving up on learning Chinese) he turns
to Greek etymology and Western poetics rather than [End Page 99] Taoism or Zen Buddhism
as the philosophical wellspring for his therapeutic ontology.31 Heidegger hinted that Asian aesthetics and
philosophy offered a means of countering the Western "enframing" of world
mechanization, but never felt confident enough to fully articulate it. However, surprisingly
enough, this was an idea already widely circulating in Euro-American popular discourse. T. J. Jackson
Lears' No Place of Grace, for example, details an especially interesting and generally overlooked tendency
in European and American culture to characterize Asia's techn as the potential solution to the problems of
Western over-technologization.32 As Lears argues, a number of Euro-Americans saw in the East a
particular form of techn, generally feminized and mystical, that might somehow provide
a therapeutic alternative to Western industrial or Taylorized forms of mass production and machine
technology.33 Unlike the more traditional protocols of orientalist
discourse (in which the East is either characterized as stagnantly "tech-less" or else dangerously
imitating Western technoculture), the advocates of Asia-as-techn asserted that
the technologically superior West had too aggressively espoused the
dictates of industrial life, and that it was necessary to turn to the
culture and tradition of the East in order to recover the essence of
some misplaced or as-yet-unfulfilled modern identity. J. J. Clarke's Oriental
Enlightenment similarly argues that contrary to the idea that the West has consistently characterized the
East as irrational and antipathetic to Western cultures of science and technology, in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, "Western
science and Eastern mysticism formed
an improbable coalition, with many thinkers looking upon Buddhism
as an ally in the struggle of science against indigenous metaphysical
traditions."34 Indeed, evidence for the promotion of Asia's techn as a more therapeutic means of
living with modern technology is everywhere in twentieth century Euro-American culture: from the
romantic tenets of late-nineteenth century Boston orientalism to the mystical visions of Shangri-La in
James Hilton and Frank Capra, from the anti-technocratic visions of the beat poets to the post-
counterculturalist values of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Asia-as-techn
has emerged again and again as a critical response to Euro-American
overconfidence in Western technoculture.35

Orientalism makes war and violence inevitable

Marrouchi, 1998 professor of postcolonial literature at LSU, [Mustapha,
Counternarratives, Recoveries, Refusals, boundary 2, vol. 25, no. 2, p.
205-257]

what Said exposes are those symptoms of prejudicial

[At the most basic level,
thinking-manifest, obsessional motifs, manipulative rhetoric, undocumented
blanket assertions, and so forth-which signal the presence of an overriding
drive to construct an image of the "Orient" in line with Western beliefs and
policy interests. Beyond that, he locates a whole repertoire of stereotyped attributes, a
system of exclusive binary oppositions where the "West" connotes values of
reason, enlightenment, progress, and civilized conduct, while the "Orient" is
shown in a negative or inverse relationship to those same values . Again, the Gulf
War provides an example of the way that these deep-rooted cultural prejudices could be mobilized in the
service of a moral crusade with insistent racist overtones: " The
whole premise of the way the
war was prepared and is being fought is colonial: the assumption is that a
small Third World country doesn't have the right to resist America, which is
white and superior. I submit that such notions are amoral, anachronistic, and
supremely mischievous, since they not only make wars possible, but also
prevent diplomacy and politics from playing the role they should ." This is a bold
position that brings to mind a comment once made by Cyril Connolly, who said, "Let us reflect whether
there be any living writer whose silence we would consider a literary disaster." Said's silence would
certainly be one.]

It also turns their K by making domination inevitable by

enabling a forcing of the Western Self upon the Oriental
Other
Said, 1978 Palestinian Activist and Former Professor at Columbia
University, [Edward, Orientalism, p. 108-110]

[We would be wrong, I think, to underestimate the reservoir of accredited knowledge, the codes of
Orientalist orthodoxy, to which Cromer and Balfour refer everywhere in their writing and in their public
To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to
policy.
ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by
Orientalism, rather than after the fact. Men have always divided the world up
into regions having either real or imagined distinction from each other. The
absolute demarcation between East and West , which Balfour and Cromer accept with
such complacency, had been years, even centuries, in the making . There were of
course innumerable voyages of discovery; there were contacts through trade and war. But more than this,
since the middle of the eighteenth century there had been two principal elements in the relation between
East and West. One was a growing systematic knowledge in Europe about the Orient, knowledge reinforced
by the colonial encounter as well as by the widespread interest in the alien and unusual, exploited by the
developing sciences of ethnology, comparative anatomy, philology, and history; furthermore, to this
systematic knowledge was added a sizable body of literature produced by novelists, poets, translators, and
gifted travelers. The other feature of Oriental-European relations was that Europe was always in a position
of strength, not to say domination. There is no way of putting this euphemistically. True, the relationship of
strong to weak could be disguised or mitigated, as when Balfour acknowledged the "greatness" of Oriental
But the essential relationship, on political, cultural, and even
civilizations.
religious grounds, was seen-in the West, which is what concerns us here to be one
between a strong and a weak partner. Many terms were used to express the relation: Balfour
and Cromer, typically, used several. The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, "different"; thus
But the way of enlivening the
the European is rational, virtuous, mature, "normal."
relationship was everywhere to stress the fact that the Oriental lived in a
different but thoroughly organized world of his own, a world with its own
national, cultural, and epistemological boundaries and principles of internal
coherence. Yet what gave the Oriental's world its intelligibility and identity was not the result of his
own efforts but rather the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations by which the Orient was
identified by the West. Thus the two features of cultural relationship I have been discussing come together.
Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense
creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world. In Cromer's and Balfour's language the
Oriental is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something
one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in
a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). The
point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented by
dominating frameworks. Where do these come from? Cultural strength is not something we can
discuss very easily and one of the purposes of the present work is to illustrate, analyze, and reflect upon
Orientalism as an exercise of cultural strength. In other words, it is better not to risk generalizations about
so vague and yet so important a notion as cultural strength until a good deal of material has been
analyzed first. But at the outset one can say that so far as the West was concerned during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, an assumption had been made that the Orient and everything in it was, if not
patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West. The Orient was viewed as if framed by
Orientalism, then, is
the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual.
knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison, or
manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or governing .]

Lastly, Orientalism ensures extinction

Said, 1/17/2003 Palestinian Activists and Former Professor at Columbia
University, [Edward, An Unacceptable Helplessness, ZNet, p. o/l:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=2881]

[Inthis entire panorama of desolation, what catches the eye is the utter
passivity and helplessness of the Arab world as a whole. The American
government and its servants issue statement after statement of purpose,
they move troops and material, they transport tanks and destroyers, but the
Arabs individually and collectively can barely muster a bland refusal (at most
they say, no, you cannot use military bases in our territory) only to reverse themselves a few days later.
Why is there such silence and such astounding helplessness? The largest
power in history is about to launch and is unremittingly reiterating its
intention to launch a war against a sovereign Arab country now ruled by a
dreadful regime, a war the clear purpose of which is not only to destroy the
Baathi regime but to re-design the entire region. The Pentagon has made no
secret that its plans are to re-draw the map of the whole Arab world, perhaps
changing other regimes and many borders in the process. No one can be
shielded from the cataclysm when it comes (if it comes, which is not yet a complete
certainty). And yet, there is only long silence followed by a few vague bleats of polite demurral in
 millions of people will be affected. America contemptuously
response. After all,
plans for their future without consulting them. Do we reserve such racist
derision? This is not only unacceptable: it is impossible to believe . How can a
region of almost 300 million Arabs wait passively for the blows to fall without attempting a collective roar
of resistance and a loud proclamation of an alternative view? Has the Arab will completely dissolved? Even
Why is there now no
a prisoner about to be executed usually has some last words to pronounce.
last testimonial to an era of history, to a civilisation about to be crushed and
transformed utterly, to a society that despite its drawbacks and weaknesses
nevertheless goes on functioning. Arab babies are born every hour, children go to school, men
and women marry and work and have children, they play, and laugh and eat, they are sad, they suffer
Arabs are
illness and death. There is love and companionship, friendship and excitement. Yes,
repressed and misruled, terribly misruled, but they manage to go on with the
business of living despite everything. This is the fact that both the Arab
leaders and the United States simply ignore when they fling empty gestures
at the so-called "Arab street" invented by mediocre Orientalists. But who is
now asking the existential questions about our future as a people? The task
cannot be left to a cacophony of religious fanatics and submissive, fatalistic
sheep. But that seems to be the case. The Arab governments -- no, most of the Arab
countries from top to bottom -- sit back in their seats and just wait as America postures, lines up, threatens
The silence is deafening. Years of
and ships out more soldiers and F-16's to deliver the punch.
sacrifice and struggle, of bones broken in hundreds of prisons and torture
chambers from the Atlantic to the Gulf, families destroyed, endless poverty
and suffering. Huge, expensive armies. For what? This is not a matter of party or ideology or
faction: it's a matter of what the great theologian Paul Tillich used to call ultimate seriousness. Technology,
modernisation and certainly globalisation are not the answer for what threatens us as a people now. We
have in our tradition an entire body of secular and religious discourse that treats of beginnings and
endings, of life and death, of love and anger, of society and history. This is there, but no voice, no
individual with great vision and moral authority seems able now to tap into that, and bring it to attention.
We are on the eve of a catastrophe that our political, moral and religious
leaders can only just denounce a little bit while, behind whispers and winks
and closed doors, they make plans somehow to ride out the storm. They think
of survival, and perhaps of heaven. But who is in charge of the present, the worldly, the land,
the water, the air and the lives dependent on each other for existence? No one seems to be in
charge. There is a wonderful colloquial expression in English that very precisely and ironically catches
our unacceptable helplessness, our passivity and inability to help ourselves now when our strength is most
We are that close
needed. The expression is: will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?
to a kind of upheaval that will leave very little standing and perilously little
left even to record, except for the last injunction that begs for extinction.
Hasn't the time come for us collectively to demand and try to formulate a
genuinely Arab alternative to the wreckage about to engulf our world ? This is not
only a trivial matter of regime change, although God knows that we can do with quite a bit of that. Surely it
can't be a return to Oslo, another offer to Israel to please accept our existence and let us live in peace,
another cringing crawling inaudible plea for mercy. Will no one come out into the light of day to express a
vision for our future that isn't based on a script written by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, those two
symbols of vacant power and overweening arrogance? I hope someone is listening.]

Taoist principles of Wu Wei is anthropocentric and

preserves human supremacy, racism, and sexism
Freya Mathews 2006 [teaches philosophy at La Trobe University, Australia]
Beyond Modernity and Tradition
A Third Way for Development1, Ethics & the Environment 11.2 (2006) 85-
113, d/l: project muse //jl
Zhuangzi illustrates wu wei via a story of a butcher whose knife is
unblunted after many years of use. So well does the butcher know
the anatomy of the beasts he carves, his knife follows the path of
least resistance through the carcass, finding the fine spaces
between joints and bones, never losing its sharpness. Another of Zhuangzi's
illustrative stories concerns an old man who falls into a river and is carried by the rapids to emerge
downstream unscathed, having rolled with the waves and currents. One might achieve many kinds of ends
in this way, by fellow-traveling with things-as-they-are rather than seeking to impose one's own designs on
them. An economic praxis based on wu wei would eschew the [End Page 99] goals of consumerism,
commodification, productivity, progress, efficiency, industry (industriousness), business (busy-ness), profit,
and property that define the praxis of modernity.18 It would instead favor practices of conserving and
cherishing "the given"that which already existsreplenishing the sources of renewal in natural cycles so
that "production" is accomplished largely by the world itself, without our having to direct and design the
process. Power, for instance, would be drawn from sources, such as solar, wind and methane, that tap
existing energies without fracturing their pre-existing flow-patterns or cycles. Food would be gathered from
productive ecosystems or grown in accordance with organic principles that rely on natural processes of
fertilization, pollination, germination, pest control, and so on, thereby minimizing the human input required
and preserving the ecological integrity of soils, waters, and landscapes. Buildings would exemplify passive
design, being sited and structured so as to trap natural light and energy while making best use of existing
geography, rather than topography being reshaped to serve the requirements of buildings.19 Wu wei
then enables us to dwell in the world without significantly disrupting
it. But it also, to a certain extent, enables us to resist those who do seek to disrupt itthose who seek
forcibly to take over the world, to dominate and control it for their own purposes and in accordance with
their prejudices. Although the practitioner of wu wei will refrain from meeting force with force, she may
harness the prejudices of those who would reshape the world and turn those prejudices back on
themselves. So, for instance, in the face of domination driven by racism, she will not seek to refute racism,
Suppose the racism in question is white racism directed
but will appeal to it.
at black peoples. Instead of contradicting the racist, the practitioner
of wu wei might "concede" his supposed "superiority," but define
that superiority in terms of the ideals of equality and reason that
came out of the European Enlightenment. In other words, she might
demonstrate that this superiority consists precisely in the
recognition of the equal worth and dignity of all peoples. Similarly,
in the face of domination driven by sexism, the practitioner of wu
wei might appeal to masculine pride. Yet she will represent
masculinity as an ideal of worthiness/nobility, so that men are
defined as most manly when they are most noble, and nobility will
involve honoring and behaving justly towards all people, including
women. In the face of domination of the environment, [End Page 100]
driven by anthropocentrism, the practitioner of wu wei will not
dispute, but again appeal to, human superiority. However, her
definition of human superiority might be in terms of our human
capacity to grasp the metaphysical unity of naturethe deep
interconnectedness of all things. In light of this, we are never more human than when we are recognizing
our kinship with all life. In short, to adopt the stance of wu wei is not to stand by while others ruin the
world. Wu wei does enable us to oppose others, but not by contradicting them; rather we harness their
beliefs in order to arrive at conclusions that preserve the world's integrity.
 AT: Zizek Psychoanalysis K

Non-unique: people already exist in a world acting upon

desire to create psychic unity, which means (a) were not
the cause of it so you dont reject us; and (b) that voting
negative wont solve.

Their K is a double-turn since their desire to reject us is

participating in the same actions they indict, which means
(a) you vote aff on abuse since it creates a performative
contradiction that allows the neg to be a moving target
and undermine reciprocity by doing the same things they
urge you to reject; and (b) gives us solvency for the
permutations answering back any residual links.
Link turn: We understand the symbolic undertrappings of
the academy, and the 1AC is committed to analyzing these
structures that prop up institutional bias and social
science interventions

Perm: Do plan and the non-competitive parts of the

alternative.
Perm: Do Both. If the permutation cant overcome the
residual links then the alternative cant overcome the
non-unique elements of the status-quo.
Perm: Enact the 1AC through the lens of the criticism.
The permutation is net-beneficial since we musnt pursue
a single path toward psychoanalysis but should rather
should exist between the disciplines instead of asking
which advocacy is more revolutionary

Gardiner 1992 (Judith [Departments of English and

Women's Studies University of Illinois at Chicago]
Review: Psychoanalysis and Feminism: An American
Humanist's View, Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2. (Winter, 1992),
pp. 437-454, d/l: jstor)

I suggest that arguments about which theories are more "revolutionary" do

not make sense without further specification. We should be looking not for
perfect whole systems, conceptually or practically, or for single solutions to
sexism like dual parenting, but for hypotheses that can be checked against changing data and that can in
turn help shape the direction of social pressure and change. In 1974, Mitchell saw under-standing the
family as central to ending women's exploitation. Now families have been demystified and destabilized,
whereas media and other cultural representations of gender seem more pervasive and ambivalent and
Assuming that individuals are embedded in
their influence on our psyches more powerful.
their cultural contexts, British psychotherapist Margot Waddell asserts that "the terms
`masculinity' and `femininity' largely denote sociological categories rather
than psychological" and that the psychoanalyst should be looking rather at
"what these notions" about gender "actually mean in the unconscious of each
individual. "34 Reading the books under review makes me wish to see some of their theory applied to
uses other than analyzing novels, admirable as these readings are. Moreover, the literary criticism
provides most of the individual "cases" in these books, which otherwise avoid therapeutic or clinical detail.
My wish extends to the theoretical as well as the practical, to a desire for
more flexible theories that break with current disciplinary mindsets. The
boundaries between psychoanalysis and sociology, psychology, medicine,
economics, politics, and activism must be breached for psychoanalysis to be
more directly useful to feminism. The books under review show large areas of consensus. They
indicate that the oedipus complex should no longer be a conceptual barrier to thinking of women as
integral to civilization and that polarized gender is not integral to a functioning individual or society.
However, the new directions these books indicate-for example, deeper analysis of human
embodiment and psychoanalytic attention to differences of race and class-
await future feminist theoretical practice.

Psychoanalysis requires myths for the Real in order to

sustain its analysis, leading to the same pitfalls,
undermining solvency

Pope 2006 [Richard, Cultural Analysis, or Theory,

Resurrected,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v009/9.1po
pe.html]
InhisrecentwritingsZizeksuggeststhatcapitalisourReal,towhichdifferentSymbolic
universesattempt,ultimatelyunsuccessfully,toaccountforwithintheirhorizons;the
fundamentalfantasytodayisthedepoliticizationoftheeconomy.Theformulaofsublimation,which
weshallsoondiscussinmoredetail,israisinganobjecttothedignityoftheThing,whereintheobjectandtheThing
shouldbeseenasthetwosidesofaMoebiusstrip;onecannotfunctionwithouttheother.Wemightsaythatasthe
Thingtodaynolongerstandsapartfromrealitybutcontaminatesitateveryturnandineverypossibleway,andas
sublimationistherebyrenderedprecarious,objectsarenolongerabletobedignified(orfromanotherangleitisthe
samearealwaysalreadyso).They
,likeprevioussublimeobjectsofBeauty,continuetoenforcea
poweroffascinationthatfinallyleadstodestructionanddeath,preciselybecausetheyarethe
verymaterializationofcapital(ism).Intheirmateriality,theyproclaimtheOther'snonexistence:
theobjectandThingcollide.Thesuperegohasbutoneimperative:"Obey!",whichtodayis
translatedas"Jouis
!",otherwisetranslatedas"Shop!".
Ofcourse,thesuperegonotonlyenjoins
youtoshop,buttoenjoydoingit;youmustbegladtoobeytheorder,eventhoughthisorderis
presentedasafreechoice.
Psychoanalysis requires myths to account for a Real that can never be
brought into the order of knowledge but must nevertheless be assumed and
presupposed to account for present conditions.
Psychoanalysis upholds heterosexism and patriarchal
violence

Parker 2004 (Ian [Professor in the Discourse Unit at

Manchester Metropolitan University, Member of the
Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and the
London Society of the New Lacanian School] Slavoj Zizek:
A Critical Introduction, Pluto Press; London, Chapter 5

However, despite Braidotti's pessimism about Butler's ability to challenge Zizek,

Butler herself does not actually let him so easily off the hook. Butler argues that his
work 'tends to rely on an unproblematized sexual antagonism that unwittingly
installs a heterosexual matrix as a permanent and incontestable structure of
culture in which women operate as a "stain" in discourse'.19 One of the key
anchoring points for a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity is the notion of
'trauma' that which is repressed, disavowed or foreclosed by the subject at the
point of its assumption of a position in language and trauma sometimes appears to
be a way of holding the subject onto the past, gripping them so that they cannot
move beyond it. For Butler, 'the very theoretical postulation of the originary
trauma presupposes the structuralist theory of kinship and sociality', 20 and
such theories of kinship and sociality are freighted with heteronormative
assumptions (assumptions that Zizek does adhere to, and here Butler is quite
right); 'What he's doing is consolidating these binaries as absolutely
necessary. He's rendering a whole domain of social life that does not fully
conform to prevalent gender norms as psychotic and unlivable' .21 This is a
real problem in his work.

Heterosexism results in violence and war

Tatchell 5/26/1999 (Peter [Journalist & Gay Activist]

Homophobia As a Weapon of War, Outcast No 2, d/l:
http://www.petertatchell.net/international/homophobia.ht
m)
the cultural war against queers - and between
The military war against Slobodan Milosevic may be over, but
queers continues. In the nations of the former Yugoslavia, peace for lesbian and gay people
remains, at best, ambiguous and uncertain, both politically and personally. Sex, love and
friendship between Serbs, Kosovars, Bosnians and Croats is, to say the least, difficult - even dangerous. Ethnic hatred still
runs deep and the memory of recent genocide lingers vividly. Gay life in the Balkans is not as we, in Britain, know it.
Guns are more common than condoms. Lovers may be military torturers. Cruising is a
minefield of ethnic animosity and violence, When Kosovar and Bosnian Muslims are circumcised
and Serbs are not, picking up the wrong man can have frightening consequences. In his book, Serbian Diaries (GMP,
1996), a gay Belgrade university lecturer, writing under the pseudonym Boris Davidovich, tells the tale of a friend, Branko, who was nearly
murdered by a member of the Serb special forces. During the conflict in Bosnia, Branko met the soldier while visiting his brother at the
Belgrade Army Hospital. After wild, passionate sex, the Serb special forces agent suddenly noticed Branko was circumcised and went beserk.
Grabbing a gun from under the pillow, he put it to Branko's head and threatened to blow out his brains, accusing him of being "Muslim scum".
It was only Branko's quick-witted ability to convince him otherwise that saved his life - such are the perils of gay sex in the fratricidal strife of
the jingoistic, hysterical patriotism
the ex-Yugoslavia. As we saw on the battlefields of Kosovo - and previously Bosnia
of wartime can turn routine homophobia into something even more sinister and evil.
The Balkan bloodbath was no exception. Home-sadism became a weapon of war.
While the rape of women was widely reported in the press, the rape of male prisoners
passed almost without mention. Why?
The widespread sex abuse of men has been publicly acknowledged by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson. What
motivated journalists to suppress information about these monstrous sex crimes? The media did, after all, report every other inhumanity with
a reasonable degree of honesty and impartiality.
Accounts collected by UN observers from ethnic Albanian refugees and former detainees confirm that many male prisoners were raped at gun-
point and sexually tortured under interrogation by Serb forces in Kosovo. In some conquered villages, Serb soldiers rounded up the men and
boys, stripped them naked, and forced the boys to fellate their fathers, and the fathers to sodomise their sons. These are the rarley reported
homophobic humiliations of the terror in the Balkans. The Belgrade-based gay rights movements, Arcadia and the Campaign Against
Homophobia, say the Nato bombing strengthened Serbian nationalism, which is notorious for its strong streak of anti-gay machismo. There
is no place for queers in the nationalist vision. Homosexuals are dismissed from the Yugoslav
armed forces on the grounds of "abnormality". Serbia's patriotic hero is the virile, masculine soldier defending his family and homeland.
Those perceived to be weak, effeminate and unmanly are vilified as traitors and fifth
columnists. During the war, some Serb television stations denounced homosexuality as a "perversion" and "disorder" that is alien to
Serbian culture, accusing gays of subverting national defence. Western governments, such as the British, were condemned by sections of the
manipulation of anti-
state-controlled press as "homosexual", and homosexuality was caricatured as a "western disease". This
gay sentiment for propaganda purposes led to a sharp rise in homophobic violence
and police harassment. "Anyone who does not fit the standard model of the strong
man defending his native land until the last drop of blood, is a possible victim of
discrimination, ranging from verbal insults to physical violence and even murder",
according to Dusan Maljkovic, a 23 year old gay activist in Belgrade. He reports police raids on gay venues and cruising places, and the
compilation of police files on known or suspected homosexuals. Even worse, the Serbian version of skinhead gangs - the dizelasi - are
targeting gays in their violent attacks on "social decadence". Homophobia is also a political weapon. The Civic
Alliance of Serbia is the only movement that has spoken out in support of lesbian and gay human rights. Most other parties and factions use
allegations of homosexuality to discredit their opponents. Anti-war students have denounced President Slobodan Milosevic with the chant
"Slobo is a faggot". The rightist deputy prime minister, Vojislav Seselj, is pilloried by left- wingers as the "Serbian Ernst Rohm" (a reference to
Extreme nationalist-fascist parties advocate the "extermination" of gays
the gay Nazi chief).
to cure the "homosexual sickness". During the western bombing raids, anti-Nato
demonstrators in Belgrade carried placards with the slogans: "Clinton, Blair &
Schroeder = Fags".

Zizeks act of transversing the real or the fantasy is

politico-ethical symbolic suicide, that aims for instilling
terrorist ethics and promoting violent fundamentalism
and fascism; this is worse than any physical death or
death of Others

Boucher 2002 (Geoff [Professor of English Literature at

Deakins University, PhD from the University of Melbourne]
The Politics of Universal Truth: An Introduction to Slavoj
ieks Lacanian Dialectics,
http://home.mira.net/~deller/ethicalpolitics/geoff-
boucher/2002/zizek.htm
In this light, for all the talk about the saint and the ethics of the drive, is not iek
suspended, fascinated at the gesture of the master, unable to consummate the
abyssal realization of desire, unwilling to accept the full cost of tarrying with the
negative"? The answer, then, to ieks question (is not Lacans entire theoretical
edifice torn between these two options: between the ethics of desire/Law, of
maintaining the gap, and the lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing?), is No. This is
a false statement of the alternatives, an ethical mirror image of the political
dilemma of postmodern post-politics (either postmarxian acceptance of the
impossibility/undesirability of revolution, or totalitarian madness and the horrors of a
fresh gulag). Zupancics statement of the ethics of the Real demonstrates that not
giving way on ones desire (the ethical maxim of psychoanalysis) is compatible with
the modern moral imperative, do your duty! Modern ethics involves neither the
direct immersion in the death drive (which leads to ieks ethical decisionism and
political voluntarism), nor the avoidance of the drive in a return to the ethics of the
master. Instead of ieks suicidal politico-ethical Act that aims directly for the Real,
the ethical act involves symbolic suicide - a political intervention guided by an ethical
imperative that brooks no exceptions and is prepared to go all the way in its
impossible demand, the revolution in permanence. For, in the final analysis, is not
symbolic suicide infinitely more anxiety provoking than real suicide, than ones
physical destruction (and the destruction of others)? There is a strange comfort in
knowing that you are the instrument of the historical process. Who wants to end up
as an excremental remainder on a planet without a visa, having sacrificed
everything and yet still having no absolute guarantee that you have done the right
thing? By contrast with the ethics of the drive, ieks psychotic politico-ethical Act
that aims directly for the Real can only terminate in a terrorist ethics, in an ethics
that substitutes violence in the Real for the dialectics of the spirit (that is, for
interventions in the symbolic fields of culture and politics), and in a politics that
desperately attempts to galvanise the historical process through the propaganda
of the deed, through exemplary acts of violence or extraordinary acts of
transgression. This is what Zupancic calls the ethics of fantasy (the ethics of
desire is the ethics of fantasy (or what we have also called the ethics of the master)
(Zupancic, 2000: 254)), and it is, I suggest, the ethics of the antagonist, the ethics of
nationalism, fundamentalism and fascism. The Left does not need such an ethics.

Psychoanalysis maintains hegemonic imperatives that

replicate colonial difference

Carr 1998 (Brian [President, Behavioral Health Associates;

Director, Bio-Behavioral Medicine Service, St. Mary of the
Plains Hospital, Lubbock, Texas] At the Thresholds of the
"Human": Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Replication of
Imperial Memory, Cultural Critique, No. 39. (Spring,
1998), pp. 119-150)
In working these two poles of difference and exclusion, we meet again the limits of a
psychoanalytic confrontation with racial difference. When Freud (as well as much of
feminist psychoanalytic theory) calls white femininity a "dark continent" as a way to
invoke the epistemological limit that white femininity poses for psychoanalysis, he
both exposes and levels off what are two different modalities of exclusion.24 For Mary
Ann Doane, the "dark continent" trope shows up the "crucial difference that white
women constitute an internal enigma . . . while `primitive' races constitute an
external enigma" for the epistemological guarantees of psycho-analysis (212). The
difference Doane flags between an "internal" and "external" "enigma" is precisely the
difference of colonial difference-being situated as internal to bourgeois rational
modes of human difference is not the same thing as being installed at the limits of
rational order where bourgeois (sexual) difference dissolves into the categorically
nonhuman site of racialized embodiment. Thus, white femininity may be troped as
racial difference in psychoanalysis and feminist film theory as a way to register its
difference, but the mechanics of that troping is itself evidence of the difference
between what Rachel calls "being in the Business" (or Doane's "internal" difference)
and being situated at the very threshold of the human. For Rachel, inauguration into
a bodily logic of sexual difference is precisely that modality by which en-trance to the
human is made possible-it is the bourgeois line of symbolic intelligibility-and it is no
accident that she is the only replicant who lives. What is at stake in thinking about
the transmutation of Rachel's racialized condition as non-subject to (hetero)sexed
subject is a rethinking of the symbolic as a formation which is not totalizing in its
reach, but hegemonic in its imperatives. Perhaps the most forceful articulation of the
hegemonic status of psychoanalysis's ex- planatory logic has been made by Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their infamous methodological attack, Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. For Deleuze and Guattari: [I]t is not at the weakest
point-the primitives-that Oedipus must be attacked, but at the strongest point, at the
level of the strongest link, by revealing the degree of disfiguration it implies and
brings to bear on desiring-production, on the syntheses of the unconscious, and on
the libidinal investments in our cultural and social milieu. Not that Oedipus counts for
nothing in our society: we have said repeatedly that Oedipus is demanded, and
demanded again and again; and even an at-tempt as profound as Lacan's at shaking
loose from the yoke of Oedipus has been interpreted as an unhoped-for means of
making it heavier still and of resecuring it on the baby and the schizo. (175) In
Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion that Oedipus be "at-tacked at the strongest point,"
they turn the critical energy away from how a psychoanalytic paradigm (and its
figuration of the oedipal scene) hits its explanatory limit at the sight of the racialized
body-what they call the "primitive"-and more toward an investigation of how the
limits of Oedipus inheres in the fact that it is "demanded again and again." By
situating oedipalization as a demand, they refuse to read it nonhegemonically, asking
instead how it functions as a "disfiguralizing" imperative located fully within "our
cultural and social milieu."25 As I have been suggesting, this is precisely the kind of
"demand" to which Rachel must respond. The desiring exchange between her and
Deckard involves an interpellating call which, made fully within a scene of extracted
consent, reveals the very hegemonic nature of sexed symbolic signification.

Psychoanalysis supports heterosexism and patriarchal

violence

Gardiner 1992 (Judith [Departments of English and

Women's Studies University of Illinois at Chicago]
Review: Psychoanalysis and Feminism: An American
Humanist's View, Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2. (Winter, 1992),
pp. 437-454, d/l: jstor)
Not all feminists were convinced that psychoanalysis could be rehabilitated. The
antipsychoanalytic views Mitchell decried are still prominent, especially among
radical feminists; they condemn its theory and despise its practice, seeing it as part
of the ideological apparatus that oppresses women. Moreover, they claim that it
manipulates and deprecates women and reinforces heterosexuality and patriarchy.
Mary Daly gleefully demonstrates that the word "therapist" can be read as "the/
rapist," and she blames psychoanalysts for "blaming the mother" for everyone else's
problems.' Andrea Dworkin calls Freud a pornographer: in "real life" and in Freudian
theory, she claims, "men use the penis to deliver death to women who are, literally,
in their genitals, dirt to the men."6 This literalism reads metaphors as facts and
opposes the psycho-analytic view of fantasy as a permanent and powerful
component of adult life. Radical feminists applaud psychoanalytic rebels such as
Jeffrey Masson who denounce Freud for giving up his early conviction that neurotic
women had been sexually abused and replacing it with a theory based on the girls'
unconscious incestuous fantasies.'

Psychoanalysis focus on becoming human fails to account

for those bodies who have become dehumanized

Carr 1998 (Brian [President, Behavioral Health Associates;

Director, Bio-Behavioral Medicine Service, St. Mary of the
Plains Hospital, Lubbock, Texas] At the Thresholds of the
"Human": Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Replication of
Imperial Memory, Cultural Critique, No. 39. (Spring,
1998), pp. 119-150)

Can we not learn to "see" race in psychoanalysis, despite its eclipsed and
coded status? This article broaches the already solidifying question of race
and psychoanalysis through the latter's most overdetermined production,
that figure whose tropic status is so foundationally occluded: the "human"
Where psychoanalysis offers us an elaborate narrative of the human subject's
develop-mental "becoming"-what we might call its humanization-this article
turns to this same narrative to find a more ghastly underside: the story of the
racialized subject's dehumanization.
Critical theorists have been telling the story of humanism's demise for some
time now, highlighting particularly the displaced epistemological security of
the human subject's claim to knowledge and identity.' However, in the often
celebratory rendering of the "post"-human, we have been seduced by a
peculiar amnesia, one which seems incapable of theorizing the figure of the
dehumanized. It is precisely this figure-that racialized non-subject whose
access to the representational status of the "human" subject is fundamentally
halted-which seems so routinely evacuated in the governing logic of the
posthuman's liberatory promise.2 Indeed, we might argue, via Spillers, that
the first-order erasure of "race" from psycho-analysis and its attendant story
of the human's emergence persists in contemporary formulations of the post-
or anti-human.
CPs
Generic CPs
 AT: Word PiCs
Perm do the CP.
Only counterplans that have a different mandate or form
of criticism than the aff are competitive.
A. Not debatable we cant garner offense against a CP
that does the exact same thing as the aff- destroys clash
which is your favorite part of debate
B. Education limits out bad CPs like the, it, and
persons PICs that discourage case specific research.
C. Solves their offense they can have word PICs and
discursive arguments, they just cant have the exact same
criticism as the aff. And Discourse D/As solve their offense
anyway.
Hyperfocus on specific words bad- Makes real change
impossible and lures us into thinking we have solved
anything, damning the emancipatory potential of their
arguments

Roskoski & Peabody, Florida State, 91

(Matthew and Joe, 1991, A Linguistic and Philosophical Critique of Language
"Arguments,
http://debate.uvm.edu/Library/DebateTheoryLibrary/Roskoski&Peabody-
LangCritiques, Date Accessed: 7/8, JS)

There are several levels upon which language "arguments" are actually
counterproductive. We will discuss the quiescence effect, deacademization,
and publicization. The quiescence effect is explained by Strossen when she
writes "the censorship approach is diversionary. It makes it easier for
communities to avoid coming to grips with less convenient and more
expensive , but ultimately more meaningful approaches " (Strossen
561). Essentially, the argument is that allowing the restriction of
language we find offensive substitutes for taking actions to check
the real problems that generated the language . Previously, we have
argued that the language advocates have erroneously reversed the causal
relationship between language and reality. We have defended the thesis that
reality shapes language, rather than the obverse. Now we will also
contend that to attempt to solve a problem by editing the language
which is symptomatic of that problem will generally trade off with
solving the reality which is the source of the problem . There are
several reasons why this is true. The first, and most obvious, is that we may
often be fooled into thinking that language "arguments" have generated real
change. As Graddol and Swan observe, "when compared with larger
social and ideological struggles, linguistic reform may seem quite a
trivial concern," further noting "there is also the danger that effective
change at this level is mistaken for real social change" (Graddol &
Swan 195). The second reason is that the language we find objectionable can
serve as a signal or an indicator of the corresponding objectionable reality.
The third reason is that restricting language only limits the overt
expressions of any objectionable reality, while leaving subtle and
hence more dangerous expressions unregulated. Once we drive the
objectionable idea underground it will be more difficult to identify,
more difficult to root out, more difficult to counteract, and more likely
to have its undesirable effect. The fourth reason is that objectionable speech
can create a "backlash" effect that raises the consciousness of people
exposed to the speech. Strossen observes that "ugly and abominable as
these expressions are, they undoubtably have had the beneficial
result of raising social consciousness about the underlying societal
problem..." (560).
The second major reason why language "arguments" are counterproductive is
that they contribute to deacademization. In the context of critiquing the
Hazelwood decision, Hopkins explains the phenomenon: To escape
censorship, therefore, student journalists may eschew school sponsorship in
favor of producing their own product. In such a case, the result would almost
certainly be lower quality of high school journalism... The purpose of high
school journalism, however, is more than learning newsgathering, writing,
and editing skills. It is also to learn the role of the press in society; it is to
teach responsibility as well as freedom. (Hopkins 536).
Hyde & Fishman further explain that to protect students from offensive
views, is to deprive them of the experiences through which they
"attain intellectual and moral maturity and become self-reliant"
(Hyde & Fishman 1485). The application of these notions to the debate round
is clear and relevant . If language "arguments" become a dominant
trend, debaters will not change their attitudes. Rather they will
manifest their attitudes in non-debate contexts. Under these
conditions, the debaters will not have the moderating effects of the
critic or the other debaters. Simply put, sexism at home or at lunch is
worse than sexism in a debate round because in the round there is a critic to
provide negative though not punitive feedback.
The publicization effects of censorship are well known. "Psychological studies
reveal that whenever the government attempts to censor speech, the
censored speech - for that very reason - becomes more appealing to many
people" (Strossen 559). These studies would suggest that language
which is critiqued by language "arguments" becomes more attractive
simply because of the critique. Hence language "arguments" are
counterproductive.

Perm do both. Abstaining from bad words destroys

radical politics.

Schram 95
prof social theory and policy @ Bryn Mawr College, 95
(Sanford F. Schram, professor of social theory and policy at Bryn Mawr College, 1995, words of
welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and the Social Science of Poverty, pg. 20-26)

The sounds of silence are several in poverty research. Whereas many welfare policy analysts are constrained by economistic-
herapeutic-manage- na1 discourse, others find themselves silenced by a politics of euphemisms. The latter
suggests that if only the right words can be found, then political change will quickly follow. This is what happens when a good idea
goes bad, when the interrogation of discourse collapses into the valorization of terminological
distinctions.' Recently, I attended a conference of social workers who were part of a network of agencies seeking to assist
homeless youths. A state legisla- tor addressed the group and at one point in the question-and-answer pe- riod
commiserated with one professional about how the by then well- accepted phrase children at risk ought to
be dropped, for it is pejorative. The legislator preferred children under stress as a more "politically correct" euphemism. Much
discussion ensued regarding how to categorize clients so as to neither patronize nor marginalize them. No one, however, mentioned
the reifying effects of all categorization, or how antiseptic language only exacerbates the problem by projecting
young people in need onto one or another dehumanizing dimension of therapeutic discourse.' No one sug- gested that although
isolated name changes may be a necessary part of po- litical action, they are insufficient by themselves. No one emphasized the need
for renamings that destabilize prevailing institutional practices.' In- stead, a science of renaming seemed to displace a
politics of interrogation. A fascination with correcting the terms of interpersonal
communication had replaced an interest in the critique of structure. A comfort in dealing with
discourse in the most narrow and literal sense had replaced an inter- est in the broader
discursive structures that set the terms for reproducing organized daily life . I was left to
question how discourse and structure need to be seen as connected before reflection about
poverty can inform political action.' The deconstruction of prevailing discursive structures helps politi- cize the
institutionalized practices that inhibit alternative ways of con- structing social relations.5 Isolated acts of renaming, however,
are unlikely to help promote political change if they are not tied to interrogations of the structures that serve as the
interpretive context for making sense of new terms.' This is especially the case when renamings take the form of eu-phemisms
designed to make what is described appear to be consonant with the existing order. In other words, the problems of a politics of
renaming are not confined to the left, but are endemic to what amounts to a classic American practice utilized across the political
spectrum.' Homeless, wel- fare, and family planning provide three examples of how isolated in- stances of renaming fail in their
efforts to make a politics out of sanitizing language. Reconsidering the Politics of Renaming Renaming can do much to indicate
respect and sympathy. It may strategi- cally recast concerns so that they can be articulated in ways that are more appealing and less
dismissive. Renaming the objects of political contesta- tion may help promote the basis for articulating latent affinities among
disparate political constituencies. The relentless march of renamings can help denaturalize and delegitimate ascendant categories and
the constraints they place on political possibility. At the moment of fissure, destabilizing renamings have the potential to encourage
reconsideration of how biases embedded in names are tied to power relations." Yet isolated acts of renam- ing do not
guarantee that audiences will be any more predisposed to treat things differently than they were
before. The problem is not limited to the political reality that dominant groups possess greater resources for influenc- ing discourse.
Ascendant political economies, such as liberal postindustrial capitalism, whether understood structurally or discursively, operate as
insti- tutionalized systems of interpretation that can subvert the most earnest of renamings." It is just as dangerous to suggest that paid
employment exhausts possi- bilities for achieving self-sufficiency as to suggest that political action can be meaningfully confined to
isolated renamings.' Neither the workplace nor a name is the definitive venue for effectuating self-worth or political intervention."
Strategies that accept the prevailing work ethos will con- tinue to marginalize those who cannot work, and increasingly so in a post-
industrial economy that does not require nearly as large a workforce as its industrial predecessor. Exclusive preoccupation
with sanitizing names over- looks the fact that names often do not matter to those who live
out their lives according to the institutionalized narratives of the broader political economy,
whether it is understood structurally or discursively, whether it is monolithically hegemonic
or reproduced through allied, if disparate, prac- tices. What is named is always encoded in some publicly
accessible and as- cendent discourse." Getting
the names right will not matter if the names are interpreted
according to the institutionalized insistences of organized society." Only when those insistences are relaxed does
there emerge the possibil- ity for new names to restructure daily practices. Texts, as it now has become notoriously apparent, can be
read in many ways, and they are most often read according to how prevailing discursive structures provide an interpretive context for
reading diem. 14 The meanings implied by new names of necessity overflow their categorizations, often to be reinterpreted in terms of
available systems of intelligibility (most often tied to existing institutions). Whereas re- naming can maneuver change within the
interstices of pervasive discursive structures, renaming is limited in reciprocal fashion. Strategies of contain- ment that
seek to confine practice to sanitized categories appreciate the discursive character of social
life, but insufficiently and wrongheadedly. I do not mean to suggest that discourse is dependent on structure as
much as that structures are hegemonic discourses. The operative structures reproduced through a multitude of daily practices and
reinforced by the efforts of aligned groups may be nothing more than stabilized ascendent discourses." Structure is the alibi for
discourse. We need to destabilize this prevailing interpretive context and the power plays that
reinforce it, rather than hope that isolated acts of linguistic sanitization will lead to political
change. Interrogating structures as discourses can politicize the terms used to fix meaning, produce value, and establish identity.
Denaturalizing value as the product of nothing more than fixed interpretations can create new possibilities for creating value in other
less insistent and injurious ways. The discursively/structurally reproduced reality of liberal capitalism as deployed by power blocs of
aligned groups serves to inform the existentially lived experiences of citizens in the contemporary postindustrial order." The powerful
get to reproduce a broader context that works to reduce the dissonance between new names and established practices. As long as the
prevailing discursive structures of liberal capitalism create value from some practices, experiences, and identities over others, no
matter how often new names are insisted upon, some people will continue to be seen as inferior simply because they do not engage in
the same practices as those who are currently dominant in positions of influence and prestige. Therefore, as much as there is a
need to reconsider the terms of debate, to interrogate the embedded biases of discursive practices, and to resist living out
the invid- ious distinctions that hegemonic categories impose, there are real limits to what isolated instances of
renaming can accomplish. Renaming points to the profoundly political character of labels. Labels oper- ate as sources of
power that serve to frame identities and interests. They predispose actors to treat the subjects in question in certain ways, whether they
are street people or social policies. This increasingly common strategy, however, overlooks at least three major pitfalls to the politics
of renaming." Each reflects a failure to appreciate language's inability to say all that is meant by any act of signification. First, many
renamings are part of a politics of euphemisms that conspires to legitimate things in ways consonant with hegemonic discourse. This
is done by stressing what is consistent and de-emphasizing what is inconsis- tent with prevailing discourse. When welfare advocates
urge the nation to invest in its most important economic resource, its children, they are seek- ing to recharacterize efforts on behalf of
poor families as critical for the country's international economic success in a way that is entirely consonant with the economistic
biases of the dominant order. They are also distracting the economic-minded from the social democratic politics that such policy
changes represent." This is a slippery politics best pursued with attention to how such renamings may reinforce entrenched
institutional practices." Yet Walter Truett Anderson's characterization of what happened to the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s has
relevance here: One reason it is so hard to tell when true cultural revolutions have occurred is that societies are terribly good at co-
opting their opponents; something that starts out to destroy the prevailing social construction of reality ends up being a part of it.
Culture and counterculture overlap and merge in countless ways. And the hostility, toward established social constructions of reality
that produced strikingly new movements and behaviors in the early decades of this century, and peaked in the 1960s, is now a familiar
part of the cultural scene. Destruction itself becomes institutionalized." According to Jeffrey Goldfarb, cynicism has lost its critical
edge and has become the common denominator of the very society that cynical criticism sought to debunk .21 If this is the case,
politically crafted characterizations can easily get co-opted by a cynical society that already anticipates the politi- cal character of such
selective renamings. The politics of renaming itself gets interpreted as a form of cynicism that uses renamings in a disingenuous
ashion in order to achieve political ends. Renaming not only loses credibility but also corrupts the terms
used. This danger is ever present, given the limits of language. Because all terms are partial and incomplete characterizations,
every new term can be invalidated as not capturing all that needs to be said about any topic?
With time, the odds increase that a new term will lose its potency as it fails to emphasize ne-glected dimensions of a problem. As
newer concerns replace the ones that helped inspire the terminological shift, newer terms will be introduced to ad- dress what has been
neglected. Where disabled was once an improvement over handicapped, other terms are now deployed to make society inclusive of all
people, however differentially situated. The "disabled" are now "physi- cally challenged" or "mentally challenged?' The politics
of renaming promotes higher and higher levels of neutralizing language." Yet a neutralized language
is itself already a partial reading even if it is only implicitly biased in favor of some attributes over others. Neutrality is always relative
to the prevailing context As the context changes, what was once neutral becomes seen as biased. Implicit moves of emphasis and de-
emphasis become more visible in a new light. "Physically" and "mentally challenged" already begin to look insufficiently affirmative
as efforts intensify to include people with such attributes in all avenues of contemporary life.24 Not just terms risk being corrupted by
a politics ofrenaming. Proponents of a politics of renaming risk their personal credibility as well. Proponents of a politics of renaming
often pose a double bind for their audiences. The politics of renaming often seeks to highlight sameness and difference si-
multaneously.25 It calls for stressing the special needs of the group while at the same time denying that the group has needs different
from those of anyone else. Whether it is women, people of color, gays and lesbians, the disabled, or even "the homeless:' renaming
seeks to both affirm and deny difference. This can be legitimate, but it is surely almost always bound to be difficult. Women can have
special needs, such as during pregnancy, that make it unfair to hold them to male standards; however, once those differ- ent
circumstances are taken into account, it becomes inappropriate to as- sume that men and women are fundamentally different in
socially signifi- cant ways .21 Yet emphasizing special work arrangements for women, such as paid maternity leave, may reinforce
sexist stereotyping that dooms women to inferior positions in the labor force. Under these circumstances, advocates of particular
renamings can easily be accused of paralyzing their audience and immobilizing potential sup- porters. Insisting
that people use terms that imply sameness and difference simultaneously is a good way to ensure such terms do not get used. This
encourages the complaint that proponents of new terms are less interested in meeting people's needs
than in demonstrating who is more sophisticated and sensitive. Others turn away, asking why they cannot still be
involved in trying to right wrongs even if they cannot correct their use of terminology," Right-minded, if wrong-worded,
people fear being labeled as the enemy; important allies are lost on the high ground of
linguistic purity. Euphemisms also encourage self-censorship. The politics of renaming discourages its
proponents from being able to respond to inconvenient infor- mation inconsistent with the
operative euphemism. Yet those who oppose it are free to dominate interpretations of the inconvenient facts. This is bad
politics. Rather than suppressing stories about the poor, for instance, it would be much better to promote
actively as many intelligent interpretations as possible. The politics of renaming overlooks that life may be
more complicated than attempts to regulate the categories of analysis. Take, for instance, the curious negative example of "culture?'
Somescholars have been quite insis- tent that it is almost always incorrect to speak about culture as a factor in explaining poverty,
especially among African Americans .211 Whereas some might suggest that attempts to discourage examining cultural differences, say
in family structure, are a form of self-censorship, others might want to argue that it is just clearheaded, informed analysis that de-
mphasizes cul- ture's relationship to poverty.29 Still others suggest that the question of what should or should not be discussed cannot
be divorced from the fact that when blacks talk publicly in this country it is always in a racist society that uses their words to
reinforcetheir subordination. Open disagreement among African Americans will be exploited by whites to delegitimate any
challengesto racism and to affirm the idea that black marginalization is self-generated.3 Emphasizing cultural differences between
blacks and whites and exposing internal "problems" in the black community minimize how "problems" across races and structural
political-economic factors, including especially the racist and sexist practices of institutionalized society, are the primary causes of
poverty. Yet it is distinctly possible that although theories proclaiming a "culture of poverty" are incorrect, cultural variation itself may
be an important issue in need of examination." For instance, there is much to be gained from contrasting the extended-family tradition
among African Americans with the welfare system of white society, which is dedicated to reinforcing the nuclear two-parent family.32
A result of self-censorship, however, is that animportant subject is left to be studied by the wrong people. Although ana- lyzing
cultural differences may not tell us much about poverty and may be dangerous in a racist society, leaving it to others to study
culture and poverty can be a real mistake as well. Culture in their hands almost always becomes "culture of poverty."" A politics of
renaming risks reducing the discussants to only those who help reinforce existing prejudices.

The perm solves better categorical rejection destroys

action you should embrace contingency that allows for
discursive redeployment

Schram 2k
professor of social theory and policy Bryn Mawr College, 2K
(Sanford F, After Welfare p. 160-164)

What then is the alternative ethic implied in the concern to compensate groups for the way have been othered? How is a
nonfoundational ethic possible? Not all ethics need be command ethics grounded in categorical imperatives of a priori premises and
foundational theories that specify the needed conditions for right conduct ahead of time.-" An ethic of contingency, equipping us to
respond as circumstances change, is one way of talking about alternatives. This is the beginning of what I would call a
postmodern ethic." In social policy, such an ethic would continually correct the harms and injuries
caused by exclusions and limitations in social policy. With such an ethic, we would forgo crying to stabilize
families in terms of -social security," which often involves marginalizing, if not punishing, those that do not conform to normative
standards. We would move beyond a normative approach that prioritizes a particular version of the family over others. Instead, we
would have a system of "compensation" to attend to the needs of families that have been
marginalized by the operative exclusionary standards . The social security 'state" would be replaced by a
compensatory "process." While social security tries to arrive at a stabilized "state," compensation enacts a dynamic process that
responds to contingent circumstances and redresses the needs of those who have been left behind. Social security fixes distinctions of
deser-vingness, while compensation seeks to correct them.' Social provision consistent with this alternative compensatory perspec-tive
would still be tied to philosophy, if not to foundations. It would be based on an alternative "ethic of alterity" that attends to constantly
being attentive to the "others" who have been discriminated against and left behind in the face of social and economic change." Such
an ethic of alterity would not align itself with an epistemology of interpreting the unknown in
terms of the known and it would resist an ontology of sameness that evaluates the other in terms
of the self)' Instead, an ethic of alteriry would encourage us to learn to work with what Homi Bhabha calls the "anxiety of
signification? Its pedagogy would teach us to live with the liminal state of being "in between. It would attend to the way the normative
standards of, say, the self-sufficient self "other" (as in the verb "to other") some people and leave out alternative identities and
practices that are nonetheless worth affirming and supporting in their own right. 3' In such cases, people whose contributions to
society take the form of child rearing or caregiving more generally, can be seen to be engaged in productive work, and vice versa. We
can then begin to appreciate how each can be supported under another's rationale in particular instances. A work ethic and a care ethic
need not be treated as mutually exclusive and what counts as work or care will be recognized as changeable
and in need of constant reconsideration under a dynamic compensatory process. 38 Rather than trying to treat
"like cases alike" according to liberal notions of equality of opportunity, fairness, and procedural
due process, the compensatory process would be willing to continually make exceptions and
account for anomalies, especially when those exceptions are a product of broader societal forces
that discriminate against those who are so othered. Such a process would recognize that
inequalities or relative deprivation can translate into inequities or absolute deprivation, especially
when such distinctions are exacerbated under conditions of rapid social and economic change . The
compensatory process would be prepared to bring forward those left behind in appreciation of the fact that their relative access to
specific social goods has been affected by (heir "hed" status and that this will affect their ability to provide for their families in the
future in real terms.
The negatives emphasis on the pre given CONTENT of our
words over the EXPRESSION of their context prevent a
rhizomatic understanding of language that prevents the
process of becoming which is necessary for NOVEL ways
of evaluating the world

Stevenson, 2k9
(Frank, Dept. English, National Taiwan Normal University, Stretching Language to Its Limit:
Deleuze and the Problem of Poeisis, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 25.1)//TR

Lecercle ends his book with a discussion of Deleuzes late theory, in Essays Critical and Clinical (Paris 1993),2 of style as a writers
capacity to make language stutter (113). In the last section of her Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (1999), Olkowski
also focuses on Deleuzes problem of language in relation to his theory of style as langue-vibration, as set forth in this same
stuttering model in Essays:3 Make the language system stutteris it possible without confusing it with speech? Everything
depends on the way in which language is thought: if we extract it like a homogeneous
system in equilibrium, or near equilibrium, and we define it by means of constant terms and
relations, it is evident that the disequilibriums and variations can only affect speech. . . . But
if the system appears to be in perpetual disequilibrium, if the system vibratesand has
terms each one of which traverses a zone of continuous variationlanguage itself will begin
to vibrate and stutter. (Deleuze 108, Olkowski 229) Deleuze had of course for many years been breaking away from
Saussurian and Chomskian semiotics, indeed from (post)structuralism with its focus on meaning (signification) and interpretation. In
The Logic of Sense (1969) his Stoic theory of language takes meaning as a virtual event, a surface effect of langue; the infinitive
Verbits paradigm the verb to becomeis now seen as expressing the entire range of language, as the virtual event of language.
Developing further this idea of language as fundamentally (verbal) action and event, Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus
(1982) set forth a fully pragmatic language-theory based on mots-dordre (order-words, commands).4 This theory is much indebted to
Austins speech-act theory (or theory of performative utterances, Deleuzes noncs) and is much closer to Foucault than to Derrida or
Lacan. Thus immediately after citing the above late-Deleuzian passage Olkowski notes that The performative must be the motion that
inaugurates any such variation in language, for [it] is both language and body. The performative is language, in that it expresses sense
in a proposition; it is simultaneously corporeal insofar as it actualizes something in bodies, it involves the actions and passions of
bodies; it is doing by saying (229). This catches one of the central paradoxes in Deleuzes language theorythe nonc (utterance,
speech) is simultaneously linguistic and corporealand is closely related to the problem raised by Deleuze himself in the above
passage: Make the language system stutteris it possible without confusing it with speech? Everything depends on the way in which
language is thought . . . (Essays 108). That is, this is not stuttering in the normal sense (a kind of vibration of speech or of the
voice) but in a much wider sense where, far from equilibrium, langue itself vibrates or (metaphorically or metonymically?)
stutters. For this wider langue-vibration or rocking is the physical, corporeal action of langue, its bodily walking, even though it
contains speech within it (in a closetoequilibrium state of vibration). Deleuze indeed associates it (metaphorically or metonymically)
with the rolling gait of Becketts Watt (110), for speaking is no less a movement than walking: the former goes beyond speech
toward language, just as the latter goes beyond the organism toward a body without organs (111). In this late model, language
becomes so strained at its extreme limit of disequilibrium that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer . . . then language in its
entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence (113.) The extreme point in the
pendulums arc, where we feel that language is moving beyond itself, is simultaneously
confronting non-language, non-speech, silence and looking back at itself, is the point
reached in the stammering of truly creative writers : Stylethe foreign language within languageis
made up of these two operations, or should we instead speak with Proust of a nonstyle, that is, of the elements in a style to come
which do not yet exist?5 Style is the economy of language. To make ones language stutter, face to face, or back to back, and at the
same time to push language as a whole to its limit, to its outside, to its silencethis would be like the boom and the crash (113).
Language now has a foreign language within it because it is in the process of overcoming itself, becoming-other or becoming-
foreign to itself, perhaps becoming its own future and/or its own past.6 However, here we might want to know how far this notion of
poetic, or more generally literary, style (as non-style) differs from conventional or traditional notions of style and/or non-style.
But it is hard to pin down the meaning of style in the conventional sense, except perhaps by saying it has to do with the technique, the
use of words, the form of expression rather than the content or meaning. It would be tempting to say that the vibrating langue-
machine is primarily the force of expression itself rather than some sort of (static, objectified) content, except for the problem that
Deleuze does not want to distinguish form from content here.7 However, insofar as the best writing stylealso painterly, musical,
dancing style?is sometimes said to be the most economical, Deleuze does also say in the above passage that Style is the economy
of language (113), no doubt thinking of this stuttering-of-language model as the most generalized and
encompassing, and/or most reductive, most simplified model of poiesis (which literally
means making in or with language) we could possibly have. It is also the most
metaphysical model: language becomes most truly poetic when it confronts its own
ultimate limit and the silence that lies beyond it.8 Still, the problem of literariness does arise here. Lecercle
points out the apparent contradiction in Deleuzes attitude toward literariness in late essays like He Stuttered and The Exhausted:
while clearly wanting to reject any elitist, self-consciously text-oriented or style-heavy (hence non-style) poetics, he chooses as his
examples Luca, Beckett, and other writers associated with elitist, hyper-intellectual high-modernist literature (Deleuzes forgivable
intellectual aesthetes love of sophisticated art is also clear in his Cinema books and his book on the English painter Francis Bacon).9
But there is a more specific literariness issue that will concern me here: that of figures of speech like metaphor, often associated
with literary (especially poetic) style. Though Deleuze does say, as part of his and Guattaris turn away from semiotics with their
pragmatic language theory, that he has no use for meaning or metaphor, the problem is that, at least for the uninitiated,
metaphoricity would seem to underlie his entire philosophical discourse, manifesting itself everywhere and not least, ironically
enough, in the very idea that the vast vibrating-langue model could itself be or embody poetic speech. A particular case of this is the
notion, trope or figure of langue gazing simultaneously (in a double-movement) at the silence beyond it and back at itself, also taken
by Deleuze as the problem of languages exhaustibility. For the notion (figure) of silence here again suggests a certain poetic
(indeed humanistic) priority inasmuch as, from a physical-science point of view, there may ultimately be only noise (rather than
silence, a term defined by a listener) beyond and between (the elements of) language or any system of meaning.10 Moreover, the
late Deleuzes argument (via Beckett) that language (meaning) could exhaust not just itself (leaving silence) but its own possibility
may seem more poetic than logical. Thus, inasmuch as Deleuze takes his late vibrating-langue model (diagram, machine) as itself
embodying poiesis or poetic speech, I want to look at the problem of literariness (style vs. non-style) in relation to this model,
more specifically the problem of metaphoricity. My first point here will be that while Deleuze rejects (a semiotics-based) signification
and metaphor on principle, the stuttering-langue machine or model is itself a figure and an embodiment of metaphoricity in its literal
sense of going-beyond (langue moves beyond itself toward silence). My second point (closely tied to the one above) point will be
that the very notion of the limit of language (as a form of sound and/or noise?) and the silence beyond this limit is a sort of metaphor
or metaphorical conception (literally one that goes beyond itself). My third point will be that the conception of languages
exhaustion as a total breaking-down or radical self-transformation is also metaphorical in the literal sense, as is Deleuzes logical
claim that Becketts narrative exhaustion of logical possibilities in Watt is in effect the giving of another reality to possibility, one that
is itself exhaustible. However, I will also point out in Deleuzes defensei.e. this is admittedly an ambiguous or problematic issue
at bestthat he accepts a certain conception of figure (rather than metaphor), one at least partly influenced by Lyotard and one
which does try to get beyond semiotics by going beneath language, i.e. by not assuming at the outset any foundational or totalizing
conception of langue but rather that there are only indeterminate figures. But here we come back to the first problem above: if
there are only shadowy figures beneath (or instead of) a totalized language, then how can we begin from the model of a totalized
langue that commences to vibrate or stutter when stretched to its extreme limits? Given the above-mentioned problematic notion of
silence in relation to sound and noise, I will then suggest that one might also move completely outside of this Deleuzian language-
space (or meaning-space) by turning to the model or paradigm of information theory. Here we begin with that physical reality or
physical world (of atoms, sound waves, etc.) that Deleuze seems to want to reach by stretching his langue to or beyond its limits, and I
will briefly describe some ways in which the information-theory modelin which noise, which underlies sound/meaning and distorts
or interrupts signals (meaningful sounds, messages)may possibly achieve the same results Deleuze is aiming for in a much simpler
or more direct way, even if now the (arguably poetic) notion of the silence that lies beyond langue may have to be discarded. The
turn to information/communication theory also seems justified inasmuch as poiesis (making) does also appear in autopoietic (self-
making) systems theory, apparently a more encompassing field than that of merely-human language. Finally, in the Conclusion I will
briefly explore the concepts or practices of problem and question, problematizing (a Deleuzian term) and questioning in order
to see what sort of light questionabilityperhaps itself a form of background noisemight throw on the above questions, problems,
ambiguities, paradoxes. In fact Deleuze in Difference and Repetition seems to have a very preliminary, incipient, inchoate theory of
questioning and/or problematizing, though one not explicitly related by him to the problem of language. Poiesis and the Problem of
Metaphor Poiesis in Greek means simply making, but it became associated long ago with the creative making of any art form,
and more especially with that of writing (hence poetry). However, since at least the mid-20th century (with the rise of cybernetics)
poiesis has also been used to signify the creative making of any system; in this wider usage of the term we usually get it as
autopoiesis or the self-making (self-creation, self-generation) of a system. Hence we have autopoietic systems theory, arguably a
(metaphorical or metonymic?) usage or context of poiesis which might have fit Deleuzes vibrating langue-model as well as, or even
better than, the modern-poetic context. This self-generating aspect is already clear in the prototypeset forth by Deluze and
Guattari in Chapter 5 of A Thousand Plateausof the late He Stuttered langue-machine. For this prototypical abstract machine
does not depend on any pre-existing foundation in language, unlike the vast syntactic theory/model of Chomsky. Rather, it . . .
makes no distinction within itself between content and expression; its content is the force of its expression, it generates itself: We
must say that this abstract machine is necessarily much more than language. When linguists (following Chomsky)
rise to the idea of a purely language-based abstract machine, [we object] that their
machine . . . is not abstract enough because it is limited to the form of expression and to
alleged universals that presuppose language. . . . A true abstract machine has no way of making a distinction
within itself between a plane of expression and a plane of content because it draws a single plane of consistency. . . . The abstract
machine in itself is destratified, deterritorialized; it has no form of its own . . . and makes no distinction within itself between content
and expression. . . . [It] in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic. . . . It operates by matter,
not by substance; by function, not by form. . . . [It] is pure Matter-Function. . . . (ATP, On Several Regimes of Signs 141) We cannot
begin like Chomsky from the foundation of a pre-given language, that is, by distinguishing expression from content, for there is no
pre-given language but rather only the rhizomic, unspecified, shifting configurations of sense.11 In a further extension of or variation
on this deterritorialized-Chomsky model we have the double-axis vibrating-langue model of He Stuttered (1993). 12 This somehow
begins from what might have been the classical double-axis semiotic models of Saussure (associative and syntagmatic axes) and
Jakobson (metaphoric and syntactic-metonymic axes or poles), but quickly moves beyond their traditional sense: Language is
subject to a double process, that of choices to be made and that of sequences to be established: disjunction or the selection of similars,
connection or the consecution of combinables. As long as language is considered as a system in equilibrium, the disjunctions are
necessarily exclusive (we do not say passion, ration, nation at the same time, but must choose between them), and the
connections, progressive (we do not combine a word with its own elements, in a kind of stop-start or forward-backward jerk). But far
from equilibrium, the disjunctions become included or inclusive, and the connections, reflexive, following a rolling gait that concerns
the process of language and no longer the flow of speech. Every word is divided, but into itself (pas-rats, passions-rations); and every
word is combined, but with itself (pas-passe-passion). It is as if the entire language started to roll from right to left, and to pitch
backward and forward: the two stutterings. (Essays 110)
DAs
Generic DAs
 Every 2AC
Scope D/A: According to McClintock, within uncovering the
circuits of hegemonic power, we need to think through
events on an individual, local sense as well. Hegemonys
forced focus on nations obscures the magnitude of
violence that occurred within these areas- we come to
view lives as parts of the nation instead of individual
lives. This is what McClintock calls imperialism
manifesting from within, reconfiguring violence and
ordinary bodies into distant clinical specters. However, to
recognize this specters is to cut against the grain of US
exceptionalism- it forces a recognition of atrocities the US
committed, which interrupts the myth the US is a global
protector acting for the good while recognizing individual
agency.
Agency d/a- Jose Medina says that the 1ACs anti-
disciplinarity is a form of guerilla pluralism to inject
multiple narratives against the hegemonic interpretation.
The goal of this is to create epistemic friction- not seeking
unity with existing power structures but rather working to
create disruption. In this specific case, the 1ACs refusal
to strategically essentialize the law for a specific policy
against military presence is because that option seeks a
unity with current power structures and necessarily
sacrifices some of the objective of anti-disciplinarity; by
engaging in our revealing and antidisciplinarity without
turning to this fixed acts, we use epistemic friction
provoke conflict, seek to point out gaps and clashing
perspectives, focuses on tension and constantly re-
investigating how our knowledge is produced. The 1AC
thus isnt a single speech act that solves all problems but
rather is a constantly producing form of scholarship that
is a process rather than a product.
Imperial Forgetting D/A: Our Street evidence says it is this
ability to forget the horrors of the nation at home and the
act of giving the nation a pass on those genocidal crimes
that fosters a brutal imperialistic drive to violently spread
outward: their limits that prevent discussions of the way
this manifests contribute to this genocide analytic within
the academy, which Rodriguez says we must constantly
produce knowledge against as radical intellectuals. Thats
why we must forefront these issues through the 1AC
We have to shift political focus towards systemic impacts
and out of the fantasy of improbable extinction scenarios

Omolade 84
(Barbara Omolade Calvin Colleges first dean of multicultural affairs, Women of Color and the
Nuclear Holocaust, Reviewed work(s):Source: Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2,
Teaching about Peace, War, and Women inthe Military (Summer, 1984), p. 12Published by: The
Feminist Press at the City University of New YorkStable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004305 .Accessed: 26/08/2012 12:36)//TR

To raise these issues effectively, the movement for nuclear dis-armament must overcome its reluctance to
speak in terms of power, of institutional racism, and imperialist military terror. The issues of nuclear
disarmament and peace have been mystified because they have been placed within a
doomsday frame which separates these issues from other ones, saying, "How can we talk about struggles against
racism, poverty, and exploitation when there will be no world after they drop the bombs?" The struggle for peace cannot
be separated from, nor considered more sacrosanct than, other struggles concerned with
human life and change. In April, 1979, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency released a report on the effects of
nuclear war that concludes that, in a general nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet
Union, 25 to 100 million people would be killed. This is approxi-mately the same number of
African people who died between 1492 and 1890 as a result of the African slave trade to the
New World. The same federal report also comments on the destruction of ur-ban housing that would cause massive shortages
after a nuclear war, as well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food shortages. Of course, for people of color
the world over, starvation is already a common problem, when, for example, a nation's
crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own people. And the housing of people of
color throughout the world's urban areas is already blighted and inhumane: families live in
shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets; even in the urban areas of North America, the poor
may live without heat or running water. For people of color, the world as we
knew it ended centuries ago . Our world, with its own languages, customs and ways, ended. And we are
only now beginning to see with increasing clarity that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for it, and rebuld it in our, own image.
The "death culture" we live in has convinced many to be more concerned with death than
with life, more willing to demon-strate for "survival at any cost" than to struggle for liberty
and peace with dignity. Nuclear disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to the daily and historic issues of
racism, to the ways in which people of color continue to be murdered. Acts of war, nu-clear holocausts,

and genocide have already been declared on our jobs, our housing,
our schools, our families, and our lands . As women of color, we are warriors, not pacifists. We
must fight as a people on all fronts, or we will continue to die as a people. We have fought in people's wars in China, in Cuba, in
Guinea- Bissau, and in such struggles as the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and in countless daily encounters with
land-lords, welfare departments, and schools. These struggles are not abstractions , but the only
means by which we have gained the ability to eat and to provide for the future of our
people.

Cyclical Violence DA: US imperialism precipitates

instability and conflict to break out, necessitating US
intervention to support the good side. Muzaffar
empirically proves-

False Preservation D/A: Our Street evidence says the key

trick to maintaining a biopolitical regime lies within
controlling their populations quality of life- threats such
as the Negs impact scenarios are leveraged to quell
insurrections like the Aff. Prefer our McClintock evidence
and our Muzaffar evidence extended above- they prove
the US actively desires wartime to build on the myth of
the great global policeman saving the day. Instead, we
need to uncloak the mechanisms of anti-blackness and
bare life inherent within military presence in the Greater
Horn of Africa via the 1AC

Operating within realism damn their authors scholarship-

their interpretation is skewed to necessitate militaristic
response
Burke 2007 (Anthony, Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in
the University of New South Wales, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, theory
& event 10.2, //TR)

My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against
86
excessive optimism. Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational
instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my
analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive
flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican
states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the
conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against
everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues,
I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being
itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to
himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of
revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be
denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the
call of a more primal truth.'87What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing
the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed
not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by
an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire
space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary
modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention,
geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely
from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but
from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in
powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe,
policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and
humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the
chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of
action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that
reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available
choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the
mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain
militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective,
dysfunctional or chaotic.

Preserving the future by destroying the present destroys

v2l and locks in authoritarianism
Haver 99 (William Haver (1999): Really Bad Infinities: Queer's Honour and the
Pornographic Life, Parallax, 5:4, 9-21)//TR

In Body Fluids, an essay as remarkable for its prescience as for its rigour, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille ask in the context of
what we have come to know as safer sex discourse in the AIDS pandemic: What will we say to those who ignore
advice and continue to make contacts known to be at risk? Will we treat them as irresponsible, to be lectured
to, put under observation, and converted? In that case, our future scenario is assured: that of the
child in the glass bubble, for whom the outside environment means death ; that of the
obsessional struggle against all unmonitored contact as potentially the source of death . 1 Much
has happened in the fourteen years since Stengerss and Gilles essay first appeared. We have learned, for example, that the
pandemic is interminable, that we are, and will be, in what we call our being, of AIDS (with the full force of the partitive:
we belong to AIDS as its ownmost), 2 and that we can therefore no longer think of the future as the
restoration of a putatively uncontaminated past; we have learned, perhaps, that so-called safer sex is not a state of
being, and that latex is no guarantee of immortality; we, some of us, have learned the hard way (there being no easy way) the
existential irrelevance of both hope and despair; we have learned that the fact that we both are and possess bodies means that our
bodies are our unavoidable exposure to danger, that there never is, has been, nor can be a
place of safety; more, that the fact of our embodiment is the fact of our utter nontranscendence, our
finitude. And we have had to live the future scenario of which Stengers and Gille warned us in 1985; absolutely nothing has
happened to deprive their question and their warning of their cogency, for we have seen technical advice pertinent
to our pleasures pressed into the service of a thoroughly authoritarian, albeit thoroughly stupid,
moralism. Indeed, safer sex discourse, including not only verbal admonition but an entire range of material and institutional
practices, has become an essential part of an entire scientific medical technology of social control such that all illness,
disability, and death itself have become essentially moral failings rather than misfortunes.

Without addressing how the panoptic diagram functions

the panopticon will continue to deem lives of value and
lives that must be destroyed. This logic allows the
imperial gaze to continue its colonization project.
Spanos 99 (William V. Spanos. His banished gods restored to
rights divine, And settled sure succession in his line. Americas
Shadow P. 37)// RJG
This new disciplinary instrument of invisible coercions, this modern
allotrope of the gaze/centered circle, which, not incidentally, had as
one of its primary enabling models the disciplinary Roman military
camp, was the Panopticon, the circular penal building designed by the
English Utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham to house social deviants of various
kinds who could be supervised from a central tower. This epochal
architectural model has, of course, been brilliantly analyzed by
Michel Foucault. But with a few partial exceptions,64 its origins, its
spatial economy, its scope, and the hold it has had on the modern
Occidental mind have not been adequately thought by those
oppositional cultural, political, and postcolonial critics who,
ostensibly, would resist the colonizing project of the imperial gaze,
whatever its terrain:
The Panopticon... must be understood as a generalizable model of
functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the
everyday life of men. No doubt Bentham presents it as a particular
institution, closed in upon itself.... But [it] must not be understood as a dream
building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form;
its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be
represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure
of political technology that may and must be detached from any
specific use. It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform
prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to
confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers
to work.65
Though Foucault does not refer to it, we may infer from the
exemplary nature of the practices he does the reformation of
prisoners, the treatment of patients, the instruction of school children, the
confinement of the insane, the supervision of workers, the putting of beggars
and idlers to work that the panoptic diagram serves as well to
"civilize" the "deviant" peoples of other "savage" or "primitive" or
"undeveloped" worlds (peoples, it should be emphasized, represented by
this gendered discourse as errant, incontinent, and seductive female). The
binary logic inhering in this figure, in other words, includes the
Metropolis and periphery.

It is the panoptic eye that creates the binaries of

inclusion/exclusion precipitating the rhetoric colonization.
Spanos 99 (William V. Spanos. From whence the race of Bing
fathers come, And the long glories of majestic Bearcats.
Americas Shadow P. 41)// RJG

What, however, the panoptic Eurocentric eye of the Enlightenment

comes to see in the space within this reconfigured trope of the circle
is no longer or at least not exclusively a vast "uninhabited"
emptiness, in which the natives do not count as human beings.
Rather, it comes primarily to see an uninformed terra incognita. As
the texts of early European travel writers (and social historians)
invariably characterize this amorphous and ahistorical "new world,"
the European panoptic gaze falls on an "unimproved" space. As the
privative prefix emphatically suggests, it is a space-time in which
everything in it flora, fauna, minerals, animals, and, later, human
beings is seen and encoded not so much as threatening, though that
meaning is clearly there as well, as wasteful or uneconomical and thus
as an untended fallow (female) terrain calling futurally for the
beneficial ministrations of the (adult, male) center.72 The
predestinarian metaphorics of the circle precipitates a whole
rhetoric of moral necessity. The "wilderness" as "underdeveloped" or
"unimproved" or "uncultivated" (i.e., "unfulfilled" or "uncircular") space must,
as the privative prefixes demand, be developed, improved, cultivated (i.e.,
fulfilled or circularized). Indeed, it is the wilderness's destiny. From this
representation of the colonial Others as mired in and by their own
chaotic primordial condition, one of the most debilitating of which is
unproductive perpetual war, it is an easy step to representing them,
as American writers and historians did the Indian race in the
nineteenth century, as either self-doomed73 or appealing to the
European to save them from themselves by way of imposing his
peace on their multiply wasteful strife.

Commodification of the planet for corporatization and

scientific inquiry means the sum total of every ecological
catastrophe will end the planet we must reorient our
politics

Ehrenfeld 5
(David, Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources @ Rutgers University, The
Environmental Limits to Globalization,Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2 April 2005)

The known effects of globalization on the environment are numerous and highly significant. Many others are undoubtedly unknown.
Given these circumstances, the first question that suggests itself is: Will globalization, as we see it now, remain a permanent state of
affairs (Rees 2002; Ehrenfeld 2003a)? The principal environmental side effects of globalization climate change, resource
exhaustion (particularly cheap energy), damage to agroecosystems, and the spread of exotic species, including
pathogens (plant, animal, and human)are sufficient to make this economic system unstable and short-
lived. The socioeconomic consequences of globalization are likely to do the same. In my book The Arrogance of Humanism (1981),
I claimed that our ability to manage global systems, which depends on our being able to predict the results of the things
we do, or even to understand the systems we have created, has been greatly exaggerated. Much of
our alleged control is science fiction; it doesnt work because of theoretical limits that we ignore at our peril. We live in a dreamworld
in which reality testing is something we must never, never do, lest we awake. In 1984 Charles Perrow explored the reasons why we
have trouble predicting what so many of our own created systems will do, and why they surprise us so unpleasantly while we think we
are managing them. In his book Normal Accidents, which does not concern globalization, he listed the critical characteristics of some
of todays complex systems. They are highly interlinked, so a change in one part can affect many
others, even those that seem quite distant. Results of some processes feed back on themselves in unexpected
ways. The controls of the system often interact with each other unpredictably. We have only indirect
ways of finding out what is happening inside the system. And we have an incomplete understanding
of some of the systems processes. His example of such a system is a nuclear power plant, and this, he explained, is why system-
wide accidents in nuclear plants cannot be predicted or eliminated by system design. I would argue that globalization is a similar
system, also subject to catastrophic accidents, many of them environmentalevents that we cannot define until after they have
occurred, and perhaps not even then. The comparatively few commentators who have predicted the collapse of globalization have
generally given social reasons to support their arguments. These deserve some consideration here, if only because the environmental
and social consequences of globalization interact so strongly with each other. In 1998, the British political economist John Gray,
giving scant attention to environmental factors, nevertheless came to the conclusion that globalization is unstable and will be short-
lived. He said, There is nothing in todays global market that buffers it against the social strains arising
highly uneven economic development within and between the worlds diverse societies. The result, Gray
from
unceasing stream of new technologies, unfettered market competition
states, is that The combination of [an]
and weak or fractured social institutions has weakened both sovereign states and
multinational corporations in their ability to control important events. Note that Gray claims that not
only nations but also multinational corporations, which are widely touted as controlling the world, are being weakened by
globalization. This idea may come as a surprise, considering the growth of multinationals in the past few decades, but I believe it is
true. Neither governments nor giant corporations are even remotely capable of controlling the
environmental or social forces released by globalization, without first controlling globalization itself. Two of the social
critics of globalization with the most dire predictions about its doom are themselves masters of the process. The late Sir James
Goldsmith, billionaire financier, wrote in 1994, It must surely be a mistake to adopt an economic policy which makes you rich if you
eliminate your national workforce and transfer production abroad, and which bankrupts you if you continue to employ your own
people. . .. It is the poor in the rich countries who will subsidize the rich in the poor countries. This
will have a serious impact on the social cohesion of nations . Another free-trade billionaire, George Soros, said
much the same thing in 1995: The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences.
Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime. How much more powerful these statements are if we factor
in the environment! As globalization collapses, what will happen to people, biodiversity, and ecosystems? With respect to people, the
gift of prophecy is not required to answer this question. What will happen depends on where you are and how you live. Many citizens
of the Third World are still comparatively self-sufficient; an unknown number of these will survive the breakdown of globalization
and its attendant chaos. In the developed world, there are also people with resources of self-sufficiency and a growing understanding
of the nature of our social and environmental problems, which may help them bridge the years of crisis. Some species are adaptable;
some are not. For the nonhuman residents of Earth, not all news will be bad. Who would have predicted that wild turkeys (Meleagris
gallopavo), one of the wiliest and most evasive of woodland birds, extinct in New Jersey 50 years ago, would now be found in every
county of this the most densely populated state, and even, occasionally, in adjacent Manhattan? Who would have predicted that black
bears (Ursus americanus), also virtually extinct in the state in the mid-twentieth century, would now number in the thousands
(Ehrenfeld 2001)? Of course these recoveries are unusualrare bright spots in a darker landscape. Finally, a few ecological systems
may survive in a comparatively undamaged state; most will be stressed to the breaking point, directly or indirectly, by many
environmental and social factors interacting unpredictably. Lady Luck, as always, will have much to say. In his book The Collapse of
Complex Societies, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988) notes that collapse, which has happened to all past empires, inevitably
results in human systems of lower complexity and less specialization, less centralized control, lower economic activity, less
information flow, lower population levels, less trade, and less redistribution of resources. All of these changes are inimical to
globalization. This less-complex, less-globalized condition is probably what human societies will be like when the dust settles. I do
not think, however, that we can make such specific predictions about the ultimate state of the environment after globalization, because
we have never experienced anything like this exceptionally rapid, global environmental damage before. History and science have little
to tell us in this situation. The end of the current economic system and the transition to a postglobalized state is and will be
accompanied by a desperate last raid on resources and a chaotic flurry of environmental destruction whose results cannot possibly be
told in advance. All one can say is that the surviving species, ecosystems, and resources will be greatly impoverished compared with
what we have now, and our descendants will not thank us for having adopted, however briefly, an economic system that consumed
their inheritance and damaged their planet so wantonly. Environment is a true bottom lineconcern for its condition must
trump all purely economic growth strategies if both the developed and developing nations are to survive and
prosper. Awareness of the environmental limits that globalized industrial society denies or ignores should not, however, bring us to an
extreme position of environmental determinism. Those whose preoccupations with modern civilizations very real social problems
cause them to reject or minimize the environmental constraints discussed here (Hollander 2003) are guilty of seeing only half the
picture. Environmental scientists sometimes fall into the same error. It is tempting to see the salvation
of civilization and environment solely in terms of technological improvements in efficiency of energy
extraction and use, control of pollution, conservation of water, and regulation of environmentally harmful activities. But
such needed developments will not be sufficientor may not even occur without corresponding
social change, including an end to human population growth and the glorification of consumption, along
with the elimination of economic mechanisms that increase the gap between rich and poor .
The environmental and social problems inherent in globalization are completely interrelatedany attempt to
treat them as separate entities is unlikely to succeed in easing the transition to a postglobalized world. Integrated
change that combines environmental awareness, technological innovation, and an altered world view is the only answer to the life-
threatening problems exacerbated by globalization (Ehrenfeld 2003b). If such integrated change occurs in time, it will likely happen
partly by our own design and partly as an unplanned response to the constraints imposed by social unrest, disease, and the economics
of scarcity. With respect to the planned component of change, we are facing, as eloquently described by Rees (2002), the ultimate
challenge to human intelligence and self-awareness, those vital qualitie swe humans claim as uniquely our own. Homo sapiens will
either. . .become fully human or wink out ignominiously, a guttering candle in a violent storm of our own making. If change does not
come quickly, our global civilization will join Tainters (1988) list as the latest and most dramatic example of collapsed complex
societies. Is there anything that could slow globalization quickly, before it collapses disastrously of its own environmental and social
weight? It
is still not too late to curtail the use of energy, reinvigorate local and regional
communities while restoring a culture of concern for each other, reduce nonessential global
trade and especially global finance (Daly & Cobb 1989), do more to control introductions of exotic species (including
pathogens), and accelerate the growth of sustainable agriculture. Many of the needed technologies are already in place. It is true that
some of the damage to our environmentspecies extinctions, loss of crop and domestic animal varieties, many exotic species
introductions, and some climatic change will be beyond repair. Nevertheless, the opportunity to help our society move past
globalization in an orderly way, while there is time, is worth our most creative and passionate efforts. The citizens of the United States
and other nations have to understand that our global economic system has placed both our environment and our society in peril, a peril
as great as that posed by any war of the twentieth century. This understanding, and the actions that follow, must come not only from
enlightened leadership, but also from grassroots consciousness raising. It is still possible to reclaim the planet from a self-
destructive economic system that is bringing us all down together , and this can and this can be a task
that bridges the divide between conservatives and liberals. The crisis is here, now. What we have to do has become obvious.
Globalization can be scaled back to manageable proportions only in the context of an
altered world view that rejects materialism even as it restores a sense of communal
obligation. In this way, alone, can we achieve real homeland security, not just in the United States, but also in other nations,
whose fates have become so thoroughly entwined with ours within the global environment we share.
 AT: African jobs/econ DA
They got it wrong: the problems of African economy are
the dominant logic of Western world
Osei 12
(Malik Sekou Osei, {whose work has appeared on Black Star News, The African Executive and
The Liberator, contributed this story via Black Left Unity.}, South Africas strikes are growing
and spreading Tuesday, October 2, 2012, http://beforeitsnews.com/african-american-
news/2012/10/south-africas-strikes-are-growing-and-spreading-2444136.html///)ap

Many see the news from South Africa only in terms of the struggle against
Apartheid and the institutionalization of white supremacy. In the bitter
struggle against the arrogance of the white supremacist apartheid state, they
seem to have forgotten that white supremacy was the rationalization for the
exploitation of resources and labor and the question of land and the nature of
white settler state colonialism. The nature of apartheid was more than racial
feel-good for white people. It had the profane stench of class struggle that
found its soil in kicking Black people off the land and turning them into a
reserve army of labor at the beck and call of white capital. However, at the
height of the anti-Apartheid movement, the ANC never dealt with the land
question in a qualitative way. The movement never advocated the seizure of
land or the means of production. Its goals were primarily to overturn the legal
restrictions of apartheid, as stated in the ANC Freedom Charter adopted June
26, 1955. Many see the news from South Africa only in terms of the struggle
against Apartheid and the institutionalization of white supremacy. Thus the
question of the vast majority of Black workers in relation to South African
capital and opening the gates to international capital from abroad was never
raised as the ANC assumed power in 1994. The ANCs vision of freedom or
liberation did not involve addressing the question of exploitation. The
approach of the ANC was legal bourgeois equality. But in any class society, it
is axiomatic that the classes are never equal. As the ANC became more
capitalist and began to acquire the resources of capital, they began in
earnest to formulate the protection of capital, because now capital was part
Black. This is the undercurrent of the struggle of the Black miners in South
Africa, where, under an ANC government, miners were shot by the police to
protect the profits of the mine owners and to try to tame the demands of the
miners for a living wage. This was the dynamic that led to a showdown at the
Marikana platinum mine that was in essence an ugly confrontation in
response to the resistance of labor against capital that has been constantly in
motion throughout South African history. The strike wave that began at
Lonmins Marikana platinum mine is now engulfing South Africas platinum,
gold and coal mining industries and has spread to transport and other
sectors, writes Chris Marsden for WSWS.org. In total, there are more than
100,000 workers on strike across South Africa. On Aug. 16, police opened
fire on striking Marikana workers, killing 34 and wounding 78. The bitter
struggle was called off only after the strikers had secured a 22 percent wage
increase. Their determined stand has emboldened many more to go into
struggle against the employers. David Davis, a SGB Securities gold analyst,
warned, Workers are now demanding wage increases according to the
Lonmin settlement. He added that the contagion of illegal strikes will
likely engulf the industry. Anglo American Platinum, or Amplats, the worlds
largest producer, has said it has 21,000 employees out on a wildcat strike
who have defied threats of dismissal to demand a wage increase equivalent
to Marikana. Only 20 percent of the workforce at four mines at Rustenberg
had reported in Friday. Like the Marikana workers, Amplats miners view the
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and other unions as stooges for the
employers and have rejected them wholesale. They have not turned to the
breakaway Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), but
have elected a leadership from the rank and file. This did not stop
AngloGold from claiming that the strikes were obviously coordinated. The
strike wave that began at Lonmins Marikana platinum mine is now engulfing
South Africas platinum, gold and coal mining industries and has spread to
transport and other sectors, writes Chris Marsden for WSWS.org. NUM
spokesperson Lesiba Seshoka said, We do not have anything from them.
Our greatest worry is that if you are going to have sporadic demands
throughout the industry, then it will undermine collective bargaining and
thats going to be chaos. Wildcat strike action has broken out at Gold Fields,
AngloGold and other company mines. Fully 39 percent of South African gold
mines capacity has been hit, with workers again demanding a 22 percent
wage increase. AngloGold Ashanti, the third-largest gold producer,
suspended all its South African operations this week. Most of its 35,000
workers throughout the company have joined a wildcat that began at
Kopanong on Sept. 20. The major fear of management is that workers are
bypassing the trade unions, their industrial policemen. The real concern is
the apparent breakdown of the collective bargaining system that has
operated effectively since the mid-1980s, Alan Fine, a spokesman for
AngloGold, told the Financial Times. Our challenge is to ensure the system
survives. Coal of Africa has also announced that employees at its
Mooiplaats colliery have struck in the first industrial action to hit the coal
sector since Marikana. A strike by 20,000 workers in the freight and
transport sector to demand a 12 percent wage increase has become
increasingly angry, despite the official control of four unions the South
African Transport and Allied Workers Union, the Professional Transport and
Allied Workers Union South Africa, the Transport and Allied Workers Union of
South Africa and the Motor Transport Workers Union. A number of trucks
have been looted and burned, and emergency services have been placed on
high alert after fighting ended in the hospitalization of scabs. The chief
executive of Anglogold Ashanti, Mark Cutifani, warned that demands for
higher wages were now a risk for the country. The women of Marikana
protested after winning the right to march in the North West Provincial High
Court Sept. 29. The employers have made increasingly bellicose threats,
with Amplats having initiated disciplinary proceedings Friday and threatening
sackings, and Gold Fields obtaining a second interdict against striking workers
at its Beatrix mine that meant, Firing the striking workers is an option. But
the main threat to the miners and other workers comes from the state and
the African National Congress (ANC) government. Labor Minister Mildred
Oliphant has declared that there is no justification for the recent wave of
unprocedural [illegal] strikes and no excuse for lawlessness. In New York,
President Jacob Zuma told the Associated Press Wednesday that the wave of
illegal strikes was not due to inequalities but was influenced by this
particular [Marikana] strike and it has also been influenced by the manner in
which the resolution has been undertaken, whereas the unions that were in
the forefront in this case because of the circumstances were not necessarily
in the forefront. This had influenced some other miners to go on strike, he
said. The repudiation of the trade unions poses a major political crisis for
the entire bourgeoisie. Alexander Joe, writing for AFP, states, The violent
crisis that has shaken South Africas mines shows workers distrust for
traditional trade unions, up to now the guardians of social peace despite the
countrys deep inequality. He cites analyst Daniel Silke explaining,
Marikana holds the potential for an era in South African labor relations where
violent strike action forces the hand of weakened management, as opposed
to historical collective bargaining promoted by COSATU and its affiliate
unions. The key issue here is whether the trade union movement, whether
COSATU itself, can keep a handle on the more militant workers who have
smelled blood with management as a result of Marikana, said Silke. But the
main threat to the miners and other workers comes from the state and the
African National Congress (ANC) government. Labor Minister Mildred Oliphant
has declared that there is no justification for the recent wave of unprocedural
[illegal] strikes and no excuse for lawlessness. The emerging mass
political and social movement of the working class and the undermining of its
key ally, the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), has
plunged the ANC into crisis, with the escalating factional conflict between
Zuma and his supporters and those of Julius Malema, the expelled former
head of the ANCs youth wing, only the most open expression. This empty
posturing is a factional fight on the backs of the South African people. None
of the factions has prioritized the liberation and development of the African
people of South Africa as the rightful owners of the land and whatever is
produced from the land. It is the people who have a right to the profits and
abundance of the land by redistributing the wealth they have produced. For
the working African masses of South Africa, history is on their side, but not
time.
 AT: Disease
Disease securitization is a tool of liberal governance used
to pacify populations and invokes a permanent state of
warfare --- critically interrogating and historicizing their
claims deconstructs the regime of global governance that
makes cycles of outbreaks inevitable [Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire when
combined with McClintock]

Pereira 8
PhD candidate in International Politics and Conflict Resolution at the Centre for Social Studies,
University of Coimbra, Portugal. (Ricardo, Processes of Securitization of Infectious Diseases
and Western Hegemonic Power: A Historical-Political Analysis, www.ghgj.org/Pereira_
%20processes%20of%20securitization.doc)//PG

Historically, public health intervention has primarily relied, at the

national scale, on health departments, and, at the international
level, on the World Health Organization (WHO). Yet, health also became important
in the development aid and military agendas during the Third World post-independence waves and the
bipolar West-East confrontation. The Western victory of the Cold War and the perspective of global human
rights promotion have promised the accomplishment of an international health agenda based on the 1978
due to the change of threat
Health for All Alma-Ata Declaration. At the same time,
perception in the West from overt attacks against national
territorial integrity by an inimical state or alliance of states to new
threats of a deterritorialized and multiform nature health and
other human-related dimensions were growingly inserted in Western
defense agendas too. Both dimensions human rights and security
coexist in the human security paradigm, as I will describe. Infectious
diseases are caused by an organism that penetrates the body, grows
and multiples in cells, tissues and body cavities, and constitute the
main cause of death in the world.i They tend to emerge and remerge
according to the conditions of the ecosystems where human beings
live in. Diseases that have been receiving more attention are, on the one hand, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis
and malaria, and, on the other hand, avian influenza, SARS and brucellosis (also known as mad cow
disease). The response to the former group has been mostly under the auspices of grand funding
schemes of the World Bank, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the United States
(mainly the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief PEPFAR), in conjunction with other public and
These programs were established to prevent and treat
private initiatives.
the most lethal diseases in the world, especially in Southern and
Eastern Africa, but with an increased focus in other
countries/regions: India, China and South-eastern Asia, the
Caribbean, Russia and Eastern Europe. Those diseases are
transmitted sexually, from mother to child and through drug
injection and needle sharing. Lack of sanitation, food and water is
also decisive. Often diseases such as tuberculosis appear and
disseminate opportunistically in people living with AIDS. These
diseases account for the greatest cause of death in the world, and
their effects are felt at the family and community levels . As far as the
latter sort of diseases goes, they are animal-transmitted, and as they
enter the food chain, they pose a direct threat to the populations.
Despite its (still) low score in inflicted deaths, Western and international authorities often compare their
potential effects with the 1918 Spanish Flus experience. Whereas the high number of
AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria deaths justifies their policy
relevance, the case of avian flu and others are considered major
threats given the imminent direct threat they pose to the West . I argue
that such direct threat status vis--vis the West explains the extraordinary attention they have been
receiving, especially when compared to neglected ones . Diseases such as buruli ulcer,
dengue/dengue haemorrhagic fever , dracunculiasis (guinea-worm disease),
fascioliasis, human African trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis, leprosy, lymphatic
filariasis, neglected zoonoses, onchocerciasis, schistosomiasis, soil
transmitted, elminthiasis, trachoma, and yaws have their incidence in the
Third World and, coincidently or not, were long eradicated in the
West. The rare cases emerging in the richest societies happen
generically due to travel or immigration. The topic of infectious
diseases has been inserted in the most recent Western strategic
concepts. The United Statess National Strategy states that new flows of trade, investment,
information, and technology are transforming national security. Globalization
has exposed us to new challenges and changed the way old
challenges touch our interests and values, while also greatly
enhancing our capacity to respond. Examples include: Public health challenges like
pandemics (HIV/AIDS, avian influenza) that recognize no borders . The risks to social order
are so great that traditional public health approaches may be
inadequate, necessitating new strategies and responses .ii In turn,
the European Unions view is that in much of the developing world,
poverty and disease cause untold suffering and give rise to pressing
security concerns. (...) New diseases can spread rapidly and become
global threats.iii The end of the Cold War and the global expansion of the neo-liberal model
brought about changes more in terms of nature of threat than subject of threat. States as sovereign units
are not bound to cause so much preoccupation from a security viewpoint as non-traditional threats do:
environmental imbalances, religious fanaticism and terrorism, ethnic wars, refugees and other irregular
Often these new
migrations, urban insecurities, reductions in energy resources, etc.
threats were regarded as risks Western societies had to take for
the sake of their own middle-class lifestyle, which one would
describe as Western ontological security.iv They are described by Anthony
Giddens as dark side of globalization, drawing from what Ulrich Beck has called risk society. v One such
risk turned out as actual hazard in September 11, 2001 was global terrorism. With regard to epidemics,
risks and effective hazards have pronouncedly been associated with the deterioration of many populations
living standards in developing countries, particularly in Africa. Phenomena such as new wars, vi i.e. post-
Cold War civil wars, and failed states,vii that is, states unable or unwilling to offer the residents basic
public goods such as food, access to health or public security, have strongly potentiated that negative
The
trend. These phenomena appear as both cause and effect of the threats mentioned above.
human security paradigm emerged in the early 1990s as a political and instrumental
response to the problems that new wars and failed states have posed throughout the post-Cold War
era. It embodies the early 1980s ambition of several authors in Security Studies (Homer-Dixon, Ullman,
enlarging the concept of security in which threat builds less in
etc.) of
function of states and more of populations and their well-being .
Informing the nascent European defense and foreign security policies and the Middle Powers Initiative,
human security has been embedded since the early 1990s in the United Nations conflict prevention,
peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction missions. It was so defined by the United Nations
Development Program (UNDP): human security can be said to have two main aspects. It means, first,
safety from such chronic diseases as hunger, disease and repression. And second, it means protection from
sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life whether in homes, in jobs or in communities. viii
According to this definition, the concept of human security presents itself as an eminently emancipating,
pacifist and human rights-centered doctrine. It is in that vein that I believe that it is widely promoted by
the activist community, as, for instance, the panel Human Security and HIV, coordinated by Alex de
Waal, at the 2008 International AIDS Conference in Mexico City confirmed. Yet, Mark Duffield warns us on
human securitys two interconnected problems.ix One problem with the human security paradigm is its
ambivalence, since, as one suggested above, it incorporates two rather conflicting agendas, i.e. human
rights and security. Duffield argues that in a single concept the idea of human security [] contains the
optimism of sustainable development while, at the same time, it draws attention to the conditions that
menace international stability.x Writing about HIV/AIDS, human rights and security, Laurie Garret
expresses such tension in these terms: As vital as the human rights agenda is in the HIV pandemic,
however, it ought not to be permitted to befuddle attention to security. xi The second problem meets the
ethical issue emerging from the induction of a state of exception for a non-military issue. xii Following 1930s
scholarship by Carl Schmitt on the establishment of a state of exception, xiii securitization may jeopardize
civil liberties, democratic order and therefore the emancipating horizon of human security. It is relevant to
clarify that pathogenic agents only appear as menacing human beings when they, first, infiltrate human
ecology and afterwards penetrate and develop themselves within the human body. Thus, those agents as
such do not pose any threat. What is actually convertible to a threat status are peoples, societies and, in
the last analysis, states. If one perceives detection, prevention, care and eventual cure of populations as
the major measures against disease, one defines as security objective the contention, if not the abolition,
of the multiplication of the number of people carrying the agent. It also accounts for the social impact that
The securitized people are depicted
such multiplication feeds and probably provokes.
as those at risk, vulnerable, if not making up dangerous
classes.xiv In Southern and Eastern Africa they are, among the general
population, orphans and vulnerable children. In China, India, Russia, and the
West, they are drug injectors, migrants, homosexuals and the general
mass of marginalized ones. Conversely, the securitizing agents
tend to be most influent groups in society, where power, according to
Williams, is more sedimented (rhetorically and discursively, culturally, and institutionally)
and structured in ways that make securitizations somewhat
predictable and thus subject to probabilistic analysis.xv Usually those
agents correspond to the political and economic elites and the
military. However, dominant civil society groups, such as large international nongovernmental
organizations (INGO) and other transnational networks led by companies, charities and celebrities, achieve
their voice opportunity. As part of a global assemblage of dispersed liberal powers ,
they exert
their strong influence globally as well. A good example, which has been recently
analyzed by Marco Vieira, relates to the process of politicization of HIV/AIDS. xvi From the mid-1980s to the
late 1990s HIV/AIDS politicization occurred through the establishment of WHO Global Program for AIDS in
1986 and UNAIDS in 1996 and was followed by the effective adoption of a security discourse in the late
1990s, mostly among a growing circle of high-profile politicians, transnational activists and academics. xvii
The securitization of diseases narrative is elaborated in articulation with other issues. The main five topics
are: war on terror; failed states, new wars, and uncontrolled migrations; globalization; current
medical practices; and social and behavioral changes. The response to the terrorist attacks against the
United States in September 11, 2001, inaugurated an era of asymmetric, global and apparently endless
war. The war on terror aims to identify and combat the means of dissemination of terror through a merge
of a various governance sectors, including health. The so-called Amerithrax case, i.e. the distribution of
letters containing anthrax to several media offices and two U.S. senators, starting on September 18, 2001
and for several weeks, fatally materialized the inscription of health-related sectors in the strategy of
counterterrorism and international stabilization. Andrew Price-Smith has produced an exhaustive work on
the relation between health indicators and state capacity, pursuing an investigative avenue for research on
epidemics impact on several societal fields. xviii Authors writing on epidemic incidence in the population
allude to the mutual direct reinforcement of disease proliferation and disruption of the socio-economic
tissue, collapse and war feeding.xix Other authors have established linkages between HIV-orphaned and
vulnerable children and delinquency. The perspective of many children and youths finding themselves
without a family, so the argument goes, might lead to the formation of pockets of delinquency that
provoke instability, even politically, with potential extremist associations. xx Lyman and Morrison have
suggested that countries like Nigeria and South Africa offer safe havens for recruitment of children and
youths for jihadist, anti-Western activities home and abroad.xxi U.S. army official Charlene Jeffersons
summarizes this complexity: Simply put, a disturbing new formula may be emerging; AIDS creates
economic devastation. Economic devastation creates an atmosphere where stable governments cannot
function. When stable governments cannot effectively function, terrorism thrives by exploiting the
underlying conditions that promote the despair and the destructive visions of political change. () AIDS
has created a steady stream of orphans who can be exploited and used for terrorist activities. xxii Yet it
should be remarked that attention paid to children and AIDS is prior to September 11. It was first
elaborated by Richard Holbrooke, former United States ambassador to the United Nations, in 2000 after
visiting some African countries. Irregular migratory movements have been added to the triangle
Apart from being considered themselves
epidemics/state capacity/conflict too.
object of security, migrants pose a threat to public health in the
countries they enter, since they generally have quite limited or
inexistent access to health care for detection and care. Migrations are,
furthermore, phenomena that economic globalization has been pushing as markets merge through
circulation of people and goods. One should then enumerate the following eco-social determinants of
health: crossborder trade, climate change, fast urbanization and intercontinental tourism. Brower and
Chalk included the relevant dimension of excessive use of antibiotics, which contributed for the emergence
of more resistant strains of viruses.xxiii Reflecting the moralist debate present particularly in the domain of
sex-related diseases, those authors found another set of causes in the higher acceptance of multiple
sexual partners and permissive homosexuality particularly in the Western countries () the Asian strong
sex industries, and the growing prevalence of intravenous drug use. xxiv Several authors have pointed out
with regard to HIV/AIDS global preventive instruments, securitization of specific scenarios, namely the
catastrophic ones on the nexus orphanage-social disruption-state collapse-violence, are highly
speculative,xxv and therefore paving the way for the creation of a truth effect informing non-evidenced
policies. Securitization: Juridical-Institutional Approach Legal scholar David Fidler considers that September
11 terrorist attacks, the Amerithrax, and 2003 SARS outbreaks have led to a reconfiguration of global
health governances constitutionalism.xxvi Yet, the historiography of such constitutionalism goes back to
the first international hygienist conference that took place as a response to a cholera epidemic in Europe in
the 1830s. This conference was followed by others throughout the 19th and early 20th century, which
paved the way for the League of Nations office of health affairs and WHO. Founded in 1948, WHO has
gained reputation for inculcating an international cooperation regime based on the 1969 International
Health Regulations (IHR), consolidating what Fidler has called Microbialpolitik, that is, an international
agenda fundamentally guided by allied fight against disease.xxvii Fidler perceives the events above and
their corresponding structuring responses of contingency as a turning point in the understanding of
epidemics as object of national and international security. One might therefore realize that security
concerns were arguably not as influent as they have been since the early 21st century. 2003 furthermore
inaugurates the new world order in public health, in which global health governance adopts the United
States federal model in the context of crisis in health at the global scale. The functions of that model are:
provision of national security; regulation of international trade; preparedness support and response to
epidemic crisis; and protection of human rights. xxviii Fidler holds that such new order reflects the post-
September 11 counterterrorist response. Thus, he confirms the merging of all areas of governance in the
United States towards a more efficient and engaged reaction. Finally, Fidler affirms that the 2005 revision
of the IHR reoriented WHOs mandate, since it may be specifically serving national and international
policies: less clear is whether the new IHR might embroil WHO in the politics of national and international
security to the detriment of its core public health functions. Although it makes some experts
uncomfortable, the potential for terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction connects public health to
security concerns.xxix The 2005 IHR revision calls for the necessity to establish partnerships with other
interested sectors, notably the armed forces. Moreover, it has to be stressed the actual paradigm change
in the whole philosophy of the revised IHR. A striking case relates to the possibility of containment at the
source, beyond the typical border controls for people and goods.xxx Such situation allows foreign
interventions to be triggered regardless of state sovereignty, namely with military means, for the sake of
epidemic contention. Fidlers legalist analysis appears limited vis--vis a profounder discussion on who is
composing the global health governances constitution. Conversely, a critical political approach to this
topic credits many other influent agents beyond major states and international organizations private
companies, non-governmental organizations, networks and partnerships and even Hollywood
celebrities.xxxi Likewise, they hold intense power agendas and regulating capacities. Perplexingly, models
relying on states as sovereign units (independently of the power relations they maintain) do not take into
due account the realization that sovereignty itself is under jeopardy according to the premises of the 2005
IHR and the aforementioned possibility of containment at the source .
This framework of
reduced national sovereignty, namely in the post-colonial world, is
exacerbated by the presence of those governance actors.
Sovereignty, as argued below, is understood as a political
component of the globality of the international system described
as an assemblage of dispersed, multifaceted liberal powers rather
than a mosaic of states in an anarchic system. Fidlers constitutionalism seems to
overestimate the role of epidemic crisis and response as contextual facts, i.e. the outbreak event and the
demanded quarantine measure. Conversely,
this approach seems to reduce the
importance of structural elements in the machinery of public health,
such as surveillance and hygiene mechanisms administered by
national and international agents. Securitization: Historical-Political Approach Instead
of stressing events such as September 11 or the 2003 SARS outbreaks I am rather more attentive to
another important happening that took place a couple of years before them and the specific context which
led to it, i.e.
the first session of the United Nations Security Council
dedicated to a health issue (HIV/AIDS), in January 10, 2000. This
session, which was followed by others under the auspices of the
Security Council and the United Nations General-Assembly, resulted
in a financial reinforcement of the United Nations Joint Program for
AIDS (UNAIDS). Two years later, in 2002, the Global Fund for the
Fight against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was launched. In
2003 the United States President Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief
(PEPFAR) was finally established. It is remarkable that the first
grand HIV/AIDS international momentum at the political level took
place in the Security Council, and moreover introduced by the
Clinton Administration. Contrarily to what would somehow be
expected, it was neither discussed in the General-Assembly, nor
brought to the fore by some hard-hit country in Southern Africa. As
such, this event is revealing for the complex chain of developments
that it provoked, a set of energetic responses to the contemplation
of a disturbing dark side of globalization. United States
Ambassador to the United Nations at the time, Richard Holbrooke,
expressed that contemplation finely. Watching kids sleep in the
gutters in Lusaka, [Zambia], knowing that they will become either
prostitutes or rape victims, either getting or spreading the disease,
because there's no shelter for them, and that the government is
doing nothing about it, makes a powerful impression on you. () I said:
Look at the facts; its not simply a humanitarian issue. If a country loses so many of its resources in
fighting a disease which takes down a third of its population, its going to be destabilized, so it is a security
issue. () Anyway, that was years ago. That issue is over. Everyone now accepts our definition of AIDS as
The genealogy of securitization of infectious
a security issue its self-evident.xxxii
disease can be considered as old as the rise of liberal political
regime in Europe since the 17th century, and whose global
expansion and consolidation were favored by international public
hygienist surveillance as of the 1830s.xxxiii Given this structure, it is relevant to briefly
review French historian-sociologist-philosopher Michel Foucaults work on the analytics of power. Inverting
the principle put forward by Clausewitz that war
is nothing but a continuation of
political intercourse, with a mixture of other means, xxxiv Foucault
maintains that modern societies in Europe, with the end of religious
wars and rise of nation-states since the 17th century, started to be
managed in function of the eminence of war, even in times of formal
peace. Hence, according to Foucault, politics is the continuation of
war by other means.xxxv As a result, there is a change in the idea of
sovereignty, which is based less on juridical and territorial premises
and more on political terms. This means that sovereignty, and its
agency, is to be found, not only in the institutional body of the state
as the national Leviathan, but in an insidious, comprehensive web of
institutions and practices, governmental and non-governmental,
local and international, yet commonly affiliated to ideals of liberal
democracy and free trade. Foucault argues that in opposition to the
philosophical-juridical discourse, which builds on the problem of
sovereignty and law, this discourse [analyzed by Foucault] is
essentially a historical-political discourse, a discourse in which the
truth works as a weapon for a partisan victory, a discourse soberly
critical and, at the same time, intensively mythic.xxxvi Unlike in the Ancien
Regime, the nature of the power exerted by the sovereign agent as an assemblage of dispersed liberal
powers reformulates itself towards a smaller capacity of exterminating lives. On the contrary, power is
conceived to both foster life and impede it to the point of death. The
object of such power consists on human beings at the aggregate
level, as well as life in general. Designated as biopower, it
expresses the 18th century scientific effort of measuring and
regulating all dimensions of life, such as birth, mortality, schooling,
employment, criminality, etc. This change has implied thinking the human being as an
tre biologique, a natural species, yet with political life and power . Biopower is therefore
totalitarian in the way that it is aimed at the totality of the
population. Yet, its design is tremendously ambivalent, which allows it to manage surplus
populations vis--vis the sovereign agents survival and expansionist
objectives. Holding society under control, biopower guarantees in
the last analysis the prevalence of the superior race, in which the
concentration camp is not just a symbol of the regime and an
institutional practice under a state of exception, but also a locus of
scientific efficiency. Therefore, two major case-studies are the Nazi
genocides and at the time of writing the unlawful imprisonments at
Guantanamo Bay detention centre.xxxvii From an ethical point of view,
the essential problem with biopower as securitization of bodies and
societies is that it works towards the establishment of normalizing
political objectives, discriminating what is superfluous, unnecessary
and impure. In his study of leper in Europe, Foucault has focused on how systems of quarantine
institutionalized a line of hygiene based on a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure [where the patient]
was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate. xxxviii Inspired by the
Stefan Elbe warns about
Foucauldian approach, in his discussion of HIV/AIDS securitization,
the potential for implementation of public measures which might
further an already very stigmatizing status for people living with
AIDS.xxxix Contrarily to previous absolutist regimes, biopower, or
biopolitics as it was later reformulated, necessitates to be
rationalized, justified. It was no longer considered that this power
of the sovereign over his subjects could be exercised in an absolute
and unconditional way, but only in cases where the sovereigns very
existence was on jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he was
threatened by external enemies who sought to overthrow him or
contest his rights, he could then legitimately wage war, and require
his subjects to take part in the defense of the state; without
directly proposing their death, he was empowered to expose
their life [] But if someone dared to rise up against him and
transgress his laws, then he could exercise a power over the
offenders life: as punishment, the latter could be put to death.xl
Foucaults later concept of governamentality embodies that necessity. It accounts for a discursive-material
device (dispositif) of security embodying rationalities and technologies of government. They comprise
discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific
statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions. xli These technologies do not necessarily
use violence to force people do what the sovereign likes.xlii In liberal societies that would indeed be very
control is
complicated to manage for the sake of the systems own sustainability. Frequently
displayed through ideological manipulation or rational
argumentation, moral advice or economic exploitation.xliii The target is,
nevertheless, the anatomic body in its most comprehensive political sense and at very different scales,
xliv
from the professional setting to the dietary/beauty regime. A major manifestation of
the sovereign powers governamentality is found in the medical
police.xlv First, one should stress the centrality of the police more as a science than a corporation
within the apparatus of liberal governance. Foucault has associated the development of the police and its
mission with the implementation of liberal regimes in Europe in the last three centuries. In fact ,
governamentality as rationalities and technologies of government
largely corresponds to a general idea of police activity: practices of
inspection and surveillance, information and intelligence gathering,
and direct intervention (to the point of deadly force) in private,
familial and commercial matters.xlvi Writing about the British case, Patrick E. Carroll
argues that the medical police did not resort to deadly force; yet it
pursued a variety of sanitary techniques in order to guarantee
health and safety among the population.xlvii Alison Bashfords article on the 1881
smallpox epidemic in Sydney, Australia, illustrates the more administrative facet of such medical policing
through the establishment of the local health authority, i.e. the Board of Health in the British Colony of
New South Wales.xlviii Although smallpox epidemics were not uncommon in the 19th century, that one
precipitated key bureaucratic changes. An analysis of medical police intervention in its early decades
should not indeed be misguided by todays understandings of police as a public uniformed authority
structure.xlix Policing was primarily about carrying out activities animated by socio-political concerns rather
than exhibiting state presence. Thus, one should mention the police role that charities pursued, as Carroll
The ultimate
shows in the case of colonial Dublin, Ireland, hygienic activities in the 18th century. l
function of health policing was to potentiate the general health
status of the populations, not just for the sake of political economy,
but also to prevent scarring contagions and epidemics that could
undermine the body politic. The conceptualization started by Foucault on liberal power as
driven by political economy ideology and not institutions leads to an image of an assemblage of various
entities. Nbuleuse is an apt alternative word to assemblage that one borrows from Robert W. Cox to
model the constitutionalism in global (health) governance, contrasting with Fidlers adoption of the
li
United States federal model.
The end of the Cold War and the rise of global
neo-liberal agendas performed by an enlarged quantity of
institutions in many different sectors of activity (trade,
development, humanitarian, etc.) and at different scales (local,
national, regional, global) confirmed the reformulation of the state
as sovereign political unit and accelerated the networking of
biopolitical-like modes of power. This nbuleuse builds on strong political density,
where many networks of governmental and non-governmental agents interact formal and informally at a
global level.
Global public health constitutes a quite solid domain for the
analysis of those phenomena and the power relations they embody.
They feature grand public-private, bilateral and multilateral funding,
managing and implementing programs, initiatives and entities:
WHO, PEPFAR, Global Fund, World Bank, UNAIDS, Clinton Initiative,
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and a vast range of INGO in the
field. Once inserted in the broader global governance, the health
system as a regime of global surveillance consolidates the
supremacy of an international arena dominated, not by anarchical
relations of individual units of sovereignty in the form of states , as
put by the realist tradition of International Relations, lii but by a
hegemonic world system of liberal sovereignty .liii If it is true that this explanation
is not fully applicable to the whole world, namely in terms of the modern world of powerful states of
regional prominence, such as India, China and Russia,liv this is particularly compelling with regard to the
in function of the establishment of
post-colonial world. Alison Bashford reports that,
border epidemical check-ups and quarantine systems, surveillance
mechanisms were installed at the global scale uniting metropolises
and colonies.lv National surveillance and hygienist measures moved beyond from the national
sphere on to the rest of the world, cementing Western power territorially and biologically, as the 1881
smallpox epidemic in Sydney above illustrated. As mentioned, a cholera epidemic affecting the European
powers in the 1830s paved the way for the several international hygienist conferences during the 19th
century that led to establishment of the international sanitary institutions in the two world wars interval.
Yet, it should be stressed that in that period, health issues were essentially taken as technical matters by
the League of Nations health office. According to Bashford, its mission was to collect information from the
national administrations, in order to control diseases such as malaria, smallpox and sleeping sickness, in
close collaboration with the Economics Office of the organization. General population-related dossiers
tended to be studied in its migratory and trade dimensions, excluding issues such as birth control, and
sexual and reproductive health. The author provides several examples on how, despite direct enquiry,
those latter matters were untouched by the League of Nations under the basis of not being part of the
organizations mandate. An important role in the systems of information on populations between colonies
and metropolises was played by the educational transnational institutions of tropical medicine of the
British Empire. Founded in the late 19th century, the schools of Tropical Medicine in London and Liverpool
were instrumental in the research and dissemination of epidemiological facts and practices at the field
level. Supported by different agents the Rockefeller Foundation, the Red Cross, the business community
of Liverpool (with vested interests in the Caribbean, West Africa and Latin America) their agendas ranged
from the medical concerns of a fading Empire to a national and international school of public health,
The cultural history of
moving towards integration of domestic and global health concerns. lvi
medical intervention in the colonial world is quite informative with
regard to a profounder comprehension of the meaning and practices
of the structures of global health. Tropical medicine as a distinctive
discipline in the curricula of medical studies was born with the
objective of facilitating the settlement of Britons and other
Europeans in threatening environments characterized by pests such
as smallpox, malaria or yellow fever.lvii But it also held the mission of
improving the lives of natives engaged in the colonial businesses,
therefore pursuing the benevolent task assigned to imperialism .
Nevertheless, in his revision of British and Australian literature in the imperial period, Cameron-Smith
medicine as a discourse that constructed the space of
identifies tropical
the tropics as Other and thus as racially pathological.lviii Building
upon perceptions of higher mortality overseas as compared to the
metropolis, and of climate-conditioned native laziness vis--vis the
superiority of the Northern European spirit, physicians in the 18th century
came to the conclusion that foreign countries were simply
unhealthy.lix In any case, the economic profits from colonial enterprise
outweighed the mortality risk, and so the Empire prolonged its
mission of civilization and exploitation. In his article on medicine in
Somaliland during the first half of the 20th century, Mohamed shows
how colonial rule benefited from health interventions, vaccination
namely, as it improved public health. The medical mission was
therefore popularizing the Government, and identifying the
administration with the peoples welfare.lx The integration of
tropical medicines culture and history when linked to the rise of
medical police is particularly illustrative of both the character of
this early securitization of infectious diseases and the apparatus of
biopolitical instrumentalization at the global level. Beyond
international and national political institutions, culture, science and
medical practice informatively contribute to the historical power
regime. Hygienism has been notably instrumental with regard to the
implementation of powerful white-supremacist regimes such as the
one South African experienced during the Apartheid period .lxi According
to Youde, the legacy of public health intervention as historically anti-black population transpires from the
South African government, notably President Thabo Mbeki, and the
2000 conflict between
Mbeki claimed that the international
international AIDS community.
communitys AIDS discourse was a Western neo-colonialist discourse
expressing Africans inferiority as a race to tackle their own
problems. This episode was particularly dramatic since South Africa
was holding, as it still does, the highest rate of HIV infections in the
world. Conclusion David Fidler is quite right when affirming that major global health concerns are
revolutionizing the way International Relations researchers observe them, from an uninteresting topic
 The general
to a relatively prominent one as part of post-Cold War human security paradigm.
issue of Western securitization of infectious diseases is mostly, and
hierarchically, connected to scenarios of biological agents spread for
terrorist purposes, outbreaks of diseases transmitted within the
food chain, and extensive impact of major diseases such as
HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in Southern and Eastern African
weak states. The adoption of a historical-political lens vis--vis a
juridical-institutional one allows us to come to, not only denser, but
also, perhaps, surprising conclusions about the intimate function of
disease in the whole Western global security project . First, the
historical-political approach takes governances constitution as an
assemblage of dispersed, though hierarchized, liberal powers .
Second, it permits an appreciation of the power role played by a
larger range of actors, namely INGOs, apart from the states and
multilateral organizations. As the HIV-security nexus case shows,
INGOs played an essential role in the early politicization of the issue
of HIV. Third, this approach emphasizes the idea of structure as the
major securitization driver. Even though context remains important (e.g. September 11,
2003 SARS outbreaks, etc.), structural governance elements, i.e. surveillance
mechanisms of epidemic control, preparedness and response,
strongly contributed to Western security. They helped in the
expansion and consolidation of the world system of dominance over
the colonial world in function of a rising global liberal economy . Post-
September 11 new order in global health and the security agenda emerging from it unfolds continuities of
Such continuities appear as tantamount to the post-
the colonial legacy.
Cold War reduction of state sovereignty in the international arena,
proportionately to the hegemonization of the assemblage of
dispersed, multifaceted liberal powers.

The Affirmatives attempts to optimize health at the level

of the population ensures a biopolitical racism thats at
the root of the worst mass atrocities

ELBE, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex, IN

2005 [Stefan, AIDS, Security, Biopolitics, International Relations, Vol. 19,
No. 4]

One of these dangers is that the biopolitical imperative of optimizing the

health of populations effectively constitutes disease and by extension the
diseased as a social and political problem that needs to be addressed , but
without specifying exactly how this problem should be dealt with. Unfortunately the creation of
universal healthcare programmes to treat the ill is just as compatible with a
biopolitical logic as is the purging of populations of the diseased by more sinister
means, such as killing them or letting them gradually die. As counterintuitive and ironic
as it may seem, a biopolitical society based on the enhancement of life and
health can still sanction and justify instances of mass death . The European era of
biopower, after all, coincided with twentieth-century political projects demanding the deaths of millions.
Foucault later came to understand this bizarre confluence only on the basis of a new racism that
biopolitical orders can give rise to.36 Racism, he contended
from a biopolitical perspective,
is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under
powers control: the break between what must live and what must die.37 The
reason biopolitical orders can still sanction mass death is because they can
generate a powerful new form of racism that pits the healthy members of
the population against the unhealthy who are deemed to sap the strength
and vitality of the population as a whole. The underlying principle of this new
biopolitical racism is thus not the primacy of cultural difference , as with many more
traditional forms of racism, but rather the more subtle idea that the death of others
makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a
population.38 The insistence on maximizing the health of populations can
thus be dangerous for those who are deemed to be unhealthy .The Nazi
movement demonstrated the extreme ends to which this darker side of
biopolitics can be taken when it carved up the European continent using the
dubious criterion of blood for deciding which populations could be usefully
Germanized and thus spared, and which ones would have to perish.39 It
remains one of the most disconcerting testaments to the dangers of
thinking security in biological terms, or on the basis of health and
sickness. In Nazi Germany, moreover, this new biological racism was also projected internally to Jews
who were no longer prosecuted solely because of their Judaism, but also because of their quasi-biologically
defined Jewishness, deemed to be undermining the purity and strength of the Aryan race. Enhancing the
strength and vitality of the latter, by this logic, required the elimination of the former. In some ways this
biopolitical racism is even more pernicious than a culturally defined one because, as Hannah Arendt once
pointed out in her memorable phrase, whereas in the past Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into
A biopolitical society aimed at
conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape.40
promoting life and health still has to make decisions about whose life is
worth preserving and whose life will be allowed to perish, and the function of
racism in a biopolitical age is to make this very distinction not necessarily
according to the principle of cultural difference, but according to the maxim
of whose survival will maximize the strength and wellbeing of the population,
and whose will undermine it.

Cant solve disease spreadmultiple alt causes swamp

the plan

HSNW 11
(Homeland Security Newswire, 2/15/11, US unprepared for climate-induced disease
outbreaks, http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/us-unprepared-climate-induced-
disease-outbreaks)

Officials warn that the United States is not equipped to handle the spread of
infectious diseases caused by climate change. More than ten years ago, intelligence
agencies warned that climate change would spread deadly infectious diseases to new regions. Yet, few
advances have been made in bolstering U.S. disease detection and response
capabilities. Increased heat, humidity, and rainfall has been steadily driving
mosquitoes, ticks, and other parasites to new areas resulting in the spread
tropical and subtropical diseases to populations who have not yet built up
resistance. West Nile virus and dengue fever, once rare in the United States, have gained a
foot hold once more. West Nile virus was first reintroduced in the United States in 1994 and has
since spread to forty-four states, while dengue fever was spotted again in 2009 and is projected to
spread to twenty-eight states, affecting more than 173.5 million Americans.
Last year the Center for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC) reported 110 deaths out of
1,356 cases of West Nile virus. Each year more cases and fatalities have been reported. Officials say
that, despite their repeated warnings, the United States is woefully underprepared to detect and respond
to large disease outbreaks before they become national security threats. Were way behind the ball on
this, said Josh Michaud, a former member of the Department of Defenses National Center for Medical
Intelligence and its Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System. According to Michaud,
the U.S. disease monitoring system , which relies mainly on publicly available data and
mathematical modeling, is insufficient to identify disease trends quickly. Officials
also worry that local health systems lack adequate epidemiological
equipment and health technicians who are able to diagnose new diseases they
have not seen before. Howard Frumkin, the former director of the CDCs National Center for Environmental
Health said the U.S. ability to manage diseases spread by climate change was shaky. He explained, Its
the entire range of preparedness work, from problem identification to
preparedness action to adaptation actions to testing the programs, that[need]
to be strengthened. The federal government has not sufficiently funded disease
detection infrastructure projects and ignored pleas to address shortfalls in the
system. Joy M. Miller, the senior global health security adviser for the National Intelligence Council,
specifically identified a gap in our surveillance to even determine whether
the vectors are changing and new diseases are being created and spread. Yet,
instead of investing to remedy this situation, the White House has cut all funding

Biologically impossible either diseases are super deadly

and kill before transmission is possible or they are highly
contagious without the deadliness.

World Health Organization 5 (World Has Lost Control of Bird Flu,

http://www.globalchange.com/birdflu.htm)

Fortunately most new lethal viruses kill the few they infect very quickly, before the virus has a
chance to spread widely, and the new infections die out. Other new viruses often become less
virulent and dangerous as they infect more people. The most dangerous are viruses which kill a
minority of those they infect, are easily transmitted, and cause little signs in people who are
infectious in the early stages.

Pathogens need a host killing everyone would be against

a diseases programming.

Lederberg 99, (Joshua, Professor of Genetics at Stanford University

School of Medicine, Epidemic: The World of Infectious Disease, Pg. 13)

The toll of the fourteenth-century plague, the "Black Death," was closer to one third. If the bugs' potential to develop adaptations that
could kill us off were the whole story, we would not be here. However, with very rare exceptions, our microbial adversaries have a
shared interest in our survival. Almost any pathogen comes to a dead end when we die; it first has to
communicate itself to another host in order to survive. So historically, the really severe host-
pathogen interactions have resulted in a wipeout of both host and pathogen. We humans are still
here because, so far, the pathogens that have attacked us have willy-nilly had an interest in our
survival. This is a very delicate balance, and it is easily disturbed, often in the wake of large-scale ecological upsets.

The deadliest disease would eradicate itself.

The Boston Globe 3 (Crossing the species barrier: from AIDS to

Ebola, our most deadly diseases have made the leap from animals to
humans, April 29)
http://www.conservationmedicine.org/news/boston_globe_2003.htm
But then the virus did something that viruses are typically loathe to do: It made people so sick that many
died, taking the virus with them. Usually, viruses aim to strike a survival balance in the organisms
they infect: They want a home, and they want to rule it, but they don't want to destroy it. In humans,
Nipah caused encephalitis, killing half of the people who developed symptoms and infecting them in
such a way that the virus was unable to jump from one human to another. "For some reason, the
Nipah virus didn't like the human host in the long term," said Dr. George Saperstein, chairman of the Department
of Environmental and Population Health at the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. "It didn't find a mechanism
to survive along with the host or a reservoir to hide out between outbreaks."

No extinction
Posner 5 Court of Appeals Judge; Professor, Chicago School of Law (Richard, Catastrophe, http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-
4150331/Catastrophe-the-dozen-most-significant.html, AG)

Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the

Yet the fact that
200,000 years or so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on
extinction events. There have been enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox,
and now AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human race. There is
a biological reason.Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality ; they are fitter in
an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do
not kill their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by
lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that
AIDS will destroy the entire human race. The likelihood of a natural pandemic that would cause the
extinction of the human race is probably even less today than in the past (except in prehistoric times,
when people lived in small, scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite
wider human contacts that make it more difficult to localize an infectious disease.
 1AR AT: Disease Elbe/Periera Extension
The affirmatives representations of an ever-present virus
threat that ominously stews in the depths of exotic lands
and looms at the edge of our borders establishes a viral
geography that conflates difference with disease and thus
isolates it as a site for extermination. Far from being
ambiguous, this representational strategy carries specific
racist and colonial overtones by positing the non-west as
inherently predisposed to infection, marking off
individuals and entire populations as not quite human and
expendable at best.
SCHELL, Ph.D. candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford
University, IN 1997 [Heather, Outburst! A Chilling True Story about
Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social Change, Configurations 5.1,
pages 101-107]
TherepeatedlyimaginedintroductionofkillervirusesfromAfricatotheUnitedStatesappearstospring
fromananalogywithAIDS(althoughmanyscientistsandculturalcriticshaveshownthatassigninganAfricanorigintoAIDS
isproblematic).However,theexplanationismorecomplexthansimplemimicry.AndtheBandPlayedOn,RandyShilts'sjournalistic
accountoftheAIDSepidemic,opensinZaireduringthe1976Ebolaepidemic,describingtheillnessofanearlyAIDSvictim,before
returningtotheUnitedStatestofollowthedevelopmentoftheAIDSepidemic. 31Hisbookwaspublishedin[EndPage101]1988,
andthefilmversion,withamuchstrongeremphasisonEbolaastheoriginaryAfricanvirus,appearedin1993.Sowhoinspired
whom?ReportsofearlierEbolaandLassafeverepidemicsoffernoexplanationfortherepeatedtrajectoryoftheopeningsequences.
Theorigindoesnotreallymattersomuchas thepaucityofimaginationrevealedbytheseconsistentlystructured
introductions, which display the reification of African origins for killer epidemics. Richard Preston so
wholeheartedlyinternalizesthisassumptionthathetravelstoAfricatolookfortheoriginoftheReston
outbreak,despitethefactthatheknowsthattheinfectedmonkeyswereshippedfromthePhilippines ,where
thediseaseisendemic.PerhapsthemediaimagesofdevastationandstarvationinAfricahavehelpedconstitutethecontinentto
Americansasahabitatwherehumansarevictimsanddiseaseandfaminehavetheupperhand. TheopeningofLaurieGarrett's
articleonthe1995EbolaepidemicsuggeststhattheveryatmosphereofZaireteemswithinfection:"The
instantthejet'sdoorsopen ..., coolEuropeanair"isreplacedby"anacrid,swelteringdampness"and
"swarmsofmalarialmosquitoes...,followedcloselybyhordesof'officials'and'helpers.'"Garrettalmost
32

conflatesZairianpeopleanddiseasebearingZairianinsects infact,thequotationmarksmakethehumans'
statusevenmoreambiguous.Inaddition,Africaastheimaginarylocusofboththeoriginsoflifeandtheendemicprimitive
couldeasilyserveastheidealmetaphoricsourceofdangerouspredators. 33WecanseethisassociationinAnnGiudiciFettner'sclaim
that"AIDS...hasspannedthehistoryofhumanevolution,withindecadesmovingfromprimitiveAfricanrainforeststothe
twentieth century." 34 Even authors who do not focus on Africa frequentlyretaintheassumptionthatvirusesare
foreignentities,possiblyevenantiAmerican.ThisforeigngenesisisstructurallyemphasizedinPeterJaret's[EndPage
102]NationalGeographicarticleonviruses.35JaretreportsvisitingeightplacesfourintheUnitedStatesinthecourseofpreparing
hisarticle.Withtheexceptionofagroupofstudentsvolunteeringtocontractcolds,alltheillpeoplehementionsareencountered
abroad.AmericanswithAIDSenteronlyasoneslideofaninfectedlymphnodeandonesolitarystatisticaboutU.S.HIVinfection
rates(placedinperspectivealongsidethestillmoreghastlyrateofinternationalinfection).EvenJaret'ssummaryofthedisease's
discovery makes nomention thatAIDS wasfirst reported in the UnitedStates. Mapsprovideagoodexampleofthe
persistentlyAfricangeographyoftheseviralnarratives.Preston'ssingleillustrationisamapofcentral
Africa,thoughonemighteasilyhaveexpectedamapoftheReston,Virginia,vicinity,giventhatarea'sprimacyinhisstory.Still,
oneinstancealonecouldbedisregardedascoincidence.Radetsky'sbookhasmanyillustrations,includinggraphsandsketchesof
viruses;nonetheless,despiteallhislengthydiscussionsofviruseslurkingintheUnitedStates,China,SouthAmerica,andJapan,he
tooincludesonlyonemapofAfrica.Garrettatfirstseemstobreakthepattern,withfivemapsaccompanying TheComingPlague:
one of the United States, one of Amazonia, and three of Africa. On the academic side, Emerging Viruses, edited by
virologistStephenMorse,includestwentyeightarticles,numerouscharts,graphs,andtablesandamapof
Africa,withtheKinshasaHighwayastheonlyidentifiedlandmark.Inadditiontoaffirmingaparticular
36
originstoryforviruses,themapssuggestthatAfricaisparticularlyunknownandunknowableandtherefore
requiresspecialvisualaids.WhetherornotAfricaisspecified,tropicalgeographyinherestoviruses.Forexample,an
infectedcellviewedintheUnitedStatesthroughanelectronmicroscopebecomes"anaerialviewofrainforest.
Thecellwasaworlddownthere,andsomewhereinthatjunglehidavirus ."37RichardMoyer,avirologistatthe
UniversityofFlorida,Gainesville,usesthesamemetaphortoanotherend:"I'vebeguntothinkofthesevirusesasBrazilianrain
forests....Manyofthesegenes...areeventuallygoingtobetherapeuticallyveryuseful." 38[EndPage103] Viralgeography
entersvirologyintheincreasingconcernaboutthe"importation"ofexotic,foreignviruses ,withairtrafficand
highwaysasparticularthreats.Krauseemphasizestheirresponsibilityinhisabstract:someepidemicsrecurdueto"changinglife
styles(includingincreasedinternationaltravel)."39Althoughepidemicscanbecausedby"changesinthepatternsofhumanbehavior,
socialorganization,urbanization,andagriculture...,themostimportantfactoristhespreadofmicrobialorganismsfrompointsof
originasaresultofthemigrationandtraveloftheirhumanhosts." 40Thisfixationontravelrepresentsaconsensusamongvirologists
concernedwithemergingdiseases,totheextentthatevenviraltransmissionisunderstoodastransportation. Morsecoinedthe
termviraltraffic
for"movementsofvirusestonewspeciesornewindividuals ." 41 Viralmetaphorsgarner
theirpowerandpersuasiveforcebycomplementingourunderstandingofviraltruth .AsanthropologistMary
Douglasaptlynoted,Westerndefinitionsofdirtandcontagionarenowmediatedbyhygiene:"Itisdifficultto
thinkofdirtexceptinthecontextofpathogenicity."
Theculturalmeaningbehindourideasofcontagion
42

caneasilybedismissedbyreferencetothemedicalaim .Inthecontextofthisessay,Iwanttoemphasizethatthe
conceptionofviralcontagionastrafficisonlyoneoftheavailablemetaphorsbasedonthecommonscientificunderstandingof
epidemics.Forexample, somerecentexplanationsoftheoriginofAIDSsuggesttheimportationofAfrican
monkeysintotheUnitedStatesformedicalresearchconcurrentwithvaccinationprogramsinAfricaasthe
meansbywhichitspreadsorapidlytobothcontinents. 43
Hemorrhagicfevershavehistoricallygained
epidemic strength only when amplified by hospital practices. Medical staff frequently misdiagnose
hemorrhagicfevers,whichatfirstresemblemoreinnocuous,endemicfeverslikemalaria; thelackofbarriertechniques
andthereuseofneedlesandbeddingthattheseruralhospitals'povertyrequires[EndPage104] quickly
transmitthisbloodborneillnesstothestaffaswellasotherpatients. Theoutbreakofahemorrhagicfever
44

inMarburg,Germany,tookplaceinalaboratoryexperimentingoninfectedmonkeys. 45
Therefore,one
couldarguethat Westernmedicineisoneofthesocialpracticesmostlikelytocauseepidemics.
Viral
injection mightjustaswellhavebeenthetermchosentoexpresstheintroductionofvirusesintonew
populations. The metaphor of viral traffic is in some ways oddly incongruous, because viruses, unlike many other
microorganisms,havenomeansoflocomotion.Rather,theimage originatesinthecausalexplanationofepidemics:
"Inevitably,viraltrafficisenhancedbyhuman traffic.Highwaysandthesubsequenthumanmigrationtocities,
especiallyintropicalareas,canintroduceonceremotevirusestoalargerpopulation .Onaglobalscale,similar
opportunitiesareofferedbyrapidairtravel." 46 Onesuspectsthat, forMorse,humantrafficnotonlyenhancesviral
trafficbutisinfactsynonymouswithit.MartinKaplan,aformersecretarygeneraloftheWorldHealth
Organization,commendedMorse'snewphrase"viraltraffic"as"apt ." 47 Thisassociationbetweenepidemicsand
moderntravelreappearsinTheHotZoneandotherpopularsciencenarratives.Prestoncautionsthaturbanizationhasreleasedaflood
ofvirusesfromtheAfricanrainforestamessagethatinitiallyseemsconcernedwiththefragileecosphereandhumandestruction.
However,heultimatelynarrowstheoriginofemergingviralepidemicstooneUrcause:thepavingoftheKinshasaHighway,which
"turnedouttobeoneofthemostimportanteventsofthetwentiethcentury.Ithasalreadycostatleasttenmillionlives,withthe
likelihoodthattheultimatenumberofhumancasualtieswillvastlyexceedthedeathsintheSecondWorldWar." 48 TheKinshasa
Highwayis definedin Preston's glossaryas"AIDS highway." 49 Readersarelefttoinferthatthe [EndPage105]
boundariesbetweenthe"silentheartofdarkness "(Preston'sterm) andthecivilizedworldshouldhavebeen
maintained,giventhatcontactmightactuallymeanthedestructionoftheworld.Facilitatedtransportation
betweenthealienworldofinnerAfricaandtherestoftheworldisblamed .PeterJaretalsoassumesthatHIV"has
changedtheworld,"andhesimilarlytracesapassageoutofAfrica(afterabriefflingwiththepromiscuitynarrative)ashisnarrative
ofdiseasetransmission:"Truckersinfectedbyprostitutescarriedthediseasefromcitytotowntovillagethroughouttheheartof
Africa.Infectedairtravelersspreadittoothercontinents." 50Noticethatincreasingurbanizationperseisnotathreat,but
increasingmovementfromAfricatotherestoftheworldis.ArecurringimageofAfrica's gettingout
pervadesthetexts.Thisisaverynew,postcolonialfearuntilrecently,EuropeansandEuroAmericansimaginedthattheyhadto
traveltoAfricathemselvesiftheywantedtobeindanger. Thetropeofnationalcontaminationthroughtravelinfects
theactualnarrativestructureofthepopularscienceaccounts .AsIwillshowalittlelater,thesamestructureisalmost
standardizedinvirusepidemicfilms.TheHotZonebeginsbyexploringoutbreaksofdeadlyfilovirusesinAfricaandculminateswith
adramatizationofaninstancewhereafiloviruswasbelievedtoinfectHazletonResearchProducts'RestonPrimateQuarantineUnit.
ThisparallelstheorganizationofJaret'sarticle,whichleadsusalternatelythroughforeignlocalesandAmericanlaboratoriesbefore
endingwithacautionarystoryaboutan"exoticvirus"thathas"alreadyemergedintheU.S." 51 Thestructureitselfsuggests
thatathreatoriginatingoutsidehastraveledinside .Beingimmobilepathogens,virusesneedahosttobringtheminside.
 The hosts implicated in the virus texts I examine are invariably outsiders themselves, usually socially
disruptiveelements.LlewellynLegters,whohelpedorganizethe"hypotheticalglobalepidemicemergency "I
mentionedearlier, createsoneofthemostsuggestiveimagesofamarginalized,infectedtraveler:"'We'go
there,'they'comehere,increasingtherisktoUnitedStatescitizensofexposuretotropical infectious
diseases."
52
"We"and"they"carrystrong (ifunspecified) racialovertonesinthisinstance;inothercontexts
they [EndPage106]
suggestmembershipinsexual,gendered,economic,andmostespeciallynational
categories.Iwilladdressthesedifferentimplicationsastheyreartheiruglylittleheadsinmyexamples.Inthemeantime,themost
importantelementof"us"and"them"liesintheirflexiblerelationship,definedprimarilybyperceivedhygieneandinfection."We"
are,aboveall,thereaders,theoneswhosesurvivalultimatelymatters."They"aretheoneswhoprobably
willnotsurvive,andwhoseinfectiousresistancetodyinginanonymousisolationendangerstherestofus .53
 AT: Economy
Their models failed to predict the economic crisis- the
assumption of rationality makes collapse inevitable

Stiglitz 10
(By Joseph Stiglitz The writer, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, is
University Professor at Columbia University. He served as chairman of President Bill Clintons
Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economist of the World Bank. He is on the Advisory
Board of INET, Needed: a new economic paradigm, August 19, 2010)//TR

The blame game continues over who is responsible for the worst recession since the
Great Depression the financiers who did such a bad job of managing risk or the regulators who failed to
stop them. But the economics profession bears more than a little culpability. It provided
the models that gave comfort to regulators that markets could be self-regulated; that they
were efficient and self-correcting. The efficient markets hypothesis the notion that
market prices fully revealed all the relevant information ruled the day. Today, not only is our
economy in a shambles but so too is the economic paradigm that
predominated in the years before the crisis or at least it should be. It is hard for non-economists to
understand how peculiar the predominant macroeconomic models were. Many assumed demand had to
equal supply and that meant there could be no unemployment. (Right now a lot of people are just
enjoying an extra dose of leisure; why they are unhappy is a matter for psychiatry, not economics.) Many
used representative agent models all individuals were assumed to be identical,
and this meant there could be no meaningful financial markets (who would
be lending money to whom?). Information asymmetries, the cornerstone of modern economics, also had no
place: they could arise only if individuals suffered from acute schizophrenia, an assumption incompatible
Bad models lead to bad policy:
with another of the favoured assumptions, full rationality.
central banks, for instance, focused on the small economic inefficiencies arising from inflation,
to the exclusion of the far, far greater inefficiencies arising from
dysfunctional financial markets and asset price bubbles. After all, their models said that
financial markets were always efficient. Remarkably, standard macroeconomic models did not even
incorporate adequate analyses of banks. No wonder former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, in
his famous mea culpa, could express his surprise that banks did not do a better job at risk management.
The real surprise was his surprise: even a cursory look at the perverse incentives confronting banks and
their managers would have predicted short-sighted behaviour with excessive risk-taking. The standard
models should be graded on their predictive ability and especially their ability to predict in circumstances
that matter. Increasing the accuracy of forecast in normal times (knowing whether the economy will grow
at 2.4 per cent or 2.5 per cent) is far less important than knowing the risk of a major recession. In this the
models failed miserably, and the predictions of policymakers based on them
have, by now, totally undermined their credibility. Policymakers did not see the
crisis coming, said its effects were contained after the bubble burst, and thought the consequences would
be far more short-lived and less severe than they have been. Fortunately, while much of the mainstream
focused on these flawed models, numerous researchers were engaged in developing alternative
approaches. Economic theory had already shown that many of the central conclusions of
the standard model were not robust that is, small changes in assumptions led to
large changes in conclusions. Even small information asymmetries, or imperfections in risk markets, meant
that markets were not efficient. Celebrated results, such as Adam Smiths invisible hand, did not hold; the
invisible hand was invisible because it was not there. Few today would argue that bank managers, in their
pursuit of their self-interest, had promoted the well-being of the global economy. Monetary policy affects
the economy through the availability of credit and the terms on which it is made available, especially to
small- and medium-sized enterprises. Understanding this requires us to analyse banks and their interaction
with the shadow banking sector. The spread between the Treasury bill rate and lending rates can change
markedly. With a few exceptions, most central banks paid little attention to systemic risk and the
risks posed by credit interlinkages. Years before the crisis, a few researchers focused on these
issues, including the possibility of the bankruptcy cascades that were to play out in such an important way
in the crisis. This is an example of the importance of modelling carefully complex interactions among
economic agents (households, companies, banks) interactions that cannot be studied in models in which
 Even the sacrosanct assumption of rationality has
everyone is assumed to be the same.
been attacked: there are systemic deviations from rationality and
consequences for macroeconomic behaviour that need to be explored. Changing
paradigms is not easy. Too many have invested too much in the wrong models. Like the Ptolemaic attempts
there will be heroic efforts to add complexities
to preserve earth-centric views of the universe,
and refinements to the standard paradigm. The resulting models will be an improvement and policies
based on them may do better, but they too are likely to fail. Nothing less than a
paradigm shift will do. But a new paradigm, I believe, is within our grasp: the intellectual
building blocks are there and the Institute for New Economic Thinking is providing a framework for bringing
the diverse group of scholars striving to create this new paradigm together. What is at stake, of course, is
more than just the credibility of the economics profession or that of the policymakers who rely on their
ideas: it is the stability and prosperity of our economies.

Economic rationality reduces beings to objects of

scientific inquiry- the drive for predictability is sustained
through the erasure of difference

Dubhashi 8
(PR, writer for mainstream weekly and public lecturer, Critique of neo-classical economics,
Mainstream, vol. XLVI, No. 19, http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article663.html)//TR

WHILE market economy seems to have emerged triumphant in todays era of globalisation, there is a
keener realisation that neo-classical Micro- economics, which is supposed to provide intellectual support to
the free market economy, is itself based on questionable assumptions. Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel Prize
winner, through his papers, made economists aware of the stringent conditions required for competitive
the concept of homo-economics, the individual economic
equilibrium. First,
agent, whether consumer or producer, making choices or taking decisions is a faulty one. An
individual does not exist in isolation. He or she is a member of a family and society
and his or her choices and decisions are influenced by interpersonal
relationships and community values. The economic activity is embedded in a web of
social institutions. An individual should be placed in a social context ,
as observed by the economist, Nobel Prize winner Trygve Haavelmo, in his lecture Economics and Welfare
that an individual makes rational
State (1989). Secondly, the stipulation
choices and takes rational decisions in self-interest is not valid. The behaviour of the
individual is influenced by many factors including moral and ethical
considerations and is not purely hedonist in character. Impulse buying, spontaneous
consumption decisions, adventure and desire for the unknown are not always
rational. But they do characterise individual decisions. Thirdly, the assumptions relating to a
perfectly competitive market are inconsistent with the conditions in the real world. One of the assumptions
is that there are innumerable buyers and sellers none of whom by themselves are able to influence the
market. In actual world, there are conditions of monopoly, oligopoly and imperfect competition based on
differentiated products. In the thirties, E. S. Chamberlain and Joan Robinson wrote books to modify the
laws formulated to suit a perfectly competitive market. This was before the emergence of modern
corporations. As J. K. Galbraith has pointed out, corporations of today are so powerful that with the aid of
advertisements and money power they are able to reverse the proposition that supply is according to
demand. Corporations manipulate demand to be in accordance with supply. Nor is the assumption of
perfect knowledge valid. Consumers are often ill informed about the products and services they buy.
There is no instantaneous omniscience. Fourthly, firms in the real world do not take decisions regarding
production by equating marginal cost with marginal revenue or by constantly substituting at the margin
one factor of production for another with a view to optimisation. These decisions are often influenced by
compulsions of machinery and capital equipment and technology. There are no constant coefficients of
production, no perfect divisibility of goods or factors of production. Fifthly, market as conceived in
textbooks of Micro-economics bears no resemblance to the market in the real world. That is why syllabus
relating to marketing in business courses deal with practical issues like brand and goodwill rather than
market equilibrium as envisaged
the theorectical stipulations of a competitive market. Sixthly,
does not deal with dynamics in the economy.
by Micro-economics is in stationary state. It
Uncertainty is an integral part of economic life and yet will not be analysed in
any rigorous way in the competitive model until the early 1950s when Kenneth Arrow introduced
uncertainty in equilibrium analysis, although in a specific and restrictive way. Its input-output relationship
dynamic changes and non-lineal and even chaotic
is lineal whereas in the real world there are
relationship is the rule rather than exception. Seventhly, Micro-economics completely overlooks the
institutional set-up in the context of which the market functions. The institutional set-up includes the legal
framework, educational set-up, cultural institutions etc. Eightly, Micro-economics confines its attention to
economic activity in the market, overlooking economic activity conducted in the fold of family, health
and educational institutions and government to give a few examples. It has been estimated that the family
activity in the Western economies account for 40 per cent of the GNP.

Organizing the economy around short-term impacts

predicated on market logic - the affs fixation on market
efficiency and short-term economic profit creates
economics of speed- leads to rapid investment shifting
and product development- thats unsustainable and
makes financial collapse inevitable

Goldman et al. 6 (Robert Goldman, Professor of Sociology at Lewis & Clark

College; Stephen Papson, Department of Sociology, St. Lawrence University; Noah
Kersey, PhD, Berkeley; 2006, Landscapes of the Social Relations of Production in a
Networked Society, Fast Capitalism 2.1,
http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_1/SocialRelations.html)

The formula for success is knowledge, power, mobility, and determination. Situated
in positions of power,
the corporate elite imagistically embody these attributes -- they are
active, informed, determined, focused, surrounded by technology. Even
when the body is not moving, information continues to flow via cell phones and
electronic information tools integrated into the scenes. Embodied in pinstripes,
wingtips, and the other accoutrements of power, these scenes suggest that markets may be volatile but capital is composed and
disciplined in its pursuit of opportunities. Nowhere is this scenario more graphically
played out than in the 1999 ad campaign for Salomon Smith Barney
that reveals a world moving at warp speed while the elite
investment bankers calmly survey it as they spot the
opportunities that will pay off. These representations resemble what Thomas
Friedman (1999) dubs the Electronic Herd in The Lexus and the Olive Tree. His metaphor embraces
the volatility of markets in conjunction with the diffusion of capital
across the electronic circuits of finance. According to Friedman, no corporation or nation-state
can risk losing the favor of the Herd. In the global economy this can be catastrophic to
market values. Those who comprise the Herd compete to maximize the rate of return on investments, which translates
into manically scouring the planet for opportunities or cutting losses as quickly as possible when it is time to sell. The manic need to
invest is matched by panic selling. Combined with the ability to transfer funds and
monies electronically, a stock can be cut in half in hours, or a
countrys currency thrown into crisis with a rapidity hitherto
unknown. Friedmans metaphor of the electronic herd pictures an
economic elite dashing about in a global free market economy fueled
by technological innovation and the liquidity of capital forms (currency,
stocks, commodities). The figures who compose this grouping are constructed
as dynamic, mobile, and technologically sophisticated. They fluidly
traverse the world of nonplaces and occupy office suites in corporate
towers surrounded by personal communication technologies. And yet, even
in these idealized abstractions, uncertainties and anxieties seep through. Narratives of success are
sprinkled with hints of impending crisis, or stories of those who
made the wrong choices - the wrong office equipment, the wrong software, the wrong package delivery service.
The exhilaration associated with accelerated social, economic, and technological change mixes with an undercurrent of apprehension.
Speed may mean winning, but it can also lead to crashing. There are
more losers than winners in casino capitalism. The landscape of risk is omnipresent.
the United States.

No impact
Robert Jervis 11, Professor in the Department of Political Science and
School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, December
2011, Force in Our Times, Survival, Vol. 25, No. 4, p. 403-425
Even if war is still seen as evil, the security community could be dissolved if severe conflicts of interest were to arise. Could the more peaceful world generate
new interests that would bring the members of the community into sharp disputes? 45 A zero-sum sense of status would be one example, perhaps linked to a
a worsening of the current economic difficulties, which
steep rise in nationalism. More likely would be

could itself produce greater nationalism, undermine democracy and bring

back old-fashioned beggar-my-neighbor economic policies . While these
dangers are real, it is hard to believe that the conflicts could be
great enough to lead the members of the community to contemplate
fighting each other. It is not so much that economic interdependence has
proceeded to the point where it could not be reversed states that were more internally interdependent than anything seen

internationally have fought bloody civil wars. Rather it is that even if the more extreme

versions of free trade and economic liberalism become

discredited , it is hard to see how without building on a preexisting high level of political conflict leaders
and mass opinion would come to believe that their countries could
prosper by impoverishing or even attacking others. Is it possible that problems will not only become
severe, but that people will entertain the thought that they have to be solved by war? While a pessimist could note that

this argument does not appear as outlandish as it did before the financial
crisis, an optimist could reply (correctly, in my view) that the very fact that we
have seen such a sharp economic down-turn without anyone
suggesting that force of arms is the solution shows that even if bad times
bring about greater economic conflict , it will not make war
thinkable .

No correlation between trade and conflict

Martin et. al. 8 (Phillipe, [University of Paris 1 Pantheon

Sorbonne, Paris School of Economics, and Centre for
Economic Policy Research; Thierry MAYER, University of
Paris 1 Pantheon] Sorbonne, [Paris School of Economics,
CEPII, and Centre for Economic Policy Research], [Mathias
THOENIG, University of Geneva and Paris School of
Economics], The Review of Economic Studies 75 //DF)

Does globalization pacify international relations? The liberal view in political

science argues that increasing trade flows and the spread of free markets and democracy should limit the
incentive to use military force in interstate relations. This vision, which can partly be traced back to Kants
Essay on Perpetual Peace (1795), has been very influential: The main objective of the European trade
integration process was to prevent the killing and destruction of the two World Wars from ever happening
during the 18702001 period, the
again.1 Figure 1 suggests2 however, that
correlation between trade openness and military conflicts is not a
clear cut one. The first era of globalization, at the end of the 19th century, was
a period of rising trade openness and multiple military conflicts,
culminating with World War I. Then, the interwar period was
characterized by a simultaneous collapse of world trade and conflict s.
After World War II, world trade increased rapidly, while the number of conflicts decreased (although the risk
There is no clear evidence that the 1990s,
of a global conflict was obviously high).
during which trade flows increased dramatically, was a period of
lower prevalence of military conflicts, even taking into account the
increase in the number of sovereign states.

No impact to protectionism- no power to start war now

Ikenson 9 (Daniel, March 12, 2009, [associate director of

the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute],
A Protectionism Fling: Why Tariff Hikes and Other Trade
Barriers Will Be Short-Lived,
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10651 //DF)

Although some governments will dabble in some degree of

protectionism, the combination of a sturdy rules-based system of
trade and the economic self interest in being open to participation in
the global economy will limit the risk of a protectionist pandemic.
According to recent estimates from the International Food Policy Research Institute, if all WTO
members were to raise all of their applied tariffs to the maximum
bound rates, the average global rate of duty would double and the
value of global trade would decline by 7.7 percent over five years .8
That would be a substantial decline relative to the 5.5 percent annual rate of trade growth experienced this
decade.9 But, to put that 7.7 percent decline in historical perspective , the
value of global trade declined by 66 percent between 1929 and 1934 ,
a period mostly in the wake of Smoot Hawley's passage in 1930.10 So the
potential downside today from what Bergsten calls "legal protectionism" is
actually not that "massive," even if all WTO members raised all of their tariffs to the highest
permissible rates. If most developing countries raised their tariffs to their bound rates, there would be an
adverse impact on the countries that raise barriers and on their most important trade partners. But
most developing countries that have room to backslide (i.e., not China)
are not major importers, and thus the impact on global trade flows would not be that
significant. OECD countries and China account for the top twothirds of global import value. 11
Backsliding from India, Indonesia, and Argentina (who collectively account for
2.4 percent of global imports) is not going to be the spark that ignites a global
trade war. Nevertheless, governments are keenly aware of the events
that transpired in the 1930s, and have made various pledges to avoid
protectionist measures in combating the current economic situation. In the United States,
after President Obama publicly registered his concern that the "Buy
American" provision in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
might be perceived as protectionist or could incite a trade war, Congress
agreed to revise the legislation to stipulate that the Buy American provision "be applied
in a manner consistent with United States obligations under international agreements." In early February,
China's vice commerce minister, Jiang Zengwei, announced that China would not include "Buy China"
even more promising than pledges
provisions in its own $586 billion stimulus bill.12 But
to avoid trade provocations are actions taken to reduce existing
trade barriers. In an effort to "reduce business operating costs, attract and retain foreign
investment, raise business productivity, and provide consumers a greater variety and better quality of
the Mexican government initiated a plan
goods and services at competitive prices,"
in January to unilaterally reduce tariffs on about 70 percent of the
items on its tariff schedule. Those 8,000 items, comprising 20 different industrial sectors,
accounted for about half of all Mexican import value in 2007. When the final phase of the plan is
implemented on January 1, 2013, the average industrial tariff rate in Mexico will have fallen from 10.4
the Brazilian government
percent to 4.3 percent.13 And Mexico is not alone. In February,
suspended tariffs entirely on some capital goods imports and reduced to 2
percent duties on a wide variety of machinery and other capital equipment, and on communications and
information technology products.14 That decision came on the heels of late-January decision in Brazil to
scrap plans for an import licensing program that would have affected 60 percent of the county's imports.15
Meanwhile, on February 27, a new free trade agreement was signed
between Australia, New Zealand, and the 10 member countries of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations to reduce and ultimately eliminate tariffs on 96 percent of all
goods by 2020. While the media and members of the trade policy
community fixate on how various protectionist measures around the
world might foreshadow a plunge into the abyss, there is plenty of
evidence that governments remain interested in removing barriers
to trade. Despite the occasional temptation to indulge discredited
policies, there is a growing body of institutional knowledge that when
people are free to engage in commerce with one another as they choose, regardless of the nationality or
location of the other parties, they can leverage that freedom to accomplish economic outcomes far more
impressive than when governments attempt to limit choices through policy constraints.
.

Econ collapse saps resources from military aggression

Bennett 2k PolSci Prof, Penn State (Scott and Timothy Nordstrom, Foreign Policy Substitutability and Internal
Economic Problems in Enduring Rivalries, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Ebsco)

Conflict settlement is also a distinct route to dealing with internal problems that leaders in rivalries may pursue when faced with internal problems. Military
Leaders may choose to negotiate
competition between states requires large amounts of resources, and rivals require even more attention.

a settlement that ends a rivalry to free up important resources that may be reallocated to the domestic
economy. In a guns versus butter world of economic trade-offs, when a state can no longer afford to pay the expenses associated with competition
in a rivalry, it is quite rational for leaders to reduce costs by ending a rivalry. This gain (a peace dividend) could be achieved at any time by ending a rivalry.
However, such a gain is likely to be most important and attractive to leaders when internal conditions are bad and the leader is seeking ways to alleviate active
problems. Support for policy change away from continued rivalry is more likely to
develop when the economic situation sours and elites and masses are
looking for ways to improve a worsening situation. It is at these times that the pressure to
cut military investment will be greatest and that state leaders will be forced to recognize the difficulty of
continuing to pay for a rivalry. Among other things, this argument also encompasses the view that the cold war ended because the

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could no longer compete economically with

Econ collapse doesnt cause war prefer our studies

Bazzi and Blattman 11

Samuel Bazzi (Department of Economics at University of California San Diego) and Christopher Blattman
(assistant professor of political science and economics at Yale University) November 2011 Economic
Shocks and Conflict: The (Absence of?) Evidence from Commodity Prices
http://www.chrisblattman.com/documents/research/2011.EconomicShocksAndConflict.pdf?9d7bd4

VI. Discussion and conclusions A. Implications for our theories of political instability and conflict The
state is not a prize?Warlord politics and the state prize logic lie at the center of the most influential
models of conflict, state development, and political transitions in economics and political science. Yet we
see no evidence for this idea in economic shocks, even when looking at the friendliest
cases: fragile and unconstrained states dominated by extractive commodity revenues .
Indeed, we see the opposite correlation: if anything, higher rents from commodity prices
weakly 22 lower the risk and length of conflict. Perhaps shocks are the wrong test. Stocks of
resources could matter more than price shocks (especially if shocks are transitory). But combined with
emerging evidence that war onset is no more likely even with rapid increases in known oil reserves
(Humphreys 2005; Cotet and Tsui 2010) we regard the state prize logic of war with skepticism.17 Our
main political economy models may need a new engine. Naturally, an absence of evidence cannot
be taken for evidence of absence. Many of our conflict onset and ending results include sizeable positive
and negative effects.18 Even so, commodity price shocks are highly influential in income and should
provide a rich source of identifiable variation in instability. It is difficult to find a better-measured, more
abundant, and plausibly exogenous independent variable than price volatility. Moreover, other time-
varying variables, like rainfall and foreign aid, exhibit robust correlations with conflict in
spite of suffering similar empirical drawbacks and generally smaller sample sizes (Miguel et
al. 2004; Nielsen et al. 2011). Thus we take the absence of evidence seriously . Do resource
revenues drive state capacity?State prize models assume that rising revenues raise the value of the
capturing the state, but have ignored or downplayed the effect of revenues on self-defense. We saw that a
growing empirical political science literature takes just such a revenue-centered approach, illustrating that
resource boom times permit both payoffs and repression, and that stocks of lootable or extractive
resources can bring political order and stability. This countervailing effect is most likely with transitory
shocks, as current revenues are affected while long term value is not. Our findings are partly consistent
with this state capacity effect. For example, conflict intensity is most sensitive to changes in the extractive
commodities rather than the annual agricultural crops that affect household incomes more directly. The
relationship only holds for conflict intensity, however, and is somewhat fragile. We do not see a large,
consistent or robust decline in conflict or coup risk when prices fall. A reasonable interpretation is that the
state prize and state capacity effects are either small or tend to cancel one another out. Opportunity cost:
Victory by default?Finally, the inverse relationship between prices and war intensity is consistent with
opportunity cost accounts, but not exclusively so. As we noted above, the relationship between intensity
and extractive commodity prices is more consistent with the state capacity view. Moreover, we shouldnt
mistake an inverse relation between individual aggression and incomes as evidence for the opportunity
cost mechanism. The same correlation is consistent with psychological theories of stress and aggression
(Berkowitz 1993) and sociological and political theories of relative deprivation and anomie (Merton
1938; Gurr 1971). Microempirical work will be needed to distinguish between these mechanisms. Other
reasons for a null result.Ultimately, however, the fact that commodity price shocks have no
discernible effect on new conflict onsets, but some effect on ongoing conflict, suggests that
political stability might be less sensitive to income or temporary shocks than generally
believed. One possibility is that successfully mounting an insurgency is no easy task. It comes with
considerable risk, costs, and coordination challenges. Another possibility is that the counterfactual is still
conflict onset. In poor and fragile nations, income shocks of one type or another are ubiquitous. If a
nation is so fragile that a change in prices could lead to war, then other shocks may trigger
war even in the absence of a price shock. The same argument has been made in debunking the
myth that price shocks led to fiscal collapse and low growth in developing nations in the 1980s.19 B. A
general problem of publication bias? More generally, these findings should heighten our concern
with publication bias in the conflict literature. Our results run against a number of
published results on commodity shocks and conflict, mainly because of select samples,
misspecification, and sensitivity to model assumptions, and, most importantly, alternative
measures of instability. Across the social and hard sciences, there is a concern that the majority of
published research findings are false (e.g. Gerber et al. 2001). Ioannidis (2005) demonstrates that a
published finding is less likely to be true when there is a greater number and lesser pre-
selection of tested relationships; there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions,
outcomes, and models; and when more teams are involved in the chase of statistical
significance. The cross-national study of conflict is an extreme case of all these. Most
worryingly, almost no paper looks at alternative dependent variables or publishes
systematic robustness checks. Hegre and Sambanis (2006) have shown that the majority of published
conflict results are fragile, though they focus on timeinvariant regressors and not the time-varying shocks
that have grown in popularity. We are also concerned there is a file drawer problem (Rosenthal 1979).
Consider this decision rule: scholars that discover robust results that fit a theoretical intuition pursue the
results; but if results are not robust the scholar (or referees) worry about problems with the data or
empirical strategy, and identify additional work to be done. If further analysis produces a robust result, it
is published. If not, back to the file drawer. In the aggregate, the consequences are dire: a lower
threshold of evidence for initially significant results than ambiguous ones .20
 AT: Econ Royal
Diversionary theory is crap---180 empirics disprove it
Gelpi 97 (Christopher, Center for International Affairs @ Harvard, "Democratic Diversions," Sage)
Students of international politics have often argued that state leaders initiate the use of
force internationally to divert attention away from domestic problems. The author
contends that these arguments concerning relationship between domestic unrest and international
conflict are not supported empirically because they focus too narrowly on
the incentives state leaders have to use external force as a diversionary tactic without
considering alternative solutions to quieting domestic unrest. It is hypothesized that
democratic leaders will respond to domestic unrest by diverting attention by using force internationally. On
leaders are expected to repress the unrest directly, and
the other hand, authoritarian
these acts of repression will make them less likely to use force internationally.
An analysis of the initiation of force by the challenging states in 180 international
crises between 1948 and 1982 strongly supports these hypotheses. The results of
the analyses and their implications for the literature on diversionary conflicts and the rapidly growing
literature on democratic peace are discussed.
 1AR Econ: Jarvis Extension
Their data is correlation not causation and their only empiric goes
neg

Niall Ferguson, Oct 2006, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, "The Next War of the
World," Foreign Affairs 85.5, p EBSCO

Nor can economic crises explain the bloodshed. What may be the most familiar causal chain in
modern historiographylinks the Great Depression to the rise of fascism and the outbreak
of World War II. But that simple story leaves too much out. Nazi Germany started the
war in Europe only after its economy had recovered. Not all the countries
affected by the Great Depression were taken over by fascist regimes, nor did
all such regimes start wars of aggression. In fact, no general relationship between
economics and conflict is discernible for the century as a whole. Some wars came after
periods of growth, others were the causes rather than the consequences of economic
catastrophe, and some severe economic crises were not followed by wars .

More ev---recession proves no impact

Barnett 9senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC (Thomas, The New Rules: Security Remains
Stable Amid Financial Crisis, 25 August 2009, http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-
financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx)

When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all
sorts of scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading
to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's
interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly worldwide
recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security
landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be
clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between
Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic
struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest
entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening
ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost
we see a most
two-decade long struggle between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then,

familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and

liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two
potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side acquiring a nuclear weapon
capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends . And with the United States effectively tied down by

its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our involvement elsewhere around the

planet has been quite modest, both leading up to and following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual
counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we
find serious instability we pretty much let it burn, occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for
example, hasn't led us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: No significant uptick in mass violence or unrest (remember the
smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); The usual frequency maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places);
No great improvement or
Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered);

disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that
No
diplomacy); A modest scaling back of international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and

serious efforts by any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant
its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the
United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.)
Sure, we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous
world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the
stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus"
spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the
most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis. Can we say that
the world has suffered a distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The
world's major economies remain governed by center-left or center-right political factions

that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were attempts across the board to
insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade
wars." Instead, the World Trade Organization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not
slowed. Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's growing
disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to
breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently frightening to
provoke major economies into establishing global regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I argued last week --
discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached great
significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world of
globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such "diverging interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly,
I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that this global
financialcrisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II international liberal
trade order.
 1AR Econ: Zakaria Extension
Robust studies prove
Miller 2k Professor of Management, Ottawa (Morris, Poverty As A Cause Of Wars?,
http://www.pugwash.org/reports/pac/pac256/WG4draft1.htm)
Thus, these armed conflicts can hardly be said to be caused by poverty as a principal factor when the greed and envy of leaders and their hegemonic
ambitions provide sufficient cause. The poor would appear to be more the victims than the perpetrators of armed conflict. It might be alleged that some
dramatic event or rapid sequence of those types of events that lead to the exacerbation of poverty might be the catalyst for a violent reaction on the part
of the people or on the part of the political leadership who might be tempted to seek a diversion by finding/fabricating an enemy and going to war.
According to a study undertaken by Minxin Pei and Ariel Adesnik of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
After studying 93 episodes of economic
there would not appear to be any merit in this hypothesis.

crisis in 22 countries in Latin America and Asia in the years since World War II they concluded that Much of
the conventional wisdom about the political impact of economic crises may be wrong...
The severity of economic crisis ---as measured in terms of inflation and negative growth--- bore no

relationship to the collapse of regimes. A more direct role was played by political variables such as ideological polarization,
labor radicalism, guerilla insurgencies and an anti-Communist military... ( In democratic states) such changes

seldom lead to an outbreak of violence (while) in the cases of dictatorships and semi-democracies, the
ruling elites responded to crises by increasing repression (thereby using one form of violence to

abort another.
 1AR Econ: Goldman
The plan removes barriers to speed and increases the
pace of global economic transaction- ensures
environmental collapse, resource wars, and extinction

Simons 10 - Former Trader and Economist, PhD in Philosophy (Petrus, February,

Accelerate or Slow Down, Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian
Thought & Practice, Vol. 18 (2010): 32-25)

Paul Virilios metaphor of a car which travels at high speed is very apt.
The driver sees trees ahead com- ing towards the windscreen and
disappearing again through the rear mirror. It is as if the environment outside is moving,
whilst the car is stationary. The ever increasing speed of our transport and
communication media distorts our view of the world around us. It
tempts us to demand more and more of the worlds resources as if they are
infinite. We ignore the massive volumes of energy required and the
pollution caused by our speed. Instead of reducing the maximum speed so as to stop the slaughter of
humans, we make the roads more suitable for the speed we desire. Sharp
bends are straightened and land, cultivated for centuries to produce food, converted to motorways.4
(Shiva, 2008, 63ff). Since barriers to trade would slow down the flows of
goods and services, thereby making large capital- intensive
transport equipment lose money, they should be abolished. The more trade is
free, the better we can compete, raising the rate of technical progress and economic (monetary) growth. It is assumed
that there will always be plenty of raw materials and energy to
construct an ever growing number of technical objects . Yet, states are
prepared to equip armies and use finance to secure adequate
supplies of oil and gas. Even an age-old activity such as agriculture is
drawn into the speed of the dromosphere. New varieties, better
(chemical) fertilisers and sprays, fast tractors, growth-hormones (not
allowed in New Zealand) and antibiotics should accelerate the speed of production . The
speeding dromosphere collides with the kingdoms of minerals,
plants and animals, which tend to change, but slowly over long periods of time. It took
millions of years for oil to accumulate in sandstone formations. We have been pumping it out within
200 to 250 years, thereby causing climate warming and a
destruction of landscapes. As the 21st century wears on, we will experience ever more painfully that speed
kills
The plan solves-the US has to exit the system to get holdouts on
board for reform-spills up to general reform of the drug conventions

Martin Jelsma, 14, coordinator of the TNI's Drugs & Democracy Programme, w/
Tom Blickman, "The Rise and Decline of Cannabis Prohibition the History of
cannabis in the UN drug control system and options for reform: Treaty reform
options,"http://www.tni.org/sites/www.tni.org/files/download/rise_and_decline_we
b.pdf
All that said, the instrument of denunciation, or perhaps the threat of
AND
organised crime and corruption issues" would also need to be considered.
 1AR Econ: Free Trade Models K
The opp cost model is oversimplifying by reducing the
indeterminancy of strategic calculations to a normative
question of what rational states SHOULD do

McDonald and Sweeney 07

Patrick, professor of gov at UT Austin and Kevin, works for the DoD (The
AchillesHeel of the Liberal IR Theory? Globalization and Conflict in the Pre-
World 1 Era, World Politics 59.3, 2007, 270-403, Project Muse)//TR

A vast quantity of empirical evidence spanning a variety of research designs and estimating techniques
that international commerce reduces
has led many scholars to conclude
military conflict between states.8 A number of studies rely on what is now
labeled the opportunity cost model. Large levels of international trade between
states make conflict less likely by raising the economic costs of war. By closing trade routes through
sanctions, embargoes, or threats of piracy and sabotage, the opportunity costs of military conflict increase
as greater potential trade may be lost. Consequently, any state that shares large levels of bilateral trade
with another state should be hesitant to use military force to resolve any political conflict between them.
widespread integration of bargaining
Despite this empirical progress, the
models of war in security studies has raised questions concerning
the mechanisms whereby commerce leads to peace. Citing the
opportunity cost models neglect of strategic interaction between
states, bargaining approaches highlight the indeterminacy of that
framework.9 While the threat of high economic costs may deter a
state from initiating military conflict, its adversary may exploit
this reluctance by displaying a greater willingness to escalate the
conflict with military force. These approaches argue instead that the links
between trade and conflict work through the formers ability to
expand the range of signals that states can use to reveal private
information about resolve and achieve a negotiated bargain short
of war in a crisis.10
Their attempt to analyze the actions of the nation as a
homogenous entity fail the nature of free trade creates
indeterminacy by restructuring wealth distribution.
Domestic policy change.

McDonald and Sweeney 07

Patrick, professor of gov at UT Austin and Kevin, works for the DoD (The
AchillesHeel of the Liberal IR Theory? Globalization and Conflict in the Pre-
World 1 Era, World Politics 59.3, 2007, 270-403, Project Muse)//TR
This theoretical choice carries important implications for any conclusion linking commerce to peace. By
focusing on the aggregate economic benefits derived from international trade,
the literature has neglected key insights from standard trade theory that illustrate that
these gains are not distributed evenly within economies. For example, the
Heckscher-Ohlin framework shows that trade increases the real income of owners of relatively abundant
factors of production in an economy.13 Owners of relatively scarce factors simultaneously see their relative
incomes decrease. If it is costly for factors to move between sectors, owners of factors specific to the
exporting industry receive increasing incomes from international trade.14 At the same time, owners of
factors specific to import-competing industries face declining incomes. These models yield a simple, but
Because international trade redistributes income
important insight.
within society, it simultaneously creates conflicting pressures for
and against more open commercial policies. This domestic conflict
implies that aggregate gains from trade will not necessarily
translate into uniform lobbying pressures from society for the
promotion of trade and peace. For example, politically powerful constituencies owning
scarce factors of production may be able to resist this process and reap economic gains from the closure of
Trade models highlighting the uneven effects within
international markets.
societies can shed light on which sectors seek open international
markets and can also provide a deductive foundation linking
domestic economic interests to the foreign policies of states. The
concentration on Ricardo dovetails with another weakness in the commercial peace literature. Numerous
scholars have pointed out thatthis literature has yet to integrate a model of
state-society relations that allows it to explain how domestic
pressures and interests filter the pressures of competitive
international markets before producing foreign policy outputs.15 By
focusing on the aggregate consequences of commerce, most explanations of commercial
liberalism rely to varying degrees on the unitary actor
assumption that neglects processes within the state and
concentrates instead on how external constraints, such as the
degree of national economic integration into the global economy,
shape foreign policy choices. Insights into these domestic pressures can be generated by
moving beyond Ricardo and shifting the underlying model of international trade for commercial peace
hypotheses.
 AT: Extinction
Negs decision calculus is symptomatic of the White
Western chauvinism that perpetuates violence against
people of color

Martin 84
(Brian Martin (born 1947) teaches in the interdisciplinary area of Science, technology, and
society at the University of Wollongong in Australia, where he became a professor in 2007.[1]
He was president of Whistleblowers Australia from 1996 to 1999 and remains their
International Director, Extinction politics, Published in SANA Update (Scientists Against
Nuclear Arms Newsletter), number 16, May 1984, pp. 5-6,
http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/84sana1.html)//TR

The peace movement also has denigrated the value of civil defence, apparently, in part, because a realistic examination of civil
defence would undermine beliefs about total annihilation. The many ways in which the effects of nuclear war
are exaggerated and worst cases emphasized can be explained as the result of a
presupposition by antiwar scientists and activists that their political aims will be fulfilled
when people are convinced that there is a good chance of total disaster from nuclear war.[7]
There are quite a number of reasons why people may find a belief in extinction from nuclear war to be attractive.[8]
Here I will only briefly comment on a few factors. The first is an implicit Western chauvinism The effects of global
nuclear war would mainly hit the population of the United States, Europe and the Soviet
Union. This is quite unlike the pattern of other major ongoing human disasters of
starvation, disease, poverty and political repression which mainly affect the poor, nonwhite
populations of the Third World. The gospel of nuclear extinction can be seen as a way by
which a problem for the rich white Western societies is claimed to be a problem for all the
world. Symptomatic of this orientation is the belief that, without Western aid and trade, the
economies and populations of the Third World would face disaster. But this is only Western
self-centredness. Actually, Third World populations would in many ways be better off
without the West: the pressure to grow cash crops of sugar, tobacco and so on would be reduced, and we would no longer
witness fresh fish being airfreighted from Bangladesh to Europe. A related factor linked with nuclear extinctionism is a belief that
nuclear war is the most pressing issue facing humans. I disagree, both morally and politically, with the stance that preventing nuclear
war has become the most important social issue for all humans. Surely, in the Third World, concern over the
actuality of massive suffering and millions of deaths resulting from poverty and exploitation
can justifiably take precedence over the possibility of a similar death toll from nuclear war .
Nuclear war may be the greatest threat to the collective lives of those in the rich, white
Western societies but, for the poor, nonwhite Third World peoples, other issues are more
pressing. In political terms, to give precedence to nuclear war as an issue is to assume that nuclear
war can be overcome in isolation from changes in major social institutions, including the
state, capitalism, state socialism and patriarchy. If war is deeply embedded in such
structures - as I would argue[9] - then to try to prevent war without making common cause with other social movements will not
be successful politically. This means that the antiwar movement needs to link its strategy and practice
with other movements such as the feminist movement, the workers' control movement and the environmental
movement..
 AT: Food Impacts
Food is going up not down- theyve got it backwards

Goklany 9 (Indur, 2009, [Worked with federal and state

governments, think tanks, and the private sector for over
35 years. Worked with IPCC before its inception as an
author, delegate and reviewer. Negotiated UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change. Managed the emissions
trading program for the EPA. Julian Simon Fellow at the
Property and Environment Research Center, visiting fellow
at AEI, winner of the Julian Simon Prize and Award. PhD,
MS, electrical engineering, MSU. B.Tech in electrical
engineering, Indian Institute of Tech,] Have increases in
population, affluence and technology worsened human
and environmental well-being?
http://www.ejsd.org/docs/HAVE_INCREASES_IN_POPULATIO
N_AFFLUENCE_AND_TECHNOLOGY_WORSENED_HUMAN_AN
D_ENVIRONMENTAL_WELL-BEING.pdf //DF)
Although global population is no longer growing exponentially, it has quadrupled since 1900. Concurrently,
affluence (or GDP per capita) has sextupled, global economic product (a
measure of aggregate consumption) has increased 23-fold and carbon dioxide has increased
over 15-fold (Maddison 2003; GGDC 2008; World Bank 2008a; Marland et al. 2007).4 But contrary to Neo-
average human well-being, measured by any objective indicator, has
Malthusian fears,
never been higher. Food supplies, Malthus original concern, are up worldwide.
Global food supplies per capita increased from 2,254 Cals/day in
1961 to 2,810 in 2003 (FAOSTAT 2008). This helped reduce hunger and
malnutrition worldwide. The proportion of the population in the
developing world, suffering from chronic hunger declined from 37
percent to 17 percent between 196971 and 20012003 despite an 87 percent population
increase (Goklany 2007a; FAO 2006).
 AT: Human Rights Discourse
Human rights dialogue will inevitably be co-opted by
elites who use rights as a call to imperialize and dominate
other countries militarily.
Baxi, 1998, (Voices of Suffering and the Future of Human Rights, 8 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs.
125, lexis) LAW PROFESSOR AT UNIV. OF WARWICK, AND DEAN, FROM DELHI UNIV. LAW, IN

the telling of large global

The post-modernist critique of human rights further maintains that
stories ("metanarratives") is less a function of emancipation as it as an
aspect of the politics of intergovernmental desire that ingests the
politics of resistance. Put another way, meta-narratives serve to co-opt into
mechanisms and processes of governance the languages of human
rights such that bills of rights may adorn many a military
constitutionalism with impunity and that so called human rights commissions may thrive
upon state/regime sponsored violations. Not surprisingly, the more severe the human
rights violation, the more the power elites declare their loyalty to the
rgime of human rights. The near-universality of ratification of the
Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), for
example, betokens no human liberation of women. Rather, it endows the
state with the power to tell more Nietschzean lies. n68
All too often, human rights languages become stratagems of imperialistic
foreign policy through military invasions as well as through global
economic diplomacy. n69 Superpower diplomacy at the United Nations is not averse to
causing untold suffering through sanctions whose manifest aim is to serve the future
of human rights. n70 The United States, the solitary superpower at the end of the millennium, has made
sanctions for the promotion of human rights abroad a gourmet feast at the White House and on Capitol
Hill.

The aff plan would allow the US government to paint

themselves as humanitarian, in the exact same way that
the metanarrative of rational morality during the
Enlightenment justified global empires and racist
oppression turning the case and swamping back the one
example of human rights abuses the aff claims to solve
for.
Baxi, 1998, (Voices of Suffering and the Future of Human Rights, 8 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs.
125, lexis) LAW PROFESSOR AT UNIV. OF WARWICK, AND DEAN, FROM DELHI UNIV. LAW, IN

The notion of human rights--historically the rights of men--is confronted with two
perplexities. The first concerns the nature of human nature (the is question). The second concerns the question: who is to
count as human or fully human (the ought question). While the first question continues to be debated in both theistic and
secular terms, n25 the second--"Who should count as 'human'?"--occupies the center stage of the "modern" enunciation
of human rights. The criteria of individuation in the European liberal traditions of thought n26 furnished some of the most
Only those beings were to be
powerful ideas in constructing a model of human rights.
regarded as "human" who were possessed of the capacity for reason
and autonomous moral will, although what counted as reason and will varied in the long
development of European liberal tradition. In its major phases of development,
"slaves," "heathens," "barbarians," colonized peoples, indigenous
populations, women, children, the impoverished, and the "insane"
have been, at various times and in various ways, thought unworthy of being
bearers of human rights. In other words, these discursive devices of
Enlightenment rationality were devices of exclusion. The "Rights of Man" were human
rights of all men capable of autonomous reason and will . While by no means
the exclusive prerogative of "modernity," n27 the large number of human beings were excluded by this peculiar
Exclusionary criteria are central to the "modern"
ontological construction. n28
conception of human rights. The foremost historical role performed by them was
to accomplish the justification of the unjustifiable , namely, colonialism and
imperialism. n29 That justification was inherently racist; colonial
powers claimed a collective human right of superior races to
dominate the inferior ones ("the Other"). The Other in many cases ceased to exist
before imperial law formulations such as the doctrine of terra nullius, following Blackstone's scandalous
distinction between the inhabited and uninhabited colonies. n30 Since the Other of European imperialism
was by definition not human or fully human, it was not worthy of human rights; at the very most, Christian
compassion and charity fashioned some devices of legal or jural paternalism. That Other, not being human
was liable to being merchandised in the slave market or
or fully human, also
to being the "raw material" of exploitative labor within and across the colonies. Not
being entitled to a right to be and remain a human being, the Other was made a stranger and an exile to the language
and logic of human rights being fashioned, slowly but surely, in (and for) the West. The classical liberal theory and
practice of human rights, in its formative era, was thus innocent of the notion of universality of rights though certainly no
The only juristic justification for
stranger to its rhetoric.
colonialism/imperialism, if any is possible, is the claim that there is a
natural collective human right of the superior races to rule the
inferior ones, and the justification comes in many shapes and forms. One has but to read the
"classic" texts of Locke or Mill to appreciate the range of talents that are devoted to the justification of
The related but different logics combined to instill belief
colonialism. n31
in the collective human right of the well-ordered societies to govern
the wild and "savage" races. All the well known devices of the formative era of classical liberal
thought were deployed: the logics of rights to property and progress; the state of nature and civil society; and social
Darwinism, combining the infantalization and maturity of "races" and stages of civilization. The collective human right to
colonize the less well-ordered peoples and societies for the collective "good" of both as well as of humankind was by
definition indefeasible as well, and not in the least weakened in the curious logical reasoning and contradictions of
languages of human
evolving liberalism. B. Human Rights Languages and the Power of Governance The
rights often are integral to tasks and practices of governance, as exemplified by
the constitutive elements of the "modern" paradigm of human rights--namely, the collective human right
The manifold though
of the colonizer to subjugate "inferior" peoples and the absolutist right to property.
justifications offered for these "human rights" ensured that the
complex
"modern" European nation-state was able to marshal the right to
property, as a right to imperium and dominium. The construction of a
collective human right to colonial/imperial governance is made
sensible by the co-optation of languages of human rights into those
of governance abroad and class and patriarchal domination at home .
The hegemonic function of rights languages, in the service of
governance at home and abroad, consisted in making whole groups
of people socially and politically invisible. Their suffering was denied
any authentic voice, since it was not constitutive of human suffering .
"Modern" human rights, in their original narrative, entombed masses of human
beings in shrouds of necrophilic silence.

Human rights cultures justify cruelty that culminates in

genocide
Baxi, 1998, (Voices of Suffering and the Future of Human Rights, 8 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs.
125, lexis) LAW PROFESSOR AT UNIV. OF WARWICK, AND DEAN, FROM DELHI UNIV. LAW, IN

The "modern" human rights cultures, tracing their pedigree to the Idea of
Progress, Social Darwinism, racism, and patriarchy (central to the " Enlightenment" ideology),
justified a global imposition of cruelty as "natural ," "ethical," and "just."
The "modern" liberal ideology that gave birth to the very notion of human rights,
howsoever Euro-enclosed and no matter how riven with contradiction between liberalism and empire, n36
regarded the imposition of dire and extravagant suffering upon
individual human beings as wholly justified. Practices of politics,
barbaric even by the standards of the theological and secular thought of the
Enlightenment, were somehow considered justified overall by
ideologues, state managers, and the politically unconscious that they
generated (despite, most notably, the divergent struggles of the working classes). This
"justification" boomeranged in the form of the politics of genocide of
the Third Reich, often resulting in cruel complicity by "ordinary"
citizens, unredeemed by even Schindler's list, in the worst foundational moments
of present-day ethnic cleansing. n37

States use human rights to legitimate their actions

which violate core rights using violent sanctions and war
to enforce norms
Baxi, 1998, (Voices of Suffering and the Future of Human Rights, 8 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs.
125, lexis) LAW PROFESSOR AT UNIV. OF WARWICK, AND DEAN, FROM DELHI UNIV. LAW, IN

Crucial for present purposes is the fact that some human rights regimes enact an hierarchy of pain and
human rights regimes seek to legitimate capital
suffering. Statist
punishment (despite normative trends signaling its progressive elimination); provide for the
suspension of human rights in situations of "emergency" (howsoever nuanced);
and promote an obstinate division between the exercise of civil and
political rights, on the one hand, and social, economic, and cultural
rights, on the other. Similarly, some global human rights regimes, policing
via emergent post-Cold War sanctioning mechanisms, justify
massive, flagrant, and ongoing human rights violations in the name
of making human rights secure. Even non-statist human rights discursivity (at first sight
"progressive") justifies the imposition of human suffering in the name of autonomy and identity
movements. The processes of globalization prescribe and apply a new dramaturgy of "justifiable" human
suffering.

We ought to focus on the sources of suffering- imperialism

and racism- rather than on human rights - this allows us
to constantly renegotiate the meaning of our norms and
standards

Baxi, 1998, (Voices of Suffering and the Future of Human Rights, 8 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs.
125, lexis) LAW PROFESSOR AT UNIV. OF WARWICK, AND DEAN, FROM DELHI UNIV. LAW, IN

What, perhaps, is helpful in relativism regarding the "contemporary" human rights movement is the notion
human suffering is not wholly legible outside cultural scripts .
that
Since suffering, whether defined as individual pain or as social suffering
is egregious, different religions and cultural traditions enact divergent
hierarchies of "justification" of experience and imposition of
suffering, providing at times and denying at others, language to pain
and suffering. The universality of human rights, it may be argued, extravagantly
forfeits cultural understanding of social suffering n97 and alienates
human rights discourse from the lived experience of
culturally/civilizationally constituted "human-nes s."
Even so, one may distinguish here the pursuit of suffering as an aspect
of a self-chosen exercise of human rights norms and standards (that is,
practices of sado-masochism within the human right to "privacy," assuring a right to self-exploitation by
from non-consensual and therefore illegitimate
way of "victimless crime")
orders of pain and suffering imposed by the civil society and the
state. Responsible and responsive relativism must be confronted with a
human rights ethic that teaches us that the buying and selling of
women as chattels in the marketplace, harnessing children in blood sports (like
camel riding), or the conscription of children into state armies or mercenary
forces is not justified by any serious understanding of culture or tradition. What we need, is a
human rights-responsive and responsible relativism, one that interrogates the
"contemporary" human rights paradigm in its endless renegotiations
of its own foundations. n98 This is, as yet, not in sight. The moral invention of the past half-
century of human rights theory and practice consists in contesting human suffering here-and-now, and the
nirvana that contemporary human rights seek is therefore sometimes said to suffer from a relatively
impoverished cosmology. However, human rights activism has its own dharma, which is the performance
of righteous deeds (karma) which, too, earn merit (punnya) to redeem the "soul."
 AT: Israel Strike Iran
No risk of Iran Strikes multiple warrants and predictive
of all their evidence

Balmer 12
(Crispian, Crispian Balmer is bureau chief for Israel and the Palestinian Territories. In 20 years with Reuters
he has reported from more than 20 countries, covering everything from Hurricane Katrina to the Tsunami
and the Balkans conflict, August 2nd 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/02/us-israel-iran-talk-
idUSBRE8710ZP20120802)//TR

For all its recent tough talk, Israel looks highly unlikely to launch an attack against Iran ahead of
U.S. presidential elections in November, hoping that Washington will ultimately do the heavy lifting. Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a blunt, public message to U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on Wednesday that
time was running out to tackle Iran and that U.S. policies to curtail its nuclear program had so far failed. An uptick of Israeli rhetoric
this summer has fuelled speculation that Netanyahu is poised to follow through on a long-standing threat to attack Iran and destroy
nuclear sites that many believe are geared towards creating an atomic bomb. Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful and it would
retaliate if attacked. Washington also believes Iran is seeking the ability to make a bomb and says it reserves the right to use force to
prevent it, but has urged Israel to allow time for tough new U.S. and EU economic sanctions imposed this year to have an effect. An
array of analysts in Israel see an Israeli strike in coming months as unlikely, pointing to the huge
difficulties posed by military action coupled with the political intricacies of defying Washington in
the run-up to the U.S. vote. An Israeli official told Reuters Netanyahu's inner council, comprising the
coalition's eight top ministers, had not discussed Iran in detail since last year, suggesting there was nothing
imminent in the works. "The octet hasn't held a proper discussion of Iran for months - since October, as far as I can recall," said
the official, who had been briefed on the closed-door sessions. "It's possible that, since then, Iran came up during other sessions, but I
wouldn't count those as serious discussions. You can't make any concrete decisions or policy advances in an hour-long chat on the
sidelines of a different agenda." In addition, the official said the octet remained split on the issue, while Israel's top
military and intelligence echelon were "entirely against" launching a unilateral strike on
distant and well-fortified Iranian targets that would pose an unprecedented challenge to their forces. Government spokesman Mark
Regev declined to comment on the octet discussions. "This is a confidential forum," he said. CAUGHT OFF GUARD Netanyahu
said this week that media reports about top-levelopposition from past and present security chiefs was
"harmful", while analysts said their reluctance could stay
his hand. "It is very, very difficult to see a situation where
a prime minister will go against the advice not just of the former heads of (spy agencies) Mossad and Shin Bet,
but most of the military commanders," said Uzi Rabi, director of the Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern studies
in Tel Aviv. Conceivably these internal divisions prompted Netanyahu to be particularly outspoken alongside Panetta on Monday,
looking to drown out the naysayers with his uncompromising language. "Neither sanctions nor diplomacy has yet had any impact on
Iran's nuclear weapons program," he said, effectively writing off all efforts by President Barack Obama to influence Iran. Panetta
appeared caught off-guard by Netanyahu's remarks, which came after two days of talks aimed at reassuring Israel that Washington was
determined to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions. Despite the tone of Netanyahu's comments, concerns over an
imminent Israeli strike have eased in U.S. defense circles since early in the year. American officials
also still do not believe that Iran has made the decision to build a nuclear weapon.

Probability is at ZERO- Its the same year after year-

incentives are in the threat of strikes alone

Goldberg 12
(Elisheva Goldberg, assistant Editor of the Daily Beast, Is An Iran Strike Imminent? Maybe Not., Aug 14,
2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/14/is-an-iran-strike-immanent-maybe-not.html)//TR

Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities? Michael Koplow over at Ottomans and Zionists thinks that our
Just how likely is an
gloom might be mostly smoke and mirrors: To my mind, the recent extremely public chatter
doom and
weighs against things, since successful Israeli strikes in the past - Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 - were
complete surprises and were not in any way publicly telegraphed. In contrast, we have heard that Israel was
readying to strike at Iran for nearly a decade now, and yet it still hasn't happened. Also weighing against an attack is the fact
that there is a lack of support for such a move from three influential groups. First is the Israeli public,
which opposes a unilateral Israeli strike by 46% to 32%, and which has increasingly rated Netanyahu's job performance as
unsatisfactory over the past three months as he has ratcheted the war talk back up. Second is the U.S., whose top officials have
repeatedly stated that sanctions should be given more time to work and have pleaded with Israel not to launch an attack. Third, and
perhaps most significantly, Israeli officials aside from Netanyahu and Barak are staunchly opposed to a strike, and while the
IDF has to carry out whatever orders are given, when the IDF chief of staff thinks that an attack is a bad idea,
he is probably going to be listened to. There is also the inconvenient fact that there is no majority in the
Shminiyah (or Octet), which is the inner security cabinet, for a strike on Iran, with Eli Yishai, Benny Begin, Dan Meridor, and
Boogie Ya'alon all firmly opposed and Avigdor Lieberman and Yuval Steinitz reportedly wavering back and forth. Netanyahu
and Barak are probably banking on the fact that the other six ministers will back them when push comes to shove,
but that's a real risk to take and the prime minister and defense minister cannot just make the decision on their
own without the support of the rest of this group. In fact, one could make a good case that all of the recent war talk from the two
men at the top is directed entirely at the Octet and that the chatter is completely about stirring up public
pressure on them. Add to these three factors the fact that Israel does not have the military capability to
do the job thoroughly and that such an attack would decimate the now-thriving Israeli economy coupled
with the loss of life and unpreparedness of the home front and Koplow has a point.
 1AR AT: Iran Strikes- Israeli Support
Majority of Israelis oppose strikes

Zeiger 12
(By ASHER ZEIGER August 12, 2012, Majority of Israelis oppose strike on Iran,
http://www.timesofisrael.com/majority-of-israelis-oppose-iran-strike-latest-poll/)//TR

The majority of Israelis oppose a strike on Irans nuclear facilities in order to halt its nuclear drive,
Channel 10 reported on Sunday. A poll conducted by the Dialogue Institute under the supervision of Dr.
Kamil Fuchs found that 46 percent of respondents said that Israel should not attack Irans nuclear facilities, 32% advocated an
Israeli strike, and 22% offered no opinion. The survey results were published amid heightened debate among senior policy officials
about the necessity of a military strike to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
Defense Minister Ehud Barak have made increasingly vociferous statements about the urgent imperative to stop Iran. The poll also
showed that Israeli support for Netanyahu has waned in the past three months . According to the poll,
only 34% expressed satisfaction with the prime minister, as opposed to 58% who said that they are dissatisfied. The
remainder had no opinion. A similar survey conducted in May found that 46% were satisfied with the prime ministers performance.
 AT: Iran/ Iran Prolif
The projection of our fears of terrorism and danger onto
Iran canot be isolated from Americas ideological drive to
domesticate the population behind a spectral ogre
simultaneously cleansing us of responsibility for
international violence and creating a politics of infinite
ressentiment in which we must tirelessly exterminate
every threat to existence

Zizek 2005
(Slavoj, Senior Researcher @ University of Ljubana (Give Iranian nukes a
change, www.lacan.com/zizekiranian.htm)//TR

On August 2, France, Britain and Germany announced that they might cut off negotiations with Iran and pursue punitive sanctions if
the country followed through on its threats to resume its uranium enrichment program. The announcement came a day after the
Washington Post reported that American intelligence agencies believe the country is a decade away from producing a nuclear weapon-
an assessment that differs with earlier timetables cited by Bush administration officials, who estimated that Iran was only five years
away from such a weapon. Responding to the Post story, State Department spokesman Tom Casey dismissed the divergent timetables,
noting that both the United States and Europe have concluded that Iran's nuclear ambitions pose "a threat for the entire international
community." But are nuclear arms in the hands of Iran's rulers really a threat to international peace and security? To answer the
question properly, one has to locate it in its political and ideological context. Every power structure has to rely on an
underlying implicit threat, i.e. whatever the official democratic rules and legal constraints may be, we can ultimately do
whatever we want to you. In the 20th century, however, the nature of this link between power and the invisible threat that
sustains it changed. Existing power structures no longer relied on their own fantasmatic projection of a potential, invisible threat in
order to secure the hold over their subjects. Rather, the threat was externalized, displaced onto an Outside Enemy. It became the
invisible (and, for that reason, all-powerful and omni-present) threat of this enemy that legitimized the
existing power structure's permanent state of emergency . Fascists invoked the threat of the Jewish
conspiracy, Stalinists the threat of the class enemy, Americans the threat of Communism-all the way up
to today's "war on terror." The threats posed by such an invisible enemy legitimizes the logic of the preemptive strike.
Precisely because the threat is virtual, one cannot afford to wait for it to come . Rather, one must strike in
advance, before it is too late. In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too visible
protective measures of defense-which, of course, are what pose the true threat to democracy and
human rights (e.g., the London police's recent execution of the innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes). Classic
power functioned as a threat that operated precisely by never actualizing itself, by always remaining a threatening gesture. Such
functioning reached its climax in the Cold War, when the threat of mutual nuclear destruction had to remain a threat. With the "war on
terror", the invisible threat causes the incessant actualization, not of the threat itself, but, of the measures against the threat. The
nuclear strike had to remain the threat of a strike, while the threat of the terrorist strike triggers the endless series
ofpreemptive strikes against potential terrorists. We are thus passing from the logic of MAD
(Mutually Assured Destruction) to a logic in which ONE SOLE MADMAN runs the entire show and is allowed
to enact its paranoia. The power that presents itself as always being under threat, living in mortal
danger, and thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of power-the very model of the Nietzschean
ressentiment and moralistic hypocrisy. And indeed, it was Nietzsche himself who, more than a century ago, in
Daybreak, provided the best analysis of the false moral premises of today's "war on terror": No government admits any more that it
keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the
morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the neighbor must be
thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring
an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an
army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a
harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their
neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is
inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because
as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition
and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests. Is not
the ongoing "war on terror" proof that "terror" is the antagonistic Other of democracy-the point at which democracy's plural options
turn into a singular antagonism? Or, as we so often hear, "In the face of the terrorist threat, we must all come together and forget our
petty differences." More pointedly, the difference between the "war on terror" with previous 20th century worldwide struggles such as
the Cold War is that the enemy used to be clearly identified with the actually existing Communist empire, whereas today the terrorist
threat is inherently spectral, without a visible center. It is a little bit like the description of Linda Fiorentino's character in The Last
Seduction: "Most people have a dark side ... she had nothing else." Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral
side ... the terrorist threat has nothing else. The paradoxical result of this spectralization of
the enemy is an unexpected reflexive reversal. In this world without a clearly identified
enemy, it is the United States, the protector against the threat, that is emerging as the main enemy-
much like in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient-Express, where, since the entire group of suspects is the murderer, the victim
himself (an evil millionaire) turns out to be the real criminal.
 AT: Mid East Instability
The invocation of regional stability is a thinly veiled
attempt to maintain US control over world politics and can
only result in violence
Hoover, 2k11 (Joe, Fellow in the International Relations Dept at the LSE,
Egypt and the Failure of Realism, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies,
Issue 4)
Recent upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya have caught many
by surprise as the order of things has proven protean in a way that
official experts and conventional wisdom were largely blind to
reality, it seems, can be unruly. As revolution unfolded in Egypt there
were many pleas for restraint, worries that political instability would
spread, and among Western leaders a profound wariness of change
that they feared would compromise their strategic interests. There
was, in a word, an invocation of realism, intended to quell the
earnestness of fast moving and profound change. The failure of
realism as a response to recent events in Egypt is revealed through
the policies invoked by state representatives, commentators and
academics, which confirmed the given reality of world politics but proved
wanting ethically and heuristically, as those willing to support the brutal rule
of Hosni Mubarak and unable to comprehend the power of the
protesters proved to be on the wrong side of history. These banal
appeals to realism, however, do lead to a broader insight, revealing
that such appeals in world politics are actually calls to preserve
what I term the reality of dominance, which invokes the
inevitability of the existing order of things to discount the reality of
resistance to that order which calls for transformation over
preservation. In early February, before Mubaraks ouster, the Egyptian
revolution was in doubt. It was still only a fragile possibility. 1 The protestors
and Mubaraks goons waited it out in Tahrir Square while the army stood
watch. The success of the revolution would be determined by whose will was
most resilient. Would the threat of increasing violence discourage the
protestors and give Mubarak the space he needed to solidify his power till
next year and thus avoid the changes the Egyptian people were demanding?
Or would the protestors resolve hold, making clear to Mubarak that he could
no longer hope to rule Egypt? As protestors faced violence, exhaustion and
deprivation the prospect of compromise must have seemed more desirable as
the hardships mounted. The time was ripe for expressions of support from
key leaders, which could buttress the resolve of the protestors and pressure
the Mubarak regime. It was much easier for Mubarak to play for time from the
presidential palace than for protesters in the streets, yet far too many of the
men and women able to make a difference did not use their voices to share in
democracys street-choir instead their voices echoed in the halls of
disreputable power. The Obama administration has the greatest culpability in
this, as they not only had the capability to undermine Mubarak, but their
failure to do so revealed the hypocrisy of US support for democracy and
human rights in the region. The events in Egypt demonstrated that President
Barak Obama has mastered the dark art of evasive support, leaving
no doubt that he fully supported Egyptian democracy, as long as it
did not change too much, too fast, and, most importantly, as long as
US strategic interests were not compromised. The administrations
restraint is also driven by the fact that, for the United States, dealing with an
Egypt without Mr. Mubarak would be difficult at best, and downright scary at
worst. For 30 years, his government has been a pillar of American foreign
policy in a volatile region. (Sanger & Cooper, 2011) Predictably, Vice
President Joe Biden made the point with less tact, but perhaps more truth,
when he expressed his insensibility to the crimes of Mubarak against his own
people: Asked if he would characterize Mubarak as a dictator Biden
responded: Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And hes
been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the
Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing
relationship with with Israel. I would not refer to him as a dictator.
(Murphy, 2011) Clearly regional stability is the key rhetorical trope,
which justified turning a blind eye to the brutality of Mubarak s
regime and the lack of democracy in Egypt. Perhaps no issue is
more important in defining what regional stability means for the
US than the issue of Israeli security. Binyamin Netanyahu clearly exerted
pressure on the US, trying to limit the support they gave to democratic
reforms in Egypt. The prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, reportedly
ordered his cabinet to refrain from commenting publicly on the unfolding
drama, saying only that the treaty must be maintained. But as Haaretz
reported today, the government is seeking to convince the US and EU to curb
their criticism of Hosni Mubarak to preserve stability in the region, even as
Washington and its allies signal their wish for an orderly transition which
the incumbent almost certainly cannot ignore. (Black, 2011) Despite the
homilies on human rights and democratic freedom delivered by Mr Obama to
the Egyptians (Wilson and Warrick, 2011), it was a predictable set of
concerns that set the agenda for the US response to the revolution
taking place in Cairo and throughout Egypt the imperative was to
maintain order, control those changes that proved inevitable and
ensure that the political and economic interests of dominant states
were preserved. The representative for the US State Department, PJ
Crowley, who was interviewed by Al Jazeera (US urges reform in Egypt, 2011),
performed a practiced dance to the theme of restraint, gradual reform and
false equivalencies as if protesters and the agents of Mubaraks coercive
apparatus could be compared 2 as he made clear that the suffering of the
Egyptian people and their desire for democracy would not undermine US
support for the Mubarak regime. We respect what Egypt contributes to the
region. It is a stabilising force; it has made its own peace with Israel and is
pursuing normal relations with Israel. We think thats important; we think
thats a model that the region should adopt broadly speaking. At the same
time, we recognise that Egypt, Tunisia, other countries, do need to reform,
they do need to respond to the needs of their people and we encourage that
reform and we are contributing across the region to that reform. (US urges
reform in Egypt, 2011) This routine, we can assume, was an exercise in
managing expectations and making US interests clear democratic
revolution should not be allowed to upset regional stability, nor
should the suffering of the protestors be allowed to cloud our
judgment on what really matters or, more bluntly, if democratic
dreams threatened the interests of the US, then so much the worse
for those beautiful revolutionary dreams. As Tony Blair joined the
discussion he not only underlined Bidens scepticism regarding whether
Mubarak was a dictator, claiming he was immensely courageous and a force
for good (McGreal, 2011), but he also clearly articulated the managerial
worldview of a man who has learned to think of himself as a member
of a privileged group of cleareyed realists whose responsibility it is
to control all the things of world politics. Blair argued that the
region has unique problems that make political change different
from the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe. He said the
principal issue was the presence of Islamist parties that he fears will
use democracy to gain power and then undermine the freedoms
people seek... Blair said he did not doubt that change was coming to Egypt.
People want a different system of government. Theyre going to get it. The
question is what emerges from that. In particular I think the key challenge for
us is how do we help partner this process of change and help manage it in
such a way that what comes out of it is open minded, fair, democratic
government. (McGreal, 2011). Not only does this response implicitly
trade in the notion that Arab countries will not be able to handle
democracy without Western tutelage, it also trades in a degraded
notion of realism, in which serious men act as if their apologia for
imperial arrogance is sagacious wisdom gleaned from long
experience. The Egyptian protestors will be allowed their
democracy, but their democracy will be managed and defined by the
powerful, so as not to disturb the order of things or run afoul of the
realities of world politics. Yet this statist and status quo line is
actually divorced from reality, or at least the reality of the protesters
battling their corrupt leaders in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and cities
throughout Egypt it reflects the reality of dominance. Realism, as
Western leaders express it, is little more than an attempt to limit the
happenings of world politics to their own constrained vision, a
myopic self-interest that fails to take the measure of the cruelty it
justifies or realise its own analytical failings.
Their representation of Mideast instability is an orientalist
discourse defined according to imperial interests

Bilgin 4 (Pinar, Bilkent University, Whose Middle East?

Geopolitical Inventions and Practices of Security,
International Relations, 18(1), p. 28//TR)

What I call the Middle East perspective is usually associated with the United States and
its regional allies. It derives from a western conception of security which
could be summed up as the unhindered flow of oil at reasonable
prices, the cessation of the ArabIsraeli conflict, the prevention of
the emergence of any regional hegemon while holding Islamism in
check, and the maintenance of friendly regimes that are sensitive
to these concerns. This was (and still is) a topdown conception of security
that privileged the security of states and military stability. It is top-
down because threats to security have been defined largely from the
perspective of external powers rather than regional states or
peoples. In the eyes of British and US defence planners, Communist infiltration and Soviet intervention
constituted the greatest threat to security in the Middle East during the Cold War. The way to enhance
regional security, they argued, was for regional states to enter into alliances with the West. Two security
umbrella schemes, the ill-born Middle East Defence Organisation (1951) and the Baghdad Pact (1955),
were designed for this purpose. Although there were regional states such as Iraq (until the 1958 coup), Iran
(until the 19789 revolution) and Turkey that shared this perception of security to a certain extent, many
Arab policy-makers begged to differ. Traces of this top-down thinking were prevalent in the US approach to
In following a policy of dual
security in the Middle East during the 1990s.
containment, US policy-makers presented Iran and Iraq as the main
threats to regional security largely due to their military capabilities
and the revisionist character of their regimes that are not
subservient to US interests. However, these top-down perspectives, while
revealing certain aspects of regional insecurity, at the same time
hinder others. For example the lives of women in Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia are made insecure not only by the threat caused by their Gulf neighbours military
capabilities, but also because of the conservative character of their own
regimes that restrict womens rights under the cloak of religious
tradition. For it is women who suffer disproportionately as a result of
militarism and the channelling of valuable resources into defence
budgets instead of education and health. Their concerns rarely make
it into security analyses. This top-down approach to regional security in the Middle East was
compounded by a conception of security that was directed outwards that is threats to security were
assumed to stem from outside the state whereas inside is viewed as a realm of peace. Although it could be
argued following R.B.J. Walker that what makes it possible for inside to remain peaceful is the
presentation of outside as a realm of danger, the practices of Middle Eastern states indicate that this
many regional policy-makers justify
does not always work as prescribed in theory. For
certain domestic security measures by way of presenting the
international arena as anarchical and stressing the need to
strengthen the state to cope with external threats. While doing this,
however, they at the same time cause insecurity for some individuals
and social groups at home the very peoples whose security they
purport to maintain. The practices of regional actors that do not match up to the theoretical
prescriptions include the Baath regime in Iraq that infringed their own citizens rights often for the
purposes of state security. Those who dare to challenge their states security
practices may be marginalized at best, and accused of treachery and
imprisoned at worst.
Aff evidence is suspect Middle East studies package the
world according to conservative strategic interests

Gerges 91 (Fawaz A., Professor of International Affairs

and Middle Eastern Studies Sarah Lawrence, The Study
of Middle East International Relations: A Critique, British
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 18(2), Jstor//TR)
Thirdly, and closely related to the preceding problem, is the policy orientation of the field. The ideological
rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union following the Second World War and the onset of
the Cold War in the late 1940s has motivated them to invest heavily in area studies with a specific
emphasis on policy-oriented research in the hope that problems can be identified and solutions found.
Thus,the U.S. foreign policy establishment 'goaded' or 'tempted ' the
academic community into establishing graduate programmes to generate useful expertise on
such crucial foreign regions as the 'Middle East'.28 Likewise, the proliferation in
1955 of new research centres, studies and periodicals on the 'Middle East' in the Soviet Union was
anything but academic: it reflected the growing Russian interest in the area.29 This revival coincided with
the conclusion of the Egyptian-Russian arms deal in September 1955 and the perceptions of Russian
leaders that the time was ripe for a political offensive in the Arab world. Indeed, as Leonard Binder notes:
'The basic development of area studies in the United States has
been political', i.e. to gain influence and to combat hostile forces.30
Though Binder hastens to add that it is difficult to discern a consistent political line in the organization of
it is clear that a large number of works on
area studies or in the patterns of funding,
modern Middle East international relations-whether in the United States
or in the Soviet Union- are 'packaged' to satisfy the policy needs of their
respective decision- makers.31 But historically, this has always been true. The
economic and strategic importance of the area has tended to attract
the interests of outside powers which have competed for influence
and control. Since 1945, however, the development of area studies has reflected more than before
the need of the Great Powers to influence the processes of change and stability in the region. The root of
the convergence of interests between the foreign policy and academic communities lies in the former's
control of research funding and the latter's dependency on and acquiescence in this state of affairs.32 The
analyses of the 'Middle East' seem to be more
result is that many
concerned with policy-oriented prescriptions than with the
understanding of the region in a sensitive and creative manner .33 It
must be confessed, however, that the glide into policy science or policy scientism is not peculiar only to
the study of Middle East international relations in general. In reflecting on the development of international
relations in the past thirty years, Professor Stanley Hoffmann establishes a strong link between the
development of the field and the dilemmas and concerns facing U.S. foreign policy in the post- Second
World War period.
Their predictions backfire- dystopic alarmism gets twisted
to lock in oppression

Kurasawa 4 (Fuyuki, Professor of Sociology- York

University of Toronto, Cautionary Tales: The Global
Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight,
Constellations, 11(4)//TR)
Up to this point, I have tried to demonstrate that transnational socio-political relations are nurturing a
thriving culture and infrastructure of prevention from below, which challenges presumptions about the
inscrutability of the future (II) and a stance of indifference toward it (III). Nonetheless, unless and until it is
farsightedness
substantively filled in, the argument is vulnerable to misappropriation since
does not in and of itself ensure emancipatory outcomes. Therefore, this
section proposes to specify normative criteria and participatory procedures through which citizens can
determine the reasonableness, legitimacy, and effectiveness of competing dystopian visions in order to
Foremost among the possible distortions
arrive at a socially self-instituting future.
of farsightedness is alarmism, the manufacturing of unwarranted
and unfounded doomsday scenarios. State and market institutions
may seek to produce a culture of fear by deliberately stretching
interpretations of reality beyond the limits of the plausible so as to
exaggerate the prospects of impending catastrophes, or yet again, by
intentionally promoting certain prognoses over others for
instrumental purposes. Accordingly, regressive dystopias can operate as Trojan horses
advancing political agendas or commercial interests that would otherwise be susceptible to public scrutiny
the
and opposition. Instances of this kind of manipulation of the dystopian imaginary are plentiful:
invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism and an imminent
threat of use of weapons of mass destruction; the severe curtailing
of American civil liberties amidst fears of a collapse of homeland
security; the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state as the only
remedy for an ideologically constructed fiscal crisis; the conservative
expansion of policing and incarceration due to supposedly spiraling crime waves; and so forth.
Alarmism constructs and codes the future in particular ways,
producing or reinforcing certain crisis narratives, belief structures,
and rhetorical conventions. As much as alarmist ideas beget a culture of fear, the reverse is
no less true.

Apocalyptic representations are deliberately falsified to

create a particular public sentiment this geopolitics of
fear allows no room for peace by endlessly recreating
violence
Sparke 7 (Matthew, Prof. of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct
Prof. of Global Health @ U. of Washington, Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic
Hopes and the Responsibilities of Geography Edited version published:
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97.2)
The geopolitical discourse about the threats posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq was so frequently repeated
and stylized in the period leading up to the American offensive that the script is now all too familiar (for
one of the most rigorous and official surveys of the misinformation that ed up to the war see the
Two big
Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staf, 2006).
fears dominated the Bush administrations geopolitical scripting. The
first was that Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction or WMD, and the
second was that these WMD could easily be passed on to terrorists because of known ties between
Hussein and al Qaeda. Most famously perhaps it was in Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech before the
United Nations that the WMD story was told with the most effortful, and in retrospect, most tendentious
claims to represent well-documented, evidence-based truth about real grounds for fear. "What you will
see," said Powell, in an appeal to the truth of vision that is one of the classic tropes of the modern
geopolitical imagination (Agnew, 2003; Tuathail, 1996), "is an accumulation of facts and disturbing
patterns of behavior." Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500
tons of chemical-weapons agents. ... Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein
to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size
of Manhattan. ... There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to
rapidly produce more, many more. ... This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well
documented (Powell, 2003). This was also the same script from which President Bush himself spoke both
before and after Powell's speech. However, the President's speech-making (which was generally designed
for domestic consumption and not an international UN audience) explained the relevance of the WMD story
in terms of the second main fearful script: in other words, in terms of Iraq's WMD getting into the hands of
terrorists. "Today," announced the President in his 2003 State of the Union address, the gravest danger in
the war on terror, the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and
possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. These regimes could use such weapons for blackmail,
terror, and mass murder. They could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them
without the least hesitation....With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons,
Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in
that region. And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from
intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that
Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without
fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own
(Bush, 2003). Insofar as Bush explained so much of his policy as an
aggressive 'bring it on' response to the real terrorism of 9/11, these
sorts of claims were to prove very powerful indeed, creating an
affect-laden and, as such, effective means of legitimating the Iraq war (
Tuathail, 2003). With Bush setting the model, the public geopolitical script of fear
included repeated statements about overwhelming evidence
combined with the affective appeal to Americans to imagine another
9/11: another 9/11 made much more deadly with the help of Iraq's WMD. "America must not ignore the
threat gathering against us," remained the administration's main fear-mongering message. "Facing clear
evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a
mushroom cloud" (Bush, 2002). The President was, of course, ably assisted in this work of geopolitical
scripting by other members of his administration. Most especially Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Vice-President Dick Cheney continued to reiterate the same twin fears about WMD and terror ties long
after the attack on Iraq and a huge security sweep of the occupied country showed that their fearful
Rumsfeld and Cheney nevertheless also effectively
geopolitics was groundless. In doing so,
underlined two key features of what made the geopolitical scripting
of fear so convincing: namely, emotion and repetition. Thus, arguing against the
critics that WMD would eventually be found in Iraq, Rumsfeld also showed how Americans' emotions about
9/11 lay at the heart of making the Iraq-as-threat geopolitics work: The coalition did not act in Iraq because
we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. We acted
because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on 9/11
(Rumsfeld, 2003). And subsequently, even in 2004, Cheney was still demonstrating that the other key
feature of making the groundless script function was repetition: "I think theres overwhelming evidence
that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government," he intoned (Cheney, 2004). In
the real world, of course, there was no such evidence. Instead, as was later made clear by the statements
of the British intelligence chief recorded in the Downing Street memos, "the intelligence and facts were
being fixed around the policy" (Danner, 2005). By this point, though, the ways in which the grounds were
invented in order to fit the script no longer mattered. Emotion, repetition and their combined conjuring of
So successful was the scripting of fear
fear had already done their geopolitical work.
that subsequently even administration officials themselves indicated
their backstage accomplishments with occasionally explicit, even
prideful, asides about the bureaucratic expediency involved. For
example, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Defense Secretary, caused a small media storm by acknowledging
something along the lines that: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S.
government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of
mass destruction, as the core reason" (quoted in McIntyre, 2003). This admission (which was itself hedged
in various ways) later came to seem minor in comparison with a much bolder account made to a reporter
by a White House aide of the administration's more generally cavalier approach to geopolitical scripting.
Given the gung-ho hubris of the account it is not surprising that this aide remains anonymous, but what he
told Ron Suskind - the reporter - remains no less telling. The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we
call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he
continued. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you,
all of you, will be left to just study what we do (Suskind, 2004). As scholars who remain committed to
geographers (with the possible exception of non-representational
studying discernible reality,
theorists) may also be derided by those at the pinnacles of American
power as located in the same low-lying reality-based community
inhabited by journalists such as Suskind. But this has not stopped
geographical studies from documenting with critical rigor the empire
of unreality produced by the geopolitical scripting of the War on
Terror. The use of the term 'empire' here is not just metaphorical, nor just a play on the imperial hubris
enunciated by Suskind's White House aide. As Gregory's forthright critique of the
colonial present makes clear, all kinds of geopolitical discourses with
their roots and routes in imperialism - including the many imaginative geographies of
imperial Orientalism famously critiqued by Edward Said (1979 and 1993) - were revitalized and
put to work in both justifying and performing the War on Terror
(Gregory, 2004). Gregory argues persuasively in this way that geopolitical scripts about
despotic, hate-filled, orientals served to provide the fear-filled
justification for treating whole communities as if they lay outside the
bounds of humanity. Building on Gregory's analysis, Allan Pred has provided in turn a powerful
critique of the groundless terror-talk into which so much of this fear-mongering fed and out of which so
much geopolitical boundary-drawing ensued. "Terror
may be instilled by way of a
variety of strategies," Pred summarizes: Through successfully perpetuating
'imaginative geographies' of Their Terrorist/Arab/Muslim space and
Their uncivilized, subhuman barbarism. Through successfully folding
distance into monstrous Difference. Through successfully insisting
that They are a pervasive military threat to Our Civilization, to the
security of Our way of life. Through avoiding any consideration of
our role in precipitating militant radicalism, in provoking the spread
of 'political Islam in its insurrectional forms'. Through successfully
implanting a just-below-the-surface sense of fear by way of
redundant representations strewn across the paths of everyday life
(Pred, 2005). As well as providing a useful summary of the geopolitics of fear at its boundary-drawing work,
Pred's textual strategy of repetition also mimics and subverts the repetitive rhetorics of the fear-mongers
themselves. In doing so, and by underlining how such rhetorics infiltrated American everyday life and
became implanted in people's 'just- below-the-surface' sensibilities, he also draws our attention to another
enunciation became
aspect of the geopolitics of the war on terror: namely, the way in which its
a performance of sovereignty and governmentality at the same time,
a way of re-enacting the power of the traditional pre-modern
sovereign to declare war on his own terms combined with a
decidedly post-modern approach to making the war make
biopolitical sense in American everyday life. The performance of
sovereignty as governmentality by the Bush administration - its way of simultaneously
producing and ruling its 'own reality' by executive fiat - has elsewhere been
theorized by Judith Butler in relation to the suspension of the Geneva conventions and the creation of
special rules and special spaces for imprisoning 'illegal combatants' in the Guantanamo gulag (Butler,
2004). Butler's argument about this "resurgence of sovereignty within the field of governmentality" (Butler,
2004: 56) seems equally applicable to the way the administration also suspended reference to real
intelligence in its geopolitical scripting of the Iraq war. However, outside of the exceptional space of
Guantanamo (where only fear seems to rule), the field of governmentality in which the resurgence of
executive sovereignty has been staged has been co-determined by another much more hopeful discourse
too: the discourse of geoeconomics. Alongside all the fear, then, there has also been much hope, and this
hope, expressed as a discourse about the inevitably inclusive and expansive aspects of capitalist
globalization, has also, just like the geopolitical scripting, had a whole series of regulative effects both in
America and elsewhere, including inside Iraq itself. In other words, if we follow Butler in noticing how the
Bush administration has invented its own sovereign realities within a post-sovereign world, and if we
combine this with an understanding of governmentality as the organization of "the conduct of conduct"
(Foucault, 1982: 220), we need to explore how the globalist common-sense about a globe-spanning level-
playing field also came to legitimate and shape the Iraq war.
 AT: Nuclear War Scenario
Everyday nuclear colonialism is overshadowed by the
fantasy of a global nuclear war, allowing ongoing
nuclear violence to continue unchecked

Kato 93
(Masahide Kato, Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze,
Source: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 339-360 Published by: Sage
Publications, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644779 Accessed: 24/08/2012)//TR

Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and
became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of
destruction can be historically contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived
and thus given due recognition by the First World community are the explosions at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose
meaning is relevant only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm of
fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet how can one deny the crude fact that
nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the name of "nuclear testing" since the first
nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth.28 The major perpetrators of
nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44
times), and China (36 times).29 The primary targets of warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the
sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall
Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814
times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of
Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times).30 Moreover, although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests"
in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence
accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear
wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the
Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear
war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and Indigenous Nations.
The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity intervention," or the
"nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have
taken a form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations.
Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear
catastrophe has never been the "unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of
repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless,
ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by
rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of
nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First World community. Such a
discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear warfare in the domain of
imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers
the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific: Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere . . . were global in effect. The winds and seas
carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call
the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into batde against nature itself.31 Although Firth's book is
definitely a remarkable study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific, the problematic division/distinction between the
"nuclear explosions" and the nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the
subject ("we") is located higher than the "real" of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological
division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the ongoing
processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of
nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized. The discursive containment/obliteration of the
"real" of nuclear warfare has been accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm
commitment to global discourse, has established the unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over the real nuclear
catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.
The threat of extinction through nuclear war is a myth
that keeps us inoculated by a fiction that undermines our
ability to change the world or challenging the ongoing
nuclear wars that occur against fourth world populations

Kato, 1993.
Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and
Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze. Masahide Kato.
Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii,
Honolulu
Nuclear criticism finds the likelihood of extinction as the most fundamental aspect of nuclear
catastrophe. The complex problematics involved in nuclear catastrophe are thus reduced to the single
The task of nuclear critics is clearly designated by Schell as
possible instant of extinction.
coming to grips with the one and only final instant: human
extinctionwhose likelihood we are chiefly interested in finding out about."
Deconstructionists, on the other hand, take a detour in their efforts to
theologize extinction. Jacques Derrida, for example, solidified the prevailing
mode of representation by constituting extinction as a fatal absence :
"Unlike the other wars, which have all been preceded by wars of more or less the same type in human
memory (and gunpowder did not mark a radical break in this respect), nuclear war has no
precedent. It has never occurred, itself; it is a non-event . The explosion of
American bombs in 1945 ended a "classical," conventional war; it did not set off a nuclear war. The
terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified
referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or text At
least today apparently." By representing the possible extinction as the single
most important problematic of nuclear catastrophe (positing it as either a
threat or a symbolic void), nuclear criticism disqualifies the entire history of
nuclear violence, the real of nuclear catastrophe as a continuous
and repetitive proves. The real of nuclear war is designated by
nuclear critics as a rehearsal (Derrik De Kerkhove) or preparation (Firth) for
what they reserve as the authentic catastrophe . The history of nuclear violence
offers, at best, a reality effect to the imagery of extinction. Schell summarized the discursive position of
nuclear critics very succinctly,
by stating that nuclear catastrophe should not
be conceptualized in the context of direct slaughter of hundreds of
millions people by the local effects. Thus the elimination of the
history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process
of discursive delocalization of nuclear violence. Their primary
focus is not local catastrophe, but delocalizable, unlocatable,
global catastrophe. The evaluation of the discursive vantage point deployed in nuclear
criticism through which extinction is conceptualized parallels that of the point of the strategic gaze:
nuclear criticism raises the notion of nuclear catastrophe to the
absolute point from which the fiction of extinction is configured.
Herein, the configuration of the globe and the conceptualization of
extinction reveal their interconnection via the absolutization of
the strategic gaz. In the same way as the fiction of the totality of
the earth is constructed, the fiction of extinction is derived from the
figure perceived through the strategic gaze.
The belief that the fate of the globe is interconnected
through nuclear war allows for the obliteration of the
Other, proving that their belief everything will die as a
result of their dis/ad impact is untrue at best and
responsible for a genocidal form of violence at worst

Kato 93
Masahide, Department of Political Science, University of
Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii. Nuclear Globalism: Traversing
Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic
Gaze. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 18, No. 3.
Sage Publications, Inc. Summer 1993. Accessed June 28,
2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644779 .
The fiction of the globe as a unified whole lends itself to the
emergence of globalism. The discourse of globalism is well epitomized in Richard Nixon's
address to the "planet" in 1969: "for one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on
this earth are truly one."24 The statement is ideologically more essential than what is later to be called
Nixon doctrine: it capitulates the global strategy of transnational capital in the post-Nixon doctrine and
we must read such seemingly universalistic
post-Bretton Woods era. Therefore,
phrases as "global village," "one earth," "global community," and so
forth, very symptomatically. Those buzzwords are none other than the
manifestation of a global discourse signifying the emergence of a
global transnational collectivity disguised in "planetary"
vocabularies. The pseudo-universalistic rhetoric of globalism is a
discursive configuration of the spatial and temporal homogenization
discussed earlier. Susan Sontag also attributes the emergence of the myth of homogeneous time and
space to the photo image taken from the point of the "absolute" strategic gaze: Our very notion
of the world - the capitalist twentieth century's "one world" - is like a photographic
overview. . . . This spurious unity of the world - is effected by translating its contents into images.
Images are always compatible, or can be made compatible, even
when the realities they depict are not25 The totality of the globe (i.e.,
the notion of "one world") is thus achieved by obliterating the "other" side of
the image, which Sontag calls "realities." One must dwell on the implications of this process of
automated and institutionalized preclusion of "realities" on the ontological terrain . The "realities"
that are precluded from the images belong to the domain that
cannot be represented or captured in homogeneous space and time ,
both in the production of photo images in general and the image recapitulation of Earth
produced by the absolute strategic gaze. However, the realities as
"otherness" of the homogenizing regime of space and time do not necessarily
configure the social forces that resist the transnationalization of
capital. They simply, as in the positive and negative image of photography, reveal the other
side of the movement for the accumulation of capital: differentiation as opposed to
homogenization. This flip side of accumulation is significantly obscured by
globalist perception and discourse. The process of differentiation includes
differentiation in space, time, and power (the North-South relationship in particular,
for example). In sum, the process of differentiation can be identified as "unequal
Masahide Kato 347 development" of capitalism. Therefore, the globalist discourse
masks, for example, the ongoing (re)arrangement of international division of labor
(deindustrialization or creation of the "third worlds" in the First
World, and transformation of the Third World into a ghetto for
metropolitan capital), and historical accumulation of capital by the
North, for further intensification of the techno-automation of the
production process in the mtropoles. The global discourse represents the
sociality of the globe as an ahistorical, undifferentiated whole that
has been always and already there. Such ahistorical and a-spatial
image narratives, reinforced by the globalist discourse, recapture
the classic teleological narrative of the linear "progression" of
capitalism

Nuclear war won't cause extinction

Martin 82
(Brian, Professor of Social Sciences in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the
University of Wollongong, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 287-300
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/82jpr.html)

To summarise the above points,

a major global nuclear war in which population centres in
the US, Soviet Union, Europe and China ware targeted, with no effective civil
defence measures taken, could kill directly perhaps 400 to 450 million people.
Induced effects, in particular starvation or epidemics following agricultural failure or economic
breakdown, might add up to several hundred million deaths to the total, though this
is most uncertain. Such an eventuality would be a catastrophe of enormous proportions,
but it is far from extinction. Even in the most extreme case there would
remain alive some 4000 million people, about nine-tenths of the world's population,
most of them unaffected physically by the nuclear war. The following areas would be relatively
unscathed, unless nuclear attacks were made in these regions: South and Central America, Africa, the
Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Australasia, Oceania and large parts of China. Even
in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere where most of the nuclear weapons would be exploded,
areas upwind of nuclear attacks would remain free of heavy radioactive
contamination, such as Portugal, Ireland and British Columbia. Many people, perhaps especially in
the peace movement, believe that global nuclear war will lead to the death of most or
all of the world's population.[12] Yet the available scientific evidence provides
no basis for this belief. Furthermore, there seem to be no convincing scientific
arguments that nuclear war could cause human extinction.[13] In particular, the idea
of 'overkill', if taken to imply the capacity to kill everyone on earth, is highly misleading.[14] In
the absence of any positive evidence, statements that nuclear war will lead
to the death of all or most people on earth should be considered exaggerations.
In most cases the exaggeration is unintended, since people holding or stating a belief in nuclear extinction
are quite sincere.[15]

Robock and Sagan are incorrect---nuclear warfare does

NOT cause extinction---their authors are biased

Seitz 6
former associate of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard Universitys Center for
International Affairs (Russell, The' Nuclear Winter ' Meltdown Photoshopping the Apocalypse,
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2006/12/preherein_honor.html)

All that remains of Sagan's Big Chill are curves such as this , but history is full of prophets of doom who fail
The 1983 'Nuclear Winter " papers in
to deliver, not all are without honor in their own land.
Science were so politicized that even the eminently liberal President of The Council for a Liveable
World called "The worst example of the misrepesentation of science to the public
in my memory." Among the authors was Stanford President Donald Kennedy. Today he edits Science ,
the nation's major arbiter of climate science--and policy. Below, a case illustrating the mid-range of the ~.7
to ~1.6 degree C maximum cooling the 2006 studies suggest is superimposed in color on the Blackly
Apocalyptic predictions published in Science Vol. 222, 1983 . They're worth comparing, because the range
of soot concentrations in the new models overlaps with cases assumed to have dire climatic consequences
in the widely publicized 1983 scenarios -- "Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken
seriously,higher standards of evidence than do assertions on other matters where the
stakes are not as great." wrote Sagan in Foreign Affairs , Winter 1983 -84. But that "evidence" was
never forthcoming. 'Nuclear Winter' never existed outside of a computer
except as air-brushed animation commissioned by the a PR firm---Porter Novelli Inc. Yet Sagan
predicted "the extinction of the human species " as temperatures plummeted 35 degrees C and the world
froze in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Last year, Sagan's cohort tried to reanimate the ghost in a
machine anti-nuclear activists invoked in the depths of the Cold War, by re-running equally arbitrary
scenarios on a modern interactive Global Circulation Model. But the Cold War is history in more ways than
computer climate simulations that they do not
one. It is a credit to post-modern
reproduce the apocalyptic results of what Sagan oxymoronically termed "a sophisticated one
dimensional model." The subzero 'baseline case' has melted down into a tepid 1.3
degrees of average cooling- grey skies do not a Ragnarok make . What remains is
just not the stuff that End of the World myths are made of. It is hard to exaggerate how seriously " nuclear
winter "was once taken by policy analysts who ought to have known better. Many were taken aback by the
sheer force of Sagan's rhetoric Remarkably, Science's news coverage of the new results fails to graphically
compare them with the old ones Editor Kennedy and other recent executives of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, once proudly co-authored and helped to publicize. You can't say they
didn't try to reproduce this Cold War icon. Once again, soot from imaginary software materializes in midair
by the megaton , flying higher than Mount Everest . This is not physics, but a crude exercise in ' garbage
in, gospel out' parameter forcing designed to maximize and extend the cooling an aeosol can generate, by
sparing it from realistic attrition by rainout in the lower atmosphere. Despite decades of progress in
modeling atmospheric chemistry , there is none in this computer simulation, and ignoring photochemistry
further extends its impact. Fortunately , the history of science is as hard to erase as it is easy to ignore.
Their past mastery of semantic agression cannot spare the authors of "Nuclear Winter Lite " direct
Dark smoke clouds in the lower atmosphere
comparison of their new results and their old.
don't last long enough to spread across the globe. Cloud droplets and rainfall remove
them. rapidly washing them out of the sky in a matter of days to weeks- not long enough to sustain a
global pall. Real world weather brings down particles much as soot is scrubbed out of
power plant smoke by the water sprays in smoke stack scrubbers, Robock acknowledges this- not even
a single degree of cooling results when soot is released at lower elevations in the models . The workaround
is to inject the imaginary aerosol at truly Himalayan elevations---pressure altitudes of 300 millibar and
higher , where the computer model's vertical transport function modules pass it off to their even higher
studies like the old
neighbors in the stratosphere , where it does not rain and particles linger.. The new
suffer from the disconnect between a desire to paint the sky black and the
vicissitudes of natural history. As with many exercise in worst case models both at invoke rare
phenomena as commonplace, claiming it prudent to assume the worst. But the real world is subject to
Murphy's lesser known second law- if everything must go wrong, don't bet on it. In 2006 as in 1983
firestorms and forest fires that send smoke into the stratosphere rise to alien prominence in the modelers
re-imagined world , but in the real one remains a very different place, where though every month sees
forest fires burning areas the size of cities---2,500 hectares or larger , stratospheric smoke injections arise
but once in a blue moon. So how come these neo-nuclear winter models feature so much smoke so far
aloft for so long?

Use of the phrase nuclear war is a ruse that inevitably

leads to extinction
Gates 02 (John M, Aileen Dunham Professor of History, Emeritus -- Wooster U, THE U.S.
ARMY AND IRREGULAR WARFARE, CHAPTER ELEVEN, THE CONTINUING PROBLEM OF
CONCEPTUAL CONFUSION//TR)
"War" is another term that loses its traditional meaning when the adjective "nuclear" precedes it. War is
supposed to be a purposeful act, calculated to make one's enemy do one's will, to paraphrase Clausewitz.
In its traditional meaning,war is an extension of politics and diplomacy, a
violent attempt to achieve one's goals when other methods fail . Given
that definition, however, the phrase "nuclear war," like "nuclear strategy," becomes an oxymoron. If
both parties to a conflict possess nuclear explosives (or have allies
possessing them), then the use of those explosive devices might
well prove suicidal, and suicide is not a rational extension of policy.
General Collins appeared to come to the only reasonable conclusion possible when he rejected nuclear war
An exchange of nuclear
as "a rational form of warfare or a rational instrument of policy."
explosions is not an example of rational, goal oriented behavior, and
therefore such an act is not war. One can speak rationally about nuclear disaster, but
talking rationally about nuclear war is more difficult. Similarly, terms such as "victory" or "win" lose their
meaning when used in conjunction with the term "nuclear." One wins by accomplishing one's goals, which
is also how one defines victory. One has difficulty imagining how any nation might accomplish a set of
goals through an exchange of nuclear explosions, despite the attempt by contemporary strategists such as
Colin Gray to make the case for a "Theory of Victory" and comments by Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of
Defense under President Reagan, about using American "nuclear capabilities" to "prevail." Weinberger's
assertion that nuclear devices could be used "to achieve political objectives and secure early war
termination on terms favorable to the United States and its allies" was nothing short of ludicrous given the
incredible dangers inherent in their use. More useful is the conclusion of Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, once
director of military operations for all United States forces in Europe and the Middle East. Said Admiral
Carroll, "there
is no safety, no survival, if both sides continue to build
and deploy war-fighting forces designed to prevail in a nuclear
conflict. Safety lies ultimately in changing our way of thinking about
the role of military power in the nuclear age." Another term that loses its meaning
when used in the nuclear context is "superiority." In military affairs, the term "superiority" is usually
associated with weapons and combat. One gains victory through superiority. It helps one win. In reference
to nuclear devices, however, the term, like so many others, has little meaning. As Henry Kissinger, former
U. S. Secretary of State, once asked: "What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the
significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?"
The answer, of course, is that no one really knows what it means to be superior or inferior as far as the
deployment of nuclear devices is concerned. Throughout the Cold War, people continued to talk about the
importance of nuclear force for "national defense" and "national security," although one could neither
defend a nation by using nuclear explosives nor guarantee its security by threatening to use them. Gwyn
Prins, the editor of The Nuclear Crisis Reader, observed that security is "a state of mind," not to be
equated "with military force and its attendant supports. Security is produced by general social well-being. .
. . the sum of individual fulfillment, which depends upon the civilized arbitration of conflicts of interest in
society, which in turn depends upon a just provision of goods, services and opportunities for all." Security,
for Prins, was also "intimately bound up with . . . freedom. Freedom from want, freedom of thought,
freedom from fear."http://www3.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book-ch11.html - fn35 The deployment of
explosive nuclear devices and their delivery vehicles would seem to have nothing positive to contribute to
the concept of security as defined here. Even the discussion of nuclear devices as deterrents was often
muddled because of the language involved. In the United States, for example, one can find numerous
references to the "Triad" of land-based ICBMs, the SLBMs of the submarine fleet, and the airborne bomber
force. In the defense debates of the Cold War the concept quickly became an unassailable holy trinity, and
few if any individuals were willing to challenge the need to maintain it. By the 1980s, however, the kinds of
delivery systems available for nuclear devices and the various methods of basing them indicated that the
Triad, if it ever existed, existed no longer. In its place was an amazing array of possibilities which can best
be described as a series of "duads." With the technology available in the last quarter of the twentieth
century, nuclear devices could be kept on the earth or above it; on earth they could be deployed on land or
at sea, on the earth's surface or beneath it. Deployment vehicles could be mobile or static; deployment
could be hard (i.e. defended by concrete and earth) or soft. The delivery devices deployed could be with or
without crews, recallable or non-recallable. They could move their deadly payloads through the
atmosphere or above it. Only one's imagination seemed to limit the possibilities for thinking about ways in
which nuclear devices could be deployed and delivered. The number of possibilities that existed seemed
too large to list, but it should have been quite clear that there were many more than three. In addition to
the various "duads" described above, one could also identify a number of "spectra" or continua along
which various delivery systems fell. On one spectrum, for example, one could plot the size of the explosive
device, from extremely small artillery shells of a fraction of a kiloton to ICBM warheads and bombs of many
megatons. On another spectrum one could plot the distance a delivery vehicle might cover (from
stationary mines to globe circling planes), and on another one could measure the speed of delivery
(measured in minutes for SLBMs and hours for manned bombers). All of these possibilities help to
demonstrate the fallacy of thinking and talking in the simplistic terms of the Triad, yet even today one still
hears references to the importance of "maintaining the Triad." The analysis contained here obviously rests
on certain assumptions, the most important being a belief in the possibility, if not the certainty, of
retaliation in most situations in which nuclear devices might be used and of a high level of destruction
accompanying such usage. At the very least, it assumes that the degree of probability of a negative
outcome occurring is so high that the use of nuclear devices as an act of war would be foolish. It also
assumes that the dangers inherent in such weapons of mass destruction are independent of the Cold War
 Unfortunately, both the end of the Cold War
that gave rise to their proliferation.
and the terminology used to discuss nuclear explosives diminishes
popular awareness of the many conceptual problems that continue
to exist. The inappropriate terminology and the conceptual
confusion accompanying it distorts reality, and by doing so both
create added dangers that someone might actually set in motion a
series of events ending in the nuclear holocaust every sane
individual wants to avoid. The dangers diminished with the end of the Cold War, but they did
not disappear. To solve the frightening problem of the nuclear threat,
people need terms that they can use to speak and write about
explosive nuclear devices that indicate how very different those
devices are from anything heretofore invented. Ending all references to nuclear
weapons, substituting a term such as nuclear explosives or nuclear deterrents in their place, represents an
one should never speak of nuclear war, only of
important first step. Similarly,
deterrence, the possible breakdown of deterrence, and the
possibility of a nuclear exchange. (I am not happy with the phrase "nuclear exchange"
because it ignores the horrible consequences of the use of nuclear explosive devices, but "nuclear
holocaust," a more vivid term, might not be accurate enough to cover all eventualities.) In any case, one
should not speak of "nuclear strategy," but of strategies for deterrence. Nuclear devices and their delivery
vehicles must be designed in terms of their actual use, as deterrents, and terms such as "prevail,"
"victory," or "win" should never be linked to nuclear explosives or their use. Recent world events,
particularly in Eastern Europe, would seem to have created a perfect opportunity for making the shift from
the deceptive nuclear language of the Cold War to a more accurate, less dangerous terminology that might
eventually help people develop new ways of thinking about nuclear explosives as well as talking about
them.With time people might even recognize that the military
defenses they have developed, including the deterrent forces of the
nuclear nations, are not a means to security but the essence of
insecurity, fragile methods for preventing unthinkable but no less
possible consequences. People may also recognize that security is
not a function of superior military power, for such a concept has also
lost its meaning in the nuclear age. A degree of conventional military power may be
needed for defense, but it will not be so great as is often thought after the military realities of the nuclear
world have been properly understood. Assuring deterrence will remain difficult, however, if people continue
to conduct their nuclear discussions in prenuclear language, and we must therefore break out of the
linguistic prison we have constructed for ourselves. No one can guarantee that new terms will enable
people to think in new ways, butthe innovative thinking needed to insure
human survival may not be possible within the prison of existing
military terminology that in both the arena of irregular conflict and
nuclear deterrence frequently distorts rather than enlightens.
Discussions based on inappropriate terminology and confused
concepts lead all too readily to the development of inadequate
doctrine. At best, such flawed doctrine will lead to military defeat; at worst, in the nuclear
context, it might well result in an even worse outcome, inflicting the
destructive consequences of a nuclear holocaust upon hundreds of
millions of uninvolved and innocent people. Even with accurate terms and
concepts, avoiding such catastrophes will not always be easy, but a reorientation of the way
in which civilian and mililtary leaders think about warfare is a
necessary first step toward the development of an intellectual
system to avoid disaster.
Every legitimate scientist concludes negative---nuclear
winter theory is crap science
J.R. Nyquist, WorldNetDaily contributing editor and author of Origins of the
Fourth World War, May 20, 1999, Antipas, Is Nuclear War Survivable?
http://www.antipas.org/news/world/nuclear_war.html

nuclear war would not be the end of

I patiently reply to these correspondents that
the world. I then point to studies showing that nuclear winter has no scientific basis, that fallout
from a nuclear war would not kill all life on earth. Surprisingly, few of my correspondents are convinced.
They prefer apocalyptic myths created by pop scientists, movie producers and journalists. If Dr. Carl Sagan
once said nuclear winter would follow a nuclear war, then it must be true. If radiation wipes out mankind
in a movie, then thats what we can expect in real life. But Carl Sagan was wrong about nuclear
winter. And the movie On the Beach misled American filmgoers about the effects of fallout. It is time,
once and for all, to lay these myths to rest. Nuclear war would not bring about the end of the world, though
prominent physicists have condemned
it would be horribly destructive. The truth is, many
the nuclear winter hypothesis. Nobel laureate Freeman Dyson once said of nuclear
winter research, Its an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the
public record straight. Professor Michael McElroy, a Harvard physics professor , also criticized
the nuclear winter hypothesis. McElroy said that nuclear winter researchers stacked the
deck in their study, which was titled Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear
Explosions (Science, December 1983). Nuclear winter is the theory that the mass use of nuclear weapons
would create enough smoke and dust to blot out the sun, causing a catastrophic drop in global
temperatures. According to Carl Sagan, in this situation the earth would freeze. No crops could be grown.
natural disasters have frequently
Humanity would die of cold and starvation. In truth,
produced smoke and dust far greater than those expected from a nuclear war.
In 1883 Krakatoa exploded with a blast equivalent to 10,000 one-megaton
bombs, a detonation greater than the combined nuclear arsenals of planet
earth. The Krakatoa explosion had negligible weather effects. Even more disastrous,
going back many thousands of years, a meteor struck Quebec with the force of 17.5
million one-megaton bombs, creating a crater 63 kilometers in diameter. But the world
did not freeze. Life on earth was not extinguished. Consider the views of Professor
George Rathjens of MIT, a known antinuclear activist, who said, Nuclear winter is the worst example of
misrepresentation of science to the public in my memory. Also consider Professor Russell Seitz, at Harvard
Universitys Center for International Affairs, who says that the nuclear winter hypothesis has been
discredited. Two researchers, Starley Thompson and Stephen Schneider, debunked the nuclear winter
the global
hypothesis in the summer 1986 issue of Foreign Affairs. Thompson and Schneider stated:
apocalyptic conclusions of the initial nuclear winter hypothesis can now be
relegated to a vanishingly low level of probability. OK, so nuclear winter isnt
going to happen. What about nuclear fallout? Wouldnt the radiation from a nuclear war
contaminate the whole earth, killing everyone? The short answer is: absolutely not. Nuclear
fallout is a problem, but we should not exaggerate its effects. As it happens, there are two types of fallout
produced by nuclear detonations. These are: 1) delayed fallout; and 2) short-term fallout. According to
researcher Peter V. Pry, Delayed fallout will not, contrary to popular belief, gradually kill
billions of people everywhere in the world. Of course, delayed fallout would increase the number of
these
people dying of lymphatic cancer, leukemia, and cancer of the thyroid. However, says Pry,
deaths would probably be far fewer than deaths now resulting from ...
smoking, or from automobile accidents. The real hazard in a nuclear war is the short-term
fallout. This is a type of fallout created when a nuclear weapon is detonated at ground level. This type of
fallout could kill millions of people, depending on the targeting strategy of the attacking country. But
short-term fallout rapidly subsides to safe levels in 13 to 18 days. It is not
permanent. People who live outside of the affected areas will be fine. Those in affected areas can
survive if they have access to underground shelters. In some areas, staying indoors may even suffice.
Contrary to popular misconception,there were no documented deaths from short-term or
delayed fallout at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. These blasts were low airbursts, which
produced minimal fallout effects. Todays thermonuclear weapons are even
cleaner. If used in airburst mode, these weapons would produce few (if any) fallout
casualties. On their side, Russian military experts believe that the next world war will be a nuclear
missile war. They know that nuclear weapons cannot cause the end of the world. According to the Russian
military writer, A. S. Milovidov, There is profound error and harm in the disoriented claims of bourgeois
ideologues that there will be no victor in a thermonuclear world war. Milovidov explains that Western
objections to the mass use of nuclear weapons are based on a subjective judgment. It expresses mere
protest against nuclear war. Another Russian theorist, Captain First Rank V. Kulakov, believes that a mass
nuclear strike may not be enough to defeat a strong enemy, with extensive territory enabling him to use
space and time for the organizations of active and passive defense. ... Russian military theory regards
nuclear war as highly destructive, but nonetheless winnable. Russian generals do not exaggerate the
effects of mass destruction weapons. Although nuclear war would be unprecedented in its death-dealing
potential, Russian strategists believe that a well-prepared system of tunnels and underground bunkers
could save many millions of lives. That is why Russia has built a comprehensive shelter system for its
nuclear
urban populace. On the American side as well, there have been studies which suggest that
war is survivable . The famous 1960 Rand Corporation study, On Thermonuclear War,
says, Even if 100 metropolitan areas [in the USA] are destroyed, there would be more wealth in this
country than there is in all of Russia today and more skills than were available to that country in the
states that
forties. The United States is a very wealthy and well-educated country. The Rand study
even if half the U.S. population were killed, the survivors would not just
lie down and die. Nor would they necessarily suffer a disastrous social
disorganization.
 AT: Oil Shocks
Impact should have already happened because the
instability has been in the status-quo for the while, which
means theres no timeframe or threshold to their terminal
impact.

Oil shocks wont kill the economy

The Economist 2011 (3/3; Oil market and Arab unrest:

The price of fear; http://www.economist.com/node/
18285768/print)\\AN
All this is a dark cloud on an otherwise bright horizon for the global economy. Few things can short-circuit
growth like an oil shock, both because of the fuels ubiquity and because of the relative insensitivity of
When the oil price jumps, consumers have little choice but to
demand.
accept it, spending less on something else. So how sensitive is the world
economy to oil prices? Thus far the rise, and the likely damage, both
look modest, in part because many forecasters had expected an
increase this year anyway. Since the end of last year the price of Brent has risen by $23 a
barrel, or about 25%, and West Texas Intermediate by $10, or 10%. The IMF reckons that a 10% increase in
the price of crude shaves 0.2%-0.3% off global GDP in one year. As it happens, crude oil (using a blend of
several grades), is now about 10% more costly than the IMF assumed in late January, when it projected
global growth of 4.4% this year. That implies that the Fund would now foresee growth of about 4.2%.
Economists do not expect a repeat of the 1970s, when oil-price rises led to stagflation in the rich world.
Olivier Blanchard, chief economist of the IMF, and Jordi Gal, of the Centre de Recerca en Economia
Internacional in Barcelona, point out that two recent oil-price risesone beginning in 1999 and another in
2002were of the same order of magnitude as during those turbulent years. But the effect on both
inflation and unemployment in the rich world was much smaller: in America, for example, a rise in inflation
of only 0.7 percentage points on average, whereas the 1970s shocks had caused a rise of 4.5 points in the
two years after the shocks. The rich world is less vulnerable now because it has substantially reduced the
amount of oil used per unit of output. Americas economy in 2009 was more than twice as large in real
terms as in 1980. Yet over that period Americas oil consumption rose only slightly, from 17.4m b/d to
17.8m. Europe actually used less oil in 2009 than in 1980, even though its economy had grown. Other
factors may also have helped. Supply shocks generate larger
increases in inflation and bigger falls in output when wages are
rigid. So oil shocks have smaller effects today, because labour
markets in rich countries have become considerably more flexible
since the 1970s.

High oil prices causes a shift to green technology

Smith 2011 (4/11; Kalen; Financial Edge, 6 Industries

Hoping That Oil Prices Go Higher;
http://financialedge.investopedia.com/financial-
edge/0411/6-Industries-Hoping-That-Oil-Prices-Go-
Higher.aspx)\\AN
Companies that provide goods that are substitutes for oil do very well when
oil prices are high. As customers become dissatisfied with the price of oil,
they often turn to coals, biofuels, natural gas and ethanol products for their
 energy needs. Peabody (NYSE:BTU) and Cloud Peak (NYSE:CLD) are two coal companies that often do
well when oil prices increase. Companies that provide green energy services are
also likely to increase in value as the profitability of wind farms, hydrogen
production facilities, and solar and fuel cells rises along with the price of
oil. First Solar (Nasdaq:FSLR), Nordic WindPower, and Altergy Freedom Power are good examples of such
green energy companies.

Renewables will solve climate change and the transition is

happening now

Union for Concerned Scientists 5/9/2011 Renewable Energy Likely to

Become Dominant Climate Change Solution by 2050, U.N. Study Concludes, d/l:
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/renewable-energy-likely-climate-solution-0539.html
//jl

WASHINGTON (May 9, 2011): Renewable energy is likely to become the worlds

dominant climate change solution by the middle of the century, according to a new study by the
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has the potential to be more
competitive than nuclear power, fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage
and other low-carbon energy options across a majority of the scenarios analyzed for the report.
More than 160 scenarios were examined for the study, with the most optimistic suggesting that almost 80 percent of the
worlds energy supply could come from renewable sources by 2050, although that could occur only with government
policies supporting deep cuts in heat-trapping emissions. The report also concluded that the technical potential of
If the full
renewable energies is 20 times greater than what global demand for energy is projected to be in 2050.
range of renewable technologies were to be deployed, levels of heat-trapping
emissions could be kept to concentrations lower than 450 parts per million.
This level could help keep global temperatures from rising more than 2F
from current levels, the temperature beyond which scientists have predicted would
likely lead to the most serious consequences of climate change. The report points out that the
renewable energy transition is already underway. Nearly half of new electric generating
capacity added globally in both 2008 and 2009 was from renewable sources. The same was true in the United States,
with wind, solar, and other renewable technologies providing more than 40 percent of the new generating capacity.

Lowering oil prices stops investment in alternative

technologies

Russell 6/09/2011 (Clyde, Market Analyst; Reuters, High

oil prices are good for you;
http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/06/09/idINIndia-
57595920110609)\\AN

There is an almost universal assumption among consumers that high oil

prices are a bad thing, but the current crude cost of around $100 a barrel is
likely to prevent prices from jumping significantly in the coming years . The failure
of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries to agree on raising output quotas showed that the group has
difficulty in putting a ceiling on prices .No
need to worry though, the market will limit gains
as ultimately if prices do get too high, the Western world will tip back into
recession, thus lowering them again. What you really want is a Goldilocks situation, where
prices are high enough to spur the development of new sources of crude, as
well as alternative fuels such as biodiesel, electric cars and natural-gas
powered vehicles. But they mustn't get too high to choke the already fragile economies in the developed
world. Low oil prices, which in the current environment would be anything below $70 a barrel for West Texas
Intermediate, only serve to drive up demand and lower the incentive to look for
new sources of supply.

Renewables create sustainable economic growth, solves

back their economy impacts that can only happen through
an oil shock
The Green Market 2011 (5/15; SolarFeeds, High Oil Prices
Stimulate Renewable Energy; http://www.solarfeeds.com/the-
green-market-blog/16879-high-oil-prices-stimulate-renewable-
energy)\\AN

Higher oil prices stimulate renewable energy. Renewable energy

enables the world economies to grow sustainably, where our current
reliance on fossil fuels is entirely unsustainable. To stimulate
renewable energy we must see what is known as supply shock. A
supply shock is an event that suddenly changes the price of a
commodity or service. In the case of oil this will be caused by a
sudden decrease in the supply relative to demand. This sudden change
affects the equilibrium price. When oil approaches $200 per barrel we
should get the shock and a stimulus effect on renewable energy. This
will occur when the oil supply out paces demand by something like 10
percent. Instability in the Middle East may very well be the catalyst
that causes oil prices to go sharply higher, which in turn will create
the shock that will stimulate renewable energy.

Renewables stimulate global economic investment,

stopping the gloom the aff predicts

Louise Downing 11/16/2011 Clean Energy Investment

May Double to $395 Billion by 2020, d/l:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-16/clean-
energy-investment-may-double-to-395-billion-by-
2020.html //jl

Investment in renewable power generation may double to $395 billion a

year by 2020, led by growth in offshore wind and solar energy projects, Bloomberg New Energy Finance
forecast. The total may rise further to $460 billion a year in real terms by 2030 from $195 billion last year,
The investments would boost clean
according to the research unit of Bloomberg LP.
energy as a portion of total world generation capacity to 15.7 percent within
20 years from 12.6 percent last year. The findings suggest wind, solar and biofuel industries will continue
quick growth through stumbling economic growth and a lack of commitment from the U.S. and China to
restrain pollution blamed for global warming. Last
years record renewable energy
investment was no one-off despite the recent economic gloom , Guy
Turner, director of commodity market research at London-based New Energy Finance, said in a statement
today. In 2014, China will likely take the lead over Europe in terms of
money spent on clean energy projects, with annual outlays of almost $50 billion.
The U.S. and Canada together will reach the same amount by 2020. The
most rapid spending growth, ranging from 10 percent to 18 percent, will come in
India, the Middle East and Africa, the report said. Big winners over the next 20
years will be the emerging renewable energy hubs in Latin America,
Asia, the Middle East and Africa - by 2020 the markets outside of the European Union,
U.S., Canada and China will account for 50 percent of global annual investment in renewable energy
capacity, Turner said. Offshore wind investment will grow fastest in terms of technologies, reaching $140
billion in 2020 compared with $82 billion last year. Solar installations will reach 1,137 gigawatts by 2030,
compared with 51 gigawatts last year.

High Oil prices no longer risk the economy

-Not key to economy
-government will intervene
-no longer pass onto core inflation

Segal 7
Paul Segal, Professor @ Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Why do Oil Price Shocks No Longer Shock?.
2007. Book.

This paper surveys the literature on the relationship between oil prices and the macroeconomy in order to explain why high oil
prices over the past three years do not appear to have led to a slow-down the world economy. It makes three arguments. First,
that oil
prices have never been as important as is popularly thought. Second, that the most
important route through which oil prices affect output is monetary policy: when
oil prices pass through to core
inflation, monetary authorities raise interest rates , slowing growth. It is argued that the direct
effect of high oil prices on output is relatively small and that the microeconomic
mechanisms proposed in the literature are insufficient to explain the historical impact of
oil prices. Based on the second argument, the third argument is that high oil prices have not reduced
growth in the past three years because they no longer pass through to core inflation, so
the monetary tightening previously seen in response to high oil prices is absent.

Econ collapse doesnt cause war prefer our studies

Bazzi and Blattman 11

Samuel Bazzi (Department of Economics at University of California San Diego) and Christopher Blattman
(assistant professor of political science and economics at Yale University) November 2011 Economic
Shocks and Conflict: The (Absence of?) Evidence from Commodity Prices
http://www.chrisblattman.com/documents/research/2011.EconomicShocksAndConflict.pdf?9d7bd4

VI. Discussion and conclusions A. Implications for our theories of political instability and conflict The
state is not a prize?Warlord politics and the state prize logic lie at the center of the most influential
models of conflict, state development, and political transitions in economics and political science. Yet we
see no evidence for this idea in economic shocks, even when looking at the friendliest
cases: fragile and unconstrained states dominated by extractive commodity revenues .
Indeed, we see the opposite correlation: if anything, higher rents from commodity prices
weakly 22 lower the risk and length of conflict. Perhaps shocks are the wrong test. Stocks of
resources could matter more than price shocks (especially if shocks are transitory). But combined with
emerging evidence that war onset is no more likely even with rapid increases in known oil reserves
(Humphreys 2005; Cotet and Tsui 2010) we regard the state prize logic of war with skepticism.17 Our
main political economy models may need a new engine. Naturally, an absence of evidence cannot
be taken for evidence of absence. Many of our conflict onset and ending results include sizeable positive
and negative effects.18 Even so, commodity price shocks are highly influential in income and should
provide a rich source of identifiable variation in instability. It is difficult to find a better-measured, more
abundant, and plausibly exogenous independent variable than price volatility. Moreover, other time-
 varying variables, like rainfall and foreign aid, exhibit robust correlations with conflict in
spite of suffering similar empirical drawbacks and generally smaller sample sizes (Miguel et
al. 2004; Nielsen et al. 2011). Thus we take the absence of evidence seriously . Do resource
revenues drive state capacity?State prize models assume that rising revenues raise the value of the
capturing the state, but have ignored or downplayed the effect of revenues on self-defense. We saw that a
growing empirical political science literature takes just such a revenue-centered approach, illustrating that
resource boom times permit both payoffs and repression, and that stocks of lootable or extractive
resources can bring political order and stability. This countervailing effect is most likely with transitory
shocks, as current revenues are affected while long term value is not. Our findings are partly consistent
with this state capacity effect. For example, conflict intensity is most sensitive to changes in the extractive
commodities rather than the annual agricultural crops that affect household incomes more directly. The
relationship only holds for conflict intensity, however, and is somewhat fragile. We do not see a large,
consistent or robust decline in conflict or coup risk when prices fall. A reasonable interpretation is that the
state prize and state capacity effects are either small or tend to cancel one another out. Opportunity cost:
Victory by default?Finally, the inverse relationship between prices and war intensity is consistent with
opportunity cost accounts, but not exclusively so. As we noted above, the relationship between intensity
and extractive commodity prices is more consistent with the state capacity view. Moreover, we shouldnt
mistake an inverse relation between individual aggression and incomes as evidence for the opportunity
cost mechanism. The same correlation is consistent with psychological theories of stress and aggression
(Berkowitz 1993) and sociological and political theories of relative deprivation and anomie (Merton
1938; Gurr 1971). Microempirical work will be needed to distinguish between these mechanisms. Other
reasons for a null result.Ultimately, however, the fact that commodity price shocks have no
discernible effect on new conflict onsets, but some effect on ongoing conflict, suggests that
political stability might be less sensitive to income or temporary shocks than generally
believed. One possibility is that successfully mounting an insurgency is no easy task. It comes with
considerable risk, costs, and coordination challenges. Another possibility is that the counterfactual is still
conflict onset. In poor and fragile nations, income shocks of one type or another are ubiquitous. If a
nation is so fragile that a change in prices could lead to war, then other shocks may trigger
war even in the absence of a price shock. The same argument has been made in debunking the
myth that price shocks led to fiscal collapse and low growth in developing nations in the 1980s.19 B. A
general problem of publication bias? More generally, these findings should heighten our concern
with publication bias in the conflict literature. Our results run against a number of
published results on commodity shocks and conflict, mainly because of select samples,
misspecification, and sensitivity to model assumptions, and, most importantly, alternative
measures of instability. Across the social and hard sciences, there is a concern that the majority of
published research findings are false (e.g. Gerber et al. 2001). Ioannidis (2005) demonstrates that a
published finding is less likely to be true when there is a greater number and lesser pre-
selection of tested relationships; there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions,
outcomes, and models; and when more teams are involved in the chase of statistical
significance. The cross-national study of conflict is an extreme case of all these. Most
worryingly, almost no paper looks at alternative dependent variables or publishes
systematic robustness checks. Hegre and Sambanis (2006) have shown that the majority of published
conflict results are fragile, though they focus on timeinvariant regressors and not the time-varying shocks
that have grown in popularity. We are also concerned there is a file drawer problem (Rosenthal 1979).
Consider this decision rule: scholars that discover robust results that fit a theoretical intuition pursue the
results; but if results are not robust the scholar (or referees) worry about problems with the data or
empirical strategy, and identify additional work to be done. If further analysis produces a robust result, it
is published. If not, back to the file drawer. In the aggregate, the consequences are dire: a lower
threshold of evidence for initially significant results than ambiguous ones .20

The Fed will check the rise of oil by cutting interest rates
to offset inflation
The Economist 11
The 2011 oil shock, Mar 3rd 2011,
http://www.economist.com/node/18281774

In theUnited States the Federal Reserve will face a relatively easy choice. Americas
economy is needlessly vulnerable, thanks to its addiction to oil (and light taxation of it). Yet inflation is
extremely low and the economy has plenty of slack. This gives its central bank the
latitude to ignore a sudden jump in the oil price. In Europe, where fuel is taxed more heavily, the
immediate effect of dearer oil is smaller. But Europes central bankers are already more worried about rising prices: hence the
fear that they could take pre-emptive action too far, and push Europes still-fragile economies back into recession.
 AT: Science Diplomacy
No impact to science diplomacy

Dickson 9
[David, Direction Science & Development Network. June 2, 2009, Science diplomacy: the case for
http://scidevnet.wordpress.com/category/new- frontiers-in-science-
caution,
diplomacy-2009]

One of the frustrations of meetings at which scientists gather to discuss policy-

related issues is the speed with which the requirements for evidence-based
discussion they would expect in a professional context can go out of
the window. Such has been the issue over the past two days in the meeting jointly organised in
London by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Royal Society on the
topic New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy. There has been much lively discussion on the
value of international collaboration in achieving scientific goals, on the need
for researchers to work together on the scientific aspects of global challenges
such as climate change and food security, and on the importance of science capacity
building in developing countries in order to make this possible. But there remained little
evidence at the end of the meeting on how useful it was to lump all these
activities together under the umbrella term of science diplomacy . More
significantly, although numerous claims were made during the conference about
the broader social and political value of scientific collaboration for example, in
establishing a framework for collaboration in other areas, and in particular
reducing tensions between rival countries little was produced to
demonstrate whether this hypothesis is true. If it is not, then some of
the arguments made on behalf of science diplomacy, and in
particular its value as a mechanism for exercising soft power in
foreign policy, do not stand up to close scrutiny. Indeed, a case can be
made that where scientific projects have successfully involved substantial
international collaboration, such success is often heavily dependent on a
prior political commitment to cooperation, rather than a mechanism
for securing cooperation where the political will is lacking . Three messages
appeared to emerge from the two days of discussion. Firstly, where the political will to
collaborate does exist, a joint scientific project can be a useful expression of
that will. Furthermore, it can be an enlightening experience for all those directly involved. But it is
seldom a magic wand that can secure broader cooperation where
none existed before. Secondly, science diplomacy will only become recognised as a useful
activity if it is closely defined to cover specific situations (such as the negotiation of major international
scientific projects or collaborative research enterprises). As an umbrella term embracing the many ways in
when
which science interacts with foreign policy, it loses much of its impact, and thus its value. Finally,
it comes to promoting the use of science in developing countries , a terminology
based historically on maximising self-interest the ultimate goal of the diplomat and on
practices through which the rich have almost invariably ended up exploiting
the poor, is likely to be counterproductive . In other words, the discussion seemed
to confirm that science diplomacy has a legitimate place in the formulation
and implementation of policies for science (just as there is a time and place for exercising
soft power in international relations). But the dangers of going beyond this including
the danger of distorting the integrity of science itself, and even alienating
potential partners in collaborative projects , particularly in the developing world were
also clearly exposed.

Science diplomacy fails political motivates corrupt its

effectiveness.
Dickson 9
David Dickson, SciDev, The limits of science diplomacy, 6/4/2009,
http://www.scidev.net/en/editorials/the-limits-of-science-diplomacy.html

But as emerged from a meeting entitled New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy, held in London this
using science for diplomatic purposes is not as
week (12 June)
straightforward as it seems. Some scientific collaboration clearly demonstrates what
countries can achieve by working together. For example, a new synchrotron under construction in
Jordan is rapidly becoming a symbol of the potential for teamwork in the Middle East. But
whether scientific cooperation can become a precursor for political
collaboration is less evident. For example, despite hopes that the
Middle East synchrotron would help bring peace to the region,
several countries have been reluctant to support it until the
Palestine problem is resolved. Indeed, one speaker at the London meeting (organised
by the UK's Royal Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science) even
suggested that the changes scientific innovations bring inevitably lead to turbulence and upheaval.
In such a context, viewing science as a driver for peace may be wishful thinking. Conflicting ethos
Perhaps the most contentious area discussed at the meeting was
how science diplomacy can frame developed countries' efforts to
help build scientific capacity in the developing world. There is little to
quarrel with in collaborative efforts that are put forward with a genuine desire for partnership.
Indeed, partnership whether between individuals, institutions or countries is the new buzzword
true partnership requires
in the "science for development" community. But
transparent relations between partners who are prepared
to meet as equals. And that goes against diplomats'
implicit role: to promote and defend their own countries'
interests. John Beddington, the British government's chief scientific adviser, may have been
a bit harsh when he told the meeting that a diplomat is someone who is "sent abroad to lie for his
country". But he touched a raw nerve. Worlds apart yet co-dependent The truth is that science and
politics make an uneasy alliance. Both need the other. Politicians need science to achieve their
goals, whether social, economic or unfortunately military; scientists need political support to
Politics is, at root, about
fund their research. But they also occupy different universes.
exercising power by one means or another. Science is or should be
about pursuing robust knowledge that can be put to useful
purposes. A strategy for promoting science diplomacy that respects these differences
deserves support. Particularly so if it focuses on ways to leverage political and financial backing for
science's more humanitarian goals, such as tackling climate change or reducing world poverty. But
a commitment to science diplomacy that ignores the differences
acting for example as if science can substitute politics (or perhaps
more worryingly, vice versa), is dangerous.

Science diplomacy is strong now science envoys and

centers of excellence.

Koenig 9
Science staff writer, 6/5/2009 [Robert, "Fuzzy Spots in Obama's Science Diplomacy,"
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/06/fuzzy-spots-in.html]
Administration officials are scrambling to add substance to President Barack Obamas new Middle
The
Eastern science diplomacy initiatives, mentioned Thursday in his speech in Cairo.
President promised new science envoys, centers of excellence,
and a technological development fund for the Middle East, North
Africa, and Southeast Asia. The State Department and White House Office of Science
and Technology Policy (OSTP) were working today to bring those words into focus. Details of these
initiatives will be crafted in discussion with officials in the nations where they will be based, said
OSTP spokesman Rick Weiss. Nina V. Fedoroff, science adviser to the Secretary of State and the
Agency for International Development, said that proposals for centers of
excellence have been bubbling up from several different
directions with emphasis on issues such as agriculture and public
health. A State Department fact sheet explained that the United States will work
with educational institutions, NGOs and foreign governments to
decide the focus and location of such centers. The new science
envoys program could follow the lines of a bill sponsored by Sen. Lugar (RIN) and
approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that would deploy prominent
scientists on missions of goodwill and collaboration. Fedoroff said such
efforts would dovetail with evolving State Department science
diplomacy programs. Obama also announced a new regional fund to support
technological development in Muslim-majority countries. The fact sheet said the fund would help
pay for S&T collaboration, capacity development and innovations with commercial potential.
Allied Prolif DA
 2AC
Stability through heg is a lie- the only empirics prove less
hegemony led to more peace

Fettweis 11 (Christopher J., 9/26/11, [Department of

Political Science, Tulane University], Free Riding or
Restraint? Examining European Grand Strategy,
Comparative Strategy, 30:316332, EBSCO //DF)

there is no evidence to support a direct

It is perhaps worth noting that
relationship between the relative level of U.S. activism and
international stability. In fact, the limited data we do have suggest the
opposite may be true. During the 1990s, the United States cut back
on its defense spending fairly substantially. By 1998, the United States was
spending $100 billion less on defense in real terms than it had in 1990.51 To internationalists, defense
hawks and believers in hegemonic stability, this irresponsible peace dividend endangered both national
and global security. No serious analyst of American military capabilities, argued Kristol and Kagan,
doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet Americas responsibilities to itself and
if the pacific trends were not based upon
to world peace.52 On the other hand,
U.S. hegemony but a strengthening norm against interstate war, one
would not have expected an increase in global instability and
violence. The verdict from the past two decades is fairly plain: The
world grew more peaceful while the United States cut its forces . No
state seemed to believe that its security was endangered by a less-
capable United States military, or at least none took any action that would suggest such a
belief. No militaries were enhanced to address power vacuums, no
security dilemmas drove insecurity or arms races, and no regional
balancing occurred once the stabilizing presence of the U.S. military
was diminished. The rest of the world acted as if the threat of
international war was not a pressing concern, despite the reduction
in U.S. capabilities. Most of all, the United States and its allies were
no less safe. The incidence and magnitude of global conflict declined while the United States cut its
military spending under President Clinton, and kept declining as the Bush Administration ramped the
No complex statistical analysis should be necessary to
spending back up.
reach the conclusion that the two are unrelated. Military spending figures by
themselves are insufficient to disprove a connection between overall U.S. actions and international
stability. Once again, one could presumably argue that spending is not the only or even the best indication
of hegemony, and that it is instead U.S. foreign political and security commitments that maintain stability.
Since neither was significantly altered during this period, instability should not have been expected.
Alternately,advocates of hegemonic stability could believe that relative
rather than absolute spending is decisive in bringing peace . Although the
United States cut back on its spending during the 1990s, its relative advantage never wavered .
However, even if it is true that either U.S. commitments or relative
spending account for global pacific trends, then at the very least
stability can evidently be maintained at drastically lower levels of
both. In other words, even if one can be allowed to argue in the alternative
for a moment and suppose that there is in fact a level of
engagement below which the United States cannot drop without
increasing international disorder, a rational grand strategist would
still recommend cutting back on engagement and spending until that
level is determined. Grand strategic decisions are never final; continual adjustments can and
must be made as time goes on. Basic logic suggests that the United States
ought to spend the minimum amount of its blood and treasure while
seeking the maximum return on its investment. And if the current era of stability
is as stable as many believe it to be, no increase in conflict would ever occur
irrespective of U.S. spending, which would save untold trillions for an increasingly debt-
ridden nation. It is also perhaps worth noting that if opposite trends had unfolded, if other states had
reacted to news of cuts in U.S. defense spending with more aggressive or insecure behavior, then
If increases in
internationalists would surely argue that their expectations had been fulfilled.
conflict would have been interpreted as proof of the wisdom of
internationalist strategies, then logical consistency demands that
the lack thereof should at least pose a problem. As it stands, the only
evidence we have regarding the likely systemic reaction to a more
restrained United States suggests that the current peaceful trends
are unrelated to U.S. military spending. Evidently the rest of the world can operate
quite effectively without the presence of a global policeman. Those who think otherwise base their view on
faith alone.
Scholarship D/A: The Negatives embracement of realism
begins from a flawed academic culture that pre-disposes
war as an inevitable result and theorizes the enemy ever-
present on the border. McClintock uses three examples to
demonstrate the military-academic-political complex:
Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US
Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use having an
army that did nothing but train, he said. Theres got to
be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for. In
1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New
American Century produced a remarkable report in which
they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would
require a catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new
Pearl Harbor. The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling
solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of
legitimacy, offering the military unimaginable license to
expand its reach. General Peter Schoomaker would
publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon:
There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a
tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing
opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have
actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some
oomph.
Our Muzaffar evidence proves that the way the Negative
constructs their impact scenarios is the same logic and
rhetoric used for years to further US neo-imperialism in
the Middle East: this neo-imperialism has resulted in
failed states, increased tensions, overall destabilization
and the formation of terror groups as a last resort to fight
these policies; essentially a geo-political factory of crises
to sustain the necessity of hegemony. Muzaffar explains
the original premise behind the War on Terror was
hegemonic expansion of control over land and resources,
specifically control over oil commodities and a key
strategic point to monitor Central Asia (much like how the
drones are currently being pitched as monitoring points
for the volatile Middle East).
And- This is already beginning to manifest in anti-
American sentiment within the originally pro-West Yemen,
as Yemeni daily reality turns into the site of an undeclared
US war: this is the cyclical turn of imperialism to produce
the crisis it then saves
Schwedler 9/27 (Jillian, [Professor of Political Science at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, and a member of the Editorial Committee of The Middle East
Research and Information Project, publishers of Middle East
Report] Is the U.S. drone program in Yemen working? 9.27.15
https://lawfareblog.com/us-drone-program-yemen-working //DF)
For al-Qaida, the drone program is a gift from the heavens. Its
recruiting narrative exploits common misperceptions of American
omnipotence, offering an alternative route to justice and
empowerment. Regardless of American perceptions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the
attacks, what Yemeni could now deny that the United States is waging
an undeclared war on Yemen? Most recently, this narrative of direct U.S.
intervention has been further substantiated by U.S. material and
intelligence support for the Saudi-led military campaign aimed at the
return to power of the unpopular and exiled-President Abed Rabbo Mansour
Hadi. Photographs of spent U.S.-made cluster bombs are widely
circulated. Nor have drone attacks ceased; alongside the often
indiscriminate Saudi-led bombing, American drones continue their
campaign of targeted assassination. One might think that the Saudi
attacks would not help al-Qaida, but it is contributing to al-Qaidas
growth in Yemen. The indiscriminate targeting of the Saudi-led
campaign undermines any sense of security, let alone Yemeni
sovereignty. And AQAP-controlled areas like the port of Mukalla are
not being targeted by Saudi or Gulf troops at all. The United States aims to take
up the job of targeting AQAP while the Saudi-led (and U.S.-backed) forces focus on defeating the Houthis
and restoring Hadi to power. But the overall situation is one in which those
multiple interventions in Yemen are creating an environment in
which al-Qaida is beginning to appeal in ways it never had before .
For these reasons, the U.S. use of drones to kill even carefully
identified AQAP leaders in Yemen is counterproductive: it gives
resonance to the claims of the very group it seeks to destroy. It
provides evidence that al-Qaidas claims and strategies are justified
and that Yemenis cannot count on the state to protect them from
threats foreign and domestic. U.S. officials have argued that the drone program has not
been used as a recruiting device for al-Qaida. But it is hard to ignore the evidence to the
contrary, from counterinsurgency experts who have worked for the U.S.
government to Yemeni voices like Farea Muslimi . Its not just that
drone strikes make al-Qaida recruiting easier, true as that probably
is, but that they broaden the social space in which al-Qaida can
function. America does not need to win the hearts and minds of Yemenis in the service of some
grand U.S. project in the region. But if America wants to weaken al-Qaida in
Yemen, it needs at a minimum to stop pursuing policies that are
bound to enrage and embitter Yemenis who might otherwise be
neutral. There is an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look
like a nail. The U.S. military let alone its drones is not the only tool on
which the United States can rely. But when the measure of success is
as narrow as the killing of a specific person, the tool gets used with
increasing frequency. Indeed, drone strikes have significantly expanded under the Obama
administration. It is crucial to see the bigger picture, the one in which
long-time Yemeni friends tell me of growing anti-U.S. sentiment
where there was previously very little. Public opinion toward
America has clearly deteriorated over the past decade, and to
reverse it may take much longer. But the use of drones to kill people
deemed enemies of the United States, along with the Saudi-led war
against the Houthis, is expanding the spaces in which al-Qaida is
able to function.

American primacy is waning now- stubbornly trying to

hold on sparks backlash

Quinn 11
Adam, Lecturer in International Studies at the University of Birmingham, July 2011, The Art of
Declining Politely: Obamas Prudent Presidency and the Waning of American Power,
International Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 4, p. 803-824

As for the administrations involvement in the Arab Spring, and latterly military intervention from the
air in Libya, these episodes also serve better to illustrate Obamas tendency towards restraint and

limitation than to showcase bold ambition. Both its record of public statements during the unfolding of the
Egyptian revolution and inside accounts after the event suggest that the administrations strategy was to ride
with caution a wave of events largely beyond its own control. The United States thus edged over a
period of days from expressing confidence in Mubarak to seeking a months-long quasi-constitutional transition to eventually
facilitating his abrupt defenestration, as events on the ground changed the balance of probabilities as to the ultimate outcome. In
eschewing either rigid public support for Mubarak, as some regional allies would have preferred, or
early and vocal backing for the protesters, Obama was successful in what was surely the primary
objective: to avoid rendering Americas interests hostage to a gamble on either the success
or the failure of the protests. 91 Given Egypts strategic importance, such dithering, as contemporary critics often
termed it, might justifiably be praised as a sensible reluctance to run out ahead of events. 92 In its approach to Libya,
the administration seems similarly to have been guided more by the movement of events
on the ground than by any overarching plan, and to have retained a default instinct of reluctance throughout.
93 The decision to intervene directly with air power was made only after it became clear that anti-Qadhafi rebels were in
imminent danger of total defeat in their last redoubt of Benghazi, after which bloody reprisals by the government against disloyal
citizens could be expected. In a major presidential address to the American people regarding operations in Libya, a chief priority
was to reassure them as to the limits of the operation. The President insisted that his decisions had been consistent with the
pledge that I made to the American people at the outset that Americas role would be limited; that we would not put ground
troops into Libya; that we would focus our unique capabilities on the front end of the operation and that we would transfer
responsibility to our allies and partners. Once the first wave of bombing was complete, he explained, the United States would
retreat to a supporting role, with the transfer of responsibility to others ensuring that the risk and cost of this operationto our
military and to American taxpayerswill be reduced significantly. Although it was right and necessary for
the US to intervene, he said, there would be no question of using American resources on the

ground to achieve regime change or nation-building . To be blunt, he observed, we went down that
road in Iraq That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya. His vision of
leadership was one whereby the US reserved the right to use unilateral military force to
defend our people, our homeland, our allies and our core interests, but in cases where our safety is not
directly threatened, but our interests and our values are the burden of action should not be
Americas alone. Real leadership, he argued, creates the conditions and coalitions for
others to step up as well; to work with allies and partners so that they bear their share of the burden and pay their share
of the costs. 94 On the very same day that Obama outlined his vision for American and western leadership in the defence of
liberal values at Westminster in May 2011, he also made remarks at a press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron that
underlined the limits of what America would contribute to the campaign in Libya, making it apparent that the high-flown ideals of
Westminster Hall would be closely circumscribed in their implementation in practice. 95 It was explications such as these of
the meaning of American leadership in the new era that inspired the unfortunate phrase
leading from behind. 96 Thus the chief message emanating from the Libyan intervention
was not, in fact, broad endorsement of liberal intervention as a general principle. Rather, one of the
clearest signals from the President was that nothing resembling the resourceintensive operation in Iraq (or perhaps, by
implication, Afghanistan) could or should ever be attempted again. Captain of a shrinking ship As noted in the opening
passages of this article, the narratives of Americas decline and Obamas restraint are distinct but
alsocrucially connected . Facing this incipient period of decline, Americas leaders
may walk one of two paths . Either the nation can come to terms with the reality
of the process that is under way and seek to finesse it in the smoothest way possible. Or it
can rage against the dying of the light , refusing to accept the waning
of its primacy . President Obamas approach, defined by restraint and awareness of
limits , makes him ideologically and temperamentally well suited to the former course
in a way that, to cite one example, his predecessor was not. He is, in short, a good president to
inaugurate an era of managed decline . Those who vocally demand that the President
act more boldly are not merely criticizing him; in suggesting that he is weak and that a tougher policy is needed, they
implicitly suppose that the resources will be available to support such a course. In doing so
they set their faces against the reality of the coming American decline . 97 If the United
States can embrace the spirit of managed decline, then this will clear the way for a judicious
retrenchment , trimming ambitions in line with the fact that the nation can no longer act
on the global stage with the wide latitude once afforded by its superior power . As part of such
a project, it can, as those who seek to qualify the decline thesis have suggested, use the significant resources still
at its disposal to smooth the edges of its loss of relative power, preserving influence to the
maximum extent possible through whatever legacy of norms and institutions is bequeathed
by its primacy. The alternative course involves the initiation or escalation
of conflictual scenarios for which the United States increasingly lacks the resources
to cater: provocation of a military conclusion to the impasse with Iran ; deliberate escalation of
strategic rivalry with China in East Asia; commitment to continuing the campaign in
Afghanistan for another decade; a costly effort to consistently apply principles of military
interventionism, regime change and democracy promotion in response to events in
North Africa . President Obama does not by any means represent a radical break with the traditions of American
foreign policy in the modern era. Examination of his major foreign policy pronouncements reveals that he remains within the
mainstream of the American discourse on foreign policy. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in December 2009 he made
it clear, not for the first time, that he is no pacifist, spelling out his view that the instruments of war do have a role to play in
preserving the peace, and that the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with
the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. 98 In his Cairo speech in June the same year, even as he sought distance
from his predecessor with the proclamation that no system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other,
he also endorsed with only slight qualification the liberal universalist view of civil liberties as transcendent human rights. I
have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things, he declared. The ability to speak your mind and have a say in
how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and
doesnt steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas. 99 His Westminster speech
repeated these sentiments. Evidently this is not a president who wishes to break signally with the
mainstream, either by advocating a radical shrinking of Americas military strength as a
good in itself or by disavowing liberal universalist global visions, as some genuine dissidents from
the prevailing foreign policy discourse would wish. 100 No doubt sensibly, given the likely political reaction at home, it is
inconceivable that he would explicitly declare his strategy to be one of managed American decline. Nevertheless, this
is
a president who, within the confines of the mainstream, embraces caution and restraint
to the greatest extent that one could hope for without an epochal paradigm shift in the
intellectual framework of American foreign policy-making. 101 In contemplating the diminished and diminishing weight of the
United States upon the scales of global power, it is important not to conflate the question of what will be with that of what we
might prefer. It may well be, as critics of the decline thesis sometimes observe, that the prospect of increased global power for a
state such as China should not, on reflection, fill any westerner with glee, whatever reservations one may have held regarding US
primacy. It is also important not to be unduly deterministic in projecting the consequences of American decline. It may
be a process that unfolds gradually and peacefully, resulting in a new order that
functions with peace and stability even in the absence of American primacy.
Alternatively, it may result in conflict, if the U nited S tates clashes with
rising powers as it refuses to relinquish the prerogatives of the
hegemon , or continues to be drawn into wars with middle powers or on the periphery in spite
of its shrinking capacity to afford them. Which outcome occurs will depend on more than the
choices of America alone. But the likelihood that the United States can preserve its prosperity and
influence and see its hegemony leave a positive legacy rather than go down
thrashing its limbs about destructively will be greatly increased if it has political leaders
disposed to minimize conflict and consider American power a scarce resourcein short,
leaders who can master the art of declining politely. At present it seems it is fortunate
enough to have a president who fits the bill .

New proliferators will build small arsenals which are

uniquely stable

Seng 98
(Jordan, PhD Candidate in Pol. Sci. U. Chicago, Dissertation, Strategy for
Pandora's Children: Stable Nuclear Proliferation Among Minor States, p. 203-
206)//TR

The nuclear
However, this "state of affairs" is not as dangerous as it might seem.
arsenals of limited nuclear proliferators will be small and,
consequently, the command and control organizations that manage chose arsenals will
be small as well. The small arsenals of limited nuclear proliferators will mitigate
against many of the dangers of the highly delegative, 'non-
centralized' launch procedures Third World states are likely to use. This will
happen in two main ways. First, only a small number of people need be
involved in Third World command and control. The superpowers had
tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and thousands of nuclear weapons personnel in a
variety of deployments organized around numerous nuclear delivery platforms. A state that
has, say, fifty nuclear weapons needs at most fifty launch operators and only a handful of
group commanders. This has both quantitative and qualitative repercussions.
Quantitatively, the very small number of people 'in the loop'
greatly diminishes the statistical probability that accidents or
human error will result in inappropriate nuclear launches. All else
being equal, the chances of finding some guard asleep at some post increases with the
number of guards and posts one has to cover. Qualitatively, small numbers
makes it possible to centrally train operators, to screen and
choose them with exceeding care, 7 and to keep each of them
in direct contact with central authorities in times of crises. With
very small control communities, there is no need for intermediary commanders. Important
information and instructions can get out quickly and directly. Quality control of launch
operators and operations is easier. In some part, at least, Third World states can compensate
for their lack of sophisticated use-control technology with a more controlled selection of, and
more extensive communication with, human operators. Secondly, and relatedly,
Third World proliferators will not need to rely on cumbersome
standard operating procedures to manage and launch their
nuclear weapons. This is because the number of weapons will be so small, and also
because the arsenals will be very simple in composition. Third World stares simply
will not have that many weapons to keep track of. Third World states
will not have the great variety of delivery platforms that the superpowers had (various ballistic
missiles, cruise missiles, long range bombers, fighter bombers, missile submarines, nuclear
armed ships, nuclear mortars, etc., etc.), or the great number and variety of basing options,
and they will not employ the complicated strategies of international basing that the
superpowers used. The small and simple arsenals of Third World proliferators will not require
highly complex systems to coordinate nuclear activities. This creates two specific
organizational advantages. One, small organizations, even if
they do rely to some extent of standard operating procedures,
can be flexible in times of crisis. As we have discussed, the essential problem
of standard operating procedures in nuclear launch processes is that the full range if possible
strategic developments cannot be predicted and specified before the fact, and thus responses
to them cannot be standardized fully. An unexpected event can lead to 'mismatched' and
inappropriate organizational reactions. In complex and extensive command and control
organizations, standard operating procedures coordinate great numbers of people at numerous
levels of command structure in a great multiplicity of places. If an unexpected event triggers
operating procedures leading to what would be an inappropriate nuclear launch, it would be
very difficult for central commanders to get the word out' to everyone involved. The
coordination needed to stop launch activity would be at least as complicated as the
coordination needed to initiate it, and, depending on the speed of launch processes, there may
be less time to accomplish it. However, the small numbers of people
involved in nuclear launches and the simplicity of arsenals will
make it far easier for Third World leaders to 'get the word out'
and reverse launch procedures if necessary. Again, so few will be the
numbers of weapons that all launch operators could be contacted directly by central leaders.
The programmed triggers of standard operating procedures can be passed over in favor of
unscripted, flexible responses based on a limited number of human-to-human communications
and confirmations. Two, the smallness and simplicity of Third World
command and control organizations will make it easier for
leaders to keep track of everything that is going on at any
given moment. One of the great dangers of complex
organizational procedures is that once one organizational
event is triggeredonce an alarm is sounded and a programmed response is made
other branches of the organization are likely to be affected as
well. This is what Charles Perrow refers to as interactive complexity, 8 and it has been a
mainstay in organizational critiques of nuclear command and control s ystems.9 The more
complex the organization is, the more likely these secondary effects are, and the less likely
they are to be foreseen, noticed, and well-managed. So, for instance, an American commander
that gives the order to scramble nuclear bombers over the U.S. as a defensive measure may
find that he has unwittingly given the order to scramble bombers in Europe as well. A recall
order to the American bombers may overlook the European theater, and nuclear misuse could
result. However, when numbers of nuclear weapons can be
measured in the dozens rather than the hundreds or thousands, and when
deployment of those weapons does not involve multiple theaters and forward based delivery
vehicles of numerous types, tight coupling is unlikely to cause
unforeseen and unnoticeable organizational events. Other things
being equal, it is just a lot easier to know all of what is going on. In short, while Third World
states may nor have the electronic use-control devices that help ensure that peripheral
commanders do nor 'get out of control,' they have other advantages that make the challenge
of centralized control easier than it was for the superpowers. The small numbers of
personnel and organizational simplicity of launch
bureaucracies means that even if a few more people have their
fingers on the button than in the case of the superpowers,
there will be less of a chance that weapons will be launched
without a definite, informed and unambiguous decision to
press that button.

Deterrence failure is very unlikely and conventional

war is worse. Proliferation saves far more lives than it
costs.

Preston 7
(Thomas, Associate Prof. IRWashington State U. and Faculty Research Associate
Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, From Lambs to Lions: Future Security
relationships in a World of Biological and Nuclear Weapons, p. 31-32)

1.) The Cost of Deterrence Failure Is Too Great Advocates of deterrence seldom
take the position that it will always work or that it cannot fail.
Rather, they take the position that if one can achieve the requisite elements
required to achieve a stable deterrent relationship between parties, it vastly
decreases the chances of miscalculation and resorting to war
even in contexts where it might otherwise be expected to
occur (George and Smoke 1974; Harvey 1997a; Powell 1990, 2003; Goldstein 2000).
Unfortunately, critics of deterrence take the understandable, if unrealistic,
position that if deterrence cannot be 100 percent effective
under all circumstances, then it is an unsound strategic
approach for states to rely upon, especially considering the immense destructiveness of
nuclear weapons. Feaver (1993, 162), for example, criticizes reliance on nuclear deterrence
because it can fail and that rational deterrence theory can only predict that peace should occur
most of the time (e.g., Lebow and Stein 1989). Yet, were we to apply this
standard of perfection to most other policy approaches
concerning security matters whether it be arms control or
proliferation regime efforts, military procurement policies, alliance
formation strategies, diplomacy, or sanctions none could be argued
with any more certainty to completely remove the threat of equally
devastating wars either. Indeed, one could easily make the argument that these
alternative means have shown themselves historically to be far
less effective than nuclear arms in preventing wars. Certainly, the
twentieth century was replete with examples of devastating
conventional conflicts which were not deterred through
nonnuclear measures. Although the potential costs of a nuclear
exchange between small states would indeed cause a frightful
loss of life, it would be no more costly (and likely far less so) than
large-scale conventional conflicts have been for combatants.
Moreover, if nuclear deterrence raises the potential costs of war
high enough for policy makers to want to avoid (rather than risk)
conflict, it is just as legitimate (if not more so) for optimists to argue
in favor of nuclear deterrence in terms of the lives saved
through the avoidance of far more likely recourses to
conventional wars, as it is for pessimists to warn of the potential costs of deterrence
failure. And, while some accounts describing the "immense weaknesses" of deterrence theory
(Lebow and Stein 1989, 1990) would lead one to believe deterrence was almost impossible to
either obtain or maintain, since 1945 there has not been one single historical instance of
nuclear deterrence failure (especially when this notion is limited to threats to key central state
interests like survival, and not to minor probing of peripheral interests). Moreover, the
actual costs of twentieth-century conventional conflicts have
been staggeringly immense, especially when compared to the
actual costs of nuclear conflicts (for example, 210,000 fatalities in
the combined 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings
compared to 62 million killed overall during World War II, over
three million dead in both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, etc.) (McKinzie et al. 2001, 28).3
Further, as Gray (1999, 158-59) observes, "it is improbable that policymakers
anywhere need to be educated as to the extraordinary
qualities and quantities of nuclear armaments." Indeed, the high
costs and uncontestable, immense levels of destruction that would
be caused by nuclear weapons have been shown historically to be facts that have
not only been readily apparent and salient to a wide range of policy makers, but ones that
have clearly been demonstrated to moderate extreme policy or
risk-taking behavior (Blight 1992; Preston 2001) Could it go wrong? Of course. There
is always that potential with human beings in the loop. Nevertheless, it has also been shown to
be effective at moderating policy maker behavior and introducing an element of constraint into
situations that otherwise would likely have resulted in war (Hagerty 1998).

No chance of miscalc or accidentsthis evidence

answers all their arguments and is way better

Quinlan 9
(Sir Michael Quinlan, Former Permanent Under-Secretary of State UK Ministry of
Defense, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects, p. 63-
69, The book reflects the author's experience across more than forty years in
assessing and forming policy about nuclear weapons, mostly at senior levels close
to the centre both of British governmental decision-making and of NATO's
development of plans and deployments, with much interaction also with comparable
levels of United States activity in the Pentagon and the State department) //TR

Even if initial nuclear use did not quickly end the fighting, the supposition of inexorable
momentum in a developing exchange, with each side rushing to overreaction amid
confusion and uncertainty, is implausible. It fails to consider
what the situation of the decision-makers would really be.
Neither side could want escalation. Both would be appalled at
what was going on. Both would be desperately looking for
signs that the other was ready to call a halt. Both, given the
capacity for evasion or concealment which drive modern
delivery platforms and vehicles can possess, could have in
reserve significant forces invulnerable enough not to entail
use-or-lose pressures. (It may be more open to question, as noted earlier, whether
newer nuclear weapon possessors can be immediately in that position; but it is within reach of
any substantial state with advanced technological capabilities and attaining it is certain to be a
high priority in the development of forces.) As a result, neither side can have any
predisposition to suppose, in an ambiguous situation of fearful
risk, that the right course when in doubt is to go on copiously
launching weapons. And none of this analysis rests on any presumption of highly
subtle or pre-concerted rationality. The rationality required is plain. The argument is reinforced
if we consider the possible reasoning of an aggressor at a more dispassionate level. Any
substantial nuclear armoury can inflict destruction outweighing any possible prize that
aggression could hope to seize. A state attacking the possessor of such an armoury must
therefore be doing so (once given that it cannot count upon destroying the armoury pre-
emptively) on a judgment that the possessor would be found lacking in the will to use it. If the
attacker possessor used nuclear weapons, whether first or in response to the aggressors own
first use, this judgment would begin to look dangerously precarious. There must be at least a
substantial probability of the aggressor leaders concluding that their initial judgment had been
mistakenthat the risks were after all greater than whatever prize they had been seeking, and
that for their own countrys survival they must call off the aggression. Deterrence planning
such as that of NATO was directed in the first place to preventing the initial misjudgment and
in the second, if it were nevertheless made, to compelling such a reappraisal. The former aim
had to have primacy, because it could not be taken for granted that the latter was certain to
work. But there was no ground for assuming in advance, for all possible scenarios, that the
chance of its working must be negligible. An aggressor state would itself be at huge risk if
nuclear war developed, as its leaders would know. It may be argued that a policy which
abandons hope of physically defeating the enemy and simply hopes to get him to desist is pure
gamble, a matter of who blinks first; and that the political and moral nature of most likely
aggressors, almost ex hypothesi, makes them less likely to blink. One response to this is to ask
what is the alternativeit can be only surrender. But a more hopeful answer lies in the fact
that the criticism is posed in a political vacuum. Real-life conflict would have a political context.
The context which concerned NATO during the Cold War, for example, was one of defending
vital interests against a postulated aggressor whose own vital interests would not be engaged
or would be less engaged. Certainty is not possible, but a clear asymmetry of vital interest is a
legitimate basis for expecting an asymmetry, credible to both sides, of resolve in conflict. That
places upon statesmen, as page 23 has noted, the key task in deterrence of building up in
advance a clear and shared grasp of where limits lie. That was plainly achieved in cold-war
Europe. If vital interests have been defused in a way that is clear, and also clearly not
overlapping or incompatible with those of the adversary; a credible basis has been laid for the
likelihood of greater resolve in resistance. It was also sometimes suggested by critics that
whatever might be indicated by theoretical discussion of political will and interests, the military
environment of nuclear warfare particularly difficulties of communication and controlwould
drive escalation with overwhelming probability to the limit. But it is obscure why matters
should be regarded as inevitably so for every possible level and setting of action. Even if the
history of war suggested (as it scarcely does) that military decision-makers are mostly apt to
work on the principle When in doubt, lash out, the nuclear revolution creates an utterly new
situation. The pervasive reality, always plain to both sides during the cold war, is if this goes
on to the end, we are all ruined. Given that inexorable escalation would mean catastrophe for
both, it would be perverse to suppose them permanently incapable of framing arrangements
which avoid it. As page 16 has noted, NATO gave its military commanders no widespread
delegated authority, in peace or war, to launch nuclear weapons without specific political
direction. Many types of weapon moreover had physical
safeguards such as PALS incorporated to reinforce
organizational ones. There were multiple communication and
control systems for passing information, orders, and prohibitions. Such
systems could not be totally guaranteed against disruption if at a fairly intense level at
strategic exchangewhich was only one of many possible levels of conflict an adversary
judged it to be in his interest to weaken political control. It was far from clear why he
necessarily should so judge. Even then, however, it remained possible to operate on a general
tail-safe presumption: no authorization, no use. That was the basis on which NATO operated. If
it is feared that the arrangements which a nuclear-weapon possessor has in place do not meet
such standards in some respects, the logical course is to continue to improve them rather than
to assume escalation to be certain and uncontrollable, with all the enormous inferences that
would have to flow from such an assumption. The likelihood of escalation can never be 100 per
cent, and never zero. Where between those two extremes it may lie can never be precisely
calculable in advance; and even were it so calculable, it would not be uniquely fixedit would
stand to vary hugely with circumstances. That there should be any risk at all of escalation to
widespread nuclear war must be deeply disturbing, and decision-makers would always have to
weigh it most anxiously. But a pair of key truths about it need to be recognized. The first is that
the risk of escalation to large-scale nuclear war is inescapably present in any significant armed
conflict between nuclear-capable powers, whoever may have started the conflict and whoever
may first have used any particular category of weapon. The initiator of the conflict will always
have physically available to him options for applying more force if he meets effective
resistance. If the risk of escalation, whatever its degree of probability, is to be regarded as
absolutely unacceptable, the necessary inference is that a state attacked by a substantial
nuclear power must forgo military resistance. It must surrender, even if it has a nuclear armory
of its own. But the companion truth is that, as page 47 has noted, the risk of escalation is an
inescapable burden also upon the aggressor. The exploitation of that burden is the crucial
route, if conflict does break out, for managing it to a tolerable outcomethe only route,
indeed, intermediate between surrender and holocaust, and so the necessary basis for
deterrence beforehand. The working nut of plans to exploit escalation risk most effectively in
deterring potential aggression entails further and complex issues. It is for example plainly
desirable, wherever geography, politics, and available resources so permit without triggering
arms races, to make provisions and dispositions that are likely to place the onus of making the
bigger and more evidently dangerous steps in escalation upon the aggressor who wishes to
maintain his attack, rather than upon the defender. The customary shorthand fur this desirable
posture used to be escalation dominance.) These issues are not further discussed here. But
addressing them needs to start from acknowledgement that there are in any event no
certainties or absolutes available, no options guaranteed to be risk-free and cost-free.
Deterrence is not possible without escalation risk; and its presence can point to no automatic
policy conclusion save for those who espouse outright pacifism and accept its consequences.
Accident and Miscalculation Ensuring the safety and security of nuclear weapons plainly needs
to be taken most seriously. Detailed information is understandably not published, but such
direct evidence as there is suggests that it always has been so taken in every possessor state,
with the inevitable occasional failures to follow strict procedures dealt with rigorously. Critics
have nevertheless from time to time argued that the possibility of accident involving nuclear
weapons is so substantial that it must weigh heavily in the entire evaluation of whether war-
prevention structures entailing their existence should be tolerated at all. Two sorts of scenario
are usually in question. The first is that of a single grave event involving an unintended nuclear
explosiona technical disaster at a storage site, for example, or the accidental or
unauthorized launch of a delivery system with a live nuclear warhead. The second is that of
some eventperhaps such an explosion or launch, or some other mishap such as malfunction
or misinterpretation of radar signals or computer systemsinitiating a sequence of response
and counter-response that culminated in a nuclear exchange which no one had truly intended.
No event that is physically possible can be said to be of absolutely zero probability (just as at
an opposite extremer it is absurd to claim, as has been heard from distinguished figures, that
nuclear-weapon use can be guaranteed to happen within some finite future span despite not
having happened for over sixty years.) But human affairs cannot be managed to the standard
of either zero or total probability. We have to assess levels between those theoretical limits and
weigh the reality and implications against other factors, in security planning as in everyday life
There have certainly been, across the decades since 1945,
many known accidents involving nuclear weapons, from transporters skidding off
roads to bomber aircraft crashing with or accidentally dropping the weapons they carried (in
past days when such carriage was a frequent feature of readiness arrangements it no longer
is). A few of these accidents may have released into the nearby environment highly toxic
material. None however has entailed a nuclear detonation. Some
commentators suggest that this reflects bizarrely good fortune amid such massive activity and
deployment over so many years. A more rational deduction from the facts
of this long experience would however be that the probability
of any accident triggering a nuclear explosion is extremely
low. It might be further nested that the mechanisms needed to
set of such an explosion are technically demanding, and that in
a large number of ways the past sixty years have seen
extensive improvements in safety arrangements for both the
design and the handling of weapons. It is undoubtedly possible to see
respects in which, after the cold war, some of the factors bearing upon risk may be new or
more adverse; but some are now plainly less so. The years which the world has
come through entirely without accidental or unauthorized
detonation have included early decades in which knowledge
was sketchier, precautions were less developed, and weapon
designs were less ultra-safe than they later became, as well as substantial
periods in which weapon numbers were larger, deployments immure widespread arid diverse,
movements more frequent, and several aspects of doctrine and readiness arrangements more
tense. Similar considerations apply to the hypothesis of nuclear war being mistakenly triggered
by false alarm. Critics again point to the fact, as it is understood, of numerous occasions when
initial steps in alert sequences for US nuclear forces were embarked upon, or at least called
for, by indicators mistaken or misconstrued. In none of these instances, it is
accepted, did matters get at all near to nuclear launch
extraordinary good fortune again, critics have suggested. But the rival and more
logical inference from hundreds of events stretching over sixty
years of experience presents itself once more: that the
probability of initial misinterpretation leading far towards
mistaken launch is remote. Precisely because any nuclear weapon
processor recognizes the vast gravity of any launch, release
sequences have many steps, and human decision is repeatedly
interposed as well as capping the sequences. To convey that because a
first step was prompted the world somehow came close to accidental nuclear war is wild
hyperbole, rather like asserting, when a tennis champion has lost his opening service game,
that he was nearly beaten in straight sets. History anyway scarcely offers any
ready example of major war started by accident even before the
nuclear revolution imposed an order-of-magnitude increase of caution. In was occasion
conjectured that nuclear war might be triggered by the real but accidental or unauthorized
launch of a strategic nuclear-weapon delivery system in the direction of a potential adversary.
No such launch is known to have occurred in over sixty years.
The probability of it is therefore very low. But even if it did
happen, the further hypothesis of it initiating a general
nuclear exchange is far-fetched. It fails to consider the real situation of
decision-makers, as pages 63-4 have brought out. The notion that cosmic holocaust might be
mistakenly precipitated in this way belongs to science fiction.

No domino effect

Alagappa 9
(Distinguished Senior Fellow, East-West Center. PhD, IR, Tufts (Muthiah, The long
shadow: nuclear weapons and security in 21st century Asia, ed. Alagappa, 521-
2)//TR

It will be useful at this juncture to address more directly the set of instability
arguments advanced by certain policy makers and scholars: the domino effect of new
nuclear weapon states, the probability of preventive action against new nuclear
weapon states, and the compulsion of these states to use their small arsenals early for fear of
losing them in a preventive or preemptive strike by a stronger nuclear adversary. On the
India's and Pakistan's nuclear weapon programs have not
domino effect,
fueled new programs in South Asia or beyond. Iran's quest for nuclear
weapons is not a reaction to the Indian or Pakistani programs. It is
grounded in that country's security concerns about the United States and Tehran's regional
The North Korean test has evoked mixed reactions in
aspirations.
Northeast Asia. Tokyo is certainly concerned; its reaction, though, has not been to initiate
its own nuclear weapon program but to reaffirm and strengthen the American extended
it is
deterrence commitment to Japan. Even if the U.S. Japan security treaty were to weaken,
not certain that Japan would embark on a nuclear weapon program.
Likewise, South Korea has sought reaffirmation of the American extended
deterrence commitment, but has firmly held to its nonnuclear posture. Without dramatic
change in its political, economic, and security circumstances, South Korea is highly unlikely to
embark on a covert (or overt) nuclear weapon program as it did in the 1970s. South Korea
could still become a nuclear weapon state by inheriting the nuclear weapons of North Korea
should the Kim Jong Il regime collapse. Whether it retains or gives up that capability will hinge
The North Korean nuclear test has
on the security circumstances of a unified Korea.
not spurred Taiwan or Mongolia to develop nuclear weapon capability.
The point is that each country's decision to embark on and sustain nuclear
weapon programs is contingent on its particular security and other
circumstances. Though appealing, the domino theory is not
predictive; often it is employed to justify policy on the basis of alarmist predictions. The
loss of South Vietnam, for example, did not lead to the predicted domino
effect in Southeast Asia. In fact the so-called dominos became drivers of a vibrant
Southeast Asia and brought about a fundamental transformation in that subregion (Lord 1993,
In the nuclear arena, the nuclear programs of China, India,
1996).
and Pakistan were part of a security chain reaction, not
mechanically falling dominos. However, as observed earlier the Indian, Pakistani,
and North Korean nuclear tests have thus far not had the domino effect predicted by alarmist
Great caution should be exercised in
analysts and policy makers.
accepting at face value the sensational predictions of
individuals who have a vested interest in accentuating the
dangers of nuclear proliferation. Such analysts are now focused on the
dangers of a nuclear Iran. A nuclear Iran may or may not have destabilizing effects. Such
claims must be assessed on the basis of an objective reading of the drivers of national and
regional security in Iran and the Middle East.

This means we control prolif offense theres no risk

of the floodgates opening, and prolif is most stable if
it happens naturally and slowly

Waltz 3
(Kenneth Waltz, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Adjunct
Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University, 2003, The Spread of Nuclear
Weapons: A Debate Renewed, p. 42-43)//TR

Some have feared that weakening opposition to the spread of

nuclear weapons will lead numerous states to obtain them
because it may seem that everyone is doing it. Why should we think that if we relax,
Both the United States
numerous states will begin to make nuclear weapons?
and the Soviet Union were relaxed in the past, and those effects
did not follow. The Soviet Union initially supported Chinas nuclear program. The United
States helped both Britain and France to produce nuclear weapons. By 1968 the CIA had
informed President Johnson of the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons, and in July of 1970,
Richard Helms, director of the CIA, gave this information to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. These and later disclosures were not followed by censure of Israel or by reductions
of economic assistance. And in September of 1980, the executive branch, against the will of
the House of Representatives but with the approval of the Senate, continued to do nuclear
business with India despite its explosion of a nuclear device and despite its unwillingness to
sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Many more countries can make
nuclear weapons than do. One can believe that American opposition to nuclear
arming stays the deluge only by overlooking the complications of international life. Any state
has to examine many conditions before deciding whether or not to develop nuclear weapons.
Our opposition is only one factor and is not likely to be the decisive one. Many states feel fairly
secure living with their neighbors. Why should they want nuclear weapons? Some countries,
feeling threatened, have found security through their own strenuous efforts and through
arrangements made with others. South Korea is an outstanding example. Many officials believe
that South Korea would lose more in terms of American support if it acquired nuclear weapons
than it would gain by having them. Further, on occasion we might slow the spread of nuclear
weapons by not opposing the nuclear weapons programs of some countries. When we opposed
Pakistans nuclear program, we were saying that we disapprove of countries developing
nuclear weapons no matter what their neighbors do. The gradual spread of
nuclear weapons has not opened the nuclear floodgates.
Nations attend to their security in the ways they think best. The
fact that so many more countries can make nuclear weapons than do says more about the
hesitation of countries to enter the nuclear military business than about the effectiveness of
American nonproliferation policy. We should suit our policy to individual
cases, sometimes bringing pressure against a country moving toward nuclear weapons
capability and sometimes quietly acquiescing: No one policy is right in all cases. We should ask
what the interests of other countries require before putting pressure on them. Some countries
are likely to suffer more in cost and pain if they remain conventional states than if they
The measured spread of nuclear weapons does
become nuclear ones.
not run against our interests and can increase the security of
some states at a price they can afford to pay.
Asia DAs
 AT: China Taiwan War
1 No Taiwan War economics

Thomas Barnett, 2004, a former Professor and senior

military analyst at the U.S. Naval War College, and a top
advisor to SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, 2004, ("The
Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace In The Twenty-First
Century," Why China will never Risk War with the US over
Taiwan... http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-
news/1361719/posts accessed 7/3/2011)//mc-cl

(the following excerpt shows why war in the Taiwan strait is highly improbable if
not impossible): "Three key pillars control the vast bulk of long-term investments.
Not surprisingly, these three constitute the Old Core of Globalization II: the United States, the
(now) European Union, and Japan. This relatively small slice of the global population
(approximately one-eighth) controls over four-fifths of the money. If you want to join the Core, you must be
That fundamental reality of the global
able to access that money-plain and simple.
economy explains why we won't be going to war with China. The
Pentagon can plan for it all it wants, but it does so purely within the
sterile logic of war, and not with and logical reference to the larger
flows of globalization. Simply put, those flows continue to reshape the international security
environment that the Defense Department often imagines it manages all by its lonesome. Let me paint
you the same basic picture I love to draw each time I give my brief to Pentagon strategists and, by doing
so, give you a realistic sense of what China would be up against if it chose to challenge the United States-
led globalization process wing military means. China has to double its energy
consumption in a generation if all the growth it is planning is actually going to occur. We
know where the Chinese have to go for the energy: Russia, Central Asia, and the Gulf. That's a lot of new
friends to make and one significant past enemy to romance (Moscow). But Beijing will pull it off, because
they have no choice. To make all that energy happen, China has to build an amazing amount of
infrastructure to import it, process it, generate the needed energy products, and deliver it to buildings and
wehicles all over the country (though mostly along the coast). That infrastructure will cost a lot, and it's
common when talking to development experts to hear the "T" word-as in "trillions"-casually tossed around.
Where is China going to go for all that money? Certainly it will tap its biggest trade
partner, Japan, for all it can. But when it really wants to tap the big sources of money,
there are only two financial communities that can handle that sort of a
request: Wall Street and the European Union. So when you add it all up, for
China to get its way on development, it needs to be friends with the
Americans, the Europeans, the Muslims, and the Slavs. Doesn't exactly leave a lot of
civilizations to clash with, does it

2 Peaceful reunification now zero risk of conflict

Robert S. Ross, 2006, Professor of Political Science at

Boston College and an Associate at the John King Fairbank
Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University,
March/April 2006, (Foreign Affairs, Taiwan's Fading
Independence Movement, p. Lexis)//mc-cl
Political developments in Taiwan over the past year have effectively ended the
independence movement there. What had been a major source of regional
instability and the most likely source of a great-power war anywhere in the world --
has become increasingly irrelevant. The peaceful transformation of
relations between China and Taiwan will help stabilize eastern Asia, reduce
the likelihood of conflict between China and the U nited S tates, and present an
opportunity for Beijing, Taipei, and Washington to adjust their defense
postures -- all without hurting Taiwan's security or threatening U.S. interests.

The drive to clinically observe and rationalize China

creates an unreflexive self/other dichotomy that
legitimates coercion

Chengxin Pan, June-July 2004, The China threat in American self-imagination:

the discursive construction of other as power politics, Alternatives, Vol 29 Issue 3, p.
infotrac

While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over what China precisely is, their debates
have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist
epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose
reality can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example,
after expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton,
former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that it is time to step back
and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold
for the rest of the world. (2) Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of
study as essentially something we can stand back from and observe with clinical
detachment. (3) Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China
scholars merely serve as disinterested observers and that their studies of China are neutral, passive
descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an
opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of what the United
States is. That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and
beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the
purpose of this article to venture my own observation of where China is today, nor to join the
containment versus engagement debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of
the China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars
in the mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a
particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the China threat literature. More
specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are
always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers /mainstream China specialists see
themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for
example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent,
preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of
normative, meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China
relations and helps transform the China threat into social reality. In other words, it
is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the China threat problem it
purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two
interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent
in the China threat literaturethemes that have been overridden and rendered
largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions. These themes are of course
nothing new nor peculiar to the China threat literature. They have been identified elsewhere by critics of
some conventional fields of study such as ethnography, anthropology, oriental studies, political science,
and international relations. (4) Yet, so far, the China field in the West in general and the U.S.
China threat literature in particular have shown remarkable resistance to
systematic critical reflection on both their normative status as discursive practice and
their enormous practical implications for international politics. (5) It is in this context
that this article seeks to make a contribution.

The claim to know Chinas reaction to the plan is a flawed

positivist epistemology to make China predictable,
making a China threat cemergance the inevitable
outgrowth of orientalization
Chengxin Pan 4 prof school of international and political studies, Deakin
U. PhD in pol sci and IR, The "China threat" in American self-imagination: the
discursive construction of other as power politics, 1 June 2004,
http://www.articlearchives.com/asia/northern-asia-china/796470-1.html
Having examined how the "China threat" literature is enabled by and serves the purpose of a particular U.S. self-construction, I want to
literature represents a discursive construction of other,
turn now to the issue of how this
instead of an "objective" account of Chinese reality. This, I argue, has less to do with its portrayal of
China as a threat per se than with its essentialization and totalization of China as an externally knowable object, independent of
historically contingent contexts or dynamic international interactions. In this sense, the discursive construction of
China as a threatening other cannot be detached from (neo)realism, a positivist,
ahistorical framework of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless
interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo)realism
is not a transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on the
modernist Western identity, which, in the quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the
sovereign territorial nation-state. This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the
constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity , disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as
(neo)realists argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the
other," (45) and "All other states are potential threats." (46) In order to survive in such a system,
states inevitably pursue power or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B. J.
Walker calls "a specific historical articulation of relations of universality/particularity and self/Other." (47) The (neo)realist
paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China
studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new crop of
China experts "are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies
or international relations than China itself." (48) As a result, for those experts to know
China is nothing more or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it,
often by asking only a few questions such as how China will "behave" in a
strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global balance of power,
with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities. As Thomas J.
Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most prevalent component of the [China
threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military power compared with that of the United States and other East Asian
regional powers." (49) Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute other and a
threat thanks to this (neo)realist prism. The (neo)realist emphasis on survival
and security in international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. self-
imagination, because for the United States to define itself as the indispensable
nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James Chace and
Caleb Carr note, "for over two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been
viewed as central to an effective American foreign policy." (50) And this self-identification in
turn leads to the definition of not only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as threats. For example,
former U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability. The enemy is instability."
(51) Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who
knows what nervousness will result?" (52) Thus understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now
automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and Munro believe
that "China's political unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a state
of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a source of danger. (53) In like manner, Richard
Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of
relief? Not entirely.... Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot
guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of economic consequences.... U.S. efforts to create a
stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under certain circumstances, but certainly not all. (54) The upshot,
therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty for peace, it must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat. In
the same way, a multitude of other unpredictable factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking,
environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been
labeled as "threats" to U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold War environment, China represents a kind of
uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more democratic, and more just world
order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China," (55) argues Samuel Kim. And such an archetypical
uncertainty is crucial to the enterprise of U.S. self-construction, because it seems that only an uncertainty with potentially global
consequences such as China could justify U.S. indispensability or its continued world dominance. In this sense, Bruce Cumings aptly
suggested in 1996 that China (as a threat) was basically "a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has lost its bearings
It
and that requires a formidable 'renegade state' to define its mission (Islam is rather vague, and Iran lacks necessary weights)." (56)
is mainly on the basis of this self-fashioning that many U.S. scholars have for
long claimed their "expertise" on China. For example, from his observation (presumably on Western TV
networks) of the Chinese protest against the U.S. bombing of their embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, Robert Kagan is
confident enough to speak on behalf of the whole Chinese people, claiming
that he knows "the fact" of "what [China] really thinks about the United
States." That is, "they consider the United States an enemy--or, more precisely, the enemy....
How else can one interpret the Chinese government's response to the bombing?" he asks, rhetorically. (57) For Kagan, because the
Chinese "have no other information" than their government's propaganda, the protesters cannot rationally "know" the whole event as
"we" do. Thus, their anger must have been orchestrated, unreal, and hence need not be taken seriously. (58) Given that
Kagan heads the U.S. Leadership Project at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and is very much at the heart of redefining the United States as the benevolent global hegemon, his
confidence in speaking for the Chinese "other" is perhaps not surprising. In a similar vein, without producing
in-depth analysis, Bernstein and Munro invoke with great ease such all-encompassing notions as "the
Chinese tradition" and its "entire three-thousand-year history." (59) In particular, they repeatedly speak of what China's "real" goal is:
China
" is an unsatisfied and ambitious power whose goal is to dominate Asia .... China aims at achieving a kind of
hegemony.... China is so big and so naturally powerful that [we know] it will tend to dominate its region even if it does not intend to do
so as a matter of national policy." (60) Likewise, with the goal of absolute security for the United States in mind, Richard Betts and
Thomas Christensen argue : The truth is that China can pose a grave problem even if it does not become a military power
on the American model, does not intend to commit aggression, integrates into a global economy, and liberalizes politically. Similarly,
the United States could face a dangerous conflict over Taiwan even if it turns
out that Beijing lacks the capacity to conquer the island.... This is true because
of geography; because of America's reliance on alliances to project power; and
because of China's capacity to harm U.S. forces, U.S. regional allies, and the American homeland,
even while losing a war in the technical, military sense. (61) By now, it seems clear that neither China's
capabilities nor intentions really matter. Rather, almost by its mere geographical
existence, China has been qualified as an absolute strategic "other ," a
discursive construct from which it cannot escape. Because of this,
"China" in U.S. IR discourse has been objectified and deprived of its own
subjectivity and exists mainly in and for the U.S. self. Little wonder that for many U.S. China specialists,
China becomes merely a "national security concern" for the United States, with the "severe disproportion
between the keen attention to China as a security concern and the intractable neglect of China's [own] security concerns in the current
At this point, at issue here is no longer whether the "China threat" argument
debate." (62)
is true or false, but is rather its reflection of a shared positivist mentality
among mainstream China experts that they know China better than do the
Chinese themselves. (63) "We" alone can know for sure that they consider "us"
their enemy and thus pose a menace to "us." Such an account of China, in many ways, strongly
seems to resemble Orientalists' problematic distinction between the West
and the Orient. Like orientalism, the U.S. construction of the Chinese "other" does not require that China acknowledge the
validity of that dichotomous construction. Indeed, as Edward Said point out, " It is enough for 'us' to set up
these distinctions in our own minds; [and] 'they' become 'they'
accordingly." (64) It may be the case that there is nothing inherently wrong
with perceiving others through one's own subjective lens. Yet, what is problematic with
mainstream U.S. China watchers is that they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the
inherent fluidity of Chinese identity and subjectivity and try instead to fix its ambiguity as absolute difference
from "us," a kind of certainty that denotes nothing but otherness and threats. As a result, it becomes difficult to
find a legitimate space for alternative ways of understanding an inherently
volatile, amorphous China (65) or to recognize that China's future trajectory in global politics is contingent
essentially on how "we" in the United States and the West in general want to see it as well as on how the Chinese choose to shape it.
(66) Indeed, discourses of "us" and "them" are always closely linked to how "we" as "what we are" deal with "them" as "what they are"
in the practical realm. This is exactly how the discursive strategy of perceiving China as a threatening other should be understood, a
point addressed in the following section, which explores some of the practical dimension of this discursive strategy in the containment
perspectives and hegemonic ambitions of U.S. foreign policy.

Reject their fantasy proscribed onto China- otherwise US

containment policy makes war inevitable- thats
McClintock from the 1AC
Not only have Asian security predictions by the West been
consistently wrong, but the need to revise the framework
for these predictions has been told to just wait: this
promotes a broken system bent on constructing the Asian
theater as war prone

Kang 3 (David, [Professor of International Relations and

Business, Director of Korean Studies Institute,] Getting
Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks
International Security, Volume 27, Number 4, Spring
2003, pp. 57-85 MUSE //DF)

Following the end of the Cold War in 1991, some

scholars in the West began to
predict that Asia was ripe for rivalry.12 They based this prediction on the following
factors: wide disparities in the levels of economic and military power among nations in the region; their different
political systems, ranging from democratic to totalitarian; historical animosities; and the lack of international
institutions. Many scholars thus
envisaged a return of power politics after de-
cades when conflict in Asia was dominated by the Cold War tension
between the United States and the Soviet Union. In addition, scholars
envisaged a re- turn of arms racing and the possibility of major
conflict among Asian coun- tries, almost all of which had rapidly
changing internal and external environments. More specific predictions included
the growing possibility of Japanese rearmament;13 increased Chinese adventurism spurred by Chinas rising power
and ostensibly revisionist intentions;14 conict or war over the status of Taiwan;15 terrorist or missile attacks from a
rogue North Korea against South Korea, Japan, or even the United States;16 and arms racing or even conflict in
More than a dozen years
Southeast Asia, prompted in part by unresolved territorial disputes.17
have passed since the end of the Cold War, yet none of these
pessimistic predictions have come to pass. Indeed there has not
been a major war in Asia since the 197879 Vietnam-Cambodia-China
conflict; and with only a few exceptions (North Korea and Taiwan), Asian countries do not
fear for their survival. Japan, though powerful, has not rearmed to the ex-
tent it could. China seems no more revisionist or adventurous now
than it was before the end of the Cold War. And no Asian country
appears to be balancing against China. In contrast to the period 195080, the past
two decades have witnessed enduring regional stability and
minimal conflict. Scholars should directly confront these
anomalies, rather than dismissing them. Social scientists can learn as much
from events that do not occur as from those that do. The case of
Asian security provides an opportunity to examine the usefulness
of accepted international relations paradigms and to determine
how the assumptions underlying these theories can become mis-
specified. Some scholars have smuggled ancillary and ad hoc
hypotheses about preferences into realist, institutionalist, and
constructivist theories to make them fit various aspects of the
Asian cases, including: assumptions about an irrational North Korean leadership, predictions of an
expansionist and revisionist China, and depictions of Japanese foreign policy as abnormal.18 Social
science moves forward from the clear statement of a theory, its
causal logic, and its predictions. Just as important, however, is the
rigorous assessment of the theory, especially if predictions flowing
from it fail to materialize. Exploring why scholars have
misunderstood Asia is both a fruitful and a necessary theoretical
exercise. Two major problems exist with many of the pessimistic
predictions about Asia. First, when confronted with the non-
balancing of Asian states against China, the lack of Japanese
rearmament, and five decades of non-invasion by North Korea,
scholars typically respond: Just wait. This reply, however, is
intellectually ambiguous. Although it would be unfair to expect instantaneous national responses to
changing international conditions, a dozen years would seem to be long enough to
detect at least some change. Indeed Asian nations have historically
shown an ability to respond quickly to changing circumstances . The
Meiji restoration in Japan in 1868 was a remarkable example of governmental response to European and American
encroachment, and by 1874 Japan had emerged from centuries of isolation to occupy Taiwan.19 More recently, with
the introduction of market reforms in late 1978, when Deng Xiaoping famously declared, To get rich is glorious,
the Chinese have trans- formed themselves from diehard socialists
to exuberant capitalists beginning less than three years after Maos
death in 1976.20 In the absence of a specific time frame, the just wait
response is unfalsifiable. Providing a causal logic that explains how
and when scholars can expect changes is an important as- pect of
this response, and reasonable scholars will accept that change may
not be immediate but may occur over time. Without such a time
frame, however, the just wait response is mere rhetorical
wordplay designed to avoid troubling evidence.
 AT: Asia Pivot
First is no Asian Pivot- all of their evidence is in context of
a single-action normal means decrease in military
presence. The 1AC instead understand the underlying
meta-narrative of global power posturing that acts to
critique Asian pivot as well, which answers the main claim
in their link evidence that we will simply ignore Asia
Their prescription of a single military decrease is the
epistemology of paranoia the 1AC directly criticizes.
Paranoia develops through closed doors and closed
classrooms, making certain forms of knowledge
acceptable and others hidden or de-legitimatized. This is
why the manifestation of US imperialism pre-9/11 was
primarily covert: without an obvious and aggressive
enemy the vision of American imperialism was harder to
sell to the general population, but following 9/11 the
image of a world out to hate America and its values and
freedom has become the national icon. This demonstrates
the way this hegemonic epistemology becomes calcified-
when the end of conflict comes American military officials
actively seek the next war, in this case China
Particularly true in context of US-Sino relations: US
foreign policy scholars have been attempting for decades
to proscribe China as aggressive and predict their next
attack, yet these scholars have continuously been wrong:
we need to recognize and break from this failed and
dangerous epistemology
No hostile Chinese rise impact---Chinese strategists wont
push to eclipse U.S. hegemony
Nathan & Scobell 12 Andrew J. Nathan, the Class of 1919 Professor of
Political Science at Columbia University; and Andrew Scobell, Senior Political
Scientist at the RAND Corporation, September/October 2012, How China
Sees America, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 91, No. 5
DESPITE THESE views, mainstream Chinese strategists do not advise China to
challenge the U nited S tates in the foreseeable future. They expect the United
States to remain the global hegemon for several decades , despite what they
perceive as initial signs of decline. For the time being, as described by Wang Jisi, dean of
Peking University's School of International Studies, "the superpower is more super, and the many great
the two countries are increasingly interdependent
powers less great." Meanwhile,
economically and have the military capability to cause each other harm . It is this
mutual vulnerability that carries the best medium-term hope for cooperation. Fear
of each other keeps alive the imperative to work together .
In the long run, however, the better alternative for both China and the West is to create a new equilibrium
of power that maintains the current world system, but with a larger role for China. China has good reasons
to seek that outcome. Even after it becomes the world's largest economy, its
prosperity will remain dependent on the prosperity of its global rivals (and vice
versa), including the United States and Japan. The richer China becomes, the greater will
be its stake in the security of sea-lanes, the stability of the world trade and
financial regimes, nonproliferation, the control of global climate change, and
cooperation on public health. China will not get ahead if its rivals do not also
prosper . And Chinese strategists must come to understand that core U.S. interests -- in the rule of law,
regional stability, and open economic competition -- do not threaten China's security.

Doesnt make them a threatdefensive moves

Stephen M. Walt 12, Robert and Rene Belfer professor of international
relations at Harvard University, "Inflating the China threat," August 27,
Foreign Policy,
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/27/inflating_the_china_threat
If you were focusing on Hurricane Isaac or the continued violence in Syria, you might have
missed the latest round of threat inflation about China. Last week, the New
York Times reported that China was "increasing its existing ability to deliver nuclear warheads to the United
States and to overwhelm missile defense systems." The online journal Salon offered an even more
breathless appraisal: the headline announced a "big story"--that "China's missiles could thwart U.S."--and
the text offered the alarming forecast that "the United States may be falling behind China when it comes to
What is really going on here? Not much. China
weapon technology."
presently has a modest strategic nuclear force. It is believed to have only
about 240 nuclear warheads, and only a handful of its ballistic
missiles can presently reach the United States . By way of comparison, the
United States has over 2000 operational nuclear warheads deployed
on ICBMs, SLBMs, and cruise missiles, all of them capable of
reaching China. And if that were not enough, the U.S. has nearly
3000 nuclear warheads in reserve. Given its modest capabilities, China is
understandably worried by U.S. missile defense efforts. Why? Chinese officials worry about
the scenario where the United States uses its larger and much more sophisticated nuclear arsenal to
launch a first strike, and then relies on ballistic missile defenses to deal with whatever small and ragged
second-strike the Chinese managed to muster. (Missile defenses can't handle large or sophisticated
attacks, but in theory they might be able to deal with a small and poorly coordinated reply). This
discussion is all pretty Strangelovian, of course, but nuclear strategists get paid to think about all sorts of
elaborate and far-fetched scenarios. In sum, those fiendish Chinese are doing precisely what any sensible
they are trying to preserve their own second-strike
power would do:
deterrent by modernizing their force, to include the development of multiple-warhead
missiles that would be able to overcome any defenses the United States might choose to build. As the Wall
Street Journal put it: The [Chinese] goal is to ensure a secure second-strike capability that could survive
in the worst of worst-case conflict scenarios, whereby an opponent would not be able to eliminate China's
nuclear capability by launching a first strike and would therefore face potential retaliation. As the U.S.
Defense Department's Ballistic Missile Defense Review points out, "China is one of the countries most
vocal about U.S. ballistic missile defenses and their strategic implications, and its leaders have expressed
concern that such defenses might negate China's strategic deterrent." Three further points should be
hawks are likely to use developments such as these to
kept in mind. First,
portray China as a rising revisionist threat, but such claims do not
follow logically from the evidence presented. To repeat: what China is
doing is a sensible defensive move, motivated by the same concerns
for deterrent stability that led the United States to create a
"strategic triad" back in the 1950s.
Chinas modernization is inherently slow and stable---
theres no chance modernization turns offensive
Yuan 9 Jing-Dong Yuan, Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program
at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and associate
professor of international policy studies at the Monterey Institute of
International Studies, April 2009, China and the Nuclear-Free World, in
Engaging China and Russia on Nuclear Disarmament, eds. Hansell and Potter,
online: http://cns.miis.edu/opapers/op15/op15.pdf
China has long maintained that its nuclear weapons development is largely driven by the need to
respond to nuclear coercion and blackmail. The role of nuclear weapons , in this context, is purely

defensive and retaliatory, rather than war-fighting, as some western analysts suggest.19 Indeed, in the early
years, China even rejected the concept of deterrence, regarding it as an attempt by the superpowers to compel others with the threat of
nuclear weapons. This probably explains the glacial pace with which China
introduced, modified, and modernized its small-size nuclear
arsenals over the past four decades. Mainly guided by the principle that nuclear weapons will only
be used (but used in a rather indiscriminate way) if China is attacked with nuclear weapons by others, nuclear weapons

in Chinas defense strategy serve political rather than military

purposes.20 PLA analysts emphasize that the terms nuclear strategy and nuclear doctrine are rarely used in Chinese
strategic discourse; instead, a more commonly used term refers to nuclear policy, which in turn is governed by the countrys national
the deployment and use of nuclear weapons are strictly
strategy. Hence,

under the supreme command of the Communist Party and its Central Military
Commission. Nuclear weapons are for strategic deterrence only;
no tactical or operational utility is entertained. If and when China is under a nuclear
strike, regardless of the size and the yield, it warrants strategic responses and retaliation.21 Chinese leaders and military strategists
consider the role for nuclear weapons as one of defensive nuclear deterrence (ziwei fangyu de heweishe). Specifically, the countrys
nuclear doctrine and force modernization have been informed and guided by three general principles: effectiveness (youxiaoxing),
sufficiency (zugou), and counter-deterrence (fanweishe).22 Chinas 2006 Defense White Paper emphasizes the importance of developing
land-based strategic capabilities, both nuclear and conventional, but provides no specifics on the existing arsenal, the structure of the
Second Artillery Corps (Chinas strategic nuclear force) order of battle, or the projected size of the nuclear force. It indicates only that
China will continue to maintain and build a lean and effective nuclear force. While Chinese analysts acknowledge that deterrence
underpins Chinas nuclear doctrine, it is more in the sense of preventing nuclear coercion by the superpower(s) without being coercive
Rather than build a large nuclear
itself, and hence it is counter-coercion or counter-deterrence.

arsenal as resources and relevant technologies have become

available, a path pursued by the superpowers during the Cold War,
China has kept the size of its nuclear weapons modest , compatible
with a nuclear doctrine of minimum deterrence.23 According to
Chinese analysts, nuclear weapons role in Chinas defense
doctrine and posture is limited and is reinforced by the NFU
position, a limited nuclear arsenal, and support of nuclear
disarmament.

This defense proves our critique - they have

methodological anxiety about constructed scenarios - this
isnt something they can kick b/c theyre wrong about the
impact and still project anxiety
Not only have Asian security predictions by the West been
consistently wrong, but the need to revise the framework
for these predictions has been told to just wait: this
promotes a broken system bent on constructing the Asian
theater as war prone
Kang 3 (David, [Professor of International Relations and
Business, Director of Korean Studies Institute,] Getting
Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks
International Security, Volume 27, Number 4, Spring
2003, pp. 57-85 MUSE //DF)

Following the end of the Cold War in 1991, some

scholars in the West began to
predict that Asia was ripe for rivalry.12 They based this prediction on the following
factors: wide disparities in the levels of economic and military power among nations in the region; their different
political systems, ranging from democratic to totalitarian; historical animosities; and the lack of international
institutions. Many scholars thus
envisaged a return of power politics after de-
cades when conflict in Asia was dominated by the Cold War tension
between the United States and the Soviet Union. In addition, scholars
envisaged a re- turn of arms racing and the possibility of major
conflict among Asian coun- tries, almost all of which had rapidly
changing internal and external environments. More specific predictions included
the growing possibility of Japanese rearmament;13 increased Chinese adventurism spurred by Chinas rising power
and ostensibly revisionist intentions;14 conict or war over the status of Taiwan;15 terrorist or missile attacks from a
rogue North Korea against South Korea, Japan, or even the United States;16 and arms racing or even conflict in
Southeast Asia, prompted in part by unresolved territorial disputes.17 More than a dozen years
have passed since the end of the Cold War, yet none of these
pessimistic predictions have come to pass. Indeed there has not
been a major war in Asia since the 197879 Vietnam-Cambodia-China
conflict; and with only a few exceptions (North Korea and Taiwan), Asian countries do not
fear for their survival. Japan, though powerful, has not rearmed to the ex-
tent it could. China seems no more revisionist or adventurous now
than it was before the end of the Cold War. And no Asian country
appears to be balancing against China. In contrast to the period 195080, the past
two decades have witnessed enduring regional stability and
minimal conflict. Scholars should directly confront these
anomalies, rather than dismissing them. Social scientists can learn as much
from events that do not occur as from those that do. The case of
Asian security provides an opportunity to examine the usefulness
of accepted international relations paradigms and to determine
how the assumptions underlying these theories can become mis-
specified. Some scholars have smuggled ancillary and ad hoc
hypotheses about preferences into realist, institutionalist, and
constructivist theories to make them fit various aspects of the
Asian cases, including: assumptions about an irrational North Korean leadership, predictions of an
expansionist and revisionist China, and depictions of Japanese foreign policy as abnormal.18 Social
science moves forward from the clear statement of a theory, its
causal logic, and its predictions. Just as important, however, is the
rigorous assessment of the theory, especially if predictions flowing
from it fail to materialize. Exploring why scholars have
misunderstood Asia is both a fruitful and a necessary theoretical
exercise. Two major problems exist with many of the pessimistic
predictions about Asia. First, when confronted with the non-
balancing of Asian states against China, the lack of Japanese
rearmament, and five decades of non-invasion by North Korea,
scholars typically respond: Just wait. This reply, however, is
intellectually ambiguous. Although it would be unfair to expect instantaneous national responses to
changing international conditions, a dozen years would seem to be long enough to
detect at least some change. Indeed Asian nations have historically
shown an ability to respond quickly to changing circumstances . The
Meiji restoration in Japan in 1868 was a remarkable example of governmental response to European and American
encroachment, and by 1874 Japan had emerged from centuries of isolation to occupy Taiwan.19 More recently, with
the introduction of market reforms in late 1978, when Deng Xiaoping famously declared, To get rich is glorious,
the Chinese have trans- formed themselves from diehard socialists
to exuberant capitalists beginning less than three years after Maos
death in 1976.20 In the absence of a specific time frame, the just wait
response is unfalsifiable. Providing a causal logic that explains how
and when scholars can expect changes is an important as- pect of
this response, and reasonable scholars will accept that change may
not be immediate but may occur over time. Without such a time
frame, however, the just wait response is mere rhetorical
wordplay designed to avoid troubling evidence.
Bahrain DA
 2AC
Their McDaniel evidence is written by a US Commander
and Surface Warfare Officer- empirically proven US
Military officials have a paranoid, aggressive, imperialistic
pathology- Schoomaker and Project for New American
Century proves from McClintock- resist this scholarship
The invocation of regional stability is a thinly veiled
attempt to maintain US control over world politics and can
only result in violence
Hoover, 2k11 (Joe, Fellow in the International Relations Dept at the LSE,
Egypt and the Failure of Realism, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies,
Issue 4)
Recent upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya have caught many by
surprise as the order of things has proven protean in a way that
official experts and conventional wisdom were largely blind to
reality, it seems, can be unruly. As revolution unfolded in Egypt there
were many pleas for restraint, worries that political instability would
spread, and among Western leaders a profound wariness of change
that they feared would compromise their strategic interests. There
was, in a word, an invocation of realism, intended to quell the
earnestness of fast moving and profound change. The failure of
realism as a response to recent events in Egypt is revealed through
the policies invoked by state representatives, commentators and academics,
which confirmed the given reality of world politics but proved wanting ethically and heuristically, as those
unable to comprehend the power
willing to support the brutal rule of Hosni Mubarak and
of the protesters proved to be on the wrong side of history. These
banal appeals to realism, however, do lead to a broader insight,
revealing that such appeals in world politics are actually calls to
preserve what I term the reality of dominance, which invokes the
inevitability of the existing order of things to discount the reality of
resistance to that order which calls for transformation over
preservation. In early February, before Mubaraks ouster, the Egyptian revolution was in doubt. It
was still only a fragile possibility. 1 The protestors and Mubaraks goons waited it out in Tahrir Square
while the army stood watch. The success of the revolution would be determined by whose will was most
resilient. Would the threat of increasing violence discourage the protestors and give Mubarak the space he
needed to solidify his power till next year and thus avoid the changes the Egyptian people were
demanding? Or would the protestors resolve hold, making clear to Mubarak that he could no longer hope
to rule Egypt? As protestors faced violence, exhaustion and deprivation the prospect of compromise must
have seemed more desirable as the hardships mounted. The time was ripe for expressions of support from
key leaders, which could buttress the resolve of the protestors and pressure the Mubarak regime. It was
much easier for Mubarak to play for time from the presidential palace than for protesters in the streets, yet
far too many of the men and women able to make a difference did not use their voices to share in
democracys street-choir instead their voices echoed in the halls of disreputable power. The Obama
administration has the greatest culpability in this, as they not only had the capability to undermine
Mubarak, but their failure to do so revealed the hypocrisy of US support for democracy and human rights in
Obama has mastered the
the region. The events in Egypt demonstrated that President Barak
dark art of evasive support, leaving no doubt that he fully supported
Egyptian democracy, as long as it did not change too much, too fast ,
and, most importantly, as long as US strategic interests were not
compromised. The administrations restraint is also driven by the fact that, for the United States,
dealing with an Egypt without Mr. Mubarak would be difficult at best, and downright scary at worst. For 30
years, his government has been a pillar of American foreign policy in a volatile region. (Sanger & Cooper,
2011) Predictably, Vice President Joe Biden made the point with less tact, but perhaps more truth, when
he expressed his insensibility to the crimes of Mubarak against his own people: Asked if he would
characterize Mubarak as a dictator Biden responded: Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of
things. And hes been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East
peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with with Israel. I would
regional stability is the key
not refer to him as a dictator. (Murphy, 2011) Clearly
rhetorical trope, which justified turning a blind eye to the brutality
of Mubaraks regime and the lack of democracy in Egypt. Perhaps
no issue is more important in defining what regional stability
means for the US than the issue of Israeli security. Binyamin Netanyahu clearly
exerted pressure on the US, trying to limit the support they gave to democratic reforms in Egypt. The
prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, reportedly ordered his cabinet to refrain from commenting publicly
on the unfolding drama, saying only that the treaty must be maintained. But as Haaretz reported today,
the government is seeking to convince the US and EU to curb their criticism of Hosni Mubarak to preserve
stability in the region, even as Washington and its allies signal their wish for an orderly transition which
the incumbent almost certainly cannot ignore. (Black, 2011) Despite the homilies on human rights and
it was a
democratic freedom delivered by Mr Obama to the Egyptians (Wilson and Warrick, 2011),
predictable set of concerns that set the agenda for the US response
to the revolution taking place in Cairo and throughout Egypt the
imperative was to maintain order, control those changes that proved
inevitable and ensure that the political and economic interests of
dominant states were preserved. The representative for the US State Department, PJ
Crowley, who was interviewed by Al Jazeera (US urges reform in Egypt, 2011), performed a practiced
dance to the theme of restraint, gradual reform and false equivalencies as if protesters and the agents of
Mubaraks coercive apparatus could be compared 2 as he made clear that the suffering of the
Egyptian people and their desire for democracy would not undermine US support for the Mubarak regime.
We respect what Egypt contributes to the region. It is a stabilising force; it has made its own peace with
Israel and is pursuing normal relations with Israel. We think thats important; we think thats a model that
the region should adopt broadly speaking. At the same time, we recognise that Egypt, Tunisia, other
countries, do need to reform, they do need to respond to the needs of their people and we encourage that
This
reform and we are contributing across the region to that reform. (US urges reform in Egypt, 2011)
routine, we can assume, was an exercise in managing expectations and
making US interests clear democratic revolution should not be
allowed to upset regional stability, nor should the suffering of the
protestors be allowed to cloud our judgment on what really
matters or, more bluntly, if democratic dreams threatened the interests of
the US, then so much the worse for those beautiful revolutionary
dreams. As Tony Blair joined the discussion he not only underlined Bidens scepticism regarding
whether Mubarak was a dictator, claiming he was immensely courageous and a force for good (McGreal,
clearly articulated the managerial worldview of a man
2011), but he also
who has learned to think of himself as a member of a privileged
group of cleareyed realists whose responsibility it is to control all
the things of world politics. Blair argued that the region has unique
problems that make political change different from the democratic
revolutions in Eastern Europe. He said the principal issue was the
presence of Islamist parties that he fears will use democracy to gain
power and then undermine the freedoms people seek... Blair said he did not
doubt that change was coming to Egypt. People want a different system of government. Theyre going to
get it. The question is what emerges from that. In particular I think the key challenge for us is how do we
help partner this process of change and help manage it in such a way that what comes out of it is open
Not only does this response
minded, fair, democratic government. (McGreal, 2011).
implicitly trade in the notion that Arab countries will not be able to
handle democracy without Western tutelage, it also trades in a
degraded notion of realism, in which serious men act as if their
apologia for imperial arrogance is sagacious wisdom gleaned from
long experience. The Egyptian protestors will be allowed their
democracy, but their democracy will be managed and defined by the
powerful, so as not to disturb the order of things or run afoul of the
realities of world politics. Yet this statist and status quo line is
actually divorced from reality, or at least the reality of the protesters
battling their corrupt leaders in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and cities throughout Egypt it
reflects the reality of dominance. Realism, as Western leaders express it, is
little more than an attempt to limit the happenings of world politics
to their own constrained vision, a myopic self-interest that fails to
take the measure of the cruelty it justifies or realise its own
analytical failings.
Their representation of Mideast instability is an orientalist
discourse defined according to imperial interests

Bilgin 4 (Pinar, Bilkent University, Whose Middle East?

Geopolitical Inventions and Practices of Security,
International Relations, 18(1), p. 28//TR)

What I call the Middle East perspective is usually associated with the United States and
its regional allies. It derives from a western conception of security which
could be summed up as the unhindered flow of oil at reasonable
prices, the cessation of the ArabIsraeli conflict, the prevention of
the emergence of any regional hegemon while holding Islamism in
check, and the maintenance of friendly regimes that are sensitive
to these concerns. This was (and still is) a topdown conception of security
that privileged the security of states and military stability. It is top-
down because threats to security have been defined largely from the
perspective of external powers rather than regional states or
peoples. In the eyes of British and US defence planners, Communist infiltration and Soviet intervention
constituted the greatest threat to security in the Middle East during the Cold War. The way to enhance
regional security, they argued, was for regional states to enter into alliances with the West. Two security
umbrella schemes, the ill-born Middle East Defence Organisation (1951) and the Baghdad Pact (1955),
were designed for this purpose. Although there were regional states such as Iraq (until the 1958 coup), Iran
(until the 19789 revolution) and Turkey that shared this perception of security to a certain extent, many
Arab policy-makers begged to differ. Traces of this top-down thinking were prevalent in the US approach to
In following a policy of dual
security in the Middle East during the 1990s.
containment, US policy-makers presented Iran and Iraq as the main
threats to regional security largely due to their military capabilities
and the revisionist character of their regimes that are not
subservient to US interests. However, these top-down perspectives, while
revealing certain aspects of regional insecurity, at the same time
hinder others. For example the lives of women in Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia are made insecure not only by the threat caused by their Gulf neighbours military
capabilities, but also because of the conservative character of their own
regimes that restrict womens rights under the cloak of religious
tradition. For it is women who suffer disproportionately as a result of
militarism and the channelling of valuable resources into defence
budgets instead of education and health. Their concerns rarely make
it into security analyses. This top-down approach to regional security in the Middle East was
compounded by a conception of security that was directed outwards that is threats to security were
assumed to stem from outside the state whereas inside is viewed as a realm of peace. Although it could be
argued following R.B.J. Walker that what makes it possible for inside to remain peaceful is the
presentation of outside as a realm of danger, the practices of Middle Eastern states indicate that this
many regional policy-makers justify
does not always work as prescribed in theory. For
certain domestic security measures by way of presenting the
international arena as anarchical and stressing the need to
strengthen the state to cope with external threats. While doing this,
however, they at the same time cause insecurity for some individuals
and social groups at home the very peoples whose security they
purport to maintain. The practices of regional actors that do not match up to the theoretical
prescriptions include the Baath regime in Iraq that infringed their own citizens rights often for the
purposes of state security. Those who dare to challenge their states security
practices may be marginalized at best, and accused of treachery and
imprisoned at worst.
Aff evidence is suspect Middle East studies package the
world according to conservative strategic interests

Gerges 91 (Fawaz A., Professor of International Affairs

and Middle Eastern Studies Sarah Lawrence, The Study
of Middle East International Relations: A Critique, British
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 18(2), Jstor//TR)
Thirdly, and closely related to the preceding problem, is the policy orientation of the field. The ideological
rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union following the Second World War and the onset of
the Cold War in the late 1940s has motivated them to invest heavily in area studies with a specific
emphasis on policy-oriented research in the hope that problems can be identified and solutions found.
Thus,the U.S. foreign policy establishment 'goaded' or 'tempted ' the
academic community into establishing graduate programmes to generate useful expertise on
such crucial foreign regions as the 'Middle East'.28 Likewise, the proliferation in
1955 of new research centres, studies and periodicals on the 'Middle East' in the Soviet Union was
anything but academic: it reflected the growing Russian interest in the area.29 This revival coincided with
the conclusion of the Egyptian-Russian arms deal in September 1955 and the perceptions of Russian
leaders that the time was ripe for a political offensive in the Arab world. Indeed, as Leonard Binder notes:
'The basic development of area studies in the United States has
been political', i.e. to gain influence and to combat hostile forces.30
Though Binder hastens to add that it is difficult to discern a consistent political line in the organization of
it is clear that a large number of works on
area studies or in the patterns of funding,
modern Middle East international relations-whether in the United States
or in the Soviet Union- are 'packaged' to satisfy the policy needs of their
respective decision- makers.31 But historically, this has always been true. The
economic and strategic importance of the area has tended to attract
the interests of outside powers which have competed for influence
and control. Since 1945, however, the development of area studies has reflected more than before
the need of the Great Powers to influence the processes of change and stability in the region. The root of
the convergence of interests between the foreign policy and academic communities lies in the former's
control of research funding and the latter's dependency on and acquiescence in this state of affairs.32 The
analyses of the 'Middle East' seem to be more
result is that many
concerned with policy-oriented prescriptions than with the
understanding of the region in a sensitive and creative manner .33 It
must be confessed, however, that the glide into policy science or policy scientism is not peculiar only to
the study of Middle East international relations in general. In reflecting on the development of international
relations in the past thirty years, Professor Stanley Hoffmann establishes a strong link between the
development of the field and the dilemmas and concerns facing U.S. foreign policy in the post- Second
World War period.
Apocalyptic representations are deliberately falsified to
create a particular public sentiment this geopolitics of
fear allows no room for peace by endlessly recreating
violence
Sparke 7 (Matthew, Prof. of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct
Prof. of Global Health @ U. of Washington, Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic
Hopes and the Responsibilities of Geography Edited version published:
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97.2)
The geopolitical discourse about the threats posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq was so frequently repeated
and stylized in the period leading up to the American offensive that the script is now all too familiar (for
one of the most rigorous and official surveys of the misinformation that ed up to the war see the
Two big
Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staf, 2006).
fears dominated the Bush administrations geopolitical scripting. The
first was that Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction or WMD, and the
second was that these WMD could easily be passed on to terrorists because of known ties between
Hussein and al Qaeda. Most famously perhaps it was in Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech before the
United Nations that the WMD story was told with the most effortful, and in retrospect, most tendentious
claims to represent well-documented, evidence-based truth about real grounds for fear. "What you will
see," said Powell, in an appeal to the truth of vision that is one of the classic tropes of the modern
geopolitical imagination (Agnew, 2003; Tuathail, 1996), "is an accumulation of facts and disturbing
patterns of behavior." Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500
tons of chemical-weapons agents. ... Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein
to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size
of Manhattan. ... There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to
rapidly produce more, many more. ... This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well
documented (Powell, 2003). This was also the same script from which President Bush himself spoke both
before and after Powell's speech. However, the President's speech-making (which was generally designed
for domestic consumption and not an international UN audience) explained the relevance of the WMD story
in terms of the second main fearful script: in other words, in terms of Iraq's WMD getting into the hands of
terrorists. "Today," announced the President in his 2003 State of the Union address, the gravest danger in
the war on terror, the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and
possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. These regimes could use such weapons for blackmail,
terror, and mass murder. They could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them
without the least hesitation....With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons,
Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in
that region. And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from
intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that
Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without
fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own
(Bush, 2003). Insofar as Bush explained so much of his policy as an
aggressive 'bring it on' response to the real terrorism of 9/11, these
sorts of claims were to prove very powerful indeed, creating an
affect-laden and, as such, effective means of legitimating the Iraq war (
Tuathail, 2003). With Bush setting the model, the public geopolitical script of fear
included repeated statements about overwhelming evidence
combined with the affective appeal to Americans to imagine another
9/11: another 9/11 made much more deadly with the help of Iraq's WMD. "America must not ignore the
threat gathering against us," remained the administration's main fear-mongering message. "Facing clear
evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a
mushroom cloud" (Bush, 2002). The President was, of course, ably assisted in this work of geopolitical
scripting by other members of his administration. Most especially Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Vice-President Dick Cheney continued to reiterate the same twin fears about WMD and terror ties long
after the attack on Iraq and a huge security sweep of the occupied country showed that their fearful
Rumsfeld and Cheney nevertheless also effectively
geopolitics was groundless. In doing so,
underlined two key features of what made the geopolitical scripting
of fear so convincing: namely, emotion and repetition. Thus, arguing against the
critics that WMD would eventually be found in Iraq, Rumsfeld also showed how Americans' emotions about
9/11 lay at the heart of making the Iraq-as-threat geopolitics work: The coalition did not act in Iraq because
we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. We acted
because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on 9/11
(Rumsfeld, 2003). And subsequently, even in 2004, Cheney was still demonstrating that the other key
feature of making the groundless script function was repetition: "I think theres overwhelming evidence
that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government," he intoned (Cheney, 2004). In
the real world, of course, there was no such evidence. Instead, as was later made clear by the statements
of the British intelligence chief recorded in the Downing Street memos, "the intelligence and facts were
being fixed around the policy" (Danner, 2005). By this point, though, the ways in which the grounds were
invented in order to fit the script no longer mattered. Emotion, repetition and their combined conjuring of
So successful was the scripting of fear
fear had already done their geopolitical work.
that subsequently even administration officials themselves indicated
their backstage accomplishments with occasionally explicit, even
prideful, asides about the bureaucratic expediency involved. For
example, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Defense Secretary, caused a small media storm by acknowledging
something along the lines that: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S.
government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of
mass destruction, as the core reason" (quoted in McIntyre, 2003). This admission (which was itself hedged
in various ways) later came to seem minor in comparison with a much bolder account made to a reporter
by a White House aide of the administration's more generally cavalier approach to geopolitical scripting.
Given the gung-ho hubris of the account it is not surprising that this aide remains anonymous, but what he
told Ron Suskind - the reporter - remains no less telling. The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we
call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
continued.
reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you,
all of you, will be left to just study what we do (Suskind, 2004). As scholars who remain committed to
geographers (with the possible exception of non-representational
studying discernible reality,
theorists)may also be derided by those at the pinnacles of American
power as located in the same low-lying reality-based community
inhabited by journalists such as Suskind. But this has not stopped
geographical studies from documenting with critical rigor the empire
of unreality produced by the geopolitical scripting of the War on
Terror. The use of the term 'empire' here is not just metaphorical, nor just a play on the imperial hubris
enunciated by Suskind's White House aide. As Gregory's forthright critique of the
colonial present makes clear, all kinds of geopolitical discourses with
their roots and routes in imperialism - including the many imaginative geographies of
imperial Orientalism famously critiqued by Edward Said (1979 and 1993) - were revitalized and
put to work in both justifying and performing the War on Terror
(Gregory, 2004). Gregory argues persuasively in this way that geopolitical scripts about
despotic, hate-filled, orientals served to provide the fear-filled
justification for treating whole communities as if they lay outside the
bounds of humanity. Building on Gregory's analysis, Allan Pred has provided in turn a powerful
critique of the groundless terror-talk into which so much of this fear-mongering fed and out of which so
much geopolitical boundary-drawing ensued. "Terror
may be instilled by way of a
variety of strategies," Pred summarizes: Through successfully perpetuating
'imaginative geographies' of Their Terrorist/Arab/Muslim space and
Their uncivilized, subhuman barbarism. Through successfully folding
distance into monstrous Difference. Through successfully insisting
that They are a pervasive military threat to Our Civilization, to the
security of Our way of life. Through avoiding any consideration of
our role in precipitating militant radicalism, in provoking the spread
of 'political Islam in its insurrectional forms'. Through successfully
implanting a just-below-the-surface sense of fear by way of
redundant representations strewn across the paths of everyday life
(Pred, 2005). As well as providing a useful summary of the geopolitics of fear at its boundary-drawing work,
Pred's textual strategy of repetition also mimics and subverts the repetitive rhetorics of the fear-mongers
themselves. In doing so, and by underlining how such rhetorics infiltrated American everyday life and
became implanted in people's 'just- below-the-surface' sensibilities, he also draws our attention to another
enunciation became
aspect of the geopolitics of the war on terror: namely, the way in which its
a performance of sovereignty and governmentality at the same time,
a way of re-enacting the power of the traditional pre-modern
sovereign to declare war on his own terms combined with a
decidedly post-modern approach to making the war make
biopolitical sense in American everyday life. The performance of
sovereignty as governmentality by the Bush administration - its way of simultaneously
producing and ruling its 'own reality' by executive fiat - has elsewhere been
theorized by Judith Butler in relation to the suspension of the Geneva conventions and the creation of
special rules and special spaces for imprisoning 'illegal combatants' in the Guantanamo gulag (Butler,
2004). Butler's argument about this "resurgence of sovereignty within the field of governmentality" (Butler,
2004: 56) seems equally applicable to the way the administration also suspended reference to real
intelligence in its geopolitical scripting of the Iraq war. However, outside of the exceptional space of
Guantanamo (where only fear seems to rule), the field of governmentality in which the resurgence of
executive sovereignty has been staged has been co-determined by another much more hopeful discourse
too: the discourse of geoeconomics. Alongside all the fear, then, there has also been much hope, and this
hope, expressed as a discourse about the inevitably inclusive and expansive aspects of capitalist
globalization, has also, just like the geopolitical scripting, had a whole series of regulative effects both in
America and elsewhere, including inside Iraq itself. In other words, if we follow Butler in noticing how the
Bush administration has invented its own sovereign realities within a post-sovereign world, and if we
combine this with an understanding of governmentality as the organization of "the conduct of conduct"
(Foucault, 1982: 220), we need to explore how the globalist common-sense about a globe-spanning level-
playing field also came to legitimate and shape the Iraq war.

Everyday nuclear colonialism is overshadowed by the

fantasy of a global nuclear war, allowing ongoing
nuclear violence to continue unchecked

Kato 93
(Masahide Kato, Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze,
Source: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 339-360 Published by: Sage
Publications, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644779 Accessed: 24/08/2012)//TR

Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and
became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of
destruction can be historically contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived
and thus given due recognition by the First World community are the explosions at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose
meaning is relevant only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm of
fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet how can one deny the crude fact that
nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the name of "nuclear testing" since the first
nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth.28 The major perpetrators of
nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44
times), and China (36 times).29 The primary targets of warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the
sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall
Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814
times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of
Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times).30 Moreover, although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests"
in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence
accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear
wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the
Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear
war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and Indigenous Nations.
The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity intervention," or the
"nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have
taken a form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations.
Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear
catastrophe has never been the "unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of
repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless,
ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by
rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of
nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First World community. Such a
discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear warfare in the domain of
imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers
the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific: Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere . . . were global in effect. The winds and seas
carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call
the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into batde against nature itself.31 Although Firth's book is
definitely a remarkable study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific, the problematic division/distinction between the
"nuclear explosions" and the nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the
subject ("we") is located higher than the "real" of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological
division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the ongoing
processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of
nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized. The discursive containment/obliteration of the
"real" of nuclear warfare has been accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm
commitment to global discourse, has established the unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over the real nuclear
catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.
Turn- Terrorism is the 21st century manifestation of the
specter of paranoia: it develops through closed doors and
closed classrooms, making certain forms of knowledge
acceptable and other hidden or de-legitimatized. This is
why the manifestation of US imperialism pre-9/11 was
primarily covert: without an obvious and aggressive
enemy the vision of American imperialism was harder to
sell to the general population, but following 9/11 the
image of a world out to hate America and its values and
freedom has become the national icon. This demonstrates
the way this hegemonic epistemology becomes calcified-
when the end of conflict comes American military officials
actively seek the next war. McClintock uses three
examples to demonstrate the military-academic-political
complex: Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of
the US Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use
having an army that did nothing but train, he said.
Theres got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we
exist for. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for
the New American Century produced a remarkable report
in which they stated that to make such an invasion
palatable would require a catastrophic and catalyzing
eventlike a new Pearl Harbor. The 9/11 attacks came as
a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the
problem of legitimacy, offering the military unimaginable
license to expand its reach. General Peter Schoomaker
would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense
boon: There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War
is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing
opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have
actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some
oomph. This means that you need to be inherently
suspicious of their impact scenarios- their ___ scenario is
particularly
Our Muzaffar evidence proves that even the way the
Negative constructs their impact scenarios is the same
logic and rhetoric used for years to further US neo-
imperialism in the Middle East particularly: this neo-
imperialism has resulted in failed states, increased
tensions, overall destabilization and the formation of
terror groups as a last resort to fight these policies;
essentially a geo-political factory of crises to sustain the
necessity of hegemony. Muzaffar explains the original
premise behind the War on Terror was hegemonic
expansion of control over land and resources, specifically
control over oil commodities and a key strategic point to
monitor Central Asia (much like how the drones are
currently being pitched as monitoring points for the
volatile Middle East). All of Bushs advisors had
specifically been planning and orchestrating a grand
scheme to manipulate Middle Eastern politics and
interests, including sabotaging the democratically elected
Hamas in Palestine and trying to replace it with a
leadership that is subservient to Israels interest,
attempting to eliminate an autonomous movement like
Hizbullah in Lebanon with the aim of bolstering a weak
pro-U.S. regime in Beirut, and targeting the independent-
minded government in Damascus. Insert how their position
furthers US control in region
This is already beginning to manifest in anti-American
sentiment within the originally pro-West Yemen, as
Yemeni daily reality turns into the site of an undeclared
US war: this is the cyclical turn of imperialism to produce
the crisis it then saves
Schwedler 9/27 (Jillian, [Professor of Political Science at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, and a member of the Editorial Committee of The Middle East
Research and Information Project, publishers of Middle East
Report] Is the U.S. drone program in Yemen working? 9.27.15
https://lawfareblog.com/us-drone-program-yemen-working //DF)
For al-Qaida, the drone program is a gift from the heavens. Its
recruiting narrative exploits common misperceptions of American
omnipotence, offering an alternative route to justice and
empowerment. Regardless of American perceptions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the
attacks, what Yemeni could now deny that the United States is waging
an undeclared war on Yemen? Most recently, this narrative of direct U.S.
intervention has been further substantiated by U.S. material and
intelligence support for the Saudi-led military campaign aimed at the
return to power of the unpopular and exiled-President Abed Rabbo Mansour
Hadi. Photographs of spent U.S.-made cluster bombs are widely
circulated. Nor have drone attacks ceased; alongside the often
indiscriminate Saudi-led bombing, American drones continue their
campaign of targeted assassination. One might think that the Saudi
attacks would not help al-Qaida, but it is contributing to al-Qaidas
growth in Yemen. The indiscriminate targeting of the Saudi-led
campaign undermines any sense of security, let alone Yemeni
sovereignty. And AQAP-controlled areas like the port of Mukalla are
not being targeted by Saudi or Gulf troops at all. The United States aims to take
up the job of targeting AQAP while the Saudi-led (and U.S.-backed) forces focus on defeating the Houthis
and restoring Hadi to power. But the overall situation is one in which those
multiple interventions in Yemen are creating an environment in
which al-Qaida is beginning to appeal in ways it never had before .
For these reasons, the U.S. use of drones to kill even carefully
identified AQAP leaders in Yemen is counterproductive: it gives
resonance to the claims of the very group it seeks to destroy. It
provides evidence that al-Qaidas claims and strategies are justified
and that Yemenis cannot count on the state to protect them from
threats foreign and domestic. U.S. officials have argued that the drone program has not
been used as a recruiting device for al-Qaida. But it is hard to ignore the evidence to the
contrary, from counterinsurgency experts who have worked for the U.S.
government to Yemeni voices like Farea Muslimi . Its not just that
drone strikes make al-Qaida recruiting easier, true as that probably
is, but that they broaden the social space in which al-Qaida can
function. America does not need to win the hearts and minds of Yemenis in the service of some
grand U.S. project in the region. But if America wants to weaken al-Qaida in
Yemen, it needs at a minimum to stop pursuing policies that are
bound to enrage and embitter Yemenis who might otherwise be
neutral. There is an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look
like a nail. The U.S. military let alone its drones is not the only tool on
which the United States can rely. But when the measure of success is
as narrow as the killing of a specific person, the tool gets used with
increasing frequency. Indeed, drone strikes have significantly expanded under the Obama
administration. It is crucial to see the bigger picture, the one in which
long-time Yemeni friends tell me of growing anti-U.S. sentiment
where there was previously very little. Public opinion toward
America has clearly deteriorated over the past decade, and to
reverse it may take much longer. But the use of drones to kill people
deemed enemies of the United States, along with the Saudi-led war
against the Houthis, is expanding the spaces in which al-Qaida is
able to function.
Terrorism wont and cant cause extinction
Friedman 6 MIT security studies program (Ben, 2/19, The War on Hype,
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
file=/c/a/2006/02/19/INGDDH8E2T1.DTL&type=printable)

Most homeland security experts say that Hurricane Katrina's flooding of New Orleans shows how
vulnerable we are to terrorists. In fact, it shows that most Americans have better things to worry about.
By any statistical measure, the terrorist threat to America has always been
low. As political scientist John Mueller notes, in most years allergic reactions to peanuts, deer in
the road and lightning have all killed about the same number of Americans as terrorism. In
2001, their banner year, terrorists killed one twelfth as many Americans as the flu and one fifteenth the
They contend that because
number killed by car accidents. Most experts dismiss this history.
both weapons technology and Sunni extremism are spreading , the terrorist
danger is ahistorical. Although both these trends are real, we should not leap to the
conclusion that the threat is growing or greater than more mundane dangers .
There is no obvious reason to believe that Sept. 11 was the start of an era of ever deadlier terrorism,
rather than its high-water mark. Both
terrorism and unconventional weapons have
existed for a long time, but terrorists have always done their damage
conventionally. Today the remnants of al Qaeda and its fellow-travelers appear to lack
the organizational capacity to operate in the United States or harness complex
weapons technologies. This argument does not endorse complacency among government officials.
Even a small threat of nuclear terrorism should provoke a better organized non-proliferation policy than the
United States now has. Nor does this argument imply that another terrorist massacre in America is unlikely.
attacks are likely to be rare
If enough people try, eventually some attack may well succeed. But
and conventional, on the scale of the London attacks, not apocalyptic nightmares. Even if
attacks killing thousands were certain, the risk to each of us would remain close to zero, far smaller than
many larger risks that do not alarm us, or provoke government warnings, like driving to work every day.
And if something far worse than Sept. 11 does occur, the country will recover.
Every year, tens of thousands Americans die on the roads. Disease preys on us. Life goes on for the rest.
The economy keeps chugging. A disaster of biblical proportions visited New
Orleans. The Republic has not crumbled. The terrorist risk to the United
States is serious, but far from existential, as some would have it.

Early detection checks

TMC 2009 global online communications and news research cite. 10-22-
2009. Breaking News!! UNDT- Universal Detection Technology to Present
Hand-Held Bioterrorism Detection for 2012 London Olympics at the Terrorism
& Security 2009 Conference, Endorsed by ACPO TAM and NYPD Intelligence.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2009/10/22/4437777.htm//TS Universal
Detection Technology (www.udetection.com)

OTCBB: UNDT), a developer of early-warning monitoring technologies and counter-terrorism

training programs to protect people from bioterrorism and other infectious health threats, announced
today that it will present its rapid response biodetection kits to the 2012 London
Olympics organizers at the 2009 Terrorism & Security Conference, held in London on November 17th and
18th. "The security risks associated with high-profile international events, such as the 2012 London
Olympics, cannot be underestimated," said Jacques Tizabi, CEO of Universal Detection Technology. " Bio-
weapons should be a particular concern to organizers , because for terrorists, they can
be purchased or engineered at relatively low costs, can induce mass casualties and are oftentimes
Universal Detection Technology is prepared
undetected by on-the-ground law enforcement;
to meet the bioterrorism detection needs of the 2012 London Olympics and similar global
venues," continued Tizabi. UNDT was invited by the conference to present to the 2012 London Olympics
organizers and security directors of international "high-value, soft-targets," including airports, sports
stadiums, national infrastructure, shopping centers, prestigious hotels and mass transport hubs to and
from the United Kingdom and Europe. Following the 2009 Terrorism & Security Conference in London,
Universal Detection Technology will also be presenting its bioterrorism
detection equipment at the upcoming 2009 Milipol Conference in Paris, November 17-20. Universal
Detection Technology's 5-agent biodetection kits, recently certified by United States Department of
Homeland Security as an "Approved Product for Homeland Security" under the Support Anti-terrorism by
the industry's only hand-held
Fostering Effective Technologies (SAFETY) Act of 2002, are
assay designed to detect and identify up to five separate threats using one
sample in a single, easy-to-use device. The kits equip first responders with an
effective tool for the rapid onsite detection of up to five biological warfare agents: anthrax,
ricin, botulinum toxin, Y. pestis (plague) and Staphylococcal Enterotoxin B (SEB). Detection time is under
three minutes.

No WMD terrorism- they see it as counterproductive.

Brad Roberts, Inst Dfnse Analyses, and Michael Moodie, Chem &
Bio Arms Cntrl Inst, 2 (Defense Horizons 15, July)

The argument about terrorist motivation is also important. Terrorists generally

have not killed as many as they have been capable of killing. This restraint seems to
derive from an understand ing of mass casualty attacks as both

unnecessary and counterproductive . They are unnecessary

because terrorists , by and large, have succeeded by

conventional means . Also, they are counterproductive because they
might alienate key constituencies , whether among the
public, state sponsors, or the terrorist leadership group. In
Brian Jenkins' famous words, terrorists want a lot of people watching, not
a lot of people dead . Others have argued that the lack of mass casualty terrorism
and effective exploitation of BW has been more a matter of accident and good fortune
than capability or intent. Adherents of this view, including former Secretary of Defense
William Cohen, argue that "it's not a matter of if but when." The attacks of September 11
would seem to settle the debate about whether terrorists have both the motivation and
sophistication to exploit weapons of mass destruction for their full lethal effect. After all,
those were terrorist attacks of unprecedented sophistication that seemed clearly aimed
at achieving mass casualties--had the World Trade Center towers collapsed as the 1993
bombers had intended, perhaps as many as 150,000 would have died. Moreover, Osama
bin Laden's constituency would appear to be not the "Arab street" or some other political
entity but his god. And terrorists answerable only to their deity have proven historically
to be among the most lethal. But this debate cannot be considered settled. Bin
Laden and his followers could have killed many more on September

11 if killing as many as possible had been their primary

objective . They now face the core dilemma of asymmetric warfare: how to escalate
without creating new interests for the stronger power and thus the incentive to exploit its
power potential more fully. Asymmetric adversaries want their
stronger enemies fearful, not fully engaged --militarily or
otherwise. They seek to win by preventing the stronger partner from exploiting its full
To kill millions in America with biological or other weapons would only
potential.
commit the United States--and much of the rest of the international community-- to
the annihilation of the perpetrators.

Nuclear war won't cause extinction

Martin 82
(Brian, Professor of Social Sciences in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the
University of Wollongong, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 287-300
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/82jpr.html)

To summarise the above points,

a major global nuclear war in which population centres in
the US, Soviet Union, Europe and China ware targeted, with no effective civil
defence measures taken, could kill directly perhaps 400 to 450 million people.
Induced effects, in particular starvation or epidemics following agricultural failure or economic
breakdown, might add up to several hundred million deaths to the total, though this
is most uncertain. Such an eventuality would be a catastrophe of enormous proportions,
but it is far from extinction. Even in the most extreme case there would
remain alive some 4000 million people, about nine-tenths of the world's population,
most of them unaffected physically by the nuclear war. The following areas would be relatively
unscathed, unless nuclear attacks were made in these regions: South and Central America, Africa, the
Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Australasia, Oceania and large parts of China. Even
in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere where most of the nuclear weapons would be exploded,
areas upwind of nuclear attacks would remain free of heavy radioactive
contamination, such as Portugal, Ireland and British Columbia. Many people, perhaps especially in
the peace movement, believe that global nuclear war will lead to the death of most or
all of the world's population.[12] Yet the available scientific evidence provides
no basis for this belief. Furthermore, there seem to be no convincing scientific
arguments that nuclear war could cause human extinction.[13] In particular, the idea
of 'overkill', if taken to imply the capacity to kill everyone on earth, is highly misleading.[14] In
the absence of any positive evidence, statements that nuclear war will lead
to the death of all or most people on earth should be considered exaggerations.
In most cases the exaggeration is unintended, since people holding or stating a belief in nuclear extinction
are quite sincere.[15]

Terrorism the result of technological domination of the

world it is an attempt to break free from the standing
reserve.

Mitchell 5
[Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, "Heidegger
and Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume 35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 181-218]//TR

Terror takes a
Nothing stable, this juncture in being itself must be followed and traced. It trembles.
situation that looks hopelessly doomed and finds the essential
within it, but terror contains its own demise, too. We flee from it. We respond to it
with a hardening of our own ways; we reaffirm the identity of being
instead of opening ourselves to others. The American response to terror has been
one of Americanism, there can be no doubt about that. Terror ends in this, and there is no
commemoration, just a forgetting. The commemorative aspect of terror allows us to remember
the fallen and understand how they can still be with us today in our American way of
Terrorism will take place in the withdrawal of beyng, in the
being.
unworld of machination. The modem configuration of war is
surpassed by the technological plan of homogenized circulation, and
the distinction between war and peace falls away in their mutual
commitment to furthering the cycle of production and consumption .
The abandonment of being that forms this unworld by draining the world of its being does not occur
without a trace, however, and terror in its trembling corresponds to that trace. Terrorism necessarily results
from such a devastation-or, "becoming-desert," Vendiistung-of the world; terrorism is always born in the
desert.Terrorism is metaphysical because it touches everything, every
particular being, all of which may be attacked and annihilated. The
circulation of the standing-reserve sets an equivalence of value
among things with a resulting worldlessness where existence is
another name for exchangeability. The exchanged and replaceable things are already
replaced and exchanged, not serially, but essentially. They are not fully present when here. Terrorism
names this absence, or rather is the effect of this absence, which is to say it is that absence
itself, since here we are not dealing with an absence that could be the effect of any loss of presence.
The absence in question is not an absence of presence, but an absence in and through
presence. It would be ridiculous to think that such a change in being would lack a corresponding
 This change in' the nature of being shows itself in the
change in beings.
fact that all beings today are terrorized. They all stand under a very
real threat of destruction via -terrorist acts. There would be no
terrorist threat were it not for these terrorists, yet there would be
no possibility of a threat were it not for being . Certainly terrorism is not the only
"effect" of this absence in presence; Heidegger frequently refers to the atomic bomb in precisely this
regard.Terrorism's claim, however, is distinct from that of atomic war. Like
the atomic bomb, terrorism operates at the level of threat. Insofar as it calls into question
all beings, terrorism is itself a metaphysical determination of
being. Terrorism makes everything a possible object of terrorist
attack, and this is the very terror of it. Everything is a possible
target, and this now means that all beings exist as possible
targets, as possibly destroyed. But this should not be taken to mean that there are
discrete beings, fully present, now threatened with destruction. The ineradicable threat of destruction
transforms the nature ofthe being itself. The being can no longer exist as indifferent to its destruction; this
destruction does not reside outside of the being. Instead, destruction inhabits the being and does so, not
as something superadded to the being, but as the essence of the being itself. Beings are henceforth as
Terror brings about an alteration in the very mode of
though destroyed.
being of reality, the real is now the terrorized. Reality is already
terrorized; the change has already taken place, -and this regardless of whether an attack comes or
not. Beings exist as endangered, as terrorized, and this means as no longer purely self-present. It means
beings exist as already destroyed. Destruction
that, in terms of pure presence,
is not something that comes at a later date, nor is it something that
may or may not already have taken place. Destruction exists now as
threat. The effectiveness of terror lies in the threat, not the attack.
Budget DA
 2AC
Well conceded the link and internal link- we derail, cause
the shutdown and wreck the economy: Movements to
localize civilization and end ecological destruction are
rapidly gaining strength; global economic collapse is the
critical mass for achieving dedevelopment.

TedTrainer, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Work,

University of New South Wales, Modified 5/29/2003,
http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/D24TheTransIsUnderway.html

Although a minor phenomenon at present, it can be confidently predicted that

this paradigm shift will accelerate in coming years given the
pace at which the globalisaztion of the economy will make it
painfully obvious to more and more people that the old values
and systems will not provide well for all. Building new systems. Much more
impressive than the evidence of a change in world view is the growth of alternative settlements and
systems. As Ife says, "At
the grassroots level...increasing numbers of
people in different countries are experimenting with
community-based alternatives, such as local economic
systems, community-based education, housing co-
operatives...a community-based strategy based on principles
of ecology and social justice is already emerging, as a result of
the initiative of ordinary people at grass-roots level, who are
turning away from mainstream structures..." (Ife, 1995, p. 99.) According to
Norberg-Hodge, "Around the world, people are building communities
that attempt to get away from the waste, pollution,
competition, and violence of contemporary life. (Norberg-Hodge, 1996, p.
405.) The agency she has founded, the International Society for Ecology and Culture, works in Ladakh to
reinforce local economies and its video Local Futures, is an inspiring illustration of what is being done in
many parts of the world. The New Economic Foundation in London works to promote local economic
development, with a special interest in bujilding local quality of life indicators and in establishing local
currencies. Schroyer"s book Towards a World That Works (1997) documents many alternative community
initiatives. "Everywhere people are waking up to the realities of
their situation in a globalising economy and are beginning to
recognise that their economies resources and socio-political
participations must be regrounded in their local and regional
communities." (p. 225) "Everywhere social and economic structures
are re-emerging in the midst of the market system that are
spontaneously generated social protections to normatively re-
embed the market..." "It is no exaggeration to say that local communities
everywhere are on the front lines of what might well be
characterised as World War III." (p. 229.) "It is a contest between
the competing goals of economic growth to maximise profits for
absentee owners vs creating healthy communities that are good
places for people to live." (p. 230.) "In Britain, over 1.5 million
people now take regular part in a rainbow economy of
community economic initiatives." (New Internationalist, 1996, p. 27.) Friberg and
Hettne (1985) argue that two main groups are behind the emergence of self reliant communities, viz.,
those holding "post materialist" values, and those who have been marginalised, such as the unemployed
and the Third World poor. In Living Lightly Schwarz and Schwarz discuss the many alternative settlements
these people "...hope that the
they visited on a recent world tour. They say that
tiny islands of better living which they inhabit will provide
examples which will eventually supplant the norms of
unfettered capitalism which rule us today. Their hope is not in
revolution but in persuasion by example." ( p. 2.) "What is new is
that small groups of Living Lightly people are now part of an
articulate and increasingly purposeful global culture which
promotes values that run counter to those of the mainstream ."
(p. 2.) "They think the empire will eventually disintegrate...In
anticipation of that collapse islands of refuge must be
prepared." (p. 3.) Living Lightly people "...can only hope to prevail
through their own example and the gradual erosion of the
dominant system through local initiatives that exchange high
living standards for a high quality of life." (p. 165.) Living Lightly
people "...are in revolt against the emerging global economy
and want to set up viable local alternatives." (p. 150.)

Collapse has already begunletting it happen is key to

stable transition.

Heinberg 10 (Richard, Fellow Post Carbon Institute, Life After

Growth, 3-4,
http://www.countercurrents.org/heinberg040310.htm) //AN
Then in 2008, the Peak Oil scenario became all too real. Global oil production had been stagnant since
2005 and petroleum prices had been soaring upward.In July, 2008, the per-barrel price
shot up nearly to $150half again higher (in inflation-adjusted terms) than the price
spikes of the 1970s that had triggered the worst recession since
World War II. By summer 2008, the auto industry, the trucking
industry, international shipping, agriculture, and the airlines were all
reeling. But what happened next riveted the world's attention to such a degree that the oil price spike
was all but forgotten: in September 2008, the global financial system nearly
collapsed. The reasons for this sudden, gripping crisis apparently had to do with housing bubbles, lack
of proper regulation of the banking industry, and the over-use of bizarre financial products that almost
the oil price spike was a
nobody understood. However, there are reasons for concluding that
much more important contributor to this economic meltdown than is
generally discussed (see www.energybulletin.net/node/49798). In the aftermath of that global
financial near-death experience, both the Peak Oil impact scenario proposed a
decade earlier and the Limits to Growth standard-run scenario of
1972 seemed to be confirmed with uncanny and frightening accuracy.
Global trade was falling. The world's largest auto companies were on life support. The U.S.
airline industry had shrunk by almost a third. Food riots were erupting in poor nations around the world.
Lingering wars in Iraq (the nation with the world's second-largest crude oil reserves) and Afghanistan (the
site of disputed oil and gas pipeline projects) continued to bleed the coffers of the world's foremost oil-
importing nation. Meanwhile, the debate about what to do to rein in global climate change exemplified the
 It had by now
political inertia that had kept the world on track for calamity since the early '70s.
become obvious to nearly every person of modest education and intellect that the world
has two urgent, incontrovertible reasons to rapidly end its reliance on fossil fuels:
the twin threats of climate catastrophe and impending constraints to fuel supplies (with most of the
Yet at the Copenhagen climate
remaining oil reserves located in just a few countries).
conference in December, 2009, the priorities of the most fuel-
dependent nations were clear: carbon emissions should be cut, and fossil fuel
dependency reduced, but only if doing so does not threaten
economic growth. The cruel irony, obvious to my Peak Oil-aware colleagues but
apparently not to the delegates at Copenhagen, was that the decades-long era of
rapid economic growth based on increased fossil-fueled production
and consumption is over anyway. The world's last chance to
collectively, cooperatively negotiate a turn away from the precipice
was being squandered for the sake of a goal that was no longer
achievable. I could take no satisfaction from these confirmations of the Limits to Growth and Peak
Oil scenarios; being able to say "I told you so" hardly made up for the
shock of knowing that our last opportunities to change direction had
been missed and that the train of industrial civilization was now not
merely still chugging toward a broken bridge, but was actually starting to plummet into the
gorge below. We had succeeded somewhat in helping increase public awareness of an issue: due to
the efforts of thousands of scientists, writers, and activists, "peak oil" had become a recognizable term in
public discourse. But we had failed to budge government policy in more than very minor ways (I had, for
example, assisted the City Council-appointed Peak Oil Task Force of Oakland, California, which produced a
The world has entered a new
sensible report on which, so far, little action has been taken).
era. The project of awakening and warning policy makers and the general public was worthy of the
investment of all the effort we could muster. In fact, it would have been negligent of the Limits to Growth
authors, Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrre, and thousands of climate and environmental scientists and
But it is now too late to avert a
activists (myself included) not to give it our best shot.
collapse of the existing system. The collapse has begun. It is time for
a different strategy. By saying this, I am not suggesting that we should all simply give up and
accept an inevitable, awful fate. Even though the collapse of the world's
financial and industrial systems has started, effort now at minimizing further dire
consequences is essential. Collapse does not mean extinction. A new way of
life will almost certainly emerge from the wreckage of the fossil-
fueled growth era. It is up to those of us who have some
understanding of what is happening, and why, to help design that
new way of life so that it will be sustainable, equitable, and fulfilling
for all concerned. We all need practical strategies and tools to
weather the collapse and to build the foundation of whatever is to
come after. The propositions described above, and my personal journey, are the starting points for a
search that can be summarized in a single question: What are the guideposts toward a livable, inviting
post-growth society? This search has in many instances entailed a literal, geographic journey. During the
past few years,as I traveled the lecture circuit, I met thousands of people
who had already concluded on their own that the global stage was
being set for an economic crash of epic proportions. They had passed through
the psychological stages of griefdenial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They were
thinking creatively, building new lives, and experimenting with a
wide range of strategies for meeting basic human needs while using much less of just about
everything. Some of these folks, like me, had been thinking along these lines for a long timesince the
1970s. Many were much younger, though, had learned about Peak Oil or climate change just within the
past few years, and had recently decided to devote their lives to building a post-hydrocarbon world. Some
were clearly members of what was known in the 1970s as the "counterculture." Others were mainstream
citizensinvestment bankers, real estate sellers, high school teachers, small business owners, corporate
middle managerswho had chanced upon information that awakened them forcibly from their routines.
Many of these folks lived in large cities, but others in small towns or on farms; some were rich, some poor
(a few by choice); some were devout, others agnostic or atheist; some were working alone on survivalist
projects, while others were building community organizations; some saw the transition as a business
opportunity while others were working through non-profit organizations. Here are just three examples that
stand out. In 2005, while on a lecture tour in Ireland, I met a young college teacher named Rob Hopkins
who believed that life could be better without fossil fuels. He had led his students in developing an "Energy
Descent Action Plan" for their town, and believed he had the seed for something larger and more
significant. He soon moved back to his native England to earn his Ph.D., and designed his thesis project
around helping the village of Totnes begin a cooperative, phased process of transitioning away from its
dependence on fossil fuels. This project in turn led to the start of a series of Transition Initiatives in villages,
towns, and neighborhoods throughout the U.K. In 2007, a version of Rob's written Ph.D. thesis was
published as a book (The Transition Handbook) that quickly began inspiring others to take up this strategy.
Today there are hundreds of Transition Initiatives at various stages of development in a dozen countries
(including over 50 in the U.S.). While in Montana for a speaking engagement at the University of Montana
in Helena in spring 2009, some local Peak Oil activists drove me to the town of Ronan and introduced me
to Billie Lee, who had helped start Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center. The Center is housed in a
fairly small, non-descript building and features medium-scale food processing equipment that local small
food producers can rent at reasonable rates. This enables small farmers to produce value-added products
(everything from canned soups to herbal tea bags) that are profitable and are price-competitive with those
made by industrial food companies located hundreds or thousands of miles from Ronan. Local food has
become an obsession for the sustainability-minded during the past few years, and local food systems will
be a necessary pillar of post-growth economies. Yet aspiring small-scale farmers often have a hard time
getting started because they cannot afford the equipment to enable them to produce profitable value-
added products. Here in the tiny hamlet of Ronan was an ingenious solution to the problem, and one that
deserves to be replicated in every agricultural county in the nation. On a trip to New England in 2007, I
met Lynn Benander, a community energy activist and entrepreneur who had started a project called Co-op
Power to bring renewable energy to low-income and multi-ethnic communities throughout the Northeast.
Typically, renewable energy projects cost more to get going than conventional coal or gas power projects,
and so they tend to be found in wealthier communities and regions. Conversely, the most polluting energy
projects tend to be sited in or near poor neighborhoods or regions. Co-op Power aims to change that
imbalance of powerin a way that any community can copy. A typical project: You help four people put up
a solar hot water system and everyone comes to help you put up yours; you save 40 to 50 percent off your
total system price, get to know your neighbors, and learn how your system works. Co-op Power had also
pioneered a cooperative financing method that cuts through the usual roadblocks to renewable energy
Individually, these
projects in poorer neighborhoods by leveraging member equity.
initiatives and projects may seem to be on too small a scale to make
much of a difference. But multiplied by thousands, with examples in
nearly every community, they represent a quiet yet powerful
movement. Few of these efforts have gained national media attention. Most media commentators
who address economic issues are focused on the prospectspositive or negativeof the existing growth-
in
based economy. These projects don't seem all that important within that framework of thinking. But
the new context of the no-growth economy, they may mean the
difference between ruinous poverty and happy sufficiency. The
trends are already in evidence: as the financial crisis worsens, more
people are planting gardens, and seed companies are working hard to keep up with the
demand. More young people are taking up farming now than in any recent decade. In 2008, more bicycles
were sold in the U.S. than automobiles (not good news for the struggling car companies, but great news for
the climate).And since the crisis started, Americans have been spending
much less on non-essentialsrepairing and re-using rather than
replacing and adding. Many economists assume these trends are
short-term and that Americans will return to consumerism as
economic crisis shifts into recovery. But if there is no "recovery" in
the usual sense, then these trends will only grow. This is what the early
adopters are assuming. They believe that the nation and the world have turned a
corner. They understand something the media either ignore or deny. They're betting on a future of local
food systems, not global agribusiness; of community credit co-ops rather than too-big-to-fail Wall Street
megabanks; of small-scale renewable energy projects, not a world-spanning system of fossil-fuel
extraction, trade, and consumption. A future in which we do for ourselves, share, and cooperate. They're
The realization that growth is at an end raises
embarking on a life after growth.
many questions. Will the financial impact be inflationary or deflationary? Will some
nations fare better than others, leading to protectionist trade wars ?
Will the "down-sizing" of social and economic complexity lead also to a substantial die-off of the human
species? How quickly will all of this happen? There simply are no hard and fast
answers to such questions. The financial, energy, food, transport, and political systems on
which we rely are complex, so it is almost impossible to reliably model their response to a shock such as a
resource limits-imposed end to economic growth. The only reasonable response, it seems to me, is to act
as if survival is possible, and to build resilience throughout society as quickly as can be, acting locally
wherever there are individuals or groups with the understanding and wherewithal. We must
assume that a satisfactory, sustainable way of life is achievable in
the absence of fossil fuels and conventional economic growth, and
go about building it. This will be the focus of my work from now onand it is likely to be the
work of the next few generations as well. Call it Transition, call it cultural survival and
renewal, call it what you will, it is the only game in town for the foreseeable
future.

Their models failed to predict the economic crisis- the

assumption of rationality makes collapse inevitable

Stiglitz 10
(By Joseph Stiglitz The writer, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, is
University Professor at Columbia University. He served as chairman of President Bill Clintons
Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economist of the World Bank. He is on the Advisory
Board of INET, Needed: a new economic paradigm, August 19, 2010)//TR

The blame game continues over who is responsible for the worst recession since the
Great Depression the financiers who did such a bad job of managing risk or the regulators who failed to
stop them. But the economics profession bears more than a little culpability. It provided
the models that gave comfort to regulators that markets could be self-regulated; that they
were efficient and self-correcting. The efficient markets hypothesis the notion that
market prices fully revealed all the relevant information ruled the day. Today, not only is our
economy in a shambles but so too is the economic paradigm that
predominated in the years before the crisis or at least it should be. It is hard for non-economists to
understand how peculiar the predominant macroeconomic models were. Many assumed demand had to
equal supply and that meant there could be no unemployment. (Right now a lot of people are just
enjoying an extra dose of leisure; why they are unhappy is a matter for psychiatry, not economics.) Many
used representative agent models all individuals were assumed to be identical,
and this meant there could be no meaningful financial markets (who would
be lending money to whom?). Information asymmetries, the cornerstone of modern economics, also had no
place: they could arise only if individuals suffered from acute schizophrenia, an assumption incompatible
Bad models lead to bad policy:
with another of the favoured assumptions, full rationality.
central banks, for instance, focused on the small economic inefficiencies arising from inflation,
to the exclusion of the far, far greater inefficiencies arising from
dysfunctional financial markets and asset price bubbles. After all, their models said that
financial markets were always efficient. Remarkably, standard macroeconomic models did not even
incorporate adequate analyses of banks. No wonder former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, in
his famous mea culpa, could express his surprise that banks did not do a better job at risk management.
The real surprise was his surprise: even a cursory look at the perverse incentives confronting banks and
their managers would have predicted short-sighted behaviour with excessive risk-taking. The standard
models should be graded on their predictive ability and especially their ability to predict in circumstances
that matter. Increasing the accuracy of forecast in normal times (knowing whether the economy will grow
at 2.4 per cent or 2.5 per cent) is far less important than knowing the risk of a major recession. In this the
models failed miserably, and the predictions of policymakers based on them
have, by now, totally undermined their credibility. Policymakers did not see the
crisis coming, said its effects were contained after the bubble burst, and thought the consequences would
be far more short-lived and less severe than they have been. Fortunately, while much of the mainstream
focused on these flawed models, numerous researchers were engaged in developing alternative
approaches. Economic theory had already shown that many of the central conclusions of
the standard model were not robust that is, small changes in assumptions led to
large changes in conclusions. Even small information asymmetries, or imperfections in risk markets, meant
that markets were not efficient. Celebrated results, such as Adam Smiths invisible hand, did not hold; the
invisible hand was invisible because it was not there. Few today would argue that bank managers, in their
pursuit of their self-interest, had promoted the well-being of the global economy. Monetary policy affects
the economy through the availability of credit and the terms on which it is made available, especially to
small- and medium-sized enterprises. Understanding this requires us to analyse banks and their interaction
with the shadow banking sector. The spread between the Treasury bill rate and lending rates can change
markedly. With a few exceptions, most central banks paid little attention to systemic risk and the
risks posed by credit interlinkages. Years before the crisis, a few researchers focused on these
issues, including the possibility of the bankruptcy cascades that were to play out in such an important way
in the crisis. This is an example of the importance of modelling carefully complex interactions among
economic agents (households, companies, banks) interactions that cannot be studied in models in which
Even the sacrosanct assumption of rationality has
everyone is assumed to be the same.
been attacked: there are systemic deviations from rationality and
consequences for macroeconomic behaviour that need to be explored. Changing
paradigms is not easy. Too many have invested too much in the wrong models. Like the Ptolemaic attempts
there will be heroic efforts to add complexities
to preserve earth-centric views of the universe,
and refinements to the standard paradigm. The resulting models will be an improvement and policies
based on them may do better, but they too are likely to fail. Nothing less than a
paradigm shift will do. But a new paradigm, I believe, is within our grasp: the intellectual
building blocks are there and the Institute for New Economic Thinking is providing a framework for bringing
the diverse group of scholars striving to create this new paradigm together. What is at stake, of course, is
more than just the credibility of the economics profession or that of the policymakers who rely on their
ideas: it is the stability and prosperity of our economies.

Transition now survivableboosting 1st world economies

causes neocolonial war during the collapse causing
extinction.

Lewis 98 (Chris H. Lewis, Professor of American Studies at the

University of Colorado-Boulder, 1998, in The Coming Age of
Scarcity, ed Dobkowski and Wallimann, p 56-57)

Most critics would argue, probably correctly, thatinstead of allowing

underdeveloped countries to withdraw from the global
economy and undermine the economies of the developed
world, the United States, Europe, and Japan and others will fight
neocolonial wars to force these countries to remain within this
collapsing global economy. These neocolonial wars will result in
mass death, suffering, and even regional nuclear wars. If First World
countries choose military confrontation and political repression to maintain the global economy, then we
may see mass death and genocide on a global scale that will
make the deaths of World War II pale in comparison. However, these
neocolonial wars, fought to maintain the developed nations
economic and political hegemony, will cause the final collapse of our
global industrial civilization. These wars will so damage the
complex economic and trading networks and squander
material, biological, and energy resources that they will
undermine the global economy and its ability to support the
earths 6 to 8 billion people. This would be the worst-case scenario for the collapse of
global civilization. It is also entirely possible that the global economy is already so fragile that
developed countries cannot afford to engage in these neocolonial
wars, especially if they do not do it as a global block of developed nations
through the United Nations. The desperate struggle among
competing modern empires to maintain their resource
pipelines into the underdeveloped world will only further undermine global
civilization. Warring nations attempts to cripple their enemies
by denying access to their economies and resources will only hasten
the collapse of the global economy. No matter how it collapses, through economic
collapse and the development of local and regional economies or through a global military struggle by the
modern industrial
First World to maintain its access to Third World resources, or both
civilization will collapse because its demands for energy,
natural resources, and ecosystem services are not sustainable.
The current collapse of economies and states in Africa, Latin
America, and the former Soviet Union demonstrate that this
global collapse is already occurring. The inability of the United
States and the United Nations in the 1990s to solve the
economic and political problems that exacerbate conflicts in
Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet
Union demonstrate that the developed countries might be
under such economic and political stress that they cannot
afford to use the political or military capital necessary to force
recalcitrant nations and peoples to remain within the global
industrial economy. Although many would argue that the massive death and suffering caused
by these conflicts must be stopped, it could be that this death will be less than if the First World intervened
Attempts to
and tried to force Third World countries to remain within global civilization.
intervene in these growing regional conflicts, on the basis of
liberal internationalism and global civilization, will backfire and
cause only more suffering. In fact, these interventions will further
accelerate the collapse of global civilization.

Global war will kill everyone in 2025 without dedev.

Chase-Dunn 99 (Christopher Chase-Dunn, Director of the

Institute for Research on World-Systems, University of California-
Riverside, and Bruce Podobnik, Assistant Professor in the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lewis and Clark
College, 1999, in The Future of Global Conflict, ed. Bornschier and
Chase-Dunn, p. 43)
While the onset of a period of hegemonic rivalry is in itself disturbing, the picture becomes even grimmer
As an extensive
when the influence of long-terni economic cycles is taken into account.
body of research documents (see especially Van Duijn, 1983), the 50 to 60
year business cycle known as the Kondratieff wave (K-wave)
has been in synchronous operation on an international scale
for at least the last two centuries. Utilizing data gathering by Levy (1983) on war severity, Goldstein
(1988) demonstrates that there is a corresponding 50 to 60 year cycle in the

number of battle deaths per year for the period 1495-1975.

Beyond merely showing that the K-wave and the war cycle are linked in a systematic fashion, Goldsteins
 severe core wars are much more likely to occur
research suggests that
late in the upswing phase of the K-wave. This finding is
interpreted as showing that, while states always desire to go
to war, they can afford to do so only when economic growth is
providing them with sufficient resources. Modelski and Thompson (1996)
present a more complex interpretation of the systemic relationship between economic and war cycles, but
it closely resembles Goldsteins hypothesis. In their analysis, a first economic upswing generates the
economic resources required by an ascending core state to make a bid for hegemony; a second period of
economic growth follows a period of global war and the establishment of a new period of hegemony. Here,
again, specific economic upswings are associated with an increased likelihood of the outbreak of core war.
It is widely accepted that the current K-wave, which entered a
downturn around 1967-73, is probably now in the process of
beginning a new upturn which will reach its apex around 2025.
It is also widely accepted that by this period US hegemony,
already unravelling, will have been definitively eroded. This
convergence of a plateauing economic cycle with a period of
political multicentricity within the core should, if history truly
does repeat itself, result in the outbreak of full-scale warfare
between the declining hegemon and the ascending core
powers. Although both Goldstein (1991) and Modelski and Thompson (1996) assert that such a global
war can (somehow) be avoided, other theorists consider that the possibility of such a
core war is sufficiently high that serious steps should be taken
to ensure that such collective suicide does not occur (Chase-Dunn and
OReilly, 1989; Goldfrank, 1987).

Ecocide kills all life by 2050 without dedev

The Observer 02 (The Observer, July 7, 2002,

http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,750783,00.h
tml)

A study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to be released on

Tuesday, warns that the human race is plundering the planet at
a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life. In a damning
condemnation of Western society's high consumption levels, it adds
that the extra planets (the equivalent size of Earth) will be required
by the year 2050 as existing resources are exhausted. The
report, based on scientific data from across the world, reveals
that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed
by humans over the past three decades. Using the image of the
need for mankind to colonise space as a stark illustration of the
problems facing Earth, the report warns that either consumption
rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no
longer be able to sustain its growing population. Experts say
that seas will become emptied of fish while forests - which
absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed
and freshwater supplies become scarce and polluted. The
report offers a vivid warning that either people curb their
extravagant lifestyles or risk leaving the onus on scientists to
locate another planet that can sustain human life. Since this is
unlikely to happen, the only option is to cut consumption now.
Systematic overexploitation of the planet's oceans has meant
the North Atlantic's cod stocks have collapsed from an estimated
spawning stock of 264,000 tonnes in 1970 to under 60,000 in 1995.
The study will also reveal a sharp fall in the planet's ecosystems
between 1970 and 2002 with the Earth's forest cover shrinking
by about 12 per cent, the ocean's biodiversity by a third and
freshwater ecosystems in the region of 55 per cent. The Living
Planet report uses an index to illustrate the shocking level of
deterioration in the world's forests as well as marine and
freshwater ecosystems. Using 1970 as a baseline year and
giving it a value of 100, the index has dropped to a new low of
around 65 in the space of a single generation. It is not just
humans who are at risk. Scientists, who examined data for 350
kinds of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish, also found the
numbers of many species have more than halved. Martin Jenkins, senior
adviser for the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, which helped compile the report, said: 'It seems things are

getting worse faster than possibly ever before. Never has one
single species had such an overwhelming influence. We are
entering uncharted territory.'

Development is reducing human reproduction capabilities,

ensuring eventual extinction.

Douthwaite 99 (Richard Douthwaite, economist employed by

Jamaica and Montserrat, journalist, 1999, in Critical Development
Theory, ed. Munck and OHearn, p. 158)

the world economy is unsustainable is that some of

A third reason that
the chemicals it employs mimic human hormones and disrupt
the bodys endocrine system. As a result, the sperm counts of
European men have been falling at 3 per cent per year since
these chemicals came into use after the Second World War (Swan
a al. 1997). The same chemicals are also causing increases in
testicular and breast cancer (European Workshop 1996) and are causing
fewer boys to be born relative to girls. Moreover, a higher
proportion of these boys than ever before have defective
genitals. In short, the world economic system is undermining
humanitys ability to reproduce itself. If the human race is not
sustainable then neither is its economic system.
Failure to de-develop ensures global pandemics and
extinction.

Ryan 97 (Frank Ryan, M.D., 1997, virus X, p. 366)

How might the human race appear to such an aggressively

emerging virus? That teeming, globally intrusive species, with
its transcontinental air travel, massively congested cities,
sexual promiscuity, and in the less affluent regions where
the virus is most likely to first emerge a vulnerable lack of
hygiene with regard to food and water supplies and hospitality
to biting insects' The virus is best seen, in John Hollands excellent analogy, as a swarm of competing mutations, with
each individual strain subjected to furious forces of natural selection for the strain, or strains, most likely to amplify and evolve in the new
ecological habitat.3 With such a promising new opportunity in the invaded species, natural selection must eventually come to

dominate viral behavior. In time the dynamics of infection will select

for a more resistant human population. Such a coevolution
takes rather longer in "human" time too long, given the ease
of spread within the global village. A rapidly lethal and quickly
spreading virus simply would not have time to switch from
aggression to coevolution. And there lies the danger. Joshua
Lederbergs prediction can now be seen to be an altogether logical one.
Pandemics are inevitable. Our incredibly rapid human
evolution, our overwhelming global needs, the advances of our
complex industrial society, all have moved the natural
goalposts. The advance of society, the very science of change,
has greatly augmented the potential for the emergence of a
pandemic strain. It is hardly surprising that Avrion Mitchison, scientific
director of Deutsches Rheuma Forschungszentrum in Berlin, asks the
question: "Will we survive! We have invaded every biome on earth and we
continue to destroy other species so very rapidly that one
eminent scientist foresees the day when no life exists on earth
apart from the human monoculture and the small volume of
species useful to it. An increasing multitude of disturbed viral-host
symbiotic cycles are provoked into self-protective counterattacks. This is a
dangerous situation. And we have seen in the previous chapter how ill-
prepared the world is to cope with it. It begs the most frightening
question of all: could such a pandemic virus cause the
extinction of the human species?

We control uniqueness: globalization makes transition

inevitable increasing complexity means a collapse
anywhere is a collapse everywhere.

Mackenzie 8 (Deborah [BBC Correspondent quoting Joe Tainter,

an archaeologist at the University of Utah, and author of the 1988
book The Collapse of Complex Societies, and Yaneer Bar-Yam,
head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in
Cambridge, Massachusetts ] Are WE doomed? April 5th, 2008
EBSCOhost)
DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the
planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in
history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different? Doomsday scenarios typically feature a
knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic . Yet there is another chilling possibility:
what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the
others, is destined to collapse sooner or later? A few researchers have been making
such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity
theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond
a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it
reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can
bring everything crashing down. Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is
time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it
is not yet too late, and that we can - we must - act now to keep disaster at bay. History is not on our side. Think of
Diamond of the University of
Sumeria, of ancient Egypt and of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller, Jared
California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental mismanagement for the fall
of the Mayan civilisation and others, and warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to
stop destroying our environmental support systems. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees.
He has that governments must pay more attention to vital environmental resources. "It's not about saving the planet. It's
about saving civilisation," he says. Others think our problems run deeper. From the moment our
ancestors started to settle down and build cities, we have had to find solutions to the problems that success brings. " For
the past 10,000 years, problem solving has produced increasing complexity in human societies," says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at the
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and author of the 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies . If crops fail because rain is patchy, build
irrigation canals. When they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields lead to a bigger population, build more canals.
When there are too many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax
inspectors and a system to record the sums paid. That much the Sumerians knew. Diminishing returns There is, however, a price to be
Every extra layer of organisation imposes a cost in terms of
paid.
energy, the common currency of all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And
increasing complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing returns. The extra
food produced by each extra hour of labour - or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare - diminishes as that
investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents per dollar invested in research as that
To keep
research investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says.
growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet
each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a larger population,
more kinds of specialists, more resources to manage, more information to juggle - and, ultimately, less bang for your
Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and
buck.
resources available to a society are required just to maintain its
existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or
barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil
order collapses. What emerges is a less complex society, which is
organised on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group. Tainter sees diminishing
returns as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilisations, from the early Chinese dynasties to the Greek
city state of Mycenae. These civilisations relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder and wood,
Western industrial
and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit, things fell apart.
civilisation has become bigger and more complex than any before it
by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal and oil, but these are limited. There are
increasing signs of diminishing returns: the energy required to get is mounting and although global is still increasing,
constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental
degradation and evolving - the yield boosts per unit of investment in
innovation are shrinking. "Since problems are inevitable," Tainter warns, "this process is in part
ineluctable." Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar-
Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the same
conclusion that Tainter reached from studying history. Social organisations become steadily more complex as they are
required to deal both with environmental problems and with challenges from neighbouring societies that are also becoming more complex,
Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a fundamental shift in the way the society is organised. "To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less
complex than the system they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies add ever more layers of management but,
ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that
We are at this point. This shift to
point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed.

decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief that modern

society is more resilient than the old hierarchical systems. "I don't
foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity, " says
futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond. "Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making." This, he
says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those like the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was
centralised. Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the
University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006 book The Upside of Down . "Initially, increasing connectedness and
diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get food from another village that didn't The very
nature of civilisation may make its demise inevitable , says Debora MacKenzie As
connections increase, though, networked systems become increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures
can propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if either has a
problem. "Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways ," says Bar-Yam.
"This is not widely understood." The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to transmit shocks rather
than absorb them. "The intricate networks that tightly connect us together -
and move people, materials, information, money and energy -
amplify and transmit any shock," says Homer-Dixon. "A financial crisis, a terrorist
attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant destabilising effects, from one side of the
world to the other." For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe suffered when apparently insignificant nodes of their
respective electricity grids failed. And this year China suffered a similar blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled networks
Perrow of Yale
like these create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries , says Charles

University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and disasters. Credit crunch Perrow says
interconnectedness in the global production system has now reached the point
where "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown
everywhere". This is especially true of the world's financial systems,
where the coupling is very tight. "Now we have a debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could be
enormous." "A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism," says Bar-Yam, "random damage is like lopping a
chunk off a sheep." Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which
it may not even be predictable - which chunks
chunks a sheep needs, it isn't clear -
of our densely networked civilisation are critical, until it's too late .
"When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask
questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means
civilisation is very vulnerable." So what can we do? "The key issue is really whether we respond
successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have," Bar-Yam says. That means making sure our "global sheep"
does not get injured in the first place - something that may be hard to guarantee as the climate shifts and the world's fuel
and mineral resources dwindle. Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse.
Similar ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling,
now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of
new forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees,
beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled system. "It becomes an extremely efficient
system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of conditions," says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions -
an insect outbreak, fire or drought - can trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end
Globalisation is
result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one.
resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our systems
to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as
companies maximise profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as
mass production maximises efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. "We need to be more selective about
increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems," says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh the
Could we heed these warnings and start carefully
benefits." Is there an alternative?
climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilisation that
managed to decline but not fall. "After the Byzantine empire lost most of its
territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities
mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy
became less monetised, and they switched from professional army
to peasant militia." Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced society. Nevertheless,
Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action now. "First, we need to encourage distributed
and decentralised production of vital goods like energy and food," he
says. "Second, we need to remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing company with a large inventory may
lose some money on warehousing, but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of action." The
electricity industry in the US has already started identifying hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting
some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a
world of fierce competition, private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidise inefficiency in
Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely.
the public interest.
"tectonic" stresses that will shove our rigid, tightly
He points to what he calls
coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever
more finely tuned to. These include population growth, the growing
divide between the world's rich and poor, financial instability,
weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and
climate change. In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of diminishing returns - just
as we are running out of cheap and plentiful energy. "This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the healthy
breakdown in natural function in our societies in a way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what
happens in forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is recolonised and renewed
We must allow partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says, rather than trying so
by younger forest elsewhere.
hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse. Lester Brown thinks we are
"The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We
fast running out of time.
need a Great Mobilisation, as we had in wartime," he says. "There has been tremendous progress in
just the past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge. But it's now a
race between tipping points - which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or collapse?" Tainter is not
convinced that even new technology will save civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-based'
approach to the future," he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the
problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute
limits. Studies of the way by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea.

Economic rationality reduces beings to objects of

scientific inquiry- the drive for predictability is sustained
through the erasure of difference

Dubhashi 8
(PR, writer for mainstream weekly and public lecturer, Critique of neo-classical economics,
Mainstream, vol. XLVI, No. 19, http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article663.html)//TR

WHILE market economy seems to have emerged triumphant in todays era of globalisation, there is a
keener realisation that neo-classical Micro- economics, which is supposed to provide intellectual support to
the free market economy, is itself based on questionable assumptions. Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel Prize
winner, through his papers, made economists aware of the stringent conditions required for competitive
the concept of homo-economics, the individual economic
equilibrium. First,
agent, whether consumer or producer, making choices or taking decisions is a faulty one. An
individual does not exist in isolation. He or she is a member of a family and society
and his or her choices and decisions are influenced by interpersonal
relationships and community values. The economic activity is embedded in a web of
social institutions. An individual should be placed in a social context ,
as observed by the economist, Nobel Prize winner Trygve Haavelmo, in his lecture Economics and Welfare
that an individual makes rational
State (1989). Secondly, the stipulation
choices and takes rational decisions in self-interest is not valid. The behaviour of the
individual is influenced by many factors including moral and ethical
considerations and is not purely hedonist in character. Impulse buying, spontaneous
consumption decisions, adventure and desire for the unknown are not always
rational. But they do characterise individual decisions. Thirdly, the assumptions relating to a
perfectly competitive market are inconsistent with the conditions in the real world. One of the assumptions
is that there are innumerable buyers and sellers none of whom by themselves are able to influence the
market. In actual world, there are conditions of monopoly, oligopoly and imperfect competition based on
differentiated products. In the thirties, E. S. Chamberlain and Joan Robinson wrote books to modify the
laws formulated to suit a perfectly competitive market. This was before the emergence of modern
corporations. As J. K. Galbraith has pointed out, corporations of today are so powerful that with the aid of
advertisements and money power they are able to reverse the proposition that supply is according to
demand. Corporations manipulate demand to be in accordance with supply. Nor is the assumption of
perfect knowledge valid. Consumers are often ill informed about the products and services they buy.
There is no instantaneous omniscience. Fourthly, firms in the real world do not take decisions regarding
production by equating marginal cost with marginal revenue or by constantly substituting at the margin
one factor of production for another with a view to optimisation. These decisions are often influenced by
compulsions of machinery and capital equipment and technology. There are no constant coefficients of
production, no perfect divisibility of goods or factors of production. Fifthly, market as conceived in
textbooks of Micro-economics bears no resemblance to the market in the real world. That is why syllabus
relating to marketing in business courses deal with practical issues like brand and goodwill rather than
market equilibrium as envisaged
the theorectical stipulations of a competitive market. Sixthly,
by Micro-economics is in stationary state. It does not deal with dynamics in the economy.
Uncertainty is an integral part of economic life and yet will not be analysed in
any rigorous way in the competitive model until the early 1950s when Kenneth Arrow introduced
uncertainty in equilibrium analysis, although in a specific and restrictive way. Its input-output relationship
is lineal whereas in the real world there are dynamic changes and non-lineal and even chaotic
relationship is the rule rather than exception. Seventhly, Micro-economics completely overlooks the
institutional set-up in the context of which the market functions. The institutional set-up includes the legal
framework, educational set-up, cultural institutions etc. Eightly, Micro-economics confines its attention to
economic activity in the market, overlooking economic activity conducted in the fold of family, health
and educational institutions and government to give a few examples. It has been estimated that the family
activity in the Western economies account for 40 per cent of the GNP.

Econ collapse saps resources from military aggression

Bennett 2k PolSci Prof, Penn State (Scott and Timothy Nordstrom, Foreign Policy Substitutability and Internal
Economic Problems in Enduring Rivalries, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Ebsco)

Conflict settlement is also a distinct route to dealing with internal problems that leaders in rivalries may pursue when faced with internal problems. Military
Leaders may choose to negotiate
competition between states requires large amounts of resources, and rivals require even more attention.

a settlement that ends a rivalry to free up important resources that may be reallocated to the domestic
economy. In a guns versus butter world of economic trade-offs, when a state can no longer afford to pay the expenses associated with competition
in a rivalry, it is quite rational for leaders to reduce costs by ending a rivalry. This gain (a peace dividend) could be achieved at any time by ending a rivalry.
However, such a gain is likely to be most important and attractive to leaders when internal conditions are bad and the leader is seeking ways to alleviate active
problems. Support for policy change away from continued rivalry is more likely to
develop when the economic situation sours and elites and masses are
looking for ways to improve a worsening situation. It is at these times that the pressure to
cut military investment will be greatest and that state leaders will be forced to recognize the difficulty of
continuing to pay for a rivalry. Among other things, this argument also encompasses the view that the cold war ended because the

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could no longer compete economically with

Econ collapse doesnt cause war prefer our studies

Bazzi and Blattman 11

Samuel Bazzi (Department of Economics at University of California San Diego) and Christopher Blattman
(assistant professor of political science and economics at Yale University) November 2011 Economic
Shocks and Conflict: The (Absence of?) Evidence from Commodity Prices
http://www.chrisblattman.com/documents/research/2011.EconomicShocksAndConflict.pdf?9d7bd4

VI. Discussion and conclusions A. Implications for our theories of political instability and conflict The state
is not a prize?Warlord politics and the state prize logic lie at the center of the most influential models of
conflict, state development, and political transitions in economics and political science. Yet we see no
evidence for this idea in economic shocks, even when looking at the friendliest cases : fragile
and unconstrained states dominated by extractive commodity revenues . Indeed, we see the
opposite correlation: if anything, higher rents from commodity prices weakly 22 lower the
risk and length of conflict. Perhaps shocks are the wrong test. Stocks of resources could matter more
than price shocks (especially if shocks are transitory). But combined with emerging evidence that war onset
is no more likely even with rapid increases in known oil reserves (Humphreys 2005; Cotet and Tsui 2010)
we regard the state prize logic of war with skepticism.17 Our main political economy models may
need a new engine. Naturally, an absence of evidence cannot be taken for evidence of absence. Many of
our conflict onset and ending results include sizeable positive and negative effects.18 Even so, commodity
price shocks are highly influential in income and should provide a rich source of identifiable variation in
instability. It is difficult to find a better-measured, more abundant, and plausibly exogenous independent
variable than price volatility. Moreover, other time-varying variables, like rainfall and foreign aid,
exhibit robust correlations with conflict in spite of suffering similar empirical drawbacks
and generally smaller sample sizes (Miguel et al. 2004; Nielsen et al. 2011). Thus we take the
absence of evidence seriously. Do resource revenues drive state capacity?State prize models assume
that rising revenues raise the value of the capturing the state, but have ignored or downplayed the effect of
revenues on self-defense. We saw that a growing empirical political science literature takes just such a
revenue-centered approach, illustrating that resource boom times permit both payoffs and repression, and
that stocks of lootable or extractive resources can bring political order and stability. This countervailing
effect is most likely with transitory shocks, as current revenues are affected while long term value is not.
Our findings are partly consistent with this state capacity effect. For example, conflict intensity is most
sensitive to changes in the extractive commodities rather than the annual agricultural crops that affect
household incomes more directly. The relationship only holds for conflict intensity, however, and is
somewhat fragile. We do not see a large, consistent or robust decline in conflict or coup risk when prices
fall. A reasonable interpretation is that the state prize and state capacity effects are either small or tend to
cancel one another out. Opportunity cost: Victory by default?Finally, the inverse relationship between
prices and war intensity is consistent with opportunity cost accounts, but not exclusively so. As we noted
above, the relationship between intensity and extractive commodity prices is more consistent with the state
capacity view. Moreover, we shouldnt mistake an inverse relation between individual aggression and
incomes as evidence for the opportunity cost mechanism. The same correlation is consistent with
psychological theories of stress and aggression (Berkowitz 1993) and sociological and political theories of
relative deprivation and anomie (Merton 1938; Gurr 1971). Microempirical work will be needed to
distinguish between these mechanisms. Other reasons for a null result.Ultimately, however, the fact
that commodity price shocks have no discernible effect on new conflict onsets , but some effect on
ongoing conflict, suggests that political stability might be less sensitive to income or temporary
shocks than generally believed. One possibility is that successfully mounting an insurgency is no easy
task. It comes with considerable risk, costs, and coordination challenges. Another possibility is that the
counterfactual is still conflict onset. In poor and fragile nations, income shocks of one type or another are
ubiquitous. If a nation is so fragile that a change in prices could lead to war, then other shocks
may trigger war even in the absence of a price shock. The same argument has been made in
debunking the myth that price shocks led to fiscal collapse and low growth in developing nations in the
1980s.19 B. A general problem of publication bias? More generally, these findings should heighten
our concern with publication bias in the conflict literature. Our results run against a
number of published results on commodity shocks and conflict, mainly because of select
samples, misspecification, and sensitivity to model assumptions, and, most importantly,
alternative measures of instability. Across the social and hard sciences, there is a concern that the
majority of published research findings are false (e.g. Gerber et al. 2001). Ioannidis (2005) demonstrates
that a published finding is less likely to be true when there is a greater number and lesser
pre-selection of tested relationships; there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions,
outcomes, and models; and when more teams are involved in the chase of statistical
significance. The cross-national study of conflict is an extreme case of all these. Most
worryingly, almost no paper looks at alternative dependent variables or publishes systematic
robustness checks. Hegre and Sambanis (2006) have shown that the majority of published conflict
results are fragile, though they focus on timeinvariant regressors and not the time-varying shocks that have
grown in popularity. We are also concerned there is a file drawer problem (Rosenthal 1979). Consider
this decision rule: scholars that discover robust results that fit a theoretical intuition pursue the results; but
if results are not robust the scholar (or referees) worry about problems with the data or empirical strategy,
and identify additional work to be done. If further analysis produces a robust result, it is published. If not,
back to the file drawer. In the aggregate, the consequences are dire: a lower threshold of evidence
for initially significant results than ambiguous ones.20

Diversionary theory is crap---180 empirics disprove it

Gelpi 97 (Christopher, Center for International Affairs @ Harvard, "Democratic Diversions," Sage)
Students of international politics have often argued that state leaders initiate the use of
force internationally to divert attention away from domestic problems. The author
 these arguments concerning relationship between domestic unrest and international
contends that
are not supported empirically because they focus too narrowly on
conflict
the incentives state leaders have to use external force as a diversionary tactic without
considering alternative solutions to quieting domestic unrest. It is hypothesized that
democratic leaders will respond to domestic unrest by diverting attention by using force internationally. On
leaders are expected to repress the unrest directly, and
the other hand, authoritarian
these acts of repression will make them less likely to use force internationally.
An analysis of the initiation of force by the challenging states in 180 international
crises between 1948 and 1982 strongly supports these hypotheses. The results of
the analyses and their implications for the literature on diversionary conflicts and the rapidly growing
literature on democratic peace are discussed.
 Djibouti Operation DA
2AC
Drone strikes are destroying Yemen- slaughtering
civilians, targeted killing based on vague and unverifiable
information, and a destabilization of daily life- even
though most of the country stands against AQAP
Schwedler 9/27 (Jillian, [Professor of Political Science at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, and a member of the Editorial Committee of The Middle East
Research and Information Project, publishers of Middle East
Report] Is the U.S. drone program in Yemen working? 9.27.15
https://lawfareblog.com/us-drone-program-yemen-working //DF)
The United States began to use drones in Yemen in 2002 to kill
individuals affiliated with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its
predecessor organizations and disrupt its operations there and
abroad. Since then, over 200 strikes have killed over a thousand
Yemenis, tens of children, and at least a handful of U.S. citizens
one of whom was a deliberate target. The program has drawn
widespread condemnation from human rights organizations and
some UN bodies, yet it remains in place because the administrations
of George W. Bush and Barack Obama view it as a success, as both have publicly
stated. Criticism of the program often takes the form of debates about which legal regime is relevant
to judging a states use of targeted killings, which critics call extra-judicial executions or simply
assassinations. While dissent has been strongest in academic and human rights communities, some
scholars have echoed the arguments made by states that the imperatives of self-defense permit states to
carry out such killings as legitimate acts of war. The Lawfare consensus seems in favor of these strikes. I
share the views of the moral and legal dissenters and hesitate to move beyond those debates because I
dont want to suggest that I accept the programs legality. But I do want to engage those who do view the
program as working after all, if the U.S. administration did not believe it was working, it wouldnt need to
by what metrics should we consider judging its
justify it legally. But
success? Perhaps the most obvious metric is whether AQAP leaders
are actually being killed and, even more, whether their deaths
substantially disrupted the groups activities in Yemen or its ability
to pursue objectives outside of Yemen. For advocates of this metric, the program has
been successful in the short term individuals killed even if the longer-term impact is less clear because
Yet the success in taking out AQAPs
new leaders seem to step in with regularity.
leadership is overstated. The numbers of AQAP members and
supporters officially reported as killed are questionable, and
probably grossly exaggerated. This is because the U.S.
administration considers all adult males in the vicinity of the strikes
to be combatants, not civilians, unless their civilian status can be
established subsequently. Full investigations are neither desirable
nor pragmatic for the U.S. government particularly now that Yemen
is the site of a civil and regional war. Even more troubling is that at
times the U.S. may not even be certain of its primary targets. It
frequently uses language that is so conditional that there seems to
be more than a bit of guessing about the identities of those being
targeted. But I would like to focus on different metric: the longer-
term impact of the drone strikes on the legitimacy and
attractiveness of al-Qaidas message in Yemen and its ability to
recruit among Yemenis themselves. Drone strikes are widely
reported in local media and online and are a regular topic of
discussion at weekly qat chewing sessions across the country. Cell
phone calls spike after drone strikes, which are also widely reported
on Twitter and Facebook. The strikes are wildly unpopular, with
attitudes toward the United States increasingly negative. An Arab
Barometer survey carried out in 2007 found that 73.5 percent of
Yemenis believed that U.S. involvement in the region justified
attacks on Americans everywhere. The narrative that the West, and
especially the United States, fears the Muslim world is powerful and
pervasive in the region. The U.S. intervenes regularly in regional
politics and is a steadfast ally of Israel. It supports Saudi Arabia and
numerous other authoritarian regimes that allow it to establish
permanent U.S. military bases on Arab land. It cares more about oil
and Israel than it does about the hundreds of millions in the region
suffering under repressive regimes and lacking the most basic
human securities. These ideas about the American role in Middle
East affairs many of them true are among those in wide
circulation in the region. Al-Qaida has since 1998 advanced the argument that Muslims need
to take up arms against the United States and its allied regimes in the region. Yet al-Qaidas
message largely fell on deaf ears in Yemen for many years. Yes, it did
attract some followers, mostly those disappointed to have missed the chance to fight as mujahidin in
al-Qaidas narrative of attacking the foreign enemy at
Afghanistan. But
home did not resonate widely. The movement remained isolated for
many years, garnering only limited sympathy from the local
communities in which they sought refuge. The dual effect of U.S. acceleration in
drone strikes since 2010 and of their continued use during the transitional period that was intended to
usher in more accountable governance has shown Yemenis how consistently their leaders will cede
sovereignty and citizens security to the United States. While Yemenis may recognize
that AQAP does target the United States, the hundreds of drone
strikes are viewed as an excessive response. The weak sovereignty
of the Yemeni state is then treated as the problem that has
allowed AQAP to expand, even as state sovereignty has been
directly undermined by U.S. policy both under President Ali
Abdullah Salih and during the transition. American security is
placed above Yemeni security, with Yemeni sovereignty violated
repeatedly in service of that cause. Regardless of what those in Washington view as
valid and legitimate responses to terrorist threats, the reality for Yemenis is that the
United States uses drone strikes regularly to run roughshod over
Yemeni sovereignty in an effort to stop a handful of attacks most
of them failed against U.S. targets. The fact that corrupt Yemeni
leaders consent to the attacks makes little difference to public
opinion.
The US has a history of imperialist ambitions with Yemen,
manifesting in economic sanctions and pressure from US-
backed powers in the region
Schwedler 9/27 (Jillian, [Professor of Political Science at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, and a member of the Editorial Committee of The Middle East
Research and Information Project, publishers of Middle East
Report] Is the U.S. drone program in Yemen working? 9.27.15
https://lawfareblog.com/us-drone-program-yemen-working //DF)
The United States cut aid to Yemen in 1990 when the newly united
Yemeni state, which had just rotated into the Arab seat on the UN
Security Council, failed to vote for a U.S.-led coalition to reverse the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Yemen suffered a tremendous economic
blow, as the United States joined Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in
unilaterally severing aid to what was then and still is the poorest
Arab nation. But with the rise of jihadi activism on the Arabian
Peninsula over the next decade, and particularly after the bombing
of USS Cole in 2000, Salih welcomed the return of U.S. aid to Yemen.
This included a strong security dimension as the United States
began tracking those suspected of involvement in the Cole attacks
and other al-Qaida activities. Conspicuous caravans of FBI agents
became a topic of local conversations, so the return of a U.S.
presence in Yemen was also more visible than it had been
previously. Salih claimed to have had advance knowledge of every drone
strike. Saudi Arabia has meddled in Yemen at least since the fall of
the northern Mutawakkilite monarchy in the late 1960s. The Saudi
intervention that began with air strikes in March of this year and
escalated to ground troops is thus only the latest and most
egregious of the kingdoms efforts to affect Yemen politics. This
background is necessary to understand that if Yemen is a failed
state, despite scholarly protestations otherwise, it is at least in
part due to decades of external actors violating Yemeni sovereignty
with near impunity. The drone program, like the Saudi-led war, is
merely a recent and overt example.

This is already beginning to manifest in anti-American

sentiment within the country, as Yemeni daily reality
turns into the site of an undeclared US war: this is the
cyclical turn of imperialism to produce the crisis it then
saves
Schwedler 9/27 (Jillian, [Professor of Political Science at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, and a member of the Editorial Committee of The Middle East
Research and Information Project, publishers of Middle East
Report] Is the U.S. drone program in Yemen working? 9.27.15
https://lawfareblog.com/us-drone-program-yemen-working //DF)
For al-Qaida, the drone program is a gift from the heavens. Its
recruiting narrative exploits common misperceptions of American
omnipotence, offering an alternative route to justice and
empowerment. Regardless of American perceptions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the
attacks, what Yemeni could now deny that the United States is waging
an undeclared war on Yemen? Most recently, this narrative of direct U.S.
intervention has been further substantiated by U.S. material and
intelligence support for the Saudi-led military campaign aimed at the
return to power of the unpopular and exiled-President Abed Rabbo Mansour
Hadi. Photographs of spent U.S.-made cluster bombs are widely
circulated. Nor have drone attacks ceased; alongside the often
indiscriminate Saudi-led bombing, American drones continue their
campaign of targeted assassination. One might think that the Saudi
attacks would not help al-Qaida, but it is contributing to al-Qaidas
growth in Yemen. The indiscriminate targeting of the Saudi-led
campaign undermines any sense of security, let alone Yemeni
sovereignty. And AQAP-controlled areas like the port of Mukalla are
not being targeted by Saudi or Gulf troops at all. The United States aims to take
up the job of targeting AQAP while the Saudi-led (and U.S.-backed) forces focus on defeating the Houthis
and restoring Hadi to power. But the overall situation is one in which those
multiple interventions in Yemen are creating an environment in
which al-Qaida is beginning to appeal in ways it never had before.
For these reasons, the U.S. use of drones to kill even carefully
identified AQAP leaders in Yemen is counterproductive: it gives
resonance to the claims of the very group it seeks to destroy. It
provides evidence that al-Qaidas claims and strategies are justified
and that Yemenis cannot count on the state to protect them from
threats foreign and domestic. U.S. officials have argued that the drone program has not
been used as a recruiting device for al-Qaida. But it is hard to ignore the evidence to the
contrary, from counterinsurgency experts who have worked for the U.S.
government to Yemeni voices like Farea Muslimi. Its not just that
drone strikes make al-Qaida recruiting easier, true as that probably
is, but that they broaden the social space in which al-Qaida can
function. America does not need to win the hearts and minds of Yemenis in the service of some
grand U.S. project in the region. But if America wants to weaken al-Qaida in
Yemen, it needs at a minimum to stop pursuing policies that are
bound to enrage and embitter Yemenis who might otherwise be
neutral. There is an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look
like a nail. The U.S. military let alone its drones is not the only tool on
which the United States can rely. But when the measure of success is
as narrow as the killing of a specific person, the tool gets used with
increasing frequency. Indeed, drone strikes have significantly expanded under the Obama
administration. It is crucial to see the bigger picture, the one in which
long-time Yemeni friends tell me of growing anti-U.S. sentiment
where there was previously very little. Public opinion toward
America has clearly deteriorated over the past decade, and to
reverse it may take much longer. But the use of drones to kill people
deemed enemies of the United States, along with the Saudi-led war
against the Houthis, is expanding the spaces in which al-Qaida is
able to function.
The invocation of regional stability is a thinly veiled
attempt to maintain US control over world politics and can
only result in violence
Hoover, 2k11 (Joe, Fellow in the International Relations Dept at the LSE,
Egypt and the Failure of Realism, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies,
Issue 4)
Recent upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya have caught many
by surprise as the order of things has proven protean in a way that
official experts and conventional wisdom were largely blind to
reality, it seems, can be unruly. As revolution unfolded in Egypt there
were many pleas for restraint, worries that political instability would
spread, and among Western leaders a profound wariness of change
that they feared would compromise their strategic interests. There
was, in a word, an invocation of realism, intended to quell the
earnestness of fast moving and profound change. The failure of
realism as a response to recent events in Egypt is revealed through
the policies invoked by state representatives, commentators and
academics, which confirmed the given reality of world politics but proved
wanting ethically and heuristically, as those willing to support the brutal rule
of Hosni Mubarak and unable to comprehend the power of the
protesters proved to be on the wrong side of history. These banal
appeals to realism, however, do lead to a broader insight, revealing
that such appeals in world politics are actually calls to preserve
what I term the reality of dominance, which invokes the
inevitability of the existing order of things to discount the reality of
resistance to that order which calls for transformation over
preservation. In early February, before Mubaraks ouster, the Egyptian
revolution was in doubt. It was still only a fragile possibility. 1 The protestors
and Mubaraks goons waited it out in Tahrir Square while the army stood
watch. The success of the revolution would be determined by whose will was
most resilient. Would the threat of increasing violence discourage the
protestors and give Mubarak the space he needed to solidify his power till
next year and thus avoid the changes the Egyptian people were demanding?
Or would the protestors resolve hold, making clear to Mubarak that he could
no longer hope to rule Egypt? As protestors faced violence, exhaustion and
deprivation the prospect of compromise must have seemed more desirable as
the hardships mounted. The time was ripe for expressions of support from
key leaders, which could buttress the resolve of the protestors and pressure
the Mubarak regime. It was much easier for Mubarak to play for time from the
presidential palace than for protesters in the streets, yet far too many of the
men and women able to make a difference did not use their voices to share in
democracys street-choir instead their voices echoed in the halls of
disreputable power. The Obama administration has the greatest culpability in
this, as they not only had the capability to undermine Mubarak, but their
failure to do so revealed the hypocrisy of US support for democracy and
human rights in the region. The events in Egypt demonstrated that President
Barak Obama has mastered the dark art of evasive support, leaving
no doubt that he fully supported Egyptian democracy, as long as it
did not change too much, too fast, and, most importantly, as long as
US strategic interests were not compromised. The administrations
restraint is also driven by the fact that, for the United States, dealing with an
Egypt without Mr. Mubarak would be difficult at best, and downright scary at
worst. For 30 years, his government has been a pillar of American foreign
policy in a volatile region. (Sanger & Cooper, 2011) Predictably, Vice
President Joe Biden made the point with less tact, but perhaps more truth,
when he expressed his insensibility to the crimes of Mubarak against his own
people: Asked if he would characterize Mubarak as a dictator Biden
responded: Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And hes
been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the
Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing
relationship with with Israel. I would not refer to him as a dictator.
(Murphy, 2011) Clearly regional stability is the key rhetorical trope,
which justified turning a blind eye to the brutality of Mubarak s
regime and the lack of democracy in Egypt. Perhaps no issue is
more important in defining what regional stability means for the
US than the issue of Israeli security. Binyamin Netanyahu clearly exerted
pressure on the US, trying to limit the support they gave to democratic
reforms in Egypt. The prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, reportedly
ordered his cabinet to refrain from commenting publicly on the unfolding
drama, saying only that the treaty must be maintained. But as Haaretz
reported today, the government is seeking to convince the US and EU to curb
their criticism of Hosni Mubarak to preserve stability in the region, even as
Washington and its allies signal their wish for an orderly transition which
the incumbent almost certainly cannot ignore. (Black, 2011) Despite the
homilies on human rights and democratic freedom delivered by Mr Obama to
the Egyptians (Wilson and Warrick, 2011), it was a predictable set of
concerns that set the agenda for the US response to the revolution
taking place in Cairo and throughout Egypt the imperative was to
maintain order, control those changes that proved inevitable and
ensure that the political and economic interests of dominant states
were preserved. The representative for the US State Department, PJ
Crowley, who was interviewed by Al Jazeera (US urges reform in Egypt, 2011),
performed a practiced dance to the theme of restraint, gradual reform and
false equivalencies as if protesters and the agents of Mubaraks coercive
apparatus could be compared 2 as he made clear that the suffering of the
Egyptian people and their desire for democracy would not undermine US
support for the Mubarak regime. We respect what Egypt contributes to the
region. It is a stabilising force; it has made its own peace with Israel and is
pursuing normal relations with Israel. We think thats important; we think
thats a model that the region should adopt broadly speaking. At the same
time, we recognise that Egypt, Tunisia, other countries, do need to reform,
they do need to respond to the needs of their people and we encourage that
reform and we are contributing across the region to that reform. (US urges
reform in Egypt, 2011) This routine, we can assume, was an exercise in
managing expectations and making US interests clear democratic
revolution should not be allowed to upset regional stability, nor
should the suffering of the protestors be allowed to cloud our
judgment on what really matters or, more bluntly, if democratic
dreams threatened the interests of the US, then so much the worse
for those beautiful revolutionary dreams. As Tony Blair joined the
discussion he not only underlined Bidens scepticism regarding whether
Mubarak was a dictator, claiming he was immensely courageous and a force
for good (McGreal, 2011), but he also clearly articulated the managerial
worldview of a man who has learned to think of himself as a member
of a privileged group of cleareyed realists whose responsibility it is
to control all the things of world politics. Blair argued that the
region has unique problems that make political change different
from the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe. He said the
principal issue was the presence of Islamist parties that he fears will
use democracy to gain power and then undermine the freedoms
people seek... Blair said he did not doubt that change was coming to Egypt.
People want a different system of government. Theyre going to get it. The
question is what emerges from that. In particular I think the key challenge for
us is how do we help partner this process of change and help manage it in
such a way that what comes out of it is open minded, fair, democratic
government. (McGreal, 2011). Not only does this response implicitly
trade in the notion that Arab countries will not be able to handle
democracy without Western tutelage, it also trades in a degraded
notion of realism, in which serious men act as if their apologia for
imperial arrogance is sagacious wisdom gleaned from long
experience. The Egyptian protestors will be allowed their
democracy, but their democracy will be managed and defined by the
powerful, so as not to disturb the order of things or run afoul of the
realities of world politics. Yet this statist and status quo line is
actually divorced from reality, or at least the reality of the protesters
battling their corrupt leaders in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and cities
throughout Egypt it reflects the reality of dominance. Realism, as
Western leaders express it, is little more than an attempt to limit the
happenings of world politics to their own constrained vision, a
myopic self-interest that fails to take the measure of the cruelty it
justifies or realise its own analytical failings.
Their representation of Mideast instability is an orientalist
discourse defined according to imperial interests

Bilgin 4 (Pinar, Bilkent University, Whose Middle East?

Geopolitical Inventions and Practices of Security,
International Relations, 18(1), p. 28//TR)

What I call the Middle East perspective is usually associated with the United States and
its regional allies. It derives from a western conception of security which
could be summed up as the unhindered flow of oil at reasonable
prices, the cessation of the ArabIsraeli conflict, the prevention of
the emergence of any regional hegemon while holding Islamism in
check, and the maintenance of friendly regimes that are sensitive
to these concerns. This was (and still is) a topdown conception of security
that privileged the security of states and military stability. It is top-
down because threats to security have been defined largely from the
perspective of external powers rather than regional states or
peoples. In the eyes of British and US defence planners, Communist infiltration and Soviet intervention
constituted the greatest threat to security in the Middle East during the Cold War. The way to enhance
regional security, they argued, was for regional states to enter into alliances with the West. Two security
umbrella schemes, the ill-born Middle East Defence Organisation (1951) and the Baghdad Pact (1955),
were designed for this purpose. Although there were regional states such as Iraq (until the 1958 coup), Iran
(until the 19789 revolution) and Turkey that shared this perception of security to a certain extent, many
Arab policy-makers begged to differ. Traces of this top-down thinking were prevalent in the US approach to
In following a policy of dual
security in the Middle East during the 1990s.
containment, US policy-makers presented Iran and Iraq as the main
threats to regional security largely due to their military capabilities
and the revisionist character of their regimes that are not
subservient to US interests. However, these top-down perspectives, while
revealing certain aspects of regional insecurity, at the same time
hinder others. For example the lives of women in Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia are made insecure not only by the threat caused by their Gulf neighbours military
capabilities, but also because of the conservative character of their own
regimes that restrict womens rights under the cloak of religious
tradition. For it is women who suffer disproportionately as a result of
militarism and the channelling of valuable resources into defence
budgets instead of education and health. Their concerns rarely make
it into security analyses. This top-down approach to regional security in the Middle East was
compounded by a conception of security that was directed outwards that is threats to security were
assumed to stem from outside the state whereas inside is viewed as a realm of peace. Although it could be
argued following R.B.J. Walker that what makes it possible for inside to remain peaceful is the
presentation of outside as a realm of danger, the practices of Middle Eastern states indicate that this
many regional policy-makers justify
does not always work as prescribed in theory. For
certain domestic security measures by way of presenting the
international arena as anarchical and stressing the need to
strengthen the state to cope with external threats. While doing this,
however, they at the same time cause insecurity for some individuals
and social groups at home the very peoples whose security they
purport to maintain. The practices of regional actors that do not match up to the theoretical
prescriptions include the Baath regime in Iraq that infringed their own citizens rights often for the
purposes of state security. Those who dare to challenge their states security
practices may be marginalized at best, and accused of treachery and
imprisoned at worst.
Aff evidence is suspect Middle East studies package the
world according to conservative strategic interests

Gerges 91 (Fawaz A., Professor of International Affairs

and Middle Eastern Studies Sarah Lawrence, The Study
of Middle East International Relations: A Critique, British
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 18(2), Jstor//TR)
Thirdly, and closely related to the preceding problem, is the policy orientation of the field. The ideological
rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union following the Second World War and the onset of
the Cold War in the late 1940s has motivated them to invest heavily in area studies with a specific
emphasis on policy-oriented research in the hope that problems can be identified and solutions found.
Thus,the U.S. foreign policy establishment 'goaded' or 'tempted ' the
academic community into establishing graduate programmes to generate useful expertise on
such crucial foreign regions as the 'Middle East'.28 Likewise, the proliferation in
1955 of new research centres, studies and periodicals on the 'Middle East' in the Soviet Union was
anything but academic: it reflected the growing Russian interest in the area.29 This revival coincided with
the conclusion of the Egyptian-Russian arms deal in September 1955 and the perceptions of Russian
leaders that the time was ripe for a political offensive in the Arab world. Indeed, as Leonard Binder notes:
'The basic development of area studies in the United States has
been political', i.e. to gain influence and to combat hostile forces.30
Though Binder hastens to add that it is difficult to discern a consistent political line in the organization of
it is clear that a large number of works on
area studies or in the patterns of funding,
modern Middle East international relations-whether in the United States
or in the Soviet Union- are 'packaged' to satisfy the policy needs of their
respective decision- makers.31 But historically, this has always been true. The
economic and strategic importance of the area has tended to attract
the interests of outside powers which have competed for influence
and control. Since 1945, however, the development of area studies has reflected more than before
the need of the Great Powers to influence the processes of change and stability in the region. The root of
the convergence of interests between the foreign policy and academic communities lies in the former's
control of research funding and the latter's dependency on and acquiescence in this state of affairs.32 The
analyses of the 'Middle East' seem to be more
result is that many
concerned with policy-oriented prescriptions than with the
understanding of the region in a sensitive and creative manner .33 It
must be confessed, however, that the glide into policy science or policy scientism is not peculiar only to
the study of Middle East international relations in general. In reflecting on the development of international
relations in the past thirty years, Professor Stanley Hoffmann establishes a strong link between the
development of the field and the dilemmas and concerns facing U.S. foreign policy in the post- Second
World War period.
Their predictions backfire- dystopic alarmism gets twisted
to lock in oppression

Kurasawa 4 (Fuyuki, Professor of Sociology- York

University of Toronto, Cautionary Tales: The Global
Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight,
Constellations, 11(4)//TR)
Up to this point, I have tried to demonstrate that transnational socio-political relations are nurturing a
thriving culture and infrastructure of prevention from below, which challenges presumptions about the
inscrutability of the future (II) and a stance of indifference toward it (III). Nonetheless, unless and until it is
farsightedness
substantively filled in, the argument is vulnerable to misappropriation since
does not in and of itself ensure emancipatory outcomes. Therefore, this
section proposes to specify normative criteria and participatory procedures through which citizens can
determine the reasonableness, legitimacy, and effectiveness of competing dystopian visions in order to
Foremost among the possible distortions
arrive at a socially self-instituting future.
of farsightedness is alarmism, the manufacturing of unwarranted
and unfounded doomsday scenarios. State and market institutions
may seek to produce a culture of fear by deliberately stretching
interpretations of reality beyond the limits of the plausible so as to
exaggerate the prospects of impending catastrophes, or yet again, by
intentionally promoting certain prognoses over others for
instrumental purposes. Accordingly, regressive dystopias can operate as Trojan horses
advancing political agendas or commercial interests that would otherwise be susceptible to public scrutiny
the
and opposition. Instances of this kind of manipulation of the dystopian imaginary are plentiful:
invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism and an imminent
threat of use of weapons of mass destruction; the severe curtailing
of American civil liberties amidst fears of a collapse of homeland
security; the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state as the only
remedy for an ideologically constructed fiscal crisis; the conservative
expansion of policing and incarceration due to supposedly spiraling crime waves; and so forth.
Alarmism constructs and codes the future in particular ways,
producing or reinforcing certain crisis narratives, belief structures,
and rhetorical conventions. As much as alarmist ideas beget a culture of fear, the reverse is
no less true.

Apocalyptic representations are deliberately falsified to

create a particular public sentiment this geopolitics of
fear allows no room for peace by endlessly recreating
violence
Sparke 7 (Matthew, Prof. of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct
Prof. of Global Health @ U. of Washington, Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic
Hopes and the Responsibilities of Geography Edited version published:
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97.2)
The geopolitical discourse about the threats posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq was so frequently repeated
and stylized in the period leading up to the American offensive that the script is now all too familiar (for
one of the most rigorous and official surveys of the misinformation that ed up to the war see the
Two big
Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staf, 2006).
fears dominated the Bush administrations geopolitical scripting. The
first was that Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction or WMD, and the
second was that these WMD could easily be passed on to terrorists because of known ties between
Hussein and al Qaeda. Most famously perhaps it was in Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech before the
United Nations that the WMD story was told with the most effortful, and in retrospect, most tendentious
claims to represent well-documented, evidence-based truth about real grounds for fear. "What you will
see," said Powell, in an appeal to the truth of vision that is one of the classic tropes of the modern
geopolitical imagination (Agnew, 2003; Tuathail, 1996), "is an accumulation of facts and disturbing
patterns of behavior." Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500
tons of chemical-weapons agents. ... Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein
to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size
of Manhattan. ... There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to
rapidly produce more, many more. ... This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well
documented (Powell, 2003). This was also the same script from which President Bush himself spoke both
before and after Powell's speech. However, the President's speech-making (which was generally designed
for domestic consumption and not an international UN audience) explained the relevance of the WMD story
in terms of the second main fearful script: in other words, in terms of Iraq's WMD getting into the hands of
terrorists. "Today," announced the President in his 2003 State of the Union address, the gravest danger in
the war on terror, the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and
possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. These regimes could use such weapons for blackmail,
terror, and mass murder. They could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them
without the least hesitation....With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons,
Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in
that region. And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from
intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that
Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without
fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own
(Bush, 2003). Insofar as Bush explained so much of his policy as an
aggressive 'bring it on' response to the real terrorism of 9/11, these
sorts of claims were to prove very powerful indeed, creating an
affect-laden and, as such, effective means of legitimating the Iraq war (
Tuathail, 2003). With Bush setting the model, the public geopolitical script of fear
included repeated statements about overwhelming evidence
combined with the affective appeal to Americans to imagine another
9/11: another 9/11 made much more deadly with the help of Iraq's WMD. "America must not ignore the
threat gathering against us," remained the administration's main fear-mongering message. "Facing clear
evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a
mushroom cloud" (Bush, 2002). The President was, of course, ably assisted in this work of geopolitical
scripting by other members of his administration. Most especially Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Vice-President Dick Cheney continued to reiterate the same twin fears about WMD and terror ties long
after the attack on Iraq and a huge security sweep of the occupied country showed that their fearful
Rumsfeld and Cheney nevertheless also effectively
geopolitics was groundless. In doing so,
underlined two key features of what made the geopolitical scripting
of fear so convincing: namely, emotion and repetition. Thus, arguing against the
critics that WMD would eventually be found in Iraq, Rumsfeld also showed how Americans' emotions about
9/11 lay at the heart of making the Iraq-as-threat geopolitics work: The coalition did not act in Iraq because
we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. We acted
because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on 9/11
(Rumsfeld, 2003). And subsequently, even in 2004, Cheney was still demonstrating that the other key
feature of making the groundless script function was repetition: "I think theres overwhelming evidence
that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government," he intoned (Cheney, 2004). In
the real world, of course, there was no such evidence. Instead, as was later made clear by the statements
of the British intelligence chief recorded in the Downing Street memos, "the intelligence and facts were
being fixed around the policy" (Danner, 2005). By this point, though, the ways in which the grounds were
invented in order to fit the script no longer mattered. Emotion, repetition and their combined conjuring of
So successful was the scripting of fear
fear had already done their geopolitical work.
that subsequently even administration officials themselves indicated
their backstage accomplishments with occasionally explicit, even
prideful, asides about the bureaucratic expediency involved. For
example, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Defense Secretary, caused a small media storm by acknowledging
something along the lines that: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S.
government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of
mass destruction, as the core reason" (quoted in McIntyre, 2003). This admission (which was itself hedged
in various ways) later came to seem minor in comparison with a much bolder account made to a reporter
by a White House aide of the administration's more generally cavalier approach to geopolitical scripting.
Given the gung-ho hubris of the account it is not surprising that this aide remains anonymous, but what he
told Ron Suskind - the reporter - remains no less telling. The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we
call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he
continued. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you,
all of you, will be left to just study what we do (Suskind, 2004). As scholars who remain committed to
geographers (with the possible exception of non-representational
studying discernible reality,
theorists) may also be derided by those at the pinnacles of American
power as located in the same low-lying reality-based community
inhabited by journalists such as Suskind. But this has not stopped
geographical studies from documenting with critical rigor the empire
of unreality produced by the geopolitical scripting of the War on
Terror. The use of the term 'empire' here is not just metaphorical, nor just a play on the imperial hubris
enunciated by Suskind's White House aide. As Gregory's forthright critique of the
colonial present makes clear, all kinds of geopolitical discourses with
their roots and routes in imperialism - including the many imaginative geographies of
imperial Orientalism famously critiqued by Edward Said (1979 and 1993) - were revitalized and
put to work in both justifying and performing the War on Terror
(Gregory, 2004). Gregory argues persuasively in this way that geopolitical scripts about
despotic, hate-filled, orientals served to provide the fear-filled
justification for treating whole communities as if they lay outside the
bounds of humanity. Building on Gregory's analysis, Allan Pred has provided in turn a powerful
critique of the groundless terror-talk into which so much of this fear-mongering fed and out of which so
much geopolitical boundary-drawing ensued. "Terror
may be instilled by way of a
variety of strategies," Pred summarizes: Through successfully perpetuating
'imaginative geographies' of Their Terrorist/Arab/Muslim space and
Their uncivilized, subhuman barbarism. Through successfully folding
distance into monstrous Difference. Through successfully insisting
that They are a pervasive military threat to Our Civilization, to the
security of Our way of life. Through avoiding any consideration of
our role in precipitating militant radicalism, in provoking the spread
of 'political Islam in its insurrectional forms'. Through successfully
implanting a just-below-the-surface sense of fear by way of
redundant representations strewn across the paths of everyday life
(Pred, 2005). As well as providing a useful summary of the geopolitics of fear at its boundary-drawing work,
Pred's textual strategy of repetition also mimics and subverts the repetitive rhetorics of the fear-mongers
themselves. In doing so, and by underlining how such rhetorics infiltrated American everyday life and
became implanted in people's 'just- below-the-surface' sensibilities, he also draws our attention to another
enunciation became
aspect of the geopolitics of the war on terror: namely, the way in which its
a performance of sovereignty and governmentality at the same time,
a way of re-enacting the power of the traditional pre-modern
sovereign to declare war on his own terms combined with a
decidedly post-modern approach to making the war make
biopolitical sense in American everyday life. The performance of
sovereignty as governmentality by the Bush administration - its way of simultaneously
producing and ruling its 'own reality' by executive fiat - has elsewhere been
theorized by Judith Butler in relation to the suspension of the Geneva conventions and the creation of
special rules and special spaces for imprisoning 'illegal combatants' in the Guantanamo gulag (Butler,
2004). Butler's argument about this "resurgence of sovereignty within the field of governmentality" (Butler,
2004: 56) seems equally applicable to the way the administration also suspended reference to real
intelligence in its geopolitical scripting of the Iraq war. However, outside of the exceptional space of
Guantanamo (where only fear seems to rule), the field of governmentality in which the resurgence of
executive sovereignty has been staged has been co-determined by another much more hopeful discourse
too: the discourse of geoeconomics. Alongside all the fear, then, there has also been much hope, and this
hope, expressed as a discourse about the inevitably inclusive and expansive aspects of capitalist
globalization, has also, just like the geopolitical scripting, had a whole series of regulative effects both in
America and elsewhere, including inside Iraq itself. In other words, if we follow Butler in noticing how the
Bush administration has invented its own sovereign realities within a post-sovereign world, and if we
combine this with an understanding of governmentality as the organization of "the conduct of conduct"
(Foucault, 1982: 220), we need to explore how the globalist common-sense about a globe-spanning level-
playing field also came to legitimate and shape the Iraq war.

Everyday nuclear colonialism is overshadowed by the

fantasy of a global nuclear war, allowing ongoing
nuclear violence to continue unchecked

Kato 93
(Masahide Kato, Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze,
Source: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 339-360 Published by: Sage
Publications, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644779 Accessed: 24/08/2012)//TR

Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and
became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of
destruction can be historically contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived
and thus given due recognition by the First World community are the explosions at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose
meaning is relevant only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm of
fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet how can one deny the crude fact that
nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the name of "nuclear testing" since the first
nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth.28 The major perpetrators of
nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44
times), and China (36 times).29 The primary targets of warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the
sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall
Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814
times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of
Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times).30 Moreover, although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests"
in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence
accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear
wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the
Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear
war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and Indigenous Nations.
The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity intervention," or the
"nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have
taken a form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations.
Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear
catastrophe has never been the "unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of
repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless,
ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by
rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of
nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First World community. Such a
discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear warfare in the domain of
imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers
the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific: Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere . . . were global in effect. The winds and seas
carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call
the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into batde against nature itself.31 Although Firth's book is
definitely a remarkable study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific, the problematic division/distinction between the
"nuclear explosions" and the nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the
subject ("we") is located higher than the "real" of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological
division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the ongoing
processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of
nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized. The discursive containment/obliteration of the
"real" of nuclear warfare has been accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm
commitment to global discourse, has established the unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over the real nuclear
catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.
India DA
 2AC
The invocation of regional stability is a thinly veiled
attempt to maintain US control over world politics and can
only result in violence
Hoover, 2k11 (Joe, Fellow in the International Relations Dept at the LSE,
Egypt and the Failure of Realism, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies,
Issue 4)
Recent upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya have caught many
by surprise as the order of things has proven protean in a way that
official experts and conventional wisdom were largely blind to
reality, it seems, can be unruly. As revolution unfolded in Egypt there
were many pleas for restraint, worries that political instability would
spread, and among Western leaders a profound wariness of change
that they feared would compromise their strategic interests. There
was, in a word, an invocation of realism, intended to quell the
earnestness of fast moving and profound change. The failure of
realism as a response to recent events in Egypt is revealed through
the policies invoked by state representatives, commentators and
academics, which confirmed the given reality of world politics but proved
wanting ethically and heuristically, as those willing to support the brutal rule
of Hosni Mubarak and unable to comprehend the power of the
protesters proved to be on the wrong side of history. These banal
appeals to realism, however, do lead to a broader insight, revealing
that such appeals in world politics are actually calls to preserve
what I term the reality of dominance, which invokes the
inevitability of the existing order of things to discount the reality of
resistance to that order which calls for transformation over
preservation. In early February, before Mubaraks ouster, the Egyptian
revolution was in doubt. It was still only a fragile possibility. 1 The protestors
and Mubaraks goons waited it out in Tahrir Square while the army stood
watch. The success of the revolution would be determined by whose will was
most resilient. Would the threat of increasing violence discourage the
protestors and give Mubarak the space he needed to solidify his power till
next year and thus avoid the changes the Egyptian people were demanding?
Or would the protestors resolve hold, making clear to Mubarak that he could
no longer hope to rule Egypt? As protestors faced violence, exhaustion and
deprivation the prospect of compromise must have seemed more desirable as
the hardships mounted. The time was ripe for expressions of support from
key leaders, which could buttress the resolve of the protestors and pressure
the Mubarak regime. It was much easier for Mubarak to play for time from the
presidential palace than for protesters in the streets, yet far too many of the
men and women able to make a difference did not use their voices to share in
democracys street-choir instead their voices echoed in the halls of
disreputable power. The Obama administration has the greatest culpability in
this, as they not only had the capability to undermine Mubarak, but their
failure to do so revealed the hypocrisy of US support for democracy and
human rights in the region. The events in Egypt demonstrated that President
Barak Obama has mastered the dark art of evasive support, leaving
no doubt that he fully supported Egyptian democracy, as long as it
did not change too much, too fast, and, most importantly, as long as
US strategic interests were not compromised. The administrations
restraint is also driven by the fact that, for the United States, dealing with an
Egypt without Mr. Mubarak would be difficult at best, and downright scary at
worst. For 30 years, his government has been a pillar of American foreign
policy in a volatile region. (Sanger & Cooper, 2011) Predictably, Vice
President Joe Biden made the point with less tact, but perhaps more truth,
when he expressed his insensibility to the crimes of Mubarak against his own
people: Asked if he would characterize Mubarak as a dictator Biden
responded: Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And hes
been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the
Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing
relationship with with Israel. I would not refer to him as a dictator.
(Murphy, 2011) Clearly regional stability is the key rhetorical trope,
which justified turning a blind eye to the brutality of Mubarak s
regime and the lack of democracy in Egypt. Perhaps no issue is
more important in defining what regional stability means for the
US than the issue of Israeli security. Binyamin Netanyahu clearly exerted
pressure on the US, trying to limit the support they gave to democratic
reforms in Egypt. The prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, reportedly
ordered his cabinet to refrain from commenting publicly on the unfolding
drama, saying only that the treaty must be maintained. But as Haaretz
reported today, the government is seeking to convince the US and EU to curb
their criticism of Hosni Mubarak to preserve stability in the region, even as
Washington and its allies signal their wish for an orderly transition which
the incumbent almost certainly cannot ignore. (Black, 2011) Despite the
homilies on human rights and democratic freedom delivered by Mr Obama to
the Egyptians (Wilson and Warrick, 2011), it was a predictable set of
concerns that set the agenda for the US response to the revolution
taking place in Cairo and throughout Egypt the imperative was to
maintain order, control those changes that proved inevitable and
ensure that the political and economic interests of dominant states
were preserved. The representative for the US State Department, PJ
Crowley, who was interviewed by Al Jazeera (US urges reform in Egypt, 2011),
performed a practiced dance to the theme of restraint, gradual reform and
false equivalencies as if protesters and the agents of Mubaraks coercive
apparatus could be compared 2 as he made clear that the suffering of the
Egyptian people and their desire for democracy would not undermine US
support for the Mubarak regime. We respect what Egypt contributes to the
region. It is a stabilising force; it has made its own peace with Israel and is
pursuing normal relations with Israel. We think thats important; we think
thats a model that the region should adopt broadly speaking. At the same
time, we recognise that Egypt, Tunisia, other countries, do need to reform,
they do need to respond to the needs of their people and we encourage that
reform and we are contributing across the region to that reform. (US urges
reform in Egypt, 2011) This routine, we can assume, was an exercise in
managing expectations and making US interests clear democratic
revolution should not be allowed to upset regional stability, nor
should the suffering of the protestors be allowed to cloud our
judgment on what really matters or, more bluntly, if democratic
dreams threatened the interests of the US, then so much the worse
for those beautiful revolutionary dreams. As Tony Blair joined the
discussion he not only underlined Bidens scepticism regarding whether
Mubarak was a dictator, claiming he was immensely courageous and a force
for good (McGreal, 2011), but he also clearly articulated the managerial
worldview of a man who has learned to think of himself as a member
of a privileged group of cleareyed realists whose responsibility it is
to control all the things of world politics. Blair argued that the
region has unique problems that make political change different
from the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe. He said the
principal issue was the presence of Islamist parties that he fears will
use democracy to gain power and then undermine the freedoms
people seek... Blair said he did not doubt that change was coming to Egypt.
People want a different system of government. Theyre going to get it. The
question is what emerges from that. In particular I think the key challenge for
us is how do we help partner this process of change and help manage it in
such a way that what comes out of it is open minded, fair, democratic
government. (McGreal, 2011). Not only does this response implicitly
trade in the notion that Arab countries will not be able to handle
democracy without Western tutelage, it also trades in a degraded
notion of realism, in which serious men act as if their apologia for
imperial arrogance is sagacious wisdom gleaned from long
experience. The Egyptian protestors will be allowed their
democracy, but their democracy will be managed and defined by the
powerful, so as not to disturb the order of things or run afoul of the
realities of world politics. Yet this statist and status quo line is
actually divorced from reality, or at least the reality of the protesters
battling their corrupt leaders in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and cities
throughout Egypt it reflects the reality of dominance. Realism, as
Western leaders express it, is little more than an attempt to limit the
happenings of world politics to their own constrained vision, a
myopic self-interest that fails to take the measure of the cruelty it
justifies or realise its own analytical failings.
Their representation of Mideast instability is an orientalist
discourse defined according to imperial interests

Bilgin 4 (Pinar, Bilkent University, Whose Middle East?

Geopolitical Inventions and Practices of Security,
International Relations, 18(1), p. 28//TR)

What I call the Middle East perspective is usually associated with the United States and
its regional allies. It derives from a western conception of security which
could be summed up as the unhindered flow of oil at reasonable
prices, the cessation of the ArabIsraeli conflict, the prevention of
the emergence of any regional hegemon while holding Islamism in
check, and the maintenance of friendly regimes that are sensitive
to these concerns. This was (and still is) a topdown conception of security
that privileged the security of states and military stability. It is top-
down because threats to security have been defined largely from the
perspective of external powers rather than regional states or
peoples. In the eyes of British and US defence planners, Communist infiltration and Soviet intervention
constituted the greatest threat to security in the Middle East during the Cold War. The way to enhance
regional security, they argued, was for regional states to enter into alliances with the West. Two security
umbrella schemes, the ill-born Middle East Defence Organisation (1951) and the Baghdad Pact (1955),
were designed for this purpose. Although there were regional states such as Iraq (until the 1958 coup), Iran
(until the 19789 revolution) and Turkey that shared this perception of security to a certain extent, many
Arab policy-makers begged to differ. Traces of this top-down thinking were prevalent in the US approach to
In following a policy of dual
security in the Middle East during the 1990s.
containment, US policy-makers presented Iran and Iraq as the main
threats to regional security largely due to their military capabilities
and the revisionist character of their regimes that are not
subservient to US interests. However, these top-down perspectives, while
revealing certain aspects of regional insecurity, at the same time
hinder others. For example the lives of women in Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia are made insecure not only by the threat caused by their Gulf neighbours military
capabilities, but also because of the conservative character of their own
regimes that restrict womens rights under the cloak of religious
tradition. For it is women who suffer disproportionately as a result of
militarism and the channelling of valuable resources into defence
budgets instead of education and health. Their concerns rarely make
it into security analyses. This top-down approach to regional security in the Middle East was
compounded by a conception of security that was directed outwards that is threats to security were
assumed to stem from outside the state whereas inside is viewed as a realm of peace. Although it could be
argued following R.B.J. Walker that what makes it possible for inside to remain peaceful is the
presentation of outside as a realm of danger, the practices of Middle Eastern states indicate that this
many regional policy-makers justify
does not always work as prescribed in theory. For
certain domestic security measures by way of presenting the
international arena as anarchical and stressing the need to
strengthen the state to cope with external threats. While doing this,
however, they at the same time cause insecurity for some individuals
and social groups at home the very peoples whose security they
purport to maintain. The practices of regional actors that do not match up to the theoretical
prescriptions include the Baath regime in Iraq that infringed their own citizens rights often for the
purposes of state security. Those who dare to challenge their states security
practices may be marginalized at best, and accused of treachery and
imprisoned at worst.
Aff evidence is suspect Middle East studies package the
world according to conservative strategic interests

Gerges 91 (Fawaz A., Professor of International Affairs

and Middle Eastern Studies Sarah Lawrence, The Study
of Middle East International Relations: A Critique, British
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 18(2), Jstor//TR)
Thirdly, and closely related to the preceding problem, is the policy orientation of the field. The ideological
rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union following the Second World War and the onset of
the Cold War in the late 1940s has motivated them to invest heavily in area studies with a specific
emphasis on policy-oriented research in the hope that problems can be identified and solutions found.
Thus,the U.S. foreign policy establishment 'goaded' or 'tempted ' the
academic community into establishing graduate programmes to generate useful expertise on
such crucial foreign regions as the 'Middle East'.28 Likewise, the proliferation in
1955 of new research centres, studies and periodicals on the 'Middle East' in the Soviet Union was
anything but academic: it reflected the growing Russian interest in the area.29 This revival coincided with
the conclusion of the Egyptian-Russian arms deal in September 1955 and the perceptions of Russian
leaders that the time was ripe for a political offensive in the Arab world. Indeed, as Leonard Binder notes:
'The basic development of area studies in the United States has
been political', i.e. to gain influence and to combat hostile forces.30
Though Binder hastens to add that it is difficult to discern a consistent political line in the organization of
it is clear that a large number of works on
area studies or in the patterns of funding,
modern Middle East international relations-whether in the United States
or in the Soviet Union- are 'packaged' to satisfy the policy needs of their
respective decision- makers.31 But historically, this has always been true. The
economic and strategic importance of the area has tended to attract
the interests of outside powers which have competed for influence
and control. Since 1945, however, the development of area studies has reflected more than before
the need of the Great Powers to influence the processes of change and stability in the region. The root of
the convergence of interests between the foreign policy and academic communities lies in the former's
control of research funding and the latter's dependency on and acquiescence in this state of affairs.32 The
analyses of the 'Middle East' seem to be more
result is that many
concerned with policy-oriented prescriptions than with the
understanding of the region in a sensitive and creative manner .33 It
must be confessed, however, that the glide into policy science or policy scientism is not peculiar only to
the study of Middle East international relations in general. In reflecting on the development of international
relations in the past thirty years, Professor Stanley Hoffmann establishes a strong link between the
development of the field and the dilemmas and concerns facing U.S. foreign policy in the post- Second
World War period.
Their predictions backfire- dystopic alarmism gets twisted
to lock in oppression

Kurasawa 4 (Fuyuki, Professor of Sociology- York

University of Toronto, Cautionary Tales: The Global
Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight,
Constellations, 11(4)//TR)
Up to this point, I have tried to demonstrate that transnational socio-political relations are nurturing a
thriving culture and infrastructure of prevention from below, which challenges presumptions about the
inscrutability of the future (II) and a stance of indifference toward it (III). Nonetheless, unless and until it is
farsightedness
substantively filled in, the argument is vulnerable to misappropriation since
does not in and of itself ensure emancipatory outcomes. Therefore, this
section proposes to specify normative criteria and participatory procedures through which citizens can
determine the reasonableness, legitimacy, and effectiveness of competing dystopian visions in order to
Foremost among the possible distortions
arrive at a socially self-instituting future.
of farsightedness is alarmism, the manufacturing of unwarranted
and unfounded doomsday scenarios. State and market institutions
may seek to produce a culture of fear by deliberately stretching
interpretations of reality beyond the limits of the plausible so as to
exaggerate the prospects of impending catastrophes, or yet again, by
intentionally promoting certain prognoses over others for
instrumental purposes. Accordingly, regressive dystopias can operate as Trojan horses
advancing political agendas or commercial interests that would otherwise be susceptible to public scrutiny
the
and opposition. Instances of this kind of manipulation of the dystopian imaginary are plentiful:
invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism and an imminent
threat of use of weapons of mass destruction; the severe curtailing
of American civil liberties amidst fears of a collapse of homeland
security; the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state as the only
remedy for an ideologically constructed fiscal crisis; the conservative
expansion of policing and incarceration due to supposedly spiraling crime waves; and so forth.
Alarmism constructs and codes the future in particular ways,
producing or reinforcing certain crisis narratives, belief structures,
and rhetorical conventions. As much as alarmist ideas beget a culture of fear, the reverse is
no less true.

Apocalyptic representations are deliberately falsified to

create a particular public sentiment this geopolitics of
fear allows no room for peace by endlessly recreating
violence
Sparke 7 (Matthew, Prof. of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct
Prof. of Global Health @ U. of Washington, Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic
Hopes and the Responsibilities of Geography Edited version published:
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97.2)
The geopolitical discourse about the threats posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq was so frequently repeated
and stylized in the period leading up to the American offensive that the script is now all too familiar (for
one of the most rigorous and official surveys of the misinformation that ed up to the war see the
Two big
Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staf, 2006).
fears dominated the Bush administrations geopolitical scripting. The
first was that Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction or WMD, and the
second was that these WMD could easily be passed on to terrorists because of known ties between
Hussein and al Qaeda. Most famously perhaps it was in Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech before the
United Nations that the WMD story was told with the most effortful, and in retrospect, most tendentious
claims to represent well-documented, evidence-based truth about real grounds for fear. "What you will
see," said Powell, in an appeal to the truth of vision that is one of the classic tropes of the modern
geopolitical imagination (Agnew, 2003; Tuathail, 1996), "is an accumulation of facts and disturbing
patterns of behavior." Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500
tons of chemical-weapons agents. ... Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein
to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size
of Manhattan. ... There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to
rapidly produce more, many more. ... This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well
documented (Powell, 2003). This was also the same script from which President Bush himself spoke both
before and after Powell's speech. However, the President's speech-making (which was generally designed
for domestic consumption and not an international UN audience) explained the relevance of the WMD story
in terms of the second main fearful script: in other words, in terms of Iraq's WMD getting into the hands of
terrorists. "Today," announced the President in his 2003 State of the Union address, the gravest danger in
the war on terror, the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and
possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. These regimes could use such weapons for blackmail,
terror, and mass murder. They could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them
without the least hesitation....With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons,
Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in
that region. And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from
intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that
Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without
fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own
(Bush, 2003). Insofar as Bush explained so much of his policy as an
aggressive 'bring it on' response to the real terrorism of 9/11, these
sorts of claims were to prove very powerful indeed, creating an
affect-laden and, as such, effective means of legitimating the Iraq war (
Tuathail, 2003). With Bush setting the model, the public geopolitical script of fear
included repeated statements about overwhelming evidence
combined with the affective appeal to Americans to imagine another
9/11: another 9/11 made much more deadly with the help of Iraq's WMD. "America must not ignore the
threat gathering against us," remained the administration's main fear-mongering message. "Facing clear
evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a
mushroom cloud" (Bush, 2002). The President was, of course, ably assisted in this work of geopolitical
scripting by other members of his administration. Most especially Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Vice-President Dick Cheney continued to reiterate the same twin fears about WMD and terror ties long
after the attack on Iraq and a huge security sweep of the occupied country showed that their fearful
Rumsfeld and Cheney nevertheless also effectively
geopolitics was groundless. In doing so,
underlined two key features of what made the geopolitical scripting
of fear so convincing: namely, emotion and repetition. Thus, arguing against the
critics that WMD would eventually be found in Iraq, Rumsfeld also showed how Americans' emotions about
9/11 lay at the heart of making the Iraq-as-threat geopolitics work: The coalition did not act in Iraq because
we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. We acted
because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on 9/11
(Rumsfeld, 2003). And subsequently, even in 2004, Cheney was still demonstrating that the other key
feature of making the groundless script function was repetition: "I think theres overwhelming evidence
that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government," he intoned (Cheney, 2004). In
the real world, of course, there was no such evidence. Instead, as was later made clear by the statements
of the British intelligence chief recorded in the Downing Street memos, "the intelligence and facts were
being fixed around the policy" (Danner, 2005). By this point, though, the ways in which the grounds were
invented in order to fit the script no longer mattered. Emotion, repetition and their combined conjuring of
So successful was the scripting of fear
fear had already done their geopolitical work.
that subsequently even administration officials themselves indicated
their backstage accomplishments with occasionally explicit, even
prideful, asides about the bureaucratic expediency involved. For
example, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Defense Secretary, caused a small media storm by acknowledging
something along the lines that: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S.
government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of
mass destruction, as the core reason" (quoted in McIntyre, 2003). This admission (which was itself hedged
in various ways) later came to seem minor in comparison with a much bolder account made to a reporter
by a White House aide of the administration's more generally cavalier approach to geopolitical scripting.
Given the gung-ho hubris of the account it is not surprising that this aide remains anonymous, but what he
told Ron Suskind - the reporter - remains no less telling. The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we
call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he
continued. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you,
all of you, will be left to just study what we do (Suskind, 2004). As scholars who remain committed to
geographers (with the possible exception of non-representational
studying discernible reality,
theorists) may also be derided by those at the pinnacles of American
power as located in the same low-lying reality-based community
inhabited by journalists such as Suskind. But this has not stopped
geographical studies from documenting with critical rigor the empire
of unreality produced by the geopolitical scripting of the War on
Terror. The use of the term 'empire' here is not just metaphorical, nor just a play on the imperial hubris
enunciated by Suskind's White House aide. As Gregory's forthright critique of the
colonial present makes clear, all kinds of geopolitical discourses with
their roots and routes in imperialism - including the many imaginative geographies of
imperial Orientalism famously critiqued by Edward Said (1979 and 1993) - were revitalized and
put to work in both justifying and performing the War on Terror
(Gregory, 2004). Gregory argues persuasively in this way that geopolitical scripts about
despotic, hate-filled, orientals served to provide the fear-filled
justification for treating whole communities as if they lay outside the
bounds of humanity. Building on Gregory's analysis, Allan Pred has provided in turn a powerful
critique of the groundless terror-talk into which so much of this fear-mongering fed and out of which so
much geopolitical boundary-drawing ensued. "Terror
may be instilled by way of a
variety of strategies," Pred summarizes: Through successfully perpetuating
'imaginative geographies' of Their Terrorist/Arab/Muslim space and
Their uncivilized, subhuman barbarism. Through successfully folding
distance into monstrous Difference. Through successfully insisting
that They are a pervasive military threat to Our Civilization, to the
security of Our way of life. Through avoiding any consideration of
our role in precipitating militant radicalism, in provoking the spread
of 'political Islam in its insurrectional forms'. Through successfully
implanting a just-below-the-surface sense of fear by way of
redundant representations strewn across the paths of everyday life
(Pred, 2005). As well as providing a useful summary of the geopolitics of fear at its boundary-drawing work,
Pred's textual strategy of repetition also mimics and subverts the repetitive rhetorics of the fear-mongers
themselves. In doing so, and by underlining how such rhetorics infiltrated American everyday life and
became implanted in people's 'just- below-the-surface' sensibilities, he also draws our attention to another
enunciation became
aspect of the geopolitics of the war on terror: namely, the way in which its
a performance of sovereignty and governmentality at the same time,
a way of re-enacting the power of the traditional pre-modern
sovereign to declare war on his own terms combined with a
decidedly post-modern approach to making the war make
biopolitical sense in American everyday life. The performance of
sovereignty as governmentality by the Bush administration - its way of simultaneously
producing and ruling its 'own reality' by executive fiat - has elsewhere been
theorized by Judith Butler in relation to the suspension of the Geneva conventions and the creation of
special rules and special spaces for imprisoning 'illegal combatants' in the Guantanamo gulag (Butler,
2004). Butler's argument about this "resurgence of sovereignty within the field of governmentality" (Butler,
2004: 56) seems equally applicable to the way the administration also suspended reference to real
intelligence in its geopolitical scripting of the Iraq war. However, outside of the exceptional space of
Guantanamo (where only fear seems to rule), the field of governmentality in which the resurgence of
executive sovereignty has been staged has been co-determined by another much more hopeful discourse
too: the discourse of geoeconomics. Alongside all the fear, then, there has also been much hope, and this
hope, expressed as a discourse about the inevitably inclusive and expansive aspects of capitalist
globalization, has also, just like the geopolitical scripting, had a whole series of regulative effects both in
America and elsewhere, including inside Iraq itself. In other words, if we follow Butler in noticing how the
Bush administration has invented its own sovereign realities within a post-sovereign world, and if we
combine this with an understanding of governmentality as the organization of "the conduct of conduct"
(Foucault, 1982: 220), we need to explore how the globalist common-sense about a globe-spanning level-
playing field also came to legitimate and shape the Iraq war.

Everyday nuclear colonialism is overshadowed by the

fantasy of a global nuclear war, allowing ongoing
nuclear violence to continue unchecked

Kato 93
(Masahide Kato, Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze,
Source: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 339-360 Published by: Sage
Publications, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644779 Accessed: 24/08/2012)//TR

Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and
became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of
destruction can be historically contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived
and thus given due recognition by the First World community are the explosions at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose
meaning is relevant only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm of
fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet how can one deny the crude fact that
nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the name of "nuclear testing" since the first
nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth.28 The major perpetrators of
nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44
times), and China (36 times).29 The primary targets of warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the
sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall
Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814
times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of
Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times).30 Moreover, although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests"
in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence
accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear
wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the
Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear
war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and Indigenous Nations.
The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity intervention," or the
"nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have
taken a form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations.
Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear
catastrophe has never been the "unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of
repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless,
ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by
rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of
nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First World community. Such a
discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear warfare in the domain of
imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers
the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific: Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere . . . were global in effect. The winds and seas
carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call
the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into batde against nature itself.31 Although Firth's book is
definitely a remarkable study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific, the problematic division/distinction between the
"nuclear explosions" and the nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the
subject ("we") is located higher than the "real" of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological
division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the ongoing
processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of
nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized. The discursive containment/obliteration of the
"real" of nuclear warfare has been accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm
commitment to global discourse, has established the unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over the real nuclear
catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.
Israel-Russia DA
 2AC
Reps of Russia either present it as absolutely other or as
a country that could easily become Westernizedboth of
these views are inadequate and perpetuate problematic
assumptions about relations between Russia and the West

Broda 2k2 (Marian, Russia and the West: The Root of the
Problem of Mutual Understanding, Studies in East
European Thought; Mar2002, Vol. 54 Issue 1/2, p7-24)

The question of Russias mental and cultural entanglements is no less evident

to Russian thinkers than to outside observers. Among the accepted positions a certain characteristic
On one side there is the tendency to absolutize the
polarization is perceptible.
decisive character of the specific traits of the Russian soul,
continuity, force, and
the Russian idea or Russias soul. The other side tends to the polar
opposite, it minimalizes, epiphenomenalizes or simply negates their significance,
treating them as something to grow out of. The first is based on
faith in the unique nature, history, and destiny of Russia, in its
unknowability for outsiders and in terms of rational categories, its unknowability in
general which renders impossible the application to Russia of
universal developmental standards, unmasked as exclusively
western. The second underwrites the comforting possibility of
transferring automatically to Russia western theoretical models of
social and cultural development. Neither point of view is adequate ,
both depend on a priori assumptions decreeing an unexamined
recognized order instead of granting it a heuristic status requiring unprejudiced investigation.
Nor are they free of unconscious or hidden paradoxes. In the former case, prescinding
from the metaphysical assumption of the unity of being and thought, it is clear that, considered
epistemically, the supposed premises of Russian identity understood as
the factor that predetermines the course of Russian history , its specificity
and likewise often its fatal outcome are mere theoretical constructs inacessible to
empirical confirmation and veri- fication.

Representations of Russia as developmentally or

structurally backward reify the binary between the
civilized, adult West and childish, incapable Russia

Broda 2k2 (Marian, Russia and the West: The Root of the
Problem of Mutual Understanding, Studies in East
European Thought; Mar2002, Vol. 54 Issue 1/2, p7-24)
But before this happens, Russia by virtue of her self-created alternative nature as well as her particular
character, including her maximalism, uncompromising attitude, communality, freedom from earthliness, ability to
represents a source of unease, a
transcend the prevailing order of things, eschatologism, etc.
threat and challenge to the Western way of thinking, valuating and
existence with emphasis on form, equilibrium, the person, moderation, the
individual, intellect, consciousness, and so forth. The classical distinction of two cognitional faculties, reason and
understanding, in accordance with which the former is directed to what is relative, terrestrial, and finite, and the latter to
what is absolute, divine, infinite, acquires in this light a specific cultural meaning, acting positively to set off Russia (and
To the dominant onesided reason
likewise orthodoxy) from the West (and Western Christianity).
in the West, considered as dry, abstract, external, purely analytical, Russian thought
opposes integral understanding regarded with approval as communal,
profound, intuitive, synthetic, and compatible with religious faith. The originally epistemological distinction between reason and
understanding took on an ethical, spiritual, religious and historiosophical meaning in Russia. To reason conceived as the effect and symptom
of the Fall is ascribed a break with moral principles as well as an alienating, desacralizing and desintegrative influence on the communal life of
the individual and its social bonds. The understanding that vanquishes one-sided reason and is capable of attaining a higher supra-empirical
reality (conceived in the spirit of mystical realism) gives up its purely human character: it comes in contact with and expresses divinity, steps
beyond the state of fragmentation, diremption and alienation, and acquires an eschatological meaning. It is no accident that the philosophical
system widely recognized in Russia to be the most significant and historically originary grew out of a principled opposition to the dominant
Western idea of an autonomous philosophy and an autonomous subject of knowledge. Its creator, Vladimir Solovv, . . . develops the thought
that a synthesis of philosphy and science with theology brings forth the possibility of an integral knowledge, and integral knowledge together
with integral creativity makes for integral life in the integral society,18 which, being a particular metamorphosis of Gods Kingdom, is not
a mere inner unity of intellectual, emotional, and creative stimuli, but is the living and authentic presence of the Absolute.19 The criterion of
truth becomes then the unifying character of knowledge, able finally to see the oneness in the whole and wholeness in the one.20 As a
result,in Russia rationalism becomes a concept which brings to
expression the essence of the West to which it is contrasted, that is, the
essence of that other civilization, religion, and philosophy and at the same
time the tool by which the latter are criticized. This is abetted by the tendency to
identify the complex nature of rationalism with knowing by means of reason. Rationalism treated
as hypertrophied reason is regarded in Russia as both the identity and the
sickness of the West: its formalism, superficiality, fragmentariness, artificiality, lack
of rootedness, and authentic contact with God. The reason-driven rationalism of
the West becomes hence a challenge for Russians, and its vanquishing
as well as the anticipated reconstruction of the fullness of reason, of
spiritual and social life are conceived as Russias all-human, historical mission. On
the contrary, in light of the solar,21 aristotelian perspective of the Western mind emphasising individualism,
historicity, the clear separation between history and eschatology, greater sensitivity to the lastingness of differentiation,
determination, and the limitations of the social world, underscoring the specificity and mutual irreducibility of particular
types of knowledge and orders of meaning, according in practice priority to phenomenalistically conceived particular
the
sciences, seeing progress in the separation and autonomization of particualar scientific disciplines, etc.
Russian consciousness or mentality as well as the way in which they
conceive reason are seen as archaic, developmentally retarded,
ignorant of the demarcational criteria separating specific kinds of
knowledge, insufficiently free of mythical structures. The Western
insistence on the immaturity, indeed the childishness of the
Russian consciousness and Russia itself, finds an all too obvious
basis in the fact that very often this same question is raised usually with entirely different intentions
on its native soil. The old West is contrasted with the young Russia, and
Russians, who are not fully formed, exist by premonitions,
feverishly, and are only just beginning to seek out and shape
themselves.22 As a result Russians see the West as washed out, empty of
sense and value, bereft of a vital tie with the Absolute, enslaved by its attachment to realitys material side,
atomized and disintegrated,23 thereby petrifying its Fallen state in which it found itself by reason of its own
principles and from which it is powerless to exit unaided. With recourse to a symptomatic example: Socialism, wrote Herzen, is a
religion of man, a religion of the earth, without a heaven; the fulfillment of Christianity and the realization of the revolution is a
society without government (. . .). The social idea can be the testament, the ultimate will, boundary, beyond which the Western
world will no longer be able to move. It can also be the ceremonious entrance into another existence, the vision of the male toga.
From the standpoint of
Europe is by far too rich to risk this; it has too many things to preserve . . .24
Western consciousness Russia is perceived on the other hand as a retarded
world, situated at an earlier, inferior stage of development, out of
which the West has already grown, having freed itself from the
desire for a naive synthesis and mythical oneness, [which are]
dangerous for the real autonomy of the individual in society,
undermine the distinctiveness of particular types of knowledge or
spheres of action. Russia is seen as a land still in the precritical phase,
characterized by Utopian attitudes, ambitions and thinking. The
relationship of Russians to Europe who are aware that they and
Russia as a whole are perceived this way has a certain relative character and, to use
Isaiah Berlins words, is conditioned by a singular amalgam of love and hate. On one side, there is an
evident intellectual respect, envy, awe, a sense of rivalry and surpassment; on the other,
a feeling of enmity, suspicion and resentment, as well as the feeling
that compared with Europe Russians are awkward, de trop, that they
do not belong to it. (. . .) in the eyes of Russians the West is
prospering, it is remarkably organized, intelligent and efficient, but at
the same time it is artificial, cold, calculating, shut up in itself,
incapable of great deeds and true emotions, of deep feelings which from
time to time have violently to rise forth from the fringes, of suffering renouncements in the name of certain unusual
historical challenges, and as a consequence it is condemned never to understand life in its fullness.25

These discrete views of Russia re-entrench universalizing

and Eurocentric mentalities. Vote Aff to reject

Broda 2k2 (Marian, Russia and the West: The Root of the
Problem of Mutual Understanding, Studies in East
European Thought; Mar2002, Vol. 54 Issue 1/2, p7-24)

What is more, they are treated not as independent but as de facto

dependent variables infused with a content judged to be the one they
should have in order to explain all the meanderings of Russian
history or enable deductions of its future. This occurs likewise when
an initiational meaning is ascribed to the given determinations of
Russias fate. In what was to become for this line of thought a highly significant
formulation, Vladimir Solovv wrote: The vocation, or that singular idea which Gods thought
intends for each moral entity the individual or the nation , and which is revealed to the
consciousness of that entity as its utmost obligation, acts in all cases on the being of the moral
entity, doing so, however, in two ways: its reveals itself as the law of life, when the obligation
is fulfilled, and as the law of death, when this has not occurred.9 The latter perspective in turn
conceals the scale of difficulties necessarily arising in conjunction with the need to clarify the
real extent of Russias empirically given distinctiveness, as opposed to the kind of marginality
ascribed to it on the basis of universalistic theoretical models. In the latter case, the extent of
Russias specificity fails to acquire a neutral account, but is instead
reified within ad hoc reductionist explanatory schemata favoring the
polarization of perceptions of Russian reality, its dismantling into
contrasting and absolutized extremes of normalcy and
strangeness (chudachnost). Closer attention should be paid, in my
opinion, to the by far more widespread conviction regarding the
singular significance and distinctive character of the cultural-mental
sphere in Russias historical destiny. Possibly, they are unwittingly
exaggerated, given Russias relatively greater untypicality (in
comparison withWestern nations) in relation toWestern theoretical
models, which are characterized by universalist intentions and a
recalcitrant eurocentrism.

Western images of Russia as nave or wild affect Russian

existence and create a self-fulfilling prophecythis turns
case
Zinik 2k4 (Zinovy, The Neighbours Fence: On Russian
Self-Alienation, 2004, http://www.sakharov-
museum.ru/museum/exhibitionhall/religion_notabene/zzini
k2004.htm)

The
The Western image of Russia - Russia as seen under Western eyes - has a crucial importance, too.
Western imagination tends to create an image of either uniquely
naive or uniquely wild Barbarians to extol the glory of our own
sophisticated civilisation. But what we think of as typically and
uniquely Russian most probably originated in the West. Stereotypes
are confusing and misleading. The legendary national habits usually betray the reverse
side of the national character such as the ostentatious Russian hospitality in a country notorious for its
xenophobia. Even Soviet kitsch, the most famous example of which is Lenin's Tomb in Red Square - the
Mausoleum, built in late the 1920s, was created after the Western fashion for everything Egyptian, after
the discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen, which coincided with the death of the Leader of the Great
Russia, according to an ironical observation of Anthony Burgess, is "the
Russian Revolution.
subconscious of the West". Therefore, the Western perception or
misconception of things Russian, do somehow affect Russian
existence itself. People begin to behave the way we see them, like
punks who play up their own ugliness in anticipation of our
revulsion.

Cross apply Santos from case

Preventitive measures make risk of war zero

Ryabikhin et al 9 (Dr. Leonid Ryabikhin, [expert of the

Russian Science Committee for Global Security], General
(Ret.) Viktor Koltunov, Dr. Eugene Miasnikov, June 2009,
De-alerting: Decreasing the Operational Readiness of
Strategic Nuclear Forces,
http://www.ewi.info/system/files/RyabikhinKoltunovMiasni
kov.pdf //DF)

states have
The issue of the possibility of an accidental nuclear war itself is hypothetical. Both
developed and implemented constructive organizational and
technical measures that practically exclude launches resulting from
unauthorized action of personnel or terrorists. Nuclear weapons are
maintained under very strict system of control that excludes any
accidental or unauthorized use and guarantees that these weapons
can only be used provided that there is an appropriate authorization
by the national leadership. Besides that it should be mentioned that even the Soviet
Union and the United States had taken important bilateral steps
toward decreasing the risk of accidental nuclear conflict. Direct
emergency telephone red line has been established between the
White House and the Kremlin in 1963. In 1971 the USSR and USA signed
the Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Nuclear War Threat. This
Agreement established the actions of each side in case of even a
hypothetical accidental missile launch and it contains the
requirements for the owner of the launched missile to deactivate
and eliminate the missile. Both the Soviet Union and 5 the United States have developed
proper measures to observe the agreed requirements.

Early warning systems guarantee no war

NTRC 08 (Nuclear Threat Reductions Campaign U.S.-
Russian Ballistic-Missile Early-Warming Cooperation
http://www.veteransforamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/22-early-
warning-final.pdf //DF)

The United States combination of space-based sensors and land-

based radars provides reliable assurance that a missile attack from
Russia would be detected, verified, and tracked with a high degree
of confidence. Consequently, Russia is assured that the U.S. will not
perceive an attack erroneously and launch a retaliatory blow by
mistake. Russias early-warning (E-W) network as originally constructed by the
Soviet Union was similarly designed to provide notice of a missile attack
from multiple sources providing overlapping verification . Today, more than
a decade after the Soviet collapse, that now-Russian E-W system is so riddled with gaps and potential
defects that a May 2003 RAND study described it as being in tatters.2

Russias upgrading their early warning systems- no

chance of miscalc

Podvig 11 (Pavel, Spring 2011, [Center for Arms Control

Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Tech. PhD
in political science, Moscow Institute of World Economy
and International Relations,] Russias Nuclear Forces:
Between Disarmament and Modernization, http://iis-
db.stanford.edu/pubs/23256/IFRI_pp37podvig.pdf //DF)

The modernization program is not limited to the offensive strategic triad. Russia is also carrying out
a number of programs that would strengthen the infrastructure
that supports operations of its nuclear forces. As part of this effort, Russia is
undertaking a major upgrade of its network of early-warning
radars, which suffered substantial losses as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union. In 2002 it
brought into operation a radar in Baranovichi, Belarus, and in
subsequent years it completed the construction of two new-
generation radars in Lekhtusi, near St-Petersburg and Armavir. These radars are
expected to begin combat service in the near future. Two more new-
generation radars are being built in the Kaliningrad region and near Irkutsk, and one more is
planned in Barnaul. The Space Forces, which operate the early-warning
system, announced the plan to eventually replace all early-warning
radars built in the Soviet Union by radars of new generations . .
Western discourse has replaced communism with
corruption in its anti-Russian rhetoric

Yurchak 99 (Alexei, Entrepreneurial Governmentality in

Post-Socialist Russia, in The New Entrepreneurs of
Europe and Asia, edited by Victoria Bonnell and Thomas
Gold, 2002, M.E. Sharpe publishing)

In much of the Western discourse about Russia today the term

corruption seems to play the role once reserved for the term
Communism. A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, tellingly entitled The New
Russian Menace, remarked: The struggle of the last half century was to
defeat Communism; the challenge in the years ahead will be to
constrain corruption. The second struggle may well prove more
difficult, because avarice is a more fundamental aspect of human
nature than the Communist precept that people are subject to historical determinist
forces beyond the individual s control. [W]e have an obligation to insure that the
corrosive impact of foreign corruption is blocked from our shores.
America may be as challenged today by the threat of a deterioration
of values galloping corruption as it was yesterday by Marxist
ideology.

Opposing Russian hegemony is unabashedly anti-Russian

and reinscribes a Western outlook

Trenin 2k4 (Dmitri, Russias Restless Frontier: the

Chechnya Factor in post-Soviet Russia, p. 202, Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C.)

Among Russias security, foreign policy, and military elites, the

traditional geopolitical world outlook was strengthened by
skepticism regarding Western views of Moscows policies in Central
Asia and the Caucasus (including Chechnya). The new Western image of
Russia was of a revanchist state seeking to use its military superiority
over weak and defenseless neighbors to regain dominance and
control their resources. This perspective led logically to a U.S. policy
toward opposing Russian hegemonistic ambitions. American
encouragement of a geopolitical pluralism in the former Soviet
south was perceived in Moscow as unabashedly anti-Russian.

Calling Russia totalitarian is part of Western discourses

strategy for ensuring Russia remains separate from the
civilized world, rendering it expendable

Zinik 2k4 (Zinovy, The Neighbours Fence: On Russian

Self-Alienation, 2004, http://www.sakharov-
museum.ru/museum/exhibitionhall/religion_notabene/zzini
k2004.htm)

The vision of Russia in the West is a double one. There is an image of

Russia as the most backward country in the world. Epithets such as
authoritarian, totalitarian, tyrannical, bureaucratic, corrupt and
technologically retarded are indispensable for taking part in any
intelligent exchange of opinions on Russia in Britain. One way or the
other, Russia is not part of the civilized Western world - Asia, most
probably, Byzantium, maybe. This image somehow doesn't exclude praise for the overrated
artistic achievements of the Russian intelligentsia which are perceived by the same chattering classes in
Britain as a persecuted minority's fight against the oppressive state with a writer's quill and an artist's
brush. We tend to forget that the Soviet system had nourished its intelligentsia as a propaganda tool in the
process of brainwashing the masses; on the whole, the intelligentsia accepted this role willingly in
exchange for bonuses and privileges. After the collapse of the Soviet system, it was primarily the
intelligentsia's tarnished image that suffered first. People were left without their guiding mentors.
Japan Prolif DA
 2AC
No link- assumes singular pullout without critique of
realism- Medina and Rodriguez show that epistemic
friction in the academy open new epistemologies outside
of realism
Their frame of realism is not inevitable 9/11, berlin wall,
etc all prove focus on states as coherent entities is long
gone, we need to break away from conventional frames to
allow our analysis to keep up with changes in world their
dogmatic adherence to realism only distracts us from
changing global conditions

Busser 6
York Centre for International and Security Studies, PhD Cand. @ McMaster University, 2006
(Mark, The Evolution of Security: Revisiting the Human Nature Debate in International Relations, August,
Online: http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP40-Busser.pdf)

Unfortunately for Bradley Thayer, evolutionary arguments do not provide a simple and
incontestable ontological and epistemological foundations for revitalized realism. Since
arguments like Thayers draw on controversial scientific branches of sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology, which arguably assume the basic features of human nature they
seek to prove, the conclusions for political theory remain almost as scientifically arbitrary
as Morgenthaus assumption of an animus dominandi. In framing the problematic of their exploration, many
of these arguments assume an individualistic and egoistic human nature and question how
political relations might arise out of the mechanical dynamics of self-interest. As Mary
Clarks work demonstrates, this ignores important factors in the evolutionary development
of the human being. Since interpersonal, cultural, political ,and social influences have had a
large role in shaping the evolution of humans and our primate relatives, it is not such a
simple task to explain human nature based on rational actor models and mathematical
calculations. In contrast to the sociobiology and evolutionary psychologys depiction of human nature as biologically
determined, Clark argues that it is a societys construction of a story of human nature that
affects how people will imagine ways to live together, fulfilling basic human needs or not.
Biology is not destiny, she seems to argue, but what we believe about our biology threatens to
become our destiny if we allow it. This highlights the possibility that seemingly universal
traits like competition, aggression and egoism might be contingent on the weight we lend
them and not biologically determined. If we have a choice in the matter, it is possible to begin
conceiving of political possibilities for global social orders that do not depend on a
combative and competitive engagement with Others. In turn, this allows a reconsideration of
the conceptual lens through which to view security . If it is not programmed into our genes to be intolerant,
ethnocentric, and aggressive, then we can find ways to abandon the traditions that have normalized
such behaviours. Following Jim George and David Campbell, perhaps a new conception of
international relationships would serve better than the current paradigm, which is based on
traditional views of an aggressive and competitive human nature. It may be that, as Clark suggests,
conflict can only be mitigated when basic human needs are met. Doing so, it seems, would require a rethinking of how differences are
engaged with, interpreted and reconciled in both international and local societies. If we humans are not biologically destined to draw
lines between ourselves and others, then it is possible for us to escape conceptions of security that necessitate aggression against, or
protection from, outsiders. Perhaps the security long sought after in international relations will come
not from making societies secure from difference, but making difference secure within and
between states.

Stability through heg is a lie- the only empirics prove less

hegemony led to more peace

Fettweis 11 (Christopher J., 9/26/11, [Department of

Political Science, Tulane University], Free Riding or
Restraint? Examining European Grand Strategy,
Comparative Strategy, 30:316332, EBSCO //DF)

there is no evidence to support a direct

It is perhaps worth noting that
relationship between the relative level of U.S. activism and
international stability. In fact, the limited data we do have suggest the
opposite may be true. During the 1990s, the United States cut back
on its defense spending fairly substantially. By 1998, the United States was
spending $100 billion less on defense in real terms than it had in 1990.51 To internationalists, defense
hawks and believers in hegemonic stability, this irresponsible peace dividend endangered both national
and global security. No serious analyst of American military capabilities, argued Kristol and Kagan,
doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet Americas responsibilities to itself and
if the pacific trends were not based upon
to world peace.52 On the other hand,
U.S. hegemony but a strengthening norm against interstate war, one
would not have expected an increase in global instability and
violence. The verdict from the past two decades is fairly plain: The
world grew more peaceful while the United States cut its forces . No
state seemed to believe that its security was endangered by a less-
capable United States military, or at least none took any action that would suggest such a
belief. No militaries were enhanced to address power vacuums, no
security dilemmas drove insecurity or arms races, and no regional
balancing occurred once the stabilizing presence of the U.S. military
was diminished. The rest of the world acted as if the threat of
international war was not a pressing concern, despite the reduction
in U.S. capabilities. Most of all, the United States and its allies were
no less safe. The incidence and magnitude of global conflict declined while the United States cut its
military spending under President Clinton, and kept declining as the Bush Administration ramped the
No complex statistical analysis should be necessary to
spending back up.
reach the conclusion that the two are unrelated. Military spending figures by
themselves are insufficient to disprove a connection between overall U.S. actions and international
stability. Once again, one could presumably argue that spending is not the only or even the best indication
of hegemony, and that it is instead U.S. foreign political and security commitments that maintain stability.
Since neither was significantly altered during this period, instability should not have been expected.
Alternately,advocates of hegemonic stability could believe that relative
rather than absolute spending is decisive in bringing peace . Although the
United States cut back on its spending during the 1990s, its relative advantage never wavered .
However, even if it is true that either U.S. commitments or relative
spending account for global pacific trends, then at the very least
stability can evidently be maintained at drastically lower levels of
both. In other words, even if one can be allowed to argue in the alternative
for a moment and suppose that there is in fact a level of
engagement below which the United States cannot drop without
increasing international disorder, a rational grand strategist would
still recommend cutting back on engagement and spending until that
level is determined. Grand strategic decisions are never final; continual adjustments can and
must be made as time goes on. Basic logic suggests that the United States
ought to spend the minimum amount of its blood and treasure while
seeking the maximum return on its investment. And if the current era of stability
is as stable as many believe it to be, no increase in conflict would ever occur
irrespective of U.S. spending, which would save untold trillions for an increasingly debt-
ridden nation. It is also perhaps worth noting that if opposite trends had unfolded, if other states had
reacted to news of cuts in U.S. defense spending with more aggressive or insecure behavior, then
If increases in
internationalists would surely argue that their expectations had been fulfilled.
conflict would have been interpreted as proof of the wisdom of
internationalist strategies, then logical consistency demands that
the lack thereof should at least pose a problem. As it stands, the only
evidence we have regarding the likely systemic reaction to a more
restrained United States suggests that the current peaceful trends
are unrelated to U.S. military spending. Evidently the rest of the world can operate
quite effectively without the presence of a global policeman. Those who think otherwise base their view on
faith alone.
Scholarship D/A: The Negatives embracement of realism
begins from a flawed academic culture that pre-disposes
war as an inevitable result and theorizes the enemy ever-
present on the border. McClintock uses three examples to
demonstrate the military-academic-political complex:
Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US
Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use having an
army that did nothing but train, he said. Theres got to
be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for. In
1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New
American Century produced a remarkable report in which
they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would
require a catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new
Pearl Harbor. The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling
solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of
legitimacy, offering the military unimaginable license to
expand its reach. General Peter Schoomaker would
publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon:
There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a
tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing
opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have
actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some
oomph.
Our Muzaffar evidence proves that the way the Negative
constructs their impact scenarios is the same logic and
rhetoric used for years to further US neo-imperialism in
the Middle East: this neo-imperialism has resulted in
failed states, increased tensions, overall destabilization
and the formation of terror groups as a last resort to fight
these policies; essentially a geo-political factory of crises
to sustain the necessity of hegemony. Muzaffar explains
the original premise behind the War on Terror was
hegemonic expansion of control over land and resources,
specifically control over oil commodities and a key
strategic point to monitor Central Asia (much like how the
drones are currently being pitched as monitoring points
for the volatile Middle East).

New proliferators will build small arsenals which are

uniquely stable

Seng 98
(Jordan, PhD Candidate in Pol. Sci. U. Chicago, Dissertation, Strategy for
Pandora's Children: Stable Nuclear Proliferation Among Minor States, p. 203-
206)//TR

The nuclear
However, this "state of affairs" is not as dangerous as it might seem.
arsenals of limited nuclear proliferators will be small and,
consequently, the command and control organizations that manage chose arsenals will
be small as well. The small arsenals of limited nuclear proliferators will mitigate
against many of the dangers of the highly delegative, 'non-
centralized' launch procedures Third World states are likely to use. This will
happen in two main ways. First, only a small number of people need be
involved in Third World command and control. The superpowers had
tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and thousands of nuclear weapons personnel in a
variety of deployments organized around numerous nuclear delivery platforms. A state that
has, say, fifty nuclear weapons needs at most fifty launch operators and only a handful of
group commanders. This has both quantitative and qualitative repercussions.
Quantitatively, the very small number of people 'in the loop'
greatly diminishes the statistical probability that accidents or
human error will result in inappropriate nuclear launches. All else
being equal, the chances of finding some guard asleep at some post increases with the
number of guards and posts one has to cover. Qualitatively, small numbers
makes it possible to centrally train operators, to screen and
choose them with exceeding care, 7 and to keep each of them
in direct contact with central authorities in times of crises. With
very small control communities, there is no need for intermediary commanders. Important
information and instructions can get out quickly and directly. Quality control of launch
operators and operations is easier. In some part, at least, Third World states can compensate
for their lack of sophisticated use-control technology with a more controlled selection of, and
more extensive communication with, human operators. Secondly, and relatedly,
Third World proliferators will not need to rely on cumbersome
standard operating procedures to manage and launch their
nuclear weapons. This is because the number of weapons will be so small, and also
because the arsenals will be very simple in composition. Third World stares simply
will not have that many weapons to keep track of. Third World states
will not have the great variety of delivery platforms that the superpowers had (various ballistic
missiles, cruise missiles, long range bombers, fighter bombers, missile submarines, nuclear
armed ships, nuclear mortars, etc., etc.), or the great number and variety of basing options,
and they will not employ the complicated strategies of international basing that the
superpowers used. The small and simple arsenals of Third World proliferators will not require
highly complex systems to coordinate nuclear activities. This creates two specific
organizational advantages. One, small organizations, even if
they do rely to some extent of standard operating procedures,
can be flexible in times of crisis. As we have discussed, the essential problem
of standard operating procedures in nuclear launch processes is that the full range if possible
strategic developments cannot be predicted and specified before the fact, and thus responses
to them cannot be standardized fully. An unexpected event can lead to 'mismatched' and
inappropriate organizational reactions. In complex and extensive command and control
organizations, standard operating procedures coordinate great numbers of people at numerous
levels of command structure in a great multiplicity of places. If an unexpected event triggers
operating procedures leading to what would be an inappropriate nuclear launch, it would be
very difficult for central commanders to get the word out' to everyone involved. The
coordination needed to stop launch activity would be at least as complicated as the
coordination needed to initiate it, and, depending on the speed of launch processes, there may
 the small numbers of people
be less time to accomplish it. However,
involved in nuclear launches and the simplicity of arsenals will
make it far easier for Third World leaders to 'get the word out'
and reverse launch procedures if necessary. Again, so few will be the
numbers of weapons that all launch operators could be contacted directly by central leaders.
The programmed triggers of standard operating procedures can be passed over in favor of
unscripted, flexible responses based on a limited number of human-to-human communications
and confirmations. Two, the smallness and simplicity of Third World
command and control organizations will make it easier for
leaders to keep track of everything that is going on at any
given moment. One of the great dangers of complex
organizational procedures is that once one organizational
event is triggeredonce an alarm is sounded and a programmed response is made
other branches of the organization are likely to be affected as
well. This is what Charles Perrow refers to as interactive complexity, 8 and it has been a
mainstay in organizational critiques of nuclear command and control s ystems.9 The more
complex the organization is, the more likely these secondary effects are, and the less likely
they are to be foreseen, noticed, and well-managed. So, for instance, an American commander
that gives the order to scramble nuclear bombers over the U.S. as a defensive measure may
find that he has unwittingly given the order to scramble bombers in Europe as well. A recall
order to the American bombers may overlook the European theater, and nuclear misuse could
result. However, when numbers of nuclear weapons can be
measured in the dozens rather than the hundreds or thousands, and when
deployment of those weapons does not involve multiple theaters and forward based delivery
vehicles of numerous types, tight coupling is unlikely to cause
unforeseen and unnoticeable organizational events. Other things
being equal, it is just a lot easier to know all of what is going on. In short, while Third World
states may nor have the electronic use-control devices that help ensure that peripheral
commanders do nor 'get out of control,' they have other advantages that make the challenge
of centralized control easier than it was for the superpowers. The small numbers of
personnel and organizational simplicity of launch
bureaucracies means that even if a few more people have their
fingers on the button than in the case of the superpowers,
there will be less of a chance that weapons will be launched
without a definite, informed and unambiguous decision to
press that button.

Deterrence failure is very unlikely and conventional

war is worse. Proliferation saves far more lives than it
costs.

Preston 7
(Thomas, Associate Prof. IRWashington State U. and Faculty Research Associate
Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, From Lambs to Lions: Future Security
relationships in a World of Biological and Nuclear Weapons, p. 31-32)

1.) The Cost of Deterrence Failure Is Too Great Advocates of deterrence seldom
take the position that it will always work or that it cannot fail.
Rather, they take the position that if one can achieve the requisite elements
required to achieve a stable deterrent relationship between parties, it vastly
decreases the chances of miscalculation and resorting to war
even in contexts where it might otherwise be expected to
occur (George and Smoke 1974; Harvey 1997a; Powell 1990, 2003; Goldstein 2000).
Unfortunately, critics of deterrence take the understandable, if unrealistic,
position that if deterrence cannot be 100 percent effective
under all circumstances, then it is an unsound strategic
approach for states to rely upon, especially considering the immense destructiveness of
nuclear weapons. Feaver (1993, 162), for example, criticizes reliance on nuclear deterrence
because it can fail and that rational deterrence theory can only predict that peace should occur
most of the time (e.g., Lebow and Stein 1989). Yet, were we to apply this
standard of perfection to most other policy approaches
concerning security matters whether it be arms control or
proliferation regime efforts, military procurement policies, alliance
formation strategies, diplomacy, or sanctions none could be argued
with any more certainty to completely remove the threat of equally
devastating wars either. Indeed, one could easily make the argument that these
alternative means have shown themselves historically to be far
less effective than nuclear arms in preventing wars. Certainly, the
twentieth century was replete with examples of devastating
conventional conflicts which were not deterred through
nonnuclear measures. Although the potential costs of a nuclear
exchange between small states would indeed cause a frightful
loss of life, it would be no more costly (and likely far less so) than
large-scale conventional conflicts have been for combatants.
Moreover, if nuclear deterrence raises the potential costs of war
high enough for policy makers to want to avoid (rather than risk)
conflict, it is just as legitimate (if not more so) for optimists to argue
in favor of nuclear deterrence in terms of the lives saved
through the avoidance of far more likely recourses to
conventional wars, as it is for pessimists to warn of the potential costs of deterrence
failure. And, while some accounts describing the "immense weaknesses" of deterrence theory
(Lebow and Stein 1989, 1990) would lead one to believe deterrence was almost impossible to
either obtain or maintain, since 1945 there has not been one single historical instance of
nuclear deterrence failure (especially when this notion is limited to threats to key central state
interests like survival, and not to minor probing of peripheral interests). Moreover, the
actual costs of twentieth-century conventional conflicts have
been staggeringly immense, especially when compared to the
actual costs of nuclear conflicts (for example, 210,000 fatalities in
the combined 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings
compared to 62 million killed overall during World War II, over
three million dead in both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, etc.) (McKinzie et al. 2001, 28).3
Further, as Gray (1999, 158-59) observes, "it is improbable that policymakers
anywhere need to be educated as to the extraordinary
qualities and quantities of nuclear armaments." Indeed, the high
costs and uncontestable, immense levels of destruction that would
be caused by nuclear weapons have been shown historically to be facts that have
not only been readily apparent and salient to a wide range of policy makers, but ones that
have clearly been demonstrated to moderate extreme policy or
risk-taking behavior (Blight 1992; Preston 2001) Could it go wrong? Of course. There
is always that potential with human beings in the loop. Nevertheless, it has also been shown to
be effective at moderating policy maker behavior and introducing an element of constraint into
situations that otherwise would likely have resulted in war (Hagerty 1998).

No chance of miscalc or accidentsthis evidence

answers all their arguments and is way better

Quinlan 9
(Sir Michael Quinlan, Former Permanent Under-Secretary of State UK Ministry of
Defense, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects, p. 63-
69, The book reflects the author's experience across more than forty years in
assessing and forming policy about nuclear weapons, mostly at senior levels close
to the centre both of British governmental decision-making and of NATO's
development of plans and deployments, with much interaction also with comparable
levels of United States activity in the Pentagon and the State department) //TR

Even if initial nuclear use did not quickly end the fighting, the supposition of inexorable
momentum in a developing exchange, with each side rushing to overreaction amid
confusion and uncertainty, is implausible. It fails to consider
what the situation of the decision-makers would really be.
Neither side could want escalation. Both would be appalled at
what was going on. Both would be desperately looking for
signs that the other was ready to call a halt. Both, given the
capacity for evasion or concealment which drive modern
delivery platforms and vehicles can possess, could have in
reserve significant forces invulnerable enough not to entail
use-or-lose pressures. (It may be more open to question, as noted earlier, whether
newer nuclear weapon possessors can be immediately in that position; but it is within reach of
any substantial state with advanced technological capabilities and attaining it is certain to be a
high priority in the development of forces.) As a result, neither side can have any
predisposition to suppose, in an ambiguous situation of fearful
risk, that the right course when in doubt is to go on copiously
launching weapons. And none of this analysis rests on any presumption of highly
subtle or pre-concerted rationality. The rationality required is plain. The argument is reinforced
if we consider the possible reasoning of an aggressor at a more dispassionate level. Any
substantial nuclear armoury can inflict destruction outweighing any possible prize that
aggression could hope to seize. A state attacking the possessor of such an armoury must
therefore be doing so (once given that it cannot count upon destroying the armoury pre-
emptively) on a judgment that the possessor would be found lacking in the will to use it. If the
attacker possessor used nuclear weapons, whether first or in response to the aggressors own
first use, this judgment would begin to look dangerously precarious. There must be at least a
substantial probability of the aggressor leaders concluding that their initial judgment had been
mistakenthat the risks were after all greater than whatever prize they had been seeking, and
that for their own countrys survival they must call off the aggression. Deterrence planning
such as that of NATO was directed in the first place to preventing the initial misjudgment and
in the second, if it were nevertheless made, to compelling such a reappraisal. The former aim
had to have primacy, because it could not be taken for granted that the latter was certain to
work. But there was no ground for assuming in advance, for all possible scenarios, that the
chance of its working must be negligible. An aggressor state would itself be at huge risk if
nuclear war developed, as its leaders would know. It may be argued that a policy which
abandons hope of physically defeating the enemy and simply hopes to get him to desist is pure
gamble, a matter of who blinks first; and that the political and moral nature of most likely
aggressors, almost ex hypothesi, makes them less likely to blink. One response to this is to ask
what is the alternativeit can be only surrender. But a more hopeful answer lies in the fact
that the criticism is posed in a political vacuum. Real-life conflict would have a political context.
The context which concerned NATO during the Cold War, for example, was one of defending
vital interests against a postulated aggressor whose own vital interests would not be engaged
or would be less engaged. Certainty is not possible, but a clear asymmetry of vital interest is a
legitimate basis for expecting an asymmetry, credible to both sides, of resolve in conflict. That
places upon statesmen, as page 23 has noted, the key task in deterrence of building up in
advance a clear and shared grasp of where limits lie. That was plainly achieved in cold-war
Europe. If vital interests have been defused in a way that is clear, and also clearly not
overlapping or incompatible with those of the adversary; a credible basis has been laid for the
likelihood of greater resolve in resistance. It was also sometimes suggested by critics that
whatever might be indicated by theoretical discussion of political will and interests, the military
environment of nuclear warfare particularly difficulties of communication and controlwould
drive escalation with overwhelming probability to the limit. But it is obscure why matters
should be regarded as inevitably so for every possible level and setting of action. Even if the
history of war suggested (as it scarcely does) that military decision-makers are mostly apt to
work on the principle When in doubt, lash out, the nuclear revolution creates an utterly new
situation. The pervasive reality, always plain to both sides during the cold war, is if this goes
on to the end, we are all ruined. Given that inexorable escalation would mean catastrophe for
both, it would be perverse to suppose them permanently incapable of framing arrangements
which avoid it. As page 16 has noted, NATO gave its military commanders no widespread
delegated authority, in peace or war, to launch nuclear weapons without specific political
direction. Many types of weapon moreover had physical
safeguards such as PALS incorporated to reinforce
organizational ones. There were multiple communication and
control systems for passing information, orders, and prohibitions. Such
systems could not be totally guaranteed against disruption if at a fairly intense level at
strategic exchangewhich was only one of many possible levels of conflict an adversary
judged it to be in his interest to weaken political control. It was far from clear why he
necessarily should so judge. Even then, however, it remained possible to operate on a general
tail-safe presumption: no authorization, no use. That was the basis on which NATO operated. If
it is feared that the arrangements which a nuclear-weapon possessor has in place do not meet
such standards in some respects, the logical course is to continue to improve them rather than
to assume escalation to be certain and uncontrollable, with all the enormous inferences that
would have to flow from such an assumption. The likelihood of escalation can never be 100 per
cent, and never zero. Where between those two extremes it may lie can never be precisely
calculable in advance; and even were it so calculable, it would not be uniquely fixedit would
stand to vary hugely with circumstances. That there should be any risk at all of escalation to
widespread nuclear war must be deeply disturbing, and decision-makers would always have to
weigh it most anxiously. But a pair of key truths about it need to be recognized. The first is that
the risk of escalation to large-scale nuclear war is inescapably present in any significant armed
conflict between nuclear-capable powers, whoever may have started the conflict and whoever
may first have used any particular category of weapon. The initiator of the conflict will always
have physically available to him options for applying more force if he meets effective
resistance. If the risk of escalation, whatever its degree of probability, is to be regarded as
absolutely unacceptable, the necessary inference is that a state attacked by a substantial
nuclear power must forgo military resistance. It must surrender, even if it has a nuclear armory
of its own. But the companion truth is that, as page 47 has noted, the risk of escalation is an
inescapable burden also upon the aggressor. The exploitation of that burden is the crucial
route, if conflict does break out, for managing it to a tolerable outcomethe only route,
indeed, intermediate between surrender and holocaust, and so the necessary basis for
deterrence beforehand. The working nut of plans to exploit escalation risk most effectively in
deterring potential aggression entails further and complex issues. It is for example plainly
desirable, wherever geography, politics, and available resources so permit without triggering
arms races, to make provisions and dispositions that are likely to place the onus of making the
bigger and more evidently dangerous steps in escalation upon the aggressor who wishes to
maintain his attack, rather than upon the defender. The customary shorthand fur this desirable
posture used to be escalation dominance.) These issues are not further discussed here. But
addressing them needs to start from acknowledgement that there are in any event no
certainties or absolutes available, no options guaranteed to be risk-free and cost-free.
Deterrence is not possible without escalation risk; and its presence can point to no automatic
policy conclusion save for those who espouse outright pacifism and accept its consequences.
Accident and Miscalculation Ensuring the safety and security of nuclear weapons plainly needs
to be taken most seriously. Detailed information is understandably not published, but such
direct evidence as there is suggests that it always has been so taken in every possessor state,
with the inevitable occasional failures to follow strict procedures dealt with rigorously. Critics
have nevertheless from time to time argued that the possibility of accident involving nuclear
weapons is so substantial that it must weigh heavily in the entire evaluation of whether war-
prevention structures entailing their existence should be tolerated at all. Two sorts of scenario
are usually in question. The first is that of a single grave event involving an unintended nuclear
explosiona technical disaster at a storage site, for example, or the accidental or
unauthorized launch of a delivery system with a live nuclear warhead. The second is that of
some eventperhaps such an explosion or launch, or some other mishap such as malfunction
or misinterpretation of radar signals or computer systemsinitiating a sequence of response
and counter-response that culminated in a nuclear exchange which no one had truly intended.
No event that is physically possible can be said to be of absolutely zero probability (just as at
an opposite extremer it is absurd to claim, as has been heard from distinguished figures, that
nuclear-weapon use can be guaranteed to happen within some finite future span despite not
having happened for over sixty years.) But human affairs cannot be managed to the standard
of either zero or total probability. We have to assess levels between those theoretical limits and
weigh the reality and implications against other factors, in security planning as in everyday life
There have certainly been, across the decades since 1945,
many known accidents involving nuclear weapons, from transporters skidding off
roads to bomber aircraft crashing with or accidentally dropping the weapons they carried (in
past days when such carriage was a frequent feature of readiness arrangements it no longer
is). A few of these accidents may have released into the nearby environment highly toxic
material. None however has entailed a nuclear detonation. Some
commentators suggest that this reflects bizarrely good fortune amid such massive activity and
deployment over so many years. A more rational deduction from the facts
of this long experience would however be that the probability
of any accident triggering a nuclear explosion is extremely
low. It might be further nested that the mechanisms needed to
set of such an explosion are technically demanding, and that in
a large number of ways the past sixty years have seen
extensive improvements in safety arrangements for both the
design and the handling of weapons. It is undoubtedly possible to see
respects in which, after the cold war, some of the factors bearing upon risk may be new or
more adverse; but some are now plainly less so. The years which the world has
come through entirely without accidental or unauthorized
detonation have included early decades in which knowledge
was sketchier, precautions were less developed, and weapon
designs were less ultra-safe than they later became, as well as substantial
periods in which weapon numbers were larger, deployments immure widespread arid diverse,
movements more frequent, and several aspects of doctrine and readiness arrangements more
tense. Similar considerations apply to the hypothesis of nuclear war being mistakenly triggered
by false alarm. Critics again point to the fact, as it is understood, of numerous occasions when
initial steps in alert sequences for US nuclear forces were embarked upon, or at least called
for, by indicators mistaken or misconstrued. In none of these instances, it is
accepted, did matters get at all near to nuclear launch
extraordinary good fortune again, critics have suggested. But the rival and more
logical inference from hundreds of events stretching over sixty
years of experience presents itself once more: that the
probability of initial misinterpretation leading far towards
mistaken launch is remote. Precisely because any nuclear weapon
processor recognizes the vast gravity of any launch, release
sequences have many steps, and human decision is repeatedly
interposed as well as capping the sequences. To convey that because a
first step was prompted the world somehow came close to accidental nuclear war is wild
hyperbole, rather like asserting, when a tennis champion has lost his opening service game,
that he was nearly beaten in straight sets. History anyway scarcely offers any
ready example of major war started by accident even before the
nuclear revolution imposed an order-of-magnitude increase of caution. In was occasion
conjectured that nuclear war might be triggered by the real but accidental or unauthorized
launch of a strategic nuclear-weapon delivery system in the direction of a potential adversary.
No such launch is known to have occurred in over sixty years.
The probability of it is therefore very low. But even if it did
happen, the further hypothesis of it initiating a general
nuclear exchange is far-fetched. It fails to consider the real situation of
decision-makers, as pages 63-4 have brought out. The notion that cosmic holocaust might be
mistakenly precipitated in this way belongs to science fiction.

No domino effect

Alagappa 9
(Distinguished Senior Fellow, East-West Center. PhD, IR, Tufts (Muthiah, The long
shadow: nuclear weapons and security in 21st century Asia, ed. Alagappa, 521-
2)//TR

It will be useful at this juncture to address more directly the set of instability
arguments advanced by certain policy makers and scholars: the domino effect of new
nuclear weapon states, the probability of preventive action against new nuclear
weapon states, and the compulsion of these states to use their small arsenals early for fear of
losing them in a preventive or preemptive strike by a stronger nuclear adversary. On the
India's and Pakistan's nuclear weapon programs have not
domino effect,
fueled new programs in South Asia or beyond. Iran's quest for nuclear
weapons is not a reaction to the Indian or Pakistani programs. It is
grounded in that country's security concerns about the United States and Tehran's regional
The North Korean test has evoked mixed reactions in
aspirations.
Northeast Asia. Tokyo is certainly concerned; its reaction, though, has not been to initiate
its own nuclear weapon program but to reaffirm and strengthen the American extended
it is
deterrence commitment to Japan. Even if the U.S. Japan security treaty were to weaken,
not certain that Japan would embark on a nuclear weapon program.
Likewise, South Korea has sought reaffirmation of the American extended
deterrence commitment, but has firmly held to its nonnuclear posture. Without dramatic
change in its political, economic, and security circumstances, South Korea is highly unlikely to
embark on a covert (or overt) nuclear weapon program as it did in the 1970s. South Korea
could still become a nuclear weapon state by inheriting the nuclear weapons of North Korea
should the Kim Jong Il regime collapse. Whether it retains or gives up that capability will hinge
 The North Korean nuclear test has
on the security circumstances of a unified Korea.
not spurred Taiwan or Mongolia to develop nuclear weapon capability.
The point is that each country's decision to embark on and sustain nuclear
weapon programs is contingent on its particular security and other
circumstances. Though appealing, the domino theory is not
predictive; often it is employed to justify policy on the basis of alarmist predictions. The
loss of South Vietnam, for example, did not lead to the predicted domino
effect in Southeast Asia. In fact the so-called dominos became drivers of a vibrant
Southeast Asia and brought about a fundamental transformation in that subregion (Lord 1993,
In the nuclear arena, the nuclear programs of China, India,
1996).
and Pakistan were part of a security chain reaction, not
mechanically falling dominos. However, as observed earlier the Indian, Pakistani,
and North Korean nuclear tests have thus far not had the domino effect predicted by alarmist
Great caution should be exercised in
analysts and policy makers.
accepting at face value the sensational predictions of
individuals who have a vested interest in accentuating the
dangers of nuclear proliferation. Such analysts are now focused on the
dangers of a nuclear Iran. A nuclear Iran may or may not have destabilizing effects. Such
claims must be assessed on the basis of an objective reading of the drivers of national and
regional security in Iran and the Middle East.

This means we control prolif offense theres no risk

of the floodgates opening, and prolif is most stable if
it happens naturally and slowly

Waltz 3
(Kenneth Waltz, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Adjunct
Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University, 2003, The Spread of Nuclear
Weapons: A Debate Renewed, p. 42-43)//TR

Some have feared that weakening opposition to the spread of

nuclear weapons will lead numerous states to obtain them
because it may seem that everyone is doing it. Why should we think that if we relax,
Both the United States
numerous states will begin to make nuclear weapons?
and the Soviet Union were relaxed in the past, and those effects
did not follow. The Soviet Union initially supported Chinas nuclear program. The United
States helped both Britain and France to produce nuclear weapons. By 1968 the CIA had
informed President Johnson of the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons, and in July of 1970,
Richard Helms, director of the CIA, gave this information to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. These and later disclosures were not followed by censure of Israel or by reductions
of economic assistance. And in September of 1980, the executive branch, against the will of
the House of Representatives but with the approval of the Senate, continued to do nuclear
business with India despite its explosion of a nuclear device and despite its unwillingness to
sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Many more countries can make
nuclear weapons than do. One can believe that American opposition to nuclear
arming stays the deluge only by overlooking the complications of international life. Any state
has to examine many conditions before deciding whether or not to develop nuclear weapons.
Our opposition is only one factor and is not likely to be the decisive one. Many states feel fairly
secure living with their neighbors. Why should they want nuclear weapons? Some countries,
feeling threatened, have found security through their own strenuous efforts and through
arrangements made with others. South Korea is an outstanding example. Many officials believe
that South Korea would lose more in terms of American support if it acquired nuclear weapons
than it would gain by having them. Further, on occasion we might slow the spread of nuclear
weapons by not opposing the nuclear weapons programs of some countries. When we opposed
Pakistans nuclear program, we were saying that we disapprove of countries developing
The gradual spread of
nuclear weapons no matter what their neighbors do.
nuclear weapons has not opened the nuclear floodgates.
Nations attend to their security in the ways they think best. The
fact that so many more countries can make nuclear weapons than do says more about the
hesitation of countries to enter the nuclear military business than about the effectiveness of
American nonproliferation policy. We should suit our policy to individual
cases, sometimes bringing pressure against a country moving toward nuclear weapons
capability and sometimes quietly acquiescing: No one policy is right in all cases. We should ask
what the interests of other countries require before putting pressure on them. Some countries
are likely to suffer more in cost and pain if they remain conventional states than if they
The measured spread of nuclear weapons does
become nuclear ones.
not run against our interests and can increase the security of
some states at a price they can afford to pay.

Not only have Asian security predictions by the West been

consistently wrong, but the need to revise the framework
for these predictions has been told to just wait: this
promotes a broken system bent on constructing the Asian
theater as war prone

Kang 3 (David, [Professor of International Relations and

Business, Director of Korean Studies Institute,] Getting
Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks
International Security, Volume 27, Number 4, Spring
2003, pp. 57-85 MUSE //DF)
Following the end of the Cold War in 1991, some
scholars in the West began to
predict that Asia was ripe for rivalry.12 They based this prediction on the following
factors: wide disparities in the levels of economic and military power among nations in the region; their different
political systems, ranging from democratic to totalitarian; historical animosities; and the lack of international
institutions. Many scholars thus
envisaged a return of power politics after de-
cades when conflict in Asia was dominated by the Cold War tension
between the United States and the Soviet Union. In addition, scholars
envisaged a re- turn of arms racing and the possibility of major
conflict among Asian coun- tries, almost all of which had rapidly
changing internal and external environments. More specific predictions included
the growing possibility of Japanese rearmament;13 increased Chinese adventurism spurred by Chinas rising power
and ostensibly revisionist intentions;14 conict or war over the status of Taiwan;15 terrorist or missile attacks from a
rogue North Korea against South Korea, Japan, or even the United States;16 and arms racing or even conflict in
Southeast Asia, prompted in part by unresolved territorial disputes.17 More than a dozen years
have passed since the end of the Cold War, yet none of these
pessimistic predictions have come to pass. Indeed there has not
been a major war in Asia since the 197879 Vietnam-Cambodia-China
conflict; and with only a few exceptions (North Korea and Taiwan), Asian countries do not
fear for their survival. Japan, though powerful, has not rearmed to the ex-
tent it could. China seems no more revisionist or adventurous now
than it was before the end of the Cold War. And no Asian country
appears to be balancing against China. In contrast to the period 195080, the past
two decades have witnessed enduring regional stability and
minimal conflict. Scholars should directly confront these
anomalies, rather than dismissing them. Social scientists can learn as much
from events that do not occur as from those that do. The case of
Asian security provides an opportunity to examine the usefulness
of accepted international relations paradigms and to determine
how the assumptions underlying these theories can become mis-
specified. Some scholars have smuggled ancillary and ad hoc
hypotheses about preferences into realist, institutionalist, and
constructivist theories to make them fit various aspects of the
Asian cases, including: assumptions about an irrational North Korean leadership, predictions of an
expansionist and revisionist China, and depictions of Japanese foreign policy as abnormal.18 Social
science moves forward from the clear statement of a theory, its
causal logic, and its predictions. Just as important, however, is the
rigorous assessment of the theory, especially if predictions flowing
from it fail to materialize. Exploring why scholars have
misunderstood Asia is both a fruitful and a necessary theoretical
exercise. Two major problems exist with many of the pessimistic
predictions about Asia. First, when confronted with the non-
balancing of Asian states against China, the lack of Japanese
rearmament, and five decades of non-invasion by North Korea,
scholars typically respond: Just wait. This reply, however, is
intellectually ambiguous. Although it would be unfair to expect instantaneous national responses to
changing international conditions, a dozen years would seem to be long enough to
detect at least some change. Indeed Asian nations have historically
shown an ability to respond quickly to changing circumstances . The
Meiji restoration in Japan in 1868 was a remarkable example of governmental response to European and American
encroachment, and by 1874 Japan had emerged from centuries of isolation to occupy Taiwan.19 More recently, with
the introduction of market reforms in late 1978, when Deng Xiaoping famously declared, To get rich is glorious,
the Chinese have trans- formed themselves from diehard socialists
to exuberant capitalists beginning less than three years after Maos
death in 1976.20 In the absence of a specific time frame, the just wait
response is unfalsifiable. Providing a causal logic that explains how
and when scholars can expect changes is an important as- pect of
this response, and reasonable scholars will accept that change may
not be immediate but may occur over time. Without such a time
frame, however, the just wait response is mere rhetorical
wordplay designed to avoid troubling evidence.
Prolif DAs
 AT: Prolif Shell
New proliferators will build small arsenals which are
uniquely stable

Seng 98
(Jordan, PhD Candidate in Pol. Sci. U. Chicago, Dissertation, Strategy for Pandora's Children:
Stable Nuclear Proliferation Among Minor States, p. 203-206)//TR

The nuclear arsenals of

However, this "state of affairs" is not as dangerous as it might seem.
limited nuclear proliferators will be small and, consequently, the
command and control organizations that manage chose arsenals will be small as well. The small
arsenals of limited nuclear proliferators will mitigate against many of the dangers
of the highly delegative, 'non-centralized' launch procedures Third World
states are likely to use. This will happen in two main ways. First, only a small number of
people need be involved in Third World command and control. The
superpowers had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and thousands of nuclear weapons personnel in a
variety of deployments organized around numerous nuclear delivery platforms. A state that has, say, fifty
nuclear weapons needs at most fifty launch operators and only a handful of group commanders. This has
Quantitatively, the very small number
both quantitative and qualitative repercussions.
of people 'in the loop' greatly diminishes the statistical probability
that accidents or human error will result in inappropriate nuclear
launches. All else being equal, the chances of finding some guard asleep at some post increases with
the number of guards and posts one has to cover. Qualitatively, small numbers makes
it possible to centrally train operators, to screen and choose them
with exceeding care, 7 and to keep each of them in direct contact
with central authorities in times of crises. With very small control communities,
there is no need for intermediary commanders. Important information and instructions can get out quickly
and directly. Quality control of launch operators and operations is easier. In some part, at least, Third World
states can compensate for their lack of sophisticated use-control technology with a more controlled
Secondly, and
selection of, and more extensive communication with, human operators.
relatedly, Third World proliferators will not need to rely on
cumbersome standard operating procedures to manage and launch
their nuclear weapons. This is because the number of weapons will be so small, and also
because the arsenals will be very simple in composition. Third World stares simply will
not have that many weapons to keep track of. Third World states will not have the
great variety of delivery platforms that the superpowers had (various ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, long
range bombers, fighter bombers, missile submarines, nuclear armed ships, nuclear mortars, etc., etc.), or
the great number and variety of basing options, and they will not employ the complicated strategies of
international basing that the superpowers used. The small and simple arsenals of Third World proliferators
This creates two
will not require highly complex systems to coordinate nuclear activities.
specific organizational advantages. One, small organizations, even if
they do rely to some extent of standard operating procedures, can
be flexible in times of crisis. As we have discussed, the essential problem of standard
operating procedures in nuclear launch processes is that the full range if possible strategic developments
cannot be predicted and specified before the fact, and thus responses to them cannot be standardized
fully. An unexpected event can lead to 'mismatched' and inappropriate organizational reactions. In complex
and extensive command and control organizations, standard operating procedures coordinate great
numbers of people at numerous levels of command structure in a great multiplicity of places. If an
unexpected event triggers operating procedures leading to what would be an inappropriate nuclear launch,
it would be very difficult for central commanders to get the word out' to everyone involved. The
coordination needed to stop launch activity would be at least as complicated as the coordination needed to
initiate it, and, depending on the speed of launch processes, there may be less time to accomplish it.
However, the small numbers of people involved in nuclear launches and
the simplicity of arsenals will make it far easier for Third World
leaders to 'get the word out' and reverse launch procedures if
necessary. Again, so few will be the numbers of weapons that all launch operators could be contacted
directly by central leaders. The programmed triggers of standard operating procedures can be passed over
in favor of unscripted, flexible responses based on a limited number of human-to-human communications
Two, the smallness and simplicity of Third World
and confirmations.
command and control organizations will make it easier for leaders to
keep track of everything that is going on at any given moment. One
of the great dangers of complex organizational procedures is that
once one organizational event is triggeredonce an alarm is sounded and a
programmed response is madeother branches of the organization are likely to
be affected as well. This is what Charles Perrow refers to as interactive complexity, 8 and it has
been a mainstay in organizational critiques of nuclear command and control s ystems.9 The more complex
the organization is, the more likely these secondary effects are, and the less likely they are to be foreseen,
noticed, and well-managed. So, for instance, an American commander that gives the order to scramble
nuclear bombers over the U.S. as a defensive measure may find that he has unwittingly given the order to
scramble bombers in Europe as well. A recall order to the American bombers may overlook the European
However, when numbers of nuclear
theater, and nuclear misuse could result.
weapons can be measured in the dozens rather than the hundreds or thousands, and
when deployment of those weapons does not involve multiple theaters and forward based delivery
tight coupling is unlikely to cause unforeseen and
vehicles of numerous types,
unnoticeable organizational events. Other things being equal, it is just a lot easier to
know all of what is going on. In short, while Third World states may nor have the electronic use-control
devices that help ensure that peripheral commanders do nor 'get out of control,' they have other
The
advantages that make the challenge of centralized control easier than it was for the superpowers.
small numbers of personnel and organizational simplicity of launch
bureaucracies means that even if a few more people have their
fingers on the button than in the case of the superpowers, there will
be less of a chance that weapons will be launched without a definite ,
informed and unambiguous decision to press that button.

Uncertainty solves war

Karl 97
president of the Asia Strategy Initiative and a lecturer in IR, USC (David, Winter, Proliferation
Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2539274?seq=9)//TR

Optimists have relaxed views of the preventive-war dangers entailed in situations in which a nuclear power
The practical difficulties of ensuring a disarming
confronts a nuclearizing rival.
strike to preclude any possibility of nuclear retaliation make
preventive actions a military gamble that states are very unlikely to
take. As Waltz explains, "prevention and pre-emption are difficult games because the costs are so high if
the games are not perfectly played. . . . Ultimately, the inhibitions [against such attacks] lie in the
impossibility of knowing for sure that a disarming strike will totally destroy an opposing force and in the
states will have to
immense destruction even a few warheads can wreak." 25 To optimists,
learn to live with a rival's emerging nuclear armory. Because
strategic uncertainty is seen as having a powerful dissuasive effect,
optimists usually view the very increase in the numbers of nuclear-
armed states as an additional element of stability . Dagobert Brito and Michael
Intriligator, for instance, argue that uncertainty over the reaction of other nuclear powers will make all
hesitant to strike individually. 26 As an example, they point to the restraint the superpowers exercised on
each other in the 1960s, when first the United States and then the Soviet Union contemplated military
The net effect of the uncertain
action against China's nascent nuclear weapon sites.
reaction of others is that "the probability of deliberate nuclear
attack falls to near zero with three, four, or more nuclear nations." 27
 even in cases of asymmetric proliferation within
Similarly, Waltz reasons that
conflict dyads, nuclear weapons will prove "poor instruments for
blackmail" because a "country that takes the nuclear offensive has to fear an appropriately punishing
strike by someone. Far from lowering the expected cost of aggression, a nuclear offense even against a
non-nuclear state raises the possible costs of aggression to incalculable heights because the aggressor
cannot be sure of the reaction of other nuclear powers."28

Deterrence failure is very unlikely and conventional war is

worse. Proliferation saves far more lives than it costs.

Preston 7
(Thomas, Associate Prof. IRWashington State U. and Faculty Research AssociateMoynihan
Institute of Global Affairs, From Lambs to Lions: Future Security relationships in a World of
Biological and Nuclear Weapons, p. 31-32)

1.) The Cost of Deterrence Failure Is Too GreatAdvocates of deterrence seldom take
the position that it will always work or that it cannot fail. Rather,
they take the position that if one can achieve the requisite elements required to achieve a
stable deterrent relationship between parties, it vastly decreases the chances of
miscalculation and resorting to wareven in contexts where it might
otherwise be expected to occur (George and Smoke 1974; Harvey 1997a; Powell 1990,
2003; Goldstein 2000). Unfortunately, critics of deterrence take the understandable, if
unrealistic, position that if deterrence cannot be 100 percent
effective under all circumstances, then it is an unsound strategic
approach for states to rely upon, especially considering the immense destructiveness of nuclear
weapons. Feaver (1993, 162), for example, criticizes reliance on nuclear deterrence because it can fail and
that rational deterrence theory can only predict that peace should occur most of the time (e.g., Lebow and
Yet, were we to apply this standard of perfection to most
Stein 1989).
other policy approaches concerning security matters whether it be
arms control or proliferation regime efforts, military procurement
policies, alliance formation strategies, diplomacy, or sanctions none could be
argued with any more certainty to completely remove the threat of equally
devastating wars either. Indeed, one could easily make the argument that these
alternative means have shown themselves historically to be far less
effective than nuclear arms in preventing wars. Certainly, the twentieth
century was replete with examples of devastating conventional
conflicts which were not deterred through nonnuclear measures .
Although the potential costs of a nuclear exchange between small
states would indeed cause a frightful loss of life, it would be no more
costly (and likely far less so) than large-scale conventional conflicts have
been for combatants. Moreover, if nuclear deterrence raises the
potential costs of war high enough for policy makers to want to
avoid (rather than risk) conflict, it is just as legitimate (if not more so) for
optimists to argue in favor of nuclear deterrence in terms of the
lives saved through the avoidance of far more likely recourses to
conventional wars, as it is for pessimists to warn of the potential costs of deterrence failure. And,
while some accounts describing the "immense weaknesses" of deterrence theory (Lebow and Stein 1989,
1990) would lead one to believe deterrence was almost impossible to either obtain or maintain, since 1945
there has not been one single historical instance of nuclear deterrence failure (especially when this notion
is limited to threats to key central state interests like survival, and not to minor probing of peripheral
the actual costs of twentieth-century conventional
interests). Moreover,
conflicts have been staggeringly immense, especially when
compared to the actual costs of nuclear conflicts (for example, 210,000
fatalities in the combined 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic
bombings compared to 62 million killed overall during World War II ,
over three million dead in both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, etc.) (McKinzie et al. 2001, 28).3 Further,
as Gray (1999, 158-59) observes, "it
is improbable that policymakers anywhere
need to be educated as to the extraordinary qualities and quantities
of nuclear armaments." Indeed, the high costs and uncontestable,
immense levels of destruction that would be caused by nuclear weapons
have been shown historically to be facts that have not only been readily apparent and salient to a wide
have clearly been demonstrated to
range of policy makers, but ones that
moderate extreme policy or risk-taking behavior (Blight 1992; Preston 2001)
Could it go wrong? Of course. There is always that potential with human beings in the loop. Nevertheless, it
has also been shown to be effective at moderating policy maker behavior and introducing an element of
constraint into situations that otherwise would likely have resulted in war (Hagerty 1998).

No chance of miscalc or accidentsthis evidence answers

all their arguments and is way better

Quinlan 9
(Sir Michael Quinlan, Former Permanent Under-Secretary of State UK Ministry of Defense,
Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects, p. 63-69, The book reflects
the author's experience across more than forty years in assessing and forming policy about
nuclear weapons, mostly at senior levels close to the centre both of British governmental
decision-making and of NATO's development of plans and deployments, with much interaction
also with comparable levels of United States activity in the Pentagon and the State
department) //TR

Even if initial nuclear use did not quickly end the fighting, the supposition of inexorable momentum in a
overreaction amid confusion and
developing exchange, with each side rushing to
uncertainty, is implausible. It fails to consider what the situation of
the decision-makers would really be. Neither side could want
escalation. Both would be appalled at what was going on. Both
would be desperately looking for signs that the other was ready to
call a halt. Both, given the capacity for evasion or concealment
which drive modern delivery platforms and vehicles can possess,
could have in reserve significant forces invulnerable enough not to
entail use-or-lose pressures. (It may be more open to question, as noted earlier, whether
newer nuclear weapon possessors can be immediately in that position; but it is within reach of any
substantial state with advanced technological capabilities and attaining it is certain to be a high priority in
neither side can have any predisposition to
the development of forces.) As a result,
suppose, in an ambiguous situation of fearful risk, that the right
course when in doubt is to go on copiously launching weapons. And
none of this analysis rests on any presumption of highly subtle or pre-concerted rationality. The rationality
required is plain. The argument is reinforced if we consider the possible reasoning of an aggressor at a
more dispassionate level. Any substantial nuclear armoury can inflict destruction outweighing any possible
prize that aggression could hope to seize. A state attacking the possessor of such an armoury must
therefore be doing so (once given that it cannot count upon destroying the armoury pre-emptively) on a
judgment that the possessor would be found lacking in the will to use it. If the attacker possessor used
nuclear weapons, whether first or in response to the aggressors own first use, this judgment would begin
to look dangerously precarious. There must be at least a substantial probability of the aggressor leaders
concluding that their initial judgment had been mistakenthat the risks were after all greater than
whatever prize they had been seeking, and that for their own countrys survival they must call off the
aggression. Deterrence planning such as that of NATO was directed in the first place to preventing the
initial misjudgment and in the second, if it were nevertheless made, to compelling such a reappraisal. The
former aim had to have primacy, because it could not be taken for granted that the latter was certain to
work. But there was no ground for assuming in advance, for all possible scenarios, that the chance of its
working must be negligible. An aggressor state would itself be at huge risk if nuclear war developed, as its
leaders would know. It may be argued that a policy which abandons hope of physically defeating the
enemy and simply hopes to get him to desist is pure gamble, a matter of who blinks first; and that the
political and moral nature of most likely aggressors, almost ex hypothesi, makes them less likely to blink.
One response to this is to ask what is the alternativeit can be only surrender. But a more hopeful answer
lies in the fact that the criticism is posed in a political vacuum. Real-life conflict would have a political
context. The context which concerned NATO during the Cold War, for example, was one of defending vital
interests against a postulated aggressor whose own vital interests would not be engaged or would be less
engaged. Certainty is not possible, but a clear asymmetry of vital interest is a legitimate basis for
expecting an asymmetry, credible to both sides, of resolve in conflict. That places upon statesmen, as
page 23 has noted, the key task in deterrence of building up in advance a clear and shared grasp of where
limits lie. That was plainly achieved in cold-war Europe. If vital interests have been defused in a way that is
clear, and also clearly not overlapping or incompatible with those of the adversary; a credible basis has
been laid for the likelihood of greater resolve in resistance. It was also sometimes suggested by critics that
whatever might be indicated by theoretical discussion of political will and interests, the military
environment of nuclear warfare particularly difficulties of communication and controlwould drive
escalation with overwhelming probability to the limit. But it is obscure why matters should be regarded as
inevitably so for every possible level and setting of action. Even if the history of war suggested (as it
scarcely does) that military decision-makers are mostly apt to work on the principle When in doubt, lash
out, the nuclear revolution creates an utterly new situation. The pervasive reality, always plain to both
sides during the cold war, is if this goes on to the end, we are all ruined. Given that inexorable escalation
would mean catastrophe for both, it would be perverse to suppose them permanently incapable of framing
arrangements which avoid it. As page 16 has noted, NATO gave its military commanders no widespread
delegated authority, in peace or war, to launch nuclear weapons without specific political direction.
Many types of weapon moreover had physical safeguards such as
PALS incorporated to reinforce organizational ones. There were
multiple communication and control systems for passing
information, orders, and prohibitions. Such systems could not be totally guaranteed against
disruption if at a fairly intense level at strategic exchangewhich was only one of many possible levels of
conflict an adversary judged it to be in his interest to weaken political control. It was far from clear why
he necessarily should so judge. Even then, however, it remained possible to operate on a general tail-safe
presumption: no authorization, no use. That was the basis on which NATO operated. If it is feared that the
arrangements which a nuclear-weapon possessor has in place do not meet such standards in some
respects, the logical course is to continue to improve them rather than to assume escalation to be certain
and uncontrollable, with all the enormous inferences that would have to flow from such an assumption. The
likelihood of escalation can never be 100 per cent, and never zero. Where between those two extremes it
may lie can never be precisely calculable in advance; and even were it so calculable, it would not be
uniquely fixedit would stand to vary hugely with circumstances. That there should be any risk at all of
escalation to widespread nuclear war must be deeply disturbing, and decision-makers would always have
to weigh it most anxiously. But a pair of key truths about it need to be recognized. The first is that the risk
of escalation to large-scale nuclear war is inescapably present in any significant armed conflict between
nuclear-capable powers, whoever may have started the conflict and whoever may first have used any
particular category of weapon. The initiator of the conflict will always have physically available to him
options for applying more force if he meets effective resistance. If the risk of escalation, whatever its
degree of probability, is to be regarded as absolutely unacceptable, the necessary inference is that a state
attacked by a substantial nuclear power must forgo military resistance. It must surrender, even if it has a
nuclear armory of its own. But the companion truth is that, as page 47 has noted, the risk of escalation is
an inescapable burden also upon the aggressor. The exploitation of that burden is the crucial route, if
conflict does break out, for managing it to a tolerable outcomethe only route, indeed, intermediate
between surrender and holocaust, and so the necessary basis for deterrence beforehand. The working nut
of plans to exploit escalation risk most effectively in deterring potential aggression entails further and
complex issues. It is for example plainly desirable, wherever geography, politics, and available resources
so permit without triggering arms races, to make provisions and dispositions that are likely to place the
onus of making the bigger and more evidently dangerous steps in escalation upon the aggressor who
wishes to maintain his attack, rather than upon the defender. The customary shorthand fur this desirable
posture used to be escalation dominance.) These issues are not further discussed here. But addressing
them needs to start from acknowledgement that there are in any event no certainties or absolutes
available, no options guaranteed to be risk-free and cost-free. Deterrence is not possible without escalation
risk; and its presence can point to no automatic policy conclusion save for those who espouse outright
pacifism and accept its consequences. Accident and Miscalculation Ensuring the safety and security of
nuclear weapons plainly needs to be taken most seriously. Detailed information is understandably not
published, but such direct evidence as there is suggests that it always has been so taken in every
possessor state, with the inevitable occasional failures to follow strict procedures dealt with rigorously.
Critics have nevertheless from time to time argued that the possibility of accident involving nuclear
weapons is so substantial that it must weigh heavily in the entire evaluation of whether war-prevention
structures entailing their existence should be tolerated at all. Two sorts of scenario are usually in question.
The first is that of a single grave event involving an unintended nuclear explosiona technical disaster at
a storage site, for example, or the accidental or unauthorized launch of a delivery system with a live
nuclear warhead. The second is that of some eventperhaps such an explosion or launch, or some other
mishap such as malfunction or misinterpretation of radar signals or computer systemsinitiating a
sequence of response and counter-response that culminated in a nuclear exchange which no one had truly
intended. No event that is physically possible can be said to be of absolutely zero probability (just as at an
opposite extremer it is absurd to claim, as has been heard from distinguished figures, that nuclear-weapon
use can be guaranteed to happen within some finite future span despite not having happened for over
sixty years.) But human affairs cannot be managed to the standard of either zero or total probability. We
have to assess levels between those theoretical limits and weigh the reality and implications against other
There have certainly been, across the
factors, in security planning as in everyday life
decades since 1945, many known accidents involving nuclear weapons, from
transporters skidding off roads to bomber aircraft crashing with or accidentally dropping the weapons they
carried (in past days when such carriage was a frequent feature of readiness arrangements it no longer is).
A few of these accidents may have released into the nearby environment highly toxic material.None
however has entailed a nuclear detonation. Some commentators suggest that this
reflects bizarrely good fortune amid such massive activity and deployment over so many years. A
more rational deduction from the facts of this long experience would
however be that the probability of any accident triggering a nuclear
explosion is extremely low. It might be further nested that the
mechanisms needed to set of such an explosion are technically
demanding, and that in a large number of ways the past sixty years
have seen extensive improvements in safety arrangements for both
the design and the handling of weapons. It is undoubtedly possible to see respects in
which, after the cold war, some of the factors bearing upon risk may be new or more adverse; but some
The years which the world has come through entirely
are now plainly less so.
without accidental or unauthorized detonation have included early
decades in which knowledge was sketchier, precautions were less
developed, and weapon designs were less ultra-safe than they later became,
as well as substantial periods in which weapon numbers were larger, deployments immure widespread arid
diverse, movements more frequent, and several aspects of doctrine and readiness arrangements more
tense. Similar considerations apply to the hypothesis of nuclear war being mistakenly triggered by false
alarm. Critics again point to the fact, as it is understood, of numerous occasions when initial steps in alert
sequences for US nuclear forces were embarked upon, or at least called for, by indicators mistaken or
In none of these instances, it is accepted, did matters get
misconstrued.
at all near to nuclear launchextraordinary good fortune again, critics have suggested. But
the rival and more logical inference from hundreds of events
stretching over sixty years of experience presents itself once more:
that the probability of initial misinterpretation leading far towards
mistaken launch is remote. Precisely because any nuclear weapon
processor recognizes the vast gravity of any launch, release
sequences have many steps, and human decision is repeatedly
interposed as well as capping the sequences. To convey that because a first step
was prompted the world somehow came close to accidental nuclear war is wild hyperbole, rather like
asserting, when a tennis champion has lost his opening service game, that he was nearly beaten in
History anyway scarcely offers any ready example of major
straight sets.
war started by accident even before the nuclear revolution imposed an order-of-magnitude
increase of caution. In was occasion conjectured that nuclear war might be triggered by the real but
accidental or unauthorized launch of a strategic nuclear-weapon delivery system in the direction of a
No such launch is known to have occurred in over sixty
potential adversary.
years. The probability of it is therefore very low. But even if it did
happen, the further hypothesis of it initiating a general nuclear
exchange is far-fetched. It fails to consider the real situation of decision-makers, as pages 63-
4 have brought out. The notion that cosmic holocaust might be mistakenly precipitated in this way belongs
to science fiction.

No domino effect

Alagappa 9
(Distinguished Senior Fellow, East-West Center. PhD, IR, Tufts (Muthiah, The long shadow:
nuclear weapons and security in 21st century Asia, ed. Alagappa, 521-2)//TR

It will be useful at this juncture to address more directly the set of instability arguments
advanced by certain policy makers and scholars: the domino effect of new nuclear weapon
states, the probability of preventive action against new nuclear weapon states, and the compulsion of
these states to use their small arsenals early for fear of losing them in a preventive or preemptive strike by

a stronger nuclear adversary. On the domino effect, India's and Pakistan's nuclear weapon
programs have not fueled new programs in South Asia or beyond. Iran's quest for
nuclear weapons is not a reaction to the Indian or Pakistani programs. It is
grounded in that country's security concerns about the United States and Tehran's regional aspirations.

The North Korean test has evoked mixed reactions in Northeast Asia. Tokyo is
certainly concerned; its reaction, though, has not been to initiate its own nuclear weapon program but to

reaffirm and strengthen the American extended deterrence commitment to Japan. Even if the U.S. Japan

security treaty were to weaken, it is not certain that Japan would embark on a nuclear
weapon program. Likewise, South Korea has sought reaffirmation of the
American extended deterrence commitment, but has firmly held to its nonnuclear posture.
Without dramatic change in its political, economic, and security circumstances, South Korea is highly

unlikely to embark on a covert (or overt) nuclear weapon program as it did in the 1970s. South Korea could

still become a nuclear weapon state by inheriting the nuclear weapons of North Korea should the Kim Jong

Il regime collapse. Whether it retains or gives up that capability will hinge on the security circumstances of

a unified Korea. The North Korean nuclear test has not spurred Taiwan or Mongolia
to develop nuclear weapon capability . The point is that each country's decision to
embark on and sustain nuclear weapon programs is contingent on its
particular security and other circumstances. Though appealing, the
domino theory is not predictive; often it is employed to justify policy on the basis of
alarmist predictions. The loss of South Vietnam, for example, did not lead to the
predicted domino effect in Southeast Asia. In fact the so-called dominos became drivers of
a vibrant Southeast Asia and brought about a fundamental transformation in that subregion (Lord 1993,

1996). In the nuclear arena, the nuclear programs of China, India, and
Pakistan were part of a security chain reaction, not mechanically
falling dominos. However, as observed earlier the Indian, Pakistani, and North Korean nuclear tests
have thus far not had the domino effect predicted by alarmist analysts and policy makers. Great
caution should be exercised in accepting at face value the
sensational predictions of individuals who have a vested interest in
accentuating the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Such analysts are now
focused on the dangers of a nuclear Iran. A nuclear Iran may or may not have destabilizing effects. Such

claims must be assessed on the basis of an objective reading of the drivers of national and regional

security in Iran and the Middle East.

Curbing nuclear prolif causes a shift to bioweapons

Zilinskas 2k
(Raymond, Former Clinical Microbiologist. Dir. Chem/Bio Weapons Nonproliferation Program
Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies (Raymond,
Biological warfare: modern offense and defense, 1-2)//-Backfile

It is an odd characteristic of biological weapons that military generals tend to

view them with distaste, but civilian bioscientists often have lobbied for their
development and deployment. There are, of course, understandable reasons for this oddity;
generals find that these weapons do not fit neatly into tactical or strategic military doctrines of attack or
defense, whereas researchers have observed that transforming microbes into weapons presents
interesting scientific challenges whose solution governments have been willing to pay well for. Another
oddity is that whenever biological weapons have been employed in battle, they have proven militarily
ineffectual, yet bellicose national leaders persevere in seeking to acquire them. There is also a facile
explanation for this anomaly, namely, that although pathogens are all too willing to invade prospective
hosts, human ingenuity so far has failed to devise reliable methods for effectively conveying a large
number of pathogens to the population targeted for annihilation by disease. This repeated failure has not
leaders; again and again they become allured by the potential destructive power of biological
deterred
direct government scientists to develop
weapons. Perhaps trusting science too much, they
them, believing that this time a usable weapon of mass destruction will be
achieved. Their belief so far has been thwarted, but is it possible that within
the foreseeable future the potential of biological weapons will be realized and
that the effect of a biological bomb, missile, or aerosolized cloud can be as
readily predetermined as that of a bomb or missile carrying a conventional or
nuclear warhead? There are many who believe that today's bioscientists and chemical engineers
working in unison and wielding the techniques of molecule biology developed since the early 1970s could,
if so commanded, develop militarily effective biological weapons within a fairly short time. If this
our perception of biological weapons as being undependable,
supposition is correct,
uncontrollable, and unreliable must change. The reason is simple: if these
weapons are demonstrated to possess properties that make it possible for
commanders to effect controlled, confined mass destruction on command, all
governments would be forced to construct defenses against them and some
undoubtedly would be tempted to arm their military with these weapons that
would be both powerful and relatively inexpensive to acquire. Ironically, as
tougher international controls are put into place to deter nations
from seeking to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons, leaders may
be even more drawn to biological arms as the most accessible form
of weapon of mass destruction. Before beginning a consideration of
the implications of molecular biology for biological warfare (BW) and
defense, it is worthwhile to briefly review the history of microbiology. It has passed through two eras, and
we presently are in its third era. The first was the pre-Pasteur era; when the underlying science of
fermentation was unknown, so microbiology was applied strictly on an empirical basis. Although
undoubtedly any fine beers and wines, as well as breads and other fermented foods, were produced
through the use of empirically developed fermentation techniques, no finely controlled production of
chemicals was possible. During this era, BW was also empirically based. Common tactics included
contaminating water sources with bloated animal carcasses and catapulting infected cadavers into citadels
(Poupard and Miller, 1992).

Extinction

Ochs 2
[Richard, Naturalist Grand Teton National park with Masters in Natural Resource
Management Rutgers, Biological Weapons must be abolished immediately 6-9,
http://www.freefromterror.net/other_articles/abolish.html]//-Backfile
Of all the weapons of mass destruction, the genetically engineered biological weapons, many without
a known cure or vaccine, are an extreme danger to the continued survival of life on earth. Any
perceived military value or deterrence pales in comparison to the great risk these weapons pose just
While a "nuclear winter resulting from a massive exchange of
sitting in vials in laboratories.
nuclear weapons, could also kill off most of life on earth and severely compromise the health of
future generations, they are easier to control. Biological weapons, on the other hand, can get out of
control very easily, as the recent anthrax attacks has demonstrated. There is no way to guarantee the
security of these doomsday weapons because very tiny amounts can be stolen or accidentally released
and then grow or be grown to horrendous proportions. The Black Death of the Middle Ages would be
small in comparison to the potential damage bioweapons could cause . Abolition of chemical
weapons is less of a priority because, while they can also kill millions of people outright, their persistence
in the environment would be less than nuclear or biological agents or more localized. Hence, chemical
weapons would have a lesser effect on future generations of innocent people and the natural environment.
Like the Holocaust, once a localized chemical extermination is over, it is over. With nuclear and biological
weapons, the killing will probably never end. Radioactive elements last tens of thousands of years and will
keep causing cancers virtually forever. Potentially worse than that, bio-engineered agents by the hundreds
with no known cure could wreck even greater calamity on the human race than could persistent radiation.
AIDS and ebola viruses are just a small example of recently emerging plagues with no known cure or
vaccine. Can we imagine hundreds of such plagues? HUMAN EXTINCTION IS NOW POSSIBLE.

This means we control prolif offense theres no risk of

the floodgates opening, and prolif is most stable if it
happens naturally and slowly

Waltz 3
(Kenneth Waltz, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Adjunct Senior
Research Scholar at Columbia University, 2003, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate
Renewed, p. 42-43)//TR

Some have feared that weakening opposition to the spread of

nuclear weapons will lead numerous states to obtain them because it may
seem that everyone is doing it. Why should we think that if we relax, numerous states will begin to make

nuclear weapons? Both the United States and the Soviet Union were
relaxed in the past, and those effects did not follow. The Soviet Union initially
supported Chinas nuclear program. The United States helped both Britain and France to produce nuclear

weapons. By 1968 the CIA had informed President Johnson of the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons, and

in July of 1970, Richard Helms, director of the CIA, gave this information to the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee. These and later disclosures were not followed by censure of Israel or by reductions of

economic assistance. And in September of 1980, the executive branch, against the will of the House of

Representatives but with the approval of the Senate, continued to do nuclear business with India despite

its explosion of a nuclear device and despite its unwillingness to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Many more countries can make nuclear weapons than do. One can believe
that American opposition to nuclear arming stays the deluge only by overlooking the complications of

international life. Any state has to examine many conditions before deciding whether or not to develop

nuclear weapons. Our opposition is only one factor and is not likely to be the decisive one. Many states feel

fairly secure living with their neighbors. Why should they want nuclear weapons? Some countries, feeling

threatened, have found security through their own strenuous efforts and through arrangements made with

others. South Korea is an outstanding example. Many officials believe that South Korea would lose more in
terms of American support if it acquired nuclear weapons than it would gain by having them. Further, on

occasion we might slow the spread of nuclear weapons by not opposing the nuclear weapons programs of

some countries. When we opposed Pakistans nuclear program, we were saying that we disapprove of

countries developing nuclear weapons no matter what their neighbors do. The gradual spread
of nuclear weapons has not opened the nuclear floodgates. Nations
attend to their security in the ways they think best . The fact that so many
more countries can make nuclear weapons than do says more about the hesitation of countries to enter

the nuclear military business than about the effectiveness of American nonproliferation policy. We
should suit our policy to individual cases, sometimes bringing pressure against a
country moving toward nuclear weapons capability and sometimes quietly acquiescing: No one policy is

right in all cases. We should ask what the interests of other countries require before putting pressure on

them. Some countries are likely to suffer more in cost and pain if they remain conventional states than if

they become nuclear ones. The measured spread of nuclear weapons does not
run against our interests and can increase the security of some
states at a price they can afford to pay.
 1AR AT Prolif: No Domino Effect
Domino theory false- empirics show leaders not
influenced by other states

Potter 8 (William C., Summer 2008, [William C. Potter is

Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar Professor of
Nonproliferation Studies and Director of the James Martin
Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey
Institute of International Studies], Divining Nuclear
Intentions,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/international_security/v033/3
3.1.potter.pdf //DF)

Hymans is keenly aware of the deficiency of past proliferation projections, which he

attributes in large part to the tendency to use the growth of nuclear
capabilities, stances toward the non-proliferation regime, and a
general roguishness of the state as proxies for nuclear weapons
intentions (p. 217). Such intentions, he believes, cannot be discerned
without reference to leadership national identity conceptions, a
focus that appears to have been absent to date in intelligence
analyses devoted to forecasting proliferation.49 Hymans is equally
critical of the popular notion that the domino theory of the
twenty-first century may well be nuclear.50 As he points out, the new
domino theory, like its discredited Cold War predecessor, assumes an oversimplified
view about why and how decisions to acquire nuclear weapons are
taken.51 Leaders nuclear preferences, he maintains, are not highly
contingent on what other states decide, and, therefore, proliferation
tomorrow will probably remain as rare as proliferation today, with no
single instance of proliferation causing a cascade of nuclear
weapons states (p. 225). In addition, he argues, the domino thesis embraces
an exceedingly dark picture of world trends by lumping the truly
dangerous leaders together with the merely self assertive ones, and
equating interest in nuclear technology with weapons intent (pp.
208209). Dire proliferation forecasts, both past and present , Hymans
believes, flow from four myths regarding nuclear decisonmaking: (1)
states want the bomb as a deterrent; (2) states seek the bomb as a
ticket to international status; (3) states go for the bomb because
of the interests of domestic groups; and (4) the international regime
protects the world from a flood of new nuclear weapons states (pp.
208216). Each of these assumptions is faulty, Hymans contends, because of its
fundamental neglect of the decisive role played by individual leaders
in nuclear matters. As discussed earlier, Hymans argues that the need for a nuclear
deterrent is entirely in the eye of the beholde ra leader with an oppositional
nationalist NIC. By the same token, just because some leaders seek to achieve
international prestige through acquisition of the bomb, it does not
mean that other leaders necessarily view the bomb as the right
ticket to punch: witness the case of several decades of Argentine leaders, as well
as the Indian Nehruvians (pp. 211212). The case of Egypt under Anwar al-
Sadat, though not discussed by Hymans, also seems to at this category. Hymanss focus on the
individual level of analysis leads him to discount bureaucratic political explanations for nuclear postures, as
the assumption that decisions to acquire
well. Central to his argument is
nuclear weapons are taken without the considerable vetting that
political scientists typically assume precedes most important states
choices (p. 13). As such, although he is prepared to credit nuclear energy bureaucracies as playing a
supporting role in the efforts by Australia, France, and India to go nuclear, he does not observe their
influence to be a determining factor in root nuclear decisions by national leaders. Moreover, contrary to a
little evidence in
central premise of Solingens model of domestic political survival, Hymans ands
his case studies of leaders pursuing nuclear weapons to advance
their political interests (p. 213). For example, he argues, the 1998 nuclear tests
in India were as risky domestically for Vajpayee as they were
internationally (p. 214). Most provocatively, Hymans invokes an individual-centric mode of
analysis to challenge the necessity and utility of a strong international nonproliferation regime. As
no evidence that the NPT regime
discussed in a preceding section, he finds
prevented any of the leaders who desired nuclear weapons from
pursuing them.
 1AR AT Prolif: No Motivation
No motivation to use nukes

Moodie 2
headed the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute and served as assistant director for
multilateral affairs at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. president of the
Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute (Brad Roberts and Michael Moodie, Biological
Weapons: Toward a Threat Reduction Strategy,
http://www.ndu.edu/inss/DefHor/DH15/DH15.htm)

The argument about terrorist motivation is also important. Terrorists

generally have not killed as many as they have been capable of
killing. This restraint seems to derive from an understanding of mass
casualty attacks as both unnecessary and counterproductive. They
are unnecessary because terrorists, by and large, have succeeded by
conventional means. Also, they are counterproductive because they
might alienate key constituencies, whether among the public, state
sponsors, or the terrorist leadership group. In Brian Jenkins famous
words, terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people
dead. Others have argued that the lack of mass casualty terrorism and
effective exploitation of BW has been more a matter of accident and good
fortune than capability or intent. Adherents of this view, including former
Secretary of Defense William Cohen, argue that its not a matter of if but
when. The attacks of September 11 would seem to settle the debate about
whether terrorists have both the motivation and sophistication to exploit
weapons of mass destruction for their full lethal effect. After all, those were
terrorist attacks of unprecedented sophistication that seemed clearly aimed
at achieving mass casualties had the World Trade Center towers collapsed
as the 1993 bombers had intended, perhaps as many as 150,000 would have
died. Moreover, Osama bin Ladens constituency would appear to be not the
Arab street or some other political entity but his god. And terrorists
answerable only to their deity have proven historically to be among the most
lethal. But this debate cannot be considered settled. Bin Laden and
his followers could have killed many more on September 11 if killing
as many as possible had been their primary objective. They now face
the core dilemma of asymmetric warfare: how to escalate without
creating new interests for the stronger power and thus the incentive
to exploit its power potential more fully. Asymmetric adversaries
want their stronger enemies fearful, not fully engagedmilitarily or
otherwise. They seek to win by preventing the stronger partner from
exploiting its full potential. To kill millions in America with biological
or other weapons would only commit the United Statesand much of
the rest of the international communityto the annihilation of the
perpetrators.
 1AR AT Prolif: Prolif decreases War
Prolif dramatically decreases the risk of full-scale war.
Robust empirical evidence proves

Asal and Beardsley 7

(Victor, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci.SUNY Albany, and Kyle, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci.Emory U.,
Journal of Peace Research, Proliferation and International Crisis Behavior, 44:2, Sage)

As Model 1 in Table IV illustrates, all of our variables are statistically significant except for the protracted
Our primary independent variable, the number of nuclear
conflict variable.
actors involved in the crisis, has a negative relationship with the
severity of violence and is significant. This lends preliminary support
to the argument that nuclear weapons have a restraining affect on
crisis behavior, as stated in H1. It should be noted that, of the crises that involved four nuclear
actorsSuez Nationalization War (1956), Berlin Wall (1961), October Yom Kippur War (1973), and Iraq No-
Fly Zone (1992)and five nuclear actorsGulf War (1990)only two are not full-scale wars. While this
demonstrates that the pacifying effect of more nuclear actors is not strong enough to prevent war in all
situations, it does not necessarily weaken the argument that there is actually a pacifying effect. The
positive and statistically significant coefficient on the variable that counts the number of crisis actors has a
magnitude greater than that on the variable that counts the number of nuclear actors. Since increases in
the number of overall actors in a crisis are strongly associated with higher levels of violence, it should be
no surprise that many of the conflicts with many nuclear actorsby extension, many general actors as well
keeping the number of
experienced war. Therefore, the results can only suggest that,
crisis actors fixed, increasing the proportion of nuclear actors has a
pacifying effect. They do not suggest that adding nuclear actors to a crisis will decrease the risk of
high levels violence; but rather, adding more actors of any type to a crisis can have a destabilizing effect.
Model 2 demonstrates that the effect of a nuclear dyad is
Also in Table IV,
only approaching statistical significance, but does have a sign that indicates higher
levels of violence are less likely in crises with opponents that have nuclear weapons than other crises.
This lukewarm result suggests that it might not be necessary for nuclear
actors to face each other in order to get the effect of decreased
propensity for violence. All actors should tend to be more cautious in
escalation when there is a nuclear opponent, regardless of their own
capabilities. While this might weaken support for focusing on specifically a balance of terror as a
source of stability (see Gaddis, 1986; Waltz, 1990; Sagan & Waltz, 2003; Mearsheimer, 1990), it
supports the logic in this article that nuclear weapons can serve as a
deterrent of aggression from both nuclear and non-nuclear
opponents.6 Model 3 transforms the violence variable to a binary indicator of war and demonstrates
that the principal relationship between the number of nuclear actors and violence holds for the most
Model 4 demonstrates that accounting for the
crucial outcome of full-scale war.
presence of new nuclear actors does not greatly change the results.
The coefficient on the new nuclear actor variable is statistically
insignificant, which lends credence to the optimists view that new
nuclear-weapon states should not be presupposed to behave less
responsibly than the USA, USSR, UK, France, and China did during
the Cold War. Finally, Model 5 similarly illustrates that crises involving superpowers are not more or
less prone to violence than others. Superpower activity appears to not be driving the observed
relationships between the number of nuclear-crisis actors and restraint toward violence. It is important to
establish more specifically what the change in the probability of full-scale war is when nuclear actors are
involved. Table V presents the probability of different levels of violence as the number of nuclear actors
increases in the Clarify simulations. The control variables are held at their modes or means, with the
exception of the variable that counts the number of crisis actors. Because it would be impossible to have,
say, five nuclear-crisis actors and only two crisis actors, the number of crisis actors is held constant at five.
 the impact of an increase in the number of nuclear actors
As we can see,
is substantial. Starting from a crisis situation without any nuclear
actors, including one nuclear actor (out of five) reduces the
likelihood of fullscale war by nine percentage points. As we continue
to add nuclear actors, the likelihood of full-scale war declines
sharply, so that the probability of a war with the maximum number
of nuclear actors is about three times less than the probability with
no nuclear actors. In addition, the probabilities of no violence and only
minor clashes increase substantially as the number of nuclear actors
increases. The probability of serious clashes is relatively constant.
Overall, the analysis lends significant support to the more optimistic
proliferation argument related to the expectation of violent conflict
when nuclear actors are involved. While the presence of nuclear
powers does not prevent war, it significantly reduces the probability
of full-scale war, with more reduction as the number of nuclear
powers involved in the conflict increases. As mentioned, concerns about selection
effects in deterrence models, as raised by Fearon (2002), should be taken seriously. While we control for
the strategic selection of serious threats within crises, we are unable to control for the non-random initial
initiation of a crisis in which the actors may choose to enter a crisis based on some ex ante assessment of
To account for possible selection bias caused by the use of
the outcomes.
a truncated sample that does not include any non-crisis cases, one
would need to use another dataset in which the crisis cases are a subset and then run Heckman type
selection models (see Lemke & Reed, 2001). It would, however, be difficult to think of a different unit of
analysis that might be employed, such that the set of crises is a subset of a larger category of interaction.
While dyadyear datasets have often been employed to similar ends, the key independent variable here,
which is specific to crises as the unit of analysis, does not lend itself to a dyadic setup. Moreover, selection
bias concerns are likely not valid in disputing the claims of this analysis .
If selection bias were
present, it would tend to bias the effect of nuclear weapons
downward, because the set of observed crises with nuclear actors
likely has a disproportionate share of resolved actors that have
chosen to take their chances against a nuclear opponent. Despite
this potential mitigating bias, the results are statistically significant ,
which strengthens the case for the explanations provided in this
study.

Deterrence breakdowns dont cause full-scale nuclear war

states will limit damage at every stage of the conflict

Waltz 3
(Kenneth Waltz, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Adjunct Senior
Research Scholar at Columbia University, 2003, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate
Renewed, p. 34-35)//TR

States are deterred by the prospect of suffering severe damage and

by their physical inability to do much to limit it. Debate over the Soviet Unions civil defence
efforts calls attention to this inability. Defensive measures can reduce casualties, but they would still be
immense were either of the great powers launch a determined attack. Moreover, civil defence cannot save
the Soviet Unions heavily concentrated industries. Warheads numbered in the hundreds can destroy the
United and the Soviet Union as viable societies no matter what defensive measures they take.
Deterrence works because nuclear weapons enable one state to
punish another state severely without first defeating it. Victory, in Thomas
Schellings words, is no longer a prerequisite for hurting the enemy. Countries armed only
with conventional weapons can hope that their military forces will be
able to limit the damage an attacker can do. Among countries armed
with strategic nuclear forces, the hope of avoiding heavy damage
depends mainly on the attackers restraint and little on ones own
efforts. Those who compare expected deaths through strategic
exchanges of nuclear warheads with casualties suffered by the
Soviet Union in World War II overlook this fundamental difference
between conventional and nuclear worlds. Deterrence rests on what countries can
do to each other with strategic nuclear weapons. From this statement, one
easily leaps to the wrong conclusion: that deterrent strategies, if they have to be carried through, will
produce a catastrophe. That countries are able to annihilate each other means neither that deterrence
Because
depends on their threatening to do so nor that they will do so if deterrence fails.
countries heavily armed with strategic nuclear weapons can carry
war to its ultimate intensity, the control of force , in wartime as in peacetime,
becomes the primary objective. If deterrence fails, leaders will have
the strongest incentives to keep force under control and limit
damage rather than launching genocidal attacks. If the Soviet Union
should attack Western Europe, NATOS objectives would be to halt the
attack and end the war. The United States has long had the ability to place hundreds of
warheads precisely on targets in the Soviet Union. Surely we would strike military
targets before striking industrial targets and industrial targets
before striking cities. The intent to do so is sometimes confused with a
war-fighting strategy, which it is not. It would not significantly reduce the Soviet Unions ability
to hurt us. It is a deterrent strategy, resting initially on the threat to
punish. The threat, if it fails to deter, is appropriately followed not by
spasms of violence but by punishment administered in ways that
convey threats to make the punishment more severe. For several
reasons, then, deterrent strategies promise less damage than war-
fighting strategies. First, deterrent strategies induce caution all
around and thus reduce the incidence of war. Second, wars fought in
the face of strategic nuclear weapons must be carefully limited
because a country having them may retaliate if its vital interests are
threatened. Third, prospective punishment need only be
proportionate to an adversarys expected gains in war after those
gains are discounted for the many uncertainties of war. Fourth,
should deterrence fail, a few judiciously delivered warheads are
likely to produce sobriety in the leaders of all of the countries
involved and thus bring rapid de-escalation. A deterrent strategy
promises less damage, should deterrence fail, than does the Schlesinger-Brown
countervailing strategy, a strategy which contemplates fighting a limited, strategic nuclear war. War-
fighting strategies offer no clear place to stop short of victory for some and defeat for others. Deterrent
strategies do, and that place is where one country threatens anothers vital interests. Deterrent strategies
If wars are nevertheless fought, deter-
lower the probability that wars will be fought.
rent strategies lower the probability that they will become wars of
high intensity. A war between the United States and the Soviet Union that did get out of control
would be catastrophic. If they set out to destroy each other, they would greatly reduce the worlds store of
developed resources while killing millions outside of their own borders through fallout. Even while
As ever, the
destroying themselves, states with few weapons would do less damage to others.
biggest international dangers come from the strongest states. Fearing
the worlds destruction, one may prefer a world of conventional great powers having a higher probability of
fighting less destructive wars to a world of nuclear great powers having a lower probability of fighting more
destructive wars. But that choice effectively disappeared with the production of atomic bombs by the
United States during World War II. Since the great powers are unlikely to be
drawn into the nuclear wars of others, the added global dangers
posed by the spread of nuclear weapons are small.

Prolif decreases war and encourages rationality

Shen 11
(Simon Shen, IR prof @ Hong Kong Inst. Of Ed., 2011, Have Nuclear Weapons Made the DPRK
a Rogue State? J. of Comparative Asian Development, v. 10, iss. 2, tandf)//TR

In our traditional mentality, the determination to denuclearize the DPRK quite

explicitly assumes that nuclear weapons are evil; as Scott Sagan (2003, p.
49) puts it, Nuclear weapons have been given a bad name. This negative
perception of nuclear weapons is built upon the basis of the huge devastation
that would result in the world if a nuclear war, of whatever scale, broke out.
Coupled with the peculiar nature of the DPRKs autocratic regime, a nuclear-
armed DPRK is then perceived as too hostile and destructive to its
neighbours. However, applying the analogy of more may be better, an
alternative discourse with respect to nuclear proliferation maintained by
Waltz could well pinpoint a far more optimistic scenario. Contrary to
conventional wisdom, Waltz asserts that nuclear proliferation not only
reduces the possibility of going to war, but also encourages new nuclear
states, which used to rule in a radical manner domestically, to behave in an
increasingly rational manner diplomatically. At the extreme, Waltz suggests
that nuclear proliferation may maintain peace rather than threaten global
security. Surprisingly, the application of his theory to the DPRK is rather
limited; and is confined only to media reports (Swami, 2010). In his classic
study Waltz (1995) proposes five fundamental assumptions to illustrate his
argument. First, he argues that the international system is anarchical, i.e., no
global authority protects security, provides public goods or controls domestic
affairs above the state level. As a result, states have to ensure their own
security by preventing attack from other states themselves. In other words,
the anarchical system drives states to self-help. The absence of a world
government then prompts individual states to gain access to weapons to
compensate for a sense of insecurity. Acquisition of nuclear weapons and
inducement of an arms race between states show the self-help system at
work. Second, as states coexist in a condition of anarchy, they try hard to
advance the sophistication of weapons and enhance military capability as
much as possible to avoid aggression from adversaries (Waltz, 1995, p. 4).
This self-strengthening process is what Waltz calls security maximization.
What do states do with their weapons throughout this process? Waltz thinks
that states mainly possess the weapons for a defensive purpose. When a
state enhances its military capability (the relevant gain), its neighbouring
states immediately face relevant loss to the military equilibrium. In
consequence, the latter have to strengthen their military power in response
to the relevant loss in order to maintain a balance of power. Waltz (1995, p.
5) explains the defensive intention of security maximization as follows: One
way to counter an intended attack is to build fortifications and to muster
forces that look forbiddingly strong. To build defenses so patently strong that
no one will try to destroy or overcome them would make international life
perfectly tranquil, I call this the defensive ideal. However, this statement
does not imply that these states will not use weapons to attack others. In the
event that a state perceives gains from aggression to outweigh the cost of
war, battle might break out.Waltz argues that this scenario is unlikely to
happen between nuclear powers. SinceWaltz, different schools deriving from
neo-realism have offered different assumptions on the likeliness of conflicts
owing to different assessments of uncertainty and risk, such as offensive
realism or defensive realism. Somemight put the defensive rationale by
indicating that states tend to keep the nuclear weapons as an existential
deterrent so as to deter others from military actions (Naval Studies Board &
US Research Council, 1997). Third,Waltz (1995, pp. 7, 9) maintains that
nuclear weapons, unlike conventional weapons, give an easy clarity for
states to predict the action of other states and thereby makes war less
likely. This is because all states realize that nuclear weapons have the
potential to cause unlimited and devastating suffering. At the extreme, the
concept of mutual assured destruction (MAD) sends a very clear message to
both sides should two nuclear powers go to war. In contrast, as the suffering
from conventional weapons can be to some extent contained, states might
deem the cost of such war affordable and recklessly wage war and suffer the
results of miscalculation. Waltz (1995, p. 9) defines the fundamental essence
of nuclear weapons thus: In a nuclear world, prediction is easy to make
because it does not require close estimates of opposing forces. . . . In a
conventional world, deterrent threats are ineffective because the damage
threatened is distant, limited, and problematic. Fourth, Waltz (1995, p. 7)
assumes state actors are rational and are able to predict scenarios as well as
calculate their self-interests, so that states will not take the risk of going to
war when they predict the battle could only win much and might lose
everything. Waltz offers the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis to illustrate this
point. As nuclear weapons can wreak unlimited damage to states, the
strategy of MAD further makes states cautious. This deterrent effect in a
nuclear world consequently avoids any miscalculation of gains and losses.
Regardless of the regime type, historical context and the political spectrum,
nuclear weapons and nuclear wars constantly imply a massive relevant loss
to states, thus preventing them from going to war. Even if the historical
context might determine a nuclear pair, such as the US and the Soviet Union,
China and the Soviet Union, India and Pakistan, many realists argues that
rational calculation is more fundamental than bitterness (Rajain, 2005). As
Waltz (1995, p. 12) puts it: Those who believe that bitterness causes wars
assume a close association that is seldom found between bitterness among
nations and their willingness to run high risks. In short, states will not go to
nuclear war as they are rational actors in international relations. Fifth, when
calculation of the prospects makes nuclear states reluctant to go to war,
Waltz suggests horizontal nuclear proliferation is encouraged in world politics
while vertical proliferation is made redundant. Vertical proliferation of
nuclear weapons, according to Waltz, was demonstrated during the Cold War,
especially between the US and the Soviet Union, when the number of nuclear
warheads and their technological quality rapidly increased. Waltz (1995, p. 7)
argues that further vertical proliferation is unnecessary since only a few
nuclear weapons and a second strike capability may be a sufficient
deterrent to other would-be attackers. Rather, horizontal proliferation,
which means the spread of nuclear weapons to different countries, is seen by
Waltz as more crucial in preserving peace in the world. When more states
possess nuclear weapons, calculations about using them become
complicated (Waltz, 1995, p. 15). States will thus be reluctant to take the risk
of starting a nuclear war because of the uncertainty of the response from
other states and the certainty of unlimited nuclear destruction to both sides
should a nuclear response be elicited. This helps exclude the option of using
nuclear weapons for the mere purpose of interest maximization.

Prolif makes the transition stable preventing great power

war

Alagappa 9
Distinguished Senior Fellow, East-West Center. PhD, IR, Tufts (Muthiah, The long shadow:
nuclear weapons and security in 21st century Asia, ed. Alagappa, 484)//TR

The fear of escalation to nuclear war conditions the role of force in major power
relations and circumscribes strategic interaction among them. By restraining measures and
actions that could lead to conflict escalation, nuclear weapons limit the
competitive strategic interaction of major powers to internal and external balancing for
deterrence purposes; constrain their resort to coercive diplomacy and cornpellence; and shift the burden of
international competition and adjustment in status and influence to the economic, political, and diplomatic
They also render remote the possibility of a hegemonic war
arenas.
should a power transition occur in the region. More immediately, nuclear
weapons enable Russia and China to deter the much stronger United States
and mitigate the negative consequences of the imbalance in conventional
military capability. Nuclear weapons reinforce India's confidence in dealing with China. By
reducing military vulnerabilities and providing insurance against unexpected
contingencies, nuclear weapons enable major powers to take a long view and
engage in competition as well as cooperation with potential adversaries.
Differences and disputes among them are frozen or settled through negotiations. Though they are not the
only or even primary factor driving strategic visions and policies, nuclear weapons are an important
They prevent the
consideration, especially in the role of force in major power strategic interaction.
outbreak of large-scale war. Military clashes when they occur tend to be
limited.
 1AR AT Prolif: States Irrational
New nuclear regimes arent irrational

Waltz 12
(Kenneth Waltz 12, senior research scholar @ Saltzman, Poly Sci Prof @ Columbia, Jul/Aug
2012, Why Iran Should Get the Bomb, Foreign Affairs 91.4,)//TR

One reason the danger of a nuclear Iran has been grossly exaggerated is
that the debate surrounding it has been distorted by misplaced worries and
fundamental misunderstandings of how states generally behave in the international
system. The first prominent concern, which undergirds many others, is that the Iranian regime is innately
irrational. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, Iranian policy is made not by
"mad mullahs" but by perfectly sane ayatollahs who want to survive just like any other leaders.
Although Iran's leaders indulge in inflammatory and hateful rhetoric, they show no propensity for
self-destruction. It would be a grave error for policymakers in the United
States and Israel to assume otherwise. Yet that is precisely what many U.S. and Israeli
officials and analysts have done. Portraying Iran as irrational has allowed them to argue that the logic of
nuclear deterrence does not apply to the Islamic Republic. If Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, they warn, it
would not hesitate to use it in a first strike against Israel, even though doing so would invite massive
retaliation and risk destroying everything the Iranian regime holds dear. Although it is impossible to be
if Iran desires nuclear weapons, it
certain of Iranian intentions, it is far more likely that
is for the purpose of providing for its own security , not to improve its offensive
capabilities (or destroy itself). Iran may be intransigent at the negotiating table and defiant in the face of
sanctions, but it still acts to secure its own preservation. Iran's leaders did not, for example, attempt to
close the Strait of Hormuz despite issuing blustery warnings that they might do so after the EU announced
The Iranian regime clearly concluded that it
its planned oil embargo in January.
did not want to provoke what would surely have been a swift and
devastating American response to such a move.

They confuse rationality with bad behavior

Waltz 2k
Emeritus Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley (Kenneth, Interview: Is Kenneth Waltz
Still M.A.D. about Nukes?, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 1.1,
http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/gjia/gjia_winspr00f.html)//TR

Waltz: We have this peculiar notion about the irrationality of rogue

states. When he was Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin said these rogue leaders might be undeterrable .
Others contend that some states may undertake courses of action even if they know
that catastrophe may result. But who would do that? Not Saddam Hussein. Not Kim Il
Sung when he was ruler of North Korea. What is a key characteristic of all those rulers? They are survivors,

as they struggle to live in a harsh environment-both internally, with the constant danger of assassination,

and externally, as they're surrounded by enemies. And they survive for decades until they are carried out

in a box. Are they irrational? Their behavior is ugly and nasty to be sure, but
irrational? How could they survive? If they were not deterrable , how
would they ever have survived? They don't run the kind of risks that would put
their regime into question. Kim Il Sung wanted to pass his reign onto his son, Kim Jong Il.
They obviously love to rule, but they've got to have a country. They're not going to risk the existence of
their country. For example, Saddam Hussein was deterred during the
Persian Gulf War. He did not arm the SCUD missiles with lethal
warheads and shoot them at Israel. They were nuisance attacks. Why? Because he
didn't want us to pound him more heavily than he was being pounded. The allies, led by the United States,

could have substantially destroyed that country without ever using nuclear weapons, and he knew it. Sure

he was deterred. So how can we say irrational or undeterrable? But we do say it.
 1AR AT Prolif: Lupovici-Deterrence
Actually deterrence empirically justifies pre-emptive
warfare because it is an internally contradictory discourse
that cannot cope with the undeterrable like Al Qaeda

Lupovici 8
(Why the Cold War Practices of Deterrence are Still Prevalent: Physical Security, Ontological Security and
Strategic Discourse Amir Lupovici Post-Doctoral Fellow Munk Centre for International Studies University of
Toronto Paper to be presented at the Canadian Political Science Association annual conference, Vancouver
June 4-6, 2008)//TR

In this respect, I suggest that the challenge and the threat for the U.S. stems not only from the fact that it has not succeeded in
implementing a deterrence strategy vis-vis al Qaeda. Rather, the U.S. tend to acknowledge that the construction
of the kind of relationship it had with the USSR would not be possible with this
organization. Thereforeand with respect to the American identity as a superpower that must demonstrate its power in world
politics by practicing deterrencethis perceived inability to socially construct such rational relations of deterrence with al Qaeda
threatens both the physical and ontological security of the U.S. I suggest therefore that it is not surprising that the war against
terrorism was perceived as a solution to these threats. Beyond retaliation and self-defense, the ontological dimension of security in
the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) has been acknowledged in different ways by scholars. Lwenheim suggests that the war was meant
to restore shaken concepts of authority in world politics and to return to former American routines (Lwenheim, 2007: 176, 2156).
Other scholars suggest that the terror attacks of 9/11 created uncertainty that by definition challenged American ontological security
and routines (Zaretsky, 2002: 101; Ruby, 2004: 25; Epstein, 2007: 17). These attacks also challenged the American identity as a
guarantor of security (Ruby, 2004: 27), as well as the American role identities of exceptionalist and benevolent hegemon (Epstein,
2007: 15-6). While acknowledging the importance of these views, I suggest that looking at the American identity as
that of a deterring actor may help to integrate the above-mentioned interpretations into explanations not only of the
American response (i.e., the war on terrorism), but of the contradictory discourse regarding the feasibility and
the importance of restoring a deterrence posture vis--vis terrorists . Acknowledging Americas
deterrent identity connects the explanation of great-powerness with those emphasizing the American attempts to restore authority.
More specifically, as a (deterring) great power, Americas inability to deter al Qaeda increased the threat of the 9/11 attacks. Not only
did it seem as if the U.S could not provide security for its own citizens, but the inability to deter aggravated the threats to the U.S
identity as a deterring actor. However, the discourse regarding the war was not coherent. On the one hand, the American
argumentation that the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror (2002) further demonstrates the influence of the rhetoric of deterrence.
According to the Bush administration, Iraq had to be attacked because Saddam Hussein is
not a rational actor and hence is not deterrable (Fleischer, 10.15.2002). Without discussing here whether or not
this postulation is correct (see for example Jervis, 2003: 323-4), it exemplifies the use of deterrence to justify actions. For example,
President Bush argued that [f]or much of the last century, America's defense relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and
containment. In some cases, those strategies still apply. But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrencethe promise of
massive retaliation against nationsmeans nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend (Bush,
1.6.2002). On the other hand, in contrast to the above protestation that these kinds of threats cannot be deterred, for example, the
spokesman of the White House, Ari Fleischer, has explained American strategy: The President also believes that the use of force
against Iraq will similarly send a powerful deterrent message to terrorists around the world (Fleischer, 19.3.2003). The
inconsistency with regard to the feasibility of deterring these actors is a result of the compelling nature of
the rhetoric developed and enabled by the deterrence norm and deterrence identity, which became a discursive
tool for the policys justification.
 1AR AT Prolif: Tech Diffusion
Tech diffusions already happened- prolif is too slow

Hymans 12 (Jacques E.C. , Assistant Professor in the

School of International Relations at the University of
Southern California,Botching the Bomb, Foreign Affairs,
Vol. 91, No. 3, May/June 2012,//PG)

"TODAY, ALMOST any industrialized country can produce a nuclear

weapon in four to five years," a former chief of Israeli military intelligence
recently wrote in The New York Times, echoing a widely held belief. Indeed,
the more nuclear technology and know-how have diffused around
the world, the more the timeline for building a bomb should have
shrunk. But in fact, rather than speeding up over the past four
decades, proliferation has gone into slow motion . Seven countries
launched dedicated nuclear weapons projects before 1970, and all seven
succeeded in relatively short order. By contrast, of the ten countries that
have launched dedicated nuclear weapons projects since 1970, only three
have achieved a bomb. And only one of the six states that failed -- Iraq -- had
made much progress toward its ultimate goal by the time it gave up trying.
(The jury is still out on Iran's program.) What is more, even the successful
projects of recent decades have needed a long time to achieve their
ends. The average timeline to the bomb for successful projects
launched before 1970 was about seven years; the average timeline
to the bomb for successful projects launched after 1970 has been
about 17 years. International security experts have been unable to
convincingly explain this remarkable trend. The first and most credible
conventional explanation is that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
(NPT) has prevented a cascade of new nuclear weapons states by
creating a system of export controls, technology safeguards, and on-
site inspections of nuclear facilities. The NPT regime has certainly
closed off the most straightforward pathways to the bomb. However,
the NPT became a formidable obstacle to would-be nuclear states only in the
1990s, when its export-control lists were expanded and Western states finally
became serious about enforcing them and when international inspectors
started acting less like tourists and more like detectives. Yet the
proliferation slowdown started at least 20 years before the system
was solidified. So the NPT, useful though it may be, cannot alone
account for this phenomenon.

Prolif is slower than ever before- no technological

knowledge and a ton of infrastructure issues

Hymans 12 (Jacques, 4/16/12, [USC Associate Professor of

IR], North Korea's Lessons for (Not) Building an Atomic
Bomb, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137408/jacques-
e-c-hymans/north-koreas-lessons-for-not-building-an-
atomic-bomb?page=show //DF)

Washington's miscalculation is not just a product of the difficulties of seeing inside the
Hermit Kingdom. It is also a result of the broader tendency to overestimate
the pace of global proliferation. For decades, Very Serious People
have predicted that strategic weapons are about to spread to every
corner of the earth. Such warnings have routinely proved wrong - for
instance, the intelligence assessments that led to the 2003 invasion of
Iraq - but they continue to be issued. In reality, despite the diffusion of the relevant
technology and the knowledge for building nuclear weapons, the
world has been experiencing a great proliferation slowdown . Nuclear
weapons programs around the world are taking much longer to get
off the ground - and their failure rate is much higher - than they did during
the first 25 years of the nuclear age.
As I explain in my article "Botching the Bomb" in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs ,
the key
reason for the great proliferation slowdown is the absence of strong
cultures of scientific professionalism in most of the recent crop of
would-be nuclear states, which in turn is a consequence of their poorly built political
institutions. In such dysfunctional states, the quality of technical workmanship is
low, there is little coordination across different technical teams, and
technical mistakes lead not to productive learning but instead to
finger-pointing and recrimination. These problems are debilitating,
and they cannot be fixed simply by bringing in more imported parts
through illicit supply networks. In short, as a struggling proliferator, North Korea has a lot
of company.
 1AR AT Prolif: Prolif Solves Terrorism
Terrorist weapons theft is unlikelysmall arsenals make
tight control feasible, risky states have greater incentives
and opaque proliferation makes weapons hard to find

Seng 98
(Jordan, PhD Candidate in Pol. Sci.U. Chicago, Dissertation, STRATEGY FOR PANDORA'S
CHILDREN: STABLE NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION AMONG MINOR STATES, p. 227-229)

If a band of terrorists manage to steal some nuclear weapons, it will be bad if the weapons are not
equipped with use-control or tamper-control devices to prevent them from being used. However, if we are
speaking of the likelihood that a state's nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists, we will want to
Third World
consider the probability that they can be stolen in the first place. It may be true that
proliferators will not have the advanced technologies to prevent stolen weapons from being used by
terrorists, but they will have excellent chances of preventing weapons from
being stolen. First, limited nuclear proliferators will have very small
nuclear arsenals. This in itself will greatly aid in the security of nuclear weapons. There will only
be a handful of weapons to guard. It is unlikely that any state's organizational or
financial resources will be stretched too thin by the security requirements of a few
dozen nuclear weapons. Personnel for guarding such a small number of
weapons can be hand-picked, and screened for loyalty and
competence (just as all personnel for controlling nuclear weapons in states with small arsenals can
be hand-picked and highly trained). Also, deployment of those few weapons in Third World states is not
likely to be far-flung or complicated. Third World proliferators do not have to worry about safeguarding
weapons in foreign countries like the U.S. did. Neither do Third World states have to worry about weapons
Third
on submarines, aircraft carriers or destroyers. In addition, Waltz has suggested that because
World states will need long lead times to develop large arsenals,
leaders will have lots of time to learn proper control and security on
small arsenals that will not place much demand on their limited organizational and financial resources. His
argument is sound enough as far as it goes. However, as I made clear in chapter two, it is highly unlikely
that Third World states will ever buildup arsenals beyond very small numbers of weapons. Limited nuclear
proliferators in the Third World will enjoy the advantages of having to secure only small numbers of
weapons; they wilt- probably get better at it over time, and the growth of their arsenalsif there is growth
Second, if a state suffers from an unstable
will not outstrip their resources.
domestic scene, one would expect it to be more worried about
weapons security, not less worried. It is unlikely that Third World
nuclear states will compromise their weapons security out of
negligence. If a government suffers from separatist agitation, for
instance, given limited nuclear proliferators' ability to hand-pick control
and security personnel, one would expect central governments to
exclude operators of questionable loyalty from the 'loop.' Such exclusive
patterns are seen in militaries in many unstable or potentially-unstable states. Saddam Hussein reserves
his best equipment and most sensitive tasks for his elite Red Guard troops. Most of the most sensitive
resources of the Yugoslavian army were kept in the hand of Serbians by the Serbdominated central
government before the national break-up. Finally, the opacity of weapons
development in the Third World will aid in preventing nuclear
weapons theft. Opaque weapons are hidden weapons. By keeping
weapons hidden from the international community proliferators will
also be keeping them hidden from terrorists who might hope to steal
them. Also, states that follow an opaque pattern of proliferation are sure to concern themselves with the
security of weapons from the very beginning of development. Even if leaders are not
worried about weapons theft, per se, they will be worried about
their secret getting our, and thus weapons will have to be carefully
guarded. In all, it seems highly unlikely that Third World proliferators will give anything less then their
full attention and best efforts to keeping nuclear weapons secure from theft. Because arsenals will be small
and patterns of deployment will be simple, their best efforts will be quite adequate despite resources that
Similarly, one need not worry
are limited in comparison to those of advanced states.
greatly about the chances that a nuclear coup d'etat could
compromise nuclear control and result in spill-over nuclear wars.
Nuclear weapons are of little use, either symbolically or strategically, to combatants in domestic disputes,
If nuclear weapons are seized by
and therefore they are unlikely to be seized by rebels.
rebels, nuclear control technically will be compromised; however, the
scenarios in which they might be used are specific and rare . If they are
used, it is difficult to see how the nuclear use could spill-over into
international nuclear conflagrations.
 1AR AT Prolif: Prolif Solves Mid-East Terror
Prolif turns and solves their terrorism impact

Sadr 5
(THE IMPACT OF IRAN'S NUCLEARIZATION ON ISRAEL Ehsaneh I Sadr. Middle East Policy.
Washington: Summer 2005. Vol. 12, Iss. 2; pg. 58, 15 pgsMs. Sadr is a graduate student in the
department of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park)

A third conceivable danger of Iran's entrance into the nuclear club is that it
might be emboldened to attack Israel through conventional means or terrorist
proxies with little fear of retaliation. Trusting that the Israelis would not wish
to escalate a conflict to the point of nuclear exchange, Iran might perceive
itself as having a freer hand to harass Israel by increasing funding for groups
like Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad and encouraging additional suicide attacks.
Such an argument hinges on the assumption that the only thing
keeping Iran from providing more support to these groups is its
current fear of Israeli retaliation. It is far from clear, however, that
this is the case. Indeed, Iran's relative transparency regarding its
support for Hezbollah over the past 25 years suggests that the
government is not at all cowed by possible Israeli retaliation . There
are numerous instances of Iranian presidents and supreme leaders issuing
public words of support and praise for Hezbollah's actions against Israel.50 It
is more likely that resource constraints and strategic evaluations of spending
priorities, rather than fear of Israeli reprisals, dictated the extent of Iranian
support for groups advocating the violent overthrow of the Israeli state.
There may, in fact, be reason to believe that a nuclearized Iran
would be less likely to continue current levels of support for anti-
Israeli terrorist organizations. The most obvious concern is that of
nuclear escalation. As proliferation optimists have noted, "The
presence of nuclear weapons makes states exceedingly cautious."51
A frequently cited example is that of India and Pakistan, which some experts
believe would have come to more serious blows if not for the introduction of
nuclear weapons into their relationship.52 There is no reason to think that
the "nuclear magic" might not be as potent in the context of the
Middle East. The remedy of Iran's security dilemma might actually
give it the confidence to forgo the use of Hezbollah as a strategic
deterrent. Although Hezbollah continues to launch a few missiles at Israel
every year and provide some tactical support to terrorists within the
Occupied Territories, its current level of activities is militarily more of an
irritant than a serious challenge to Israel . Its visible presence and cross-border
contacts, however, may serve as a potent reminder of the more serious
trouble it could cause in response to Israeli actions it deems unacceptable.
Iran may feel that Hezbollah serves as a useful deterrent against Israeli or
U.S. military attacks. Were Iran to possess the more powerful deterrent
of nuclear weapons, the cost of continued Hezbollah support might
be perceived as unnecessary.
Prolif causes an increase in emphases on US unmanned
tech

NYT 1
[James Dao, Bush Giving New Life to Old Ideas About
Possible Changes at the Pentagon, 3-25, L/N]

The National Defense Panel was created by Congress in 1996 to study the military's
efforts to address future threats. It concluded that a cornerstone of Pentagon policy -- planning to
fight two major wars simultaneously -- was becoming obsolete, serving only
to justify the military's size and structure. The panel also asserted that China would
become an increasingly important factor in world affairs, warned against terrorist attacks within America's borders and urged the

United States to be more aggressive in defending its space satellites . And it

predicted that the proliferation of nuclear weapons, cruise missiles and other
powerful weapons would make American forces overseas more vulnerable,
forcing the United States to rely increasingly on unmanned aircraft and long-
range bombers.
Solves terrorism

Pea 6
[Charles, Senior Fellow Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy and advisor Straus Military
Reformm Project, Orbis, A Smaller Military To Fight the War on Terror, 50:2, Spring,
ScienceDirect]

As important as human intelligence is, technology still has its place . For example,
the potential utility of UAVs for the war on terror has been demonstrated in
Afghanistan and Yemen. In Afghanistan, UAVs moved beyond playing a supporting role for combat aircraft, as they had in
the Balkans and then in Iraq in the mid-1990s, providing surveillance and later designating targets

for laser-guided bombs. They became offensive weapons when armed with
Hellfire missiles. In February 2002, a Predator UAV armed with Hellfire missiles and operated by the CIA in the Tora Bora region
attacked a convoy and killed several people, including a suspected Al Qaeda leader. In November 2002, a Predator in Yemen destroyed a car
If
containing six Al Qaeda suspects, including Abu Ali al- Harithi, one of the suspected planners of the USS Cole attack in October 2000.

parts of the war on terror are to be fought in places such as Yemen, Sudan,
Somalia, and Pakistan, then UAVs, with their ability to cover large swaths of
land for extended periods of time in search of targets, could be key assets for
finding and targeting Al Qaeda operatives. A Predator has a combat radius of 400 nautical miles and can
carry a maximum payload of 450 pounds for more than twenty-four hours. One unmanned sentry could survey the same area as ten or more
Armed UAVs offer a cost-effective alternative to deploying troops or
human sentries.22

having to call in manned aircraft to perform combat missions against

identified terrorist targets. According to Dyke Weatherington, deputy of the DoDs UAV Planning Task Force, without
armed UAVs we either couldnt get strikes to the target in time or the manned aircraft couldnt find that target the UAV had found.23 One
can only wonder what might have happened if the spy Predator that took pictures of a tall man in white robes surrounded by a group of people
believed by many intelligence analysts to be bin Ladenin the fall of 2000 had instead been an armed Predator capable of immediately
striking the target. According to retired General Wayne Downing, We were not prepared to take the military action necessary. . . . We should
Another factor that
have had strike forces prepared to go in and react to this intelligence, certainly cruise missiles.24

makes UAVs particularly attractive is their low cost, especially when

compared to manned aircraft. Their developmental costs are actually about
the same as they are for a similar manned aircraft, but their procurement
costs are substantially lower, at an average unit cost of 16 million over three
years.25 O&M costs for UAVs are also expected to be lower than for manned aircraft. So the
10billioninplannedspendingonUAVsoverthenext decade (compared to just 3 billion in the 1990s) is a smart investment in the war on terror.
Even doubling the budget to 20 billion over the next ten years would make sense and would represent less than 1 percent of an annual
defense budget based on a balancer-of-last-resort strategy. An added benefit is that pilots lives are not
at risk with every sortie.
 1AR AT Prolif: Prolif Solves Middle East
Stability
Prolif turns and solves their Middle East Impact-
Conventional weapons cant create Mid-East stability
only nukes create real and perceived balance of power
and ensure negotiation

Rosen 77 (Steven, Prof. Australian National University and Brandeis

University, American Political Science Review, A Stable System of Mutual
Nuclear Deterrence in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 71:4, JSTOR)

that conventional containment alone cannot bring

For all these reasons, it appears
stability to the Middle East, even if the balance of forces can be equilibrated during rapid
technological, economic, and political changes. However, the addition of a nuclear level of
deterrence has the potential to compensate for the deficiencies of the
conventional balance of power. Israel in particular may be drawn to the
nuclear option to put a halt to what might otherwise be an unending series
of small wars. Ironically, the case from Israel's point of view has been put forth most eloquently by
an Arab-American scholar, Fuad Jabber: Where conventional power has failed, weapons
of mass destruction would be expected to succeed in convincing Arab
populations first and their governments second of the futility of continuing
their confrontation with Israel. With the realization that Israel cannot be militarily defeated,
the rationale behind the permanent state of war, the economic blockade, and the policy of non-
acceptance and nonrecognition might be expected to break down. Moreover, whatever tendencies
towards recognition and negotiations may already exist in the Arab world would be enormously
Hitherto, governments willing to negotiate had not dared to act
strengthened.
because their position at home would have become untenable. In a nuclear
context, the survival imperative might provide enough justification to make
such approaches possible. . . . The psychologically erosive effects of the
nuclear logic would be at work on the Arab will, gradually producing that
pervasive feeling of "doubt and eventually resignation and despair about the
dream of eliminating Israel from the world's map" that Israel's doctrine of
deterrence had always sought to create. In this way, a nuclear deterrent
could enhance the stability of the balance of power by creating the
perception of balance that conventional arms alone cannot produce .

P rolif causes Middle East peace.

Sadr 5 (THE IMPACT OF IRAN'S NUCLEARIZATION ON ISRAEL Ehsaneh I Sadr.

Middle East Policy. Washington: Summer 2005. Vol. 12, Iss. 2; pg. 58, 15
pgsMs. Sadr is a graduate student in the department of government and
politics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Indeed, there is reason to believe that Irans access to nuclear weapons may
increase the prospects for regional stability and even Middle East
peace. Given the horrendous consequences of an accidental nuclear war, it
will be imperative that Iran and Israel develop some sort of ability to
communicate with one another directly. It is not outside the realm of
possibility that the institutionalization of such communications may be the
first step in the normalization of relations between the two countries
and the future integration of Israel into its neighborhood .
 1AR AT Prolif: Prolif Solves Environment

Proliferation spurs satellite expansion

Norris, 2007 [Pat, Space Strategy Manager Logica UK,

Spies in the sky: surveillance satellites in war and
peace, p. 169-170, Google Print]

Surveillance satellites that are specifically military in nature are operated by

seven countries, namely Russia, the US, France, Japan, Germany, China, and
Britain (although Britain's is only a technology demonstrator satellite, not an
operational system). The impetus for new countries to build these satellites
has come from the fragmentation of the world's military threats since the end
of the Cold War. Where before the main threat was a US-Soviet
confrontation--either directly or via satellite states--military forces from the
developed countries are now involved in actions around the globe. The
proliferation of missile and nuclear technology has also motivated countries
to have an autonomous satellite-monitoring capability. Japan's decision to
build a fleet of radar and visible imaging satellites stems from concerns about
the missile tests undertaken by North Korea.

Thats key to the global environment

Reibaldi, 1995 [Giuseppe, European Space Agency, Acta

Astronautica, Contribution of Space Activities to Peace,
35:8, ScienceDirect]

The 1970s have seen the rise of ecological movements, originating from the
view of the fragile Earth, as photographed by the Apollo astronauts on the
way to the Moon. The human species already consumes or destroys 40% of
all energy produced by terrestrial photosynthesis, that is, 40% of the food
potentially available to living things on land. Predictions for the future indicate that tropical forests
will continue to be destroyed, arable land will shrink because of the top soil
pollution that cannot be repaired. The control of the environment is no longer the issue of a single state but its
implication is international, so it requires close monitoring to avoid disputes in this matter, eventually generating situations of conflict.
pollution had reached unsurpassed levels and after several
Governments realized that

years of futile discussions they agreed on several environmental treaties

which limited the use of substances which proved to be dangerous to the
environment (i.e. Montreal Accord which seeks to limit the global emission of CFCs to protect the ozone layer). The United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 was a significant step in this direction, since it was attended by Heads
of State and Government. Delegates from rich and poor countries participating in the Rio Conference worked out agreements to protect bio-
diversity, control carbon dioxide emission and slow deforestation. Those agreements require verification in order to be credible and binding for
. Earth observing satellites can bring awareness of any
the countries which adhere to it

violation of environmental treaties as an independent source of information. For

example, the European Space Agencys Earth Remote Sensing 1 (ERS-1) satellite can detect , by day and by

night, river pollution and identify the potential responsible, or oil leakage
generated by a transport ship which is washing its tanks in international
waters. Furthermore, space technology can provide easier access to soft
technology such as education and health care as well as hard technology
such as telecommunication and discovery of natural re- sources and this will
help developing countries in achieving a policy of sustainable development.

Extinction.

Cairns, 2004 [John Cairns, 2004. Department of Biology,

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Future of Life on Earth, Ethics in Science and
Environmental Politics, www.int-
res.com/esepbooks/EB2Pt2.pdf]
One lesson from the five great global extinctions is that species and ecosystems come and go, but the evolutionary process continues. In

short, life forms have a future on Earth, bu t humankinds future depends on its
stewardship of ecosystems that favor Homo sapiens. By
practicing sustainability ethics, humankind can protect
and preserve ecosystems that have services favorable to
it. Earth has reached its present state through an estimated 4550 million years and may last for 15000 million more years. The
sixth mass extinction, now underway, is unique because
humankind is a major contributor to the process.
Excessive damage to the ecological life support system
will markedly alter civilization, as it is presently known, and might even result
in human extinction. However, if humankind learns to live
sustainably, the likelihood of leaving a habitable planet
for posterity will dramatically increase. The 21st century
represents a defining moment for humankindwill
present generations become good ancestors for their
descendants by living sustainably or will they leave a less
habitable planet for posterity by continuing to live
unsustainably?
1AR AT Prolif: Conventional War Extension Wall
The newest and best research coupled with all history
proves prolif is stabilizing. It prevents bloody
conventional wars

Tepperman 9
(Jonathon, former Deputy Managing Ed. Foreig Affairs and Assistant Managing Ed. Newsweek,
Newsweek, Why Obama should Learn to Love the Bomb, 44:154, 9-7, L/N)

A growing and compelling body of research suggests that nuclear

weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous, as Obama and most people assume. The
bomb may actually make us safer. In this era of rogue states and transnational terrorists,
that idea sounds so obviously wrongheaded that few politicians or policymakers are willing to entertain it.
But that's a mistake. Knowing the truth about nukes would have a profound impact on government policy.
Obama's idealistic campaign, so out of character for a pragmatic administration, may be unlikely to get far
(past presidents have tried and failed). But it's not even clear he should make the effort. There are more
important measures the U.S. government can and should take to make the real world safer, and these
mustn't be ignored in the name of a dreamy ideal (a nuke-free planet) that's both unrealistic and possibly
undesirable. The argument that nuclear weapons can be agents of peace as well as destruction rests on
nuclear weapons have not been used
two deceptively simple observations. First,
since 1945. Second, there's never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear, war
between two states that possess them. Just stop for a second and think about that:
it's hard to overstate how remarkable it is, especially given the singular viciousness of the 20th century. As
Kenneth Waltz, the leading "nuclear optimist" and a professor emeritus of political science at UC Berkeley
puts it, "We now have 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It's striking and against all historical
precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states." To
understand whyand why the next 64 years are likely to play out the same wayyou need to start by
recognizing that all states are rational on some basic level. Their leaders may be
stupid, petty, venal, even evil, but they tend to do things only when they're pretty sure they can get away
with them. Take war: a country will start a fight only when it's almost certain it can get what it wants at an
acceptable price.Not even Hitler or Saddam waged wars they didn't think
they could win. The problem historically has been that leaders often
make the wrong gamble and underestimate the other side and millions of
innocents pay the price. Nuclear weapons change all that by making the costs
of war obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable. Suddenly, when both sides
have the ability to turn the other to ashes with the push of a button
and everybody knows itthe basic math shifts. Even the craziest
tin-pot dictator is forced to accept that war with a nuclear state is
unwinnable and thus not worth the effort. As Waltz puts it, "Why fight if you can't
win and might lose everything?" Why indeed? The iron logic of deterrence and
mutually assured destruction is so compelling, it's led to what's known as
the nuclear peace: the virtually unprecedented stretch since the end
of World War II in which all the world's major powers have avoided
coming to blows. They did fight proxy wars, ranging from Korea to Vietnam to Angola to Latin
America. But these never matched the furious destruction of full-on, great-power war (World War II alone
was responsible for some 50 million to 70 million deaths). And since the end of the Cold War, such
nuclear powers have scrupulously
bloodshed has declined precipitously. Meanwhile, the
avoided direct combat, and there's very good reason to think they
always will. There have been some near misses, but a close look at
these cases is fundamentally reassuringbecause in each instance,
very different leaders all came to the same safe conclusion. Take the
mother of all nuclear standoffs: the Cuban missile crisis. For 13 days in October 1962, the United States
and the Soviet Union each threatened the other with destruction. But both countries soon stepped back
from the brink when they recognized that a war would have meant curtains for everyone. As important as
the fact that they did is the reason why: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's aide Fyodor Burlatsky said later
on, "It is impossible to win a nuclear war, and both sides realized that, maybe for the first time." The record
nuclear-armed enemies slide toward
since then shows the same pattern repeating:
war, then pull back, always for the same reasons. The best recent example is
India and Pakistan, which fought three bloody wars after independence before acquiring their own nukes in
1998. Getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction didn't do
anything to lessen their animosity. But it did dramatically mellow
their behavior. Since acquiring atomic weapons, the two sides have
never fought another war, despite severe provocations (like Pakistani-based
terrorist attacks on India in 2001 and 2008). They have skirmished once. But during
that flare-up, in Kashmir in 1999, both countries were careful to keep the
fighting limited and to avoid threatening the other's vital interests. Sumit Ganguly, an Indiana
University professor and coauthor of the forthcoming India, Pakistan, and the Bomb, has found that on
both sides, officials' thinking was strikingly similar to that of the Russians and Americans in 1962. The
prospect of war brought Delhi and Islamabad face to face with a nuclear holocaust, and leaders in each
country did what they had to do to avoid it. Nuclear pessimistsand there are manyinsist that even if
this pattern has held in the past, it's crazy to rely on it in the future, for several reasons. The first is that
today's nuclear wannabes are so completely unhinged, you'd be mad to trust them with a bomb. Take the
sybaritic Kim Jong Il, who's never missed a chance to demonstrate his battiness, or Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who has denied the Holocaust and promised the destruction of Israel, and who, according to
some respected Middle East scholars, runs a messianic martyrdom cult that would welcome nuclear
obliteration. These regimes are the ultimate rogues, the thinking goesand there's no deterring rogues.
But are Kim and Ahmadinejad really scarier and crazier than were Stalin and Mao? It might look that way
from Seoul or Tel Aviv, but history says otherwise. Khrushchev, remember, threatened to "bury" the United
States, and in 1957, Mao blithely declared that a nuclear war with America wouldn't be so bad because
even "if half of mankind died the whole world would become socialist." Pyongyang and Tehran support
terrorismbut so did Moscow and Beijing. And as for seeming suicidal, Michael Desch of the University of
Notre Dame points out that Stalin and Mao are the real record holders here: both were responsible for the
when push came to shove, their
deaths of some 20 million of their own citizens. Yet
regimes balked at nuclear suicide, and so would today's
international bogeymen. For all of Ahmadinejad's antics, his power is limited, and the clerical
regime has always proved rational and pragmatic when its life is on the line. Revolutionary Iran has never
started a war, has done deals with both Washington and Jerusalem, and sued for peace in its war with Iraq
(which Saddam started) once it realized it couldn't win. North Korea, meanwhile, is a tiny, impoverished,
family-run country with a history of being invaded; its overwhelming preoccupation is survival, and every
time it becomes more belligerent it reverses itself a few months later (witness last week, when Pyongyang
countries may
told Seoul and Washington it was ready to return to the bargaining table). These
be brutally oppressive, but nothing in their behavior suggests they
have a death wish.
 1AR AT Prolif: Prolif Solves Heg Power Wars
Proliferation solves destructive power wars

Delvoie 2
[Louis, Former Assistant Deputy Minister National Defense Headquarters (Canada) and
Senior Fellow Center for International Relations Queens U., Canadian Military Journal,
VIEWS AND OPINIONS IN PRAISE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, Autumn,
http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo3/no3/doc/66-69-eng.pdf]

major conventional wars had become progressively

The first of these truths was that

more destructive and more murderous between the mid-19th and mid-
20th centuries. What is often referred to as the first modern war in terms of military technology, the American Civil War (1860-
65), produced a death toll of about 600,000. The First World War (1914-18) resulted in the deaths of some 15 million. The Second World War
The
(1939-45) saw some 80 million die, including 20 million Russians and 20 million Chinese, all too often forgotten in the Western world.

idea of millions of people being killed in war is not solely the spectre of the
nuclear age; it was the reality of the pre-nuclear age. The second truth is that the
world was spared another war engaging the major powers throughout the
second half of the 20th century. This was not because of a shortage of
conflicts or events, which in an era of purely conventional weapons
(regardless of their lethality) might well have precipitated a third world
war. Indeed, any one of the following would probably have been viewed as a cassus belli: The Berlin blockade of 1948; The Suez Crisis
of 1956; The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956; The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; The American bombing of North Vietnam; The Soviet
. That no new
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; The Arab-Israeli War of 1973; and The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979

world war resulted from any of these events is largely due to the existence of
nuclear weapons, and to the deterrent effect which their possession and
deployment had on the actions of the major powers throughout the Cold War.
Although the theories of nuclear deterrence are numerous and complex, the lesson learned by the governments of the major powers was
expressed with eloquent simplicity by the historian Paul Kennedy: It is now clear that the dropping of the
atomic bombs in 1945 marked a watershed in the military history of the
world, and one which throws into doubt the viability of mankind should a
Great Power war with atomic weaponry ever be fought.1 The third point is that hundreds of
thousands of people were killed in civil and inter-state wars in the second half
of the twentieth century. The carnage of the Algerian War of Independence, of
the Vietnam War, of the Iran-Iraq War and of the civil wars in the Sudan,
Afghanistan, Rwanda and Sri Lanka was and is horrendous. That carnage was,
however, largely inflicted with weapons ranging from machetes and machine guns to

howitzers and helicopter gunships; none of it was the result of the use of
nuclear weapons. On the contrary, the deterrent value of nuclear weapons
served to avoid the far worse carnage which would have attended a
third world war among the major powers. There are those who, while prepared
to recognize the merits of nuclear deterrence in the geo-strategic framework of the Cold War, consider that the concept

is now obsolete in a post-Cold War world. This is a view which pays

insufficient attention to the history of international relations and to the
realities of world politics. The end of a fairly stable structure of politico-ideological competition and conflict between East
and West does not mean the end of divergent interests and power struggles among the worlds principal politicomilitary actors .

Countries such as the United States, Russia and China will not cease to
pursue their own agendas, and will risk collisions in the process. When this
occurs, nuclear deterrence will continue to serve as a moderating influence in
their mutual relations, and will have a usefully restraining effect on any
overly hegemonistic ambitions.
 1AR AT Prolif: Conventional War Outweighs
Conventional war is really deadly

Arbatov et al 89
(Alexei, Head, Nikolae Kishilov, Head of Section, and Oleg Amirov, Senior Researcher,
Department on Problems of DisarmamentInstitute of world Economic and International
Relations, in Conventional arms Control and East-West Security, Ed. Robert Blackwill and F.
Stephen Larrabee, p. 76-78)

A large-scale conventional war, even if it would not quickly boil over

into a nuclear war, would have numerous unpredictable features
that would make it quite dissimilar to World War II, the experience of which
continues to be used even now as the point of departure for the strategic and operational planning of
combat operations for NATO and WTO ground forces, air forces and naval forces. The fact that during the
past 40 years incomparably greater changes have taken place in technology than those that took place in
war in
the earlier interwar periods of 1870-1914 and 1918-1939 supports such a conclusion. Therefore,
the modern era is even less similar to World War II than that war
was to War World I, and the latter in turn to the Franco-Prussian war. It is exceptionally difficult,
if it is possible at all, to predict its course. But there is every justification to say that the numerous
contradictions and paradoxes of a hypothetical new war would in practice have the most unexpected
consequences, consequences most likely incompatible with the concept of "protracted" conventional
combat on the European continent or on a global scale. This concerns, for example, the fact that the
sharply increased interdependence of different types of armed forces and troops, individual formations and
units and various weapons systems is a distinguishing feature of the functioning of enormous and highly
complex organizations, which is what modern armed forces are. A great spacial scope of operations (on the
scale of entire TVDs), the rapidity and intensity of combat actions, and the multinational structure of
opposing coalitions of states will characterize their actions. All of this poses unprecedently high demands
for coordinating the actions of all elements of military potentials and for carefully planning operations,
their priority, sequence of interaction and so on. At the same time, the character of modern warfare makes
inevitable the constant and rapid change of the combat situation on the fronts, deep breakthroughs and
envelopments, and the intermixing of one's own and others' formations, units and subunits. In view of the
high maneuverability of troops even the traditional FEBA may no longer exist. In place of it zones of
combat contact of a depth of dozens of kilometers will arise and rapidly change and shift. The
unpredictability, mutability and intensity of probable combat actions would so overload the capabilities of a
centralized command and control in the theater of war and the separate TVDs that they would most likely
rapidly lead to total chaos. The intensity of the anticipated combat also renders inevitable exceptionally
great losses in arms and equipment. At the same time, because of the rapid increase in the cost of
weapons systems, the quantitative levels of armed forces and arms on the whole have a tendency to
decrease. Fewer but much improved and more powerful arms have a much lesser chance than in World
War II of being used repeatedly in several battles. Their longevity will entirely depend on how successfully
they may outstrip the opponent and destroy his forces and capabilities earlier than they will be destroyed
by him. Therefore, combat actions will in any event most likely have a short-term character, if not for both,
then at least for one of the sides. And this is not to mention the enormous losses among the civilian
population and the damage to the economic infrastructure in the region of combat, which may now
Neither the
envelop the greatest and most densely populated portion of the European continent.
population, economy nor ecology of Europe can withstand a large-
scale conventional war for any amount of timeeven in the
improbable event that nuclear power stations, chemical enterprises
and nuclear and chemical weapons depots are not destroyed. The limited
capabilities of the "human factor" in conditions of modern battle are clearly demonstrated by the
experience of the local wars of the 197os and the 198os. Thus, for maintaining the combat capability of
troops at a "sufficiently high level" during the Falklands conflict (1982), the British command was forced to
replace forward units every two days. Furthermore, the high sortie rate of Great Britain's air force and
naval aviation in this period was guaranteed largely thanks to the use of special medicinal preparations.
Naturally, it is impossible to compare and carry over the experience of individual local conflicts to potential
large-scale combat operations on the European continent, where their character would be quite different
both in terms of intensity and scope. This concerns the anticipated transient "fire contacts" with the rapid
change of the tactical and operational situation, the threat of using nuclear weapons at any moment, the
swift advance of enemy troops, the simultaneous envelopment of large territories with combat actions, the
premeditated violation of lines of communication and C3I, and the conduct of combat operations at any
time of the day (including at night) and under any weather conditionsall of which maximally increase the
physical and psychological stress on a person, and cannot be compared with what took place in the years
of World War II, in the Middle East in 1973 or in the Falkland Islands in 1982. It is also necessary to observe
that the replacement of the leading units by their withdrawal to the rear for rest and replenishment, as was
done in the past, becomes practically impossible in the conditions of large-scale combat operations. Where
to withdraw the units for rest, and at what time, if just 3o-5o kilometers from the front there would be a
zone of combat operations just as intense as at the forward line? Any assessments of the losses of the
Only one thing is clearthe
sides participating in the conflict can only be highly abstract.
human and material losses in the event of a "general conventional
war" will be characterized, undoubtedly, by a scale many hundreds
of times greater than that in analogous conflicts of the past , and, what is
especially important, by a significantly higher "attrition rate" of people and equipment, of the share of
irreplaceable losses.

Benefits outweigh the costs 40 to 1

de Mesquita and Riker 82

(Bruce Bueno and William, Dept. Pol. Sci.Rochester, Journal of Conflict Resolution, An
Assessment of the Merits of Selective Nuclear Proliferation, Vol. 26, No. 2, p. 302-303)

Conceding that the likelihood of miscalculation does

One might object further.
diminish as proliferation occurs, one might still contend that the
costs of such a miscalculation are so large that they cannot
conceivably justify even the diminished risk of war. If the expected
costs from nuclear wars arising out of miscalculation or irrational
acts exceed the expected costs from wars that could be prevented
by proliferation, then, indeed, proliferation is a very dangerous thing. There
is, of course, no precise way to measure these expected costs, but we do have some basis for estimating
them. Using expected utility calculations similar to the one suggested here, one of us (Bueno de Mesquita
1981b) found that 65 of approximately 70,000 opportunities to initiate war rationally were seized in the
period 1816 to 1974, with hundreds of other opportunities being used to threaten war. In that same study
it was also found that only 11 of nearly 500,000 opportunities to initiate war were seized in violation of the
expectations arising from the expected utility framework. In other words, the ratio of
seemingly rational and correct calculations to either irrational
calculations or miscalculations that have led to war is over 40 to 1 .
This implies that through symmetry-producing nuclear proliferation,
we may expect to prevent approximately 40 conventional or one-sided
nuclear wars for every one miscalculated or irrational bilateral
nuclear exchange. Using the 40 most recent wars as a crude
indicator, this analysis implies that a single miscalculated or
irrational nuclear exchange in the third world would have to kill
several tens of millions of people before some proliferation would be
unjustified by yielding a higher expected loss of life. It seems to us
unlikely that one such miscalculated or irrational act among third
world countries, each with a very few warheads, could produce this
level of loss. Still, we do not rule it out, but rather note that it is exactly such estimates that must be
made in calculating the trade-offs between gains and losses from nuclear proliferation. One might expect,
for instance, that selection of candidates for proliferation might be based partially on the calculation of the
marginal effect on expected costs in life and property from not standing in the way of the candidate in
question. Thus, proliferation would be resisted where the expected marginal effect would be an increase in
loss of life and property over nonproliferation, but would be encouraged where the marginal effect was
otherwise.
 1AR AT Prolif: Terrorism

Their impact evidence assumes retaliation to an attack ---

no such scenario under Obama

Ruwe 8 (Daniel, 5/27,

http://danielruwe.blogspot.com/2008/05/barack-obama-
gaffe-machine.html)

Another revealing Obama quote is his answer to a debate question

regarding a hypothetical terrorist attack on an American city.
(Remember when there was a presidential debate about every two weeks?
That seems so long ago). Obamas answer: the first thing wed have to
do is make sure weve got an effective emergency response,
something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in
New Orleans. And I think we have to review how we operate in the event of
not only a natural disaster but also a terrorist attack. The second thing is to
make sure that weve got good intelligence. . . . But what we cant do
is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence,
based on bluster and bombast. If that answer still is Obamas position
(Obamas views are maddeningly hard to pin down), then he clearly has not
the vaguest idea of how to respond to a terrorist attack. The emergency
response required for a terrorist attack is completely different than that
required for a natural disasterfor example, natural disasters are handled
first by state and local governments, while terrorist attacks fall squarely into
the federal governments bailiwick. In addition, terrorist attacks are
preventable. Also, Obama might want to consider retaliating against those
who attacked us, a concept missing from his reply. Lack of retaliation
against Americas enemies seems to be a premise of his foreign
policyif we talk to them, they wont attack us. He seems to base
his opposition to the Iraq War not so much on the strategic reasons
behind it, but because he seems to think that war in general is
almost always unacceptable. This quote is revealing because he rarely
enunciates this idea so openly.
 1AR AT Prolif: Miscalculation
Extend Quinlan
Proliferation stops miscalculationrisks of nuclear war
are too clear.

Roth 7
(Ariel Ilan, Associate Dir. National Security StudiesJohns Hopkins U. and Visiting Assistant
Prof. IRGoucher College, International Studies Review, Reflection, Evaluation, Integration
Nuclear Weapons in Neo-Realist Theory, 9, p. 369-384)

No such potential for miscalculation exists in a nuclear conflict . In

several papers and articles, as well as a co-authored book, Waltz makes explicit his belief that nuclear
weapons eliminate (or at least severely reduce) the likelihood of
miscalculation of the degree to which a war will be costly . Because,
according to Waltz, one of the main engines for war is uncertainty
regarding outcomes and because the immense destruction that can
come as the result of a nuclear exchange can be fully anticipated, it
is never rational to engage in a war where the possibility of a
nuclear exchange exists. Consequently, as Waltz (1990:740) forcefully argues, the
probability of major war among states having nuclear weapons
approaches zero.
 1AR AT Prolif: Missing Nukes
Missing nukes would have been used already

Associated Press 12 (Vladimir Isachenkov, reporter for the Associated

Press, http://www.military.com/news/article/how-threat-of-loose-soviet-
nukes-was-avoided.html, How Threat of Loose Soviet Nukes Was Avoided,"
January 9, 2012,//PG)

There have been gnawing fears that a few Soviet nukes still might
have gone missing, but experts with inside knowledge say that if it were
true, the world would already know. "If somebody or a terrorist
group got hold of a nuclear weapon, they would probably use it as
quickly as possible," said Steven Pifer, who served as U.S. ambassador to
Ukraine, held other senior State Department posts and is now director of the
Brookings Institute's Arms Control Initiative. "So the fact that you haven't
seen a nuclear detonation ... reflects the fact that the nuclear
weapons have been maintained in a secure way."

Loose nukes are empirically denied- too many safeguards

Chapman12 (Steve Chapman, writer for the Chicago Tribune,

http://reason.com/archives/2012/05/17/the-implausibility-of-
nuclear-terrorism, "The Implausibility of Nuclear
Terrorism,", May 17, 2012,,//PG)
The events required to make that happen comprise a multitude of
Herculean tasks. First, a terrorist group has to get a bomb or fissile
material, perhaps from Russia's inventory of decommissioned warheads.
If that were easy, one would have already gone missing. Besides, those
devices are probably no longer a danger, since weapons that are not
scrupulously maintained (as those have not been) quickly become what
one expert calls "radioactive scrap metal." If terrorists were able to steal
a Pakistani bomb, they would still have to defeat the arming codes and
other safeguards designed to prevent unauthorized use. As for Iran, no
nuclear state has ever given a bomb to an allyfor reasons even the
Iranians can grasp.
 1AR AT Prolif: Arms Racing
No impact to arms racing.
Seng 98 (Jordan, PhD Candidate in Pol. Sci.U. Chicago, Dissertation,
STRATEGY FOR PANDORA'S CHILDREN: STABLE NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION
AMONG MINOR STATES, p. 247)

arms buildups in the Third World are not likely result in a

In all,
reduction of security for any state involved. Even at minimal levels
of weapons development, Third World proliferators will achieve
ample damage capability. Third World proliferators will find it easy
to make their forces invulnerable to counterforce strikes from one another.
Because Third World states could never hope to compromise the
second strike capability of advanced nuclear states, arms races
between Third World proliferators and advanced nuclear powers will
not change security equations in any destabilizing way. Strategically
speaking, arms races are simply unlikely to matter .
 1AR AT Prolif: Conflict Escalation
Prolif decreases conflict intensity. Diminishes crisis
escalation and increases stability.

Sechser 9
(Todd, Assistant Prof. PoliticsUVA and PhD Pol.. Sci.Stanford, in Controversies in
Globalization: Contending Approaches to International Relations, Ed. John A. Hird, Peter M.
Haas and Beth McBratney, p. 167-168)
What about conflicts which, despite the shadow of nuclear weapons,
nevertheless occur? Proliferation optimists argue that even if nuclear-
armed states fight one another, their wars will not be intense: leaders will
prevent such conflicts from escalating to avoid the risk that nuclear weapons
might be used. As Waltz writes, "Everyone knows that if force gets out
of hand all the parties to a conflict face catastrophe. With
conventional weapons, the crystal ball is clouded. With nuclear
weapons, it is perfectly clear" (Sagan and Waltz 2003, 114). This reasoning
was borne out clearly by the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan
the only war ever to occur between two nuclear states. The episode is
instructive because the war entailed far fewer causalities than any of the
prior wars between India and Pakistan (see Table 1), owing in part to the
restraint of the Indian military in expelling Pakistani insurgents from the Kargil
region. The Indian military could have reduced its own losses and
ended the war more quickly by attacking critical communication and
supply lines in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, yet because crossing into
Pakistani territory might have widened the war and risked provoking a
Pakistani nuclear threat, Indian leaders instead opted for caution. It is
not hard to find other military crises in which the risk of nuclear escalation
induced restraint. In March 1969, Chinese forces ambushed Russian
troops along the Ussuri River in northwest China, prompting a Soviet
counterattack. But one important reason we do not read about the
catastrophic Sino- Soviet War of 1969 is that a Soviet threat to launch
preventive strikes against Chinese nuclear targets induced Chinese
leaders to de-escalate the crisis. Despite having initiated the challenge,
China backed down rather than risk letting events get out of hand. The Soviet
Union, of course, had itself recently backed down from a crisis it precipitated
when Nikita Khrushchev agreed in 1962 to remove Soviet missile bases from
Cuba rather than risk a potentially nuclear conflict with the United States.
These examples make clear that nuclear weapons cannot prevent all
conflicts: indeed, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Ussuri River crisis, and
the Kargil War all came about because one nuclear power was bold
enough to challenge another. But in a world without nuclear
weapons, these clashes might have escalated to large-scale
conventional wars. Instead, in each case the shadow of nuclear
weapons helped to cool tempers and contain the crisis: retaliation
remained limited, escalatory options were rejected, and eventually the
challenger backed down.
 AT: Resource Wars
No resource wars
Tetrais 12Senior Research Fellow at the Fondation pour la Recherche
Stratgique (FRS). Past positions include: Director, Civilian Affairs Committee,
NATO Assembly (1990-1993); European affairs desk officer, Ministry of
Defense (1993-1995); Visiting Fellow, the Rand Corporation (1995-1996);
Special Assistant to the Director of Strategic Affairs, Ministry of Defense
(1996-2001).(Bruno, The Demise of Ares,
csis.org/files/publication/twq12SummerTertrais.pdf)
The Unconvincing Case for New Wars Is the demise of war reversible? In recent years, the metaphor of
a new Dark Age or Middle Ages has flourished. 57 The rise of political Islam, Western policies in the
development of emerging countries, population growth, and
Middle East, the fast
climate change have led to fears of civilization, resource, and environmental
wars. We have heard the New Middle Age theme before. In 1973, Italian writer Roberto Vacca
famously suggested that mankind was about to enter an era of famine , nuclear
war, and civilizational collapse. U.S. economist Robert Heilbroner made the same suggestion
one year later. And in 1977, the great Australian political scientist Hedley Bull also heralded such an age.
58 But the case for new wars remains as flimsy as it was in the
1970s . Admittedly, there is a stronger role of religion in civil conflicts. The proportion of internal wars
with a religious dimension was about 25 percent between 1940 and 1960, but 43 percent in the first years
of the 21st century. 59 This may be an effect of the demise of traditional territorial conflict, but as seen
above, this has not increased the number or frequency of wars at the global level. Over the past decade,
neither Western governments nor Arab/Muslim countries have fallen into the trap of the clash of
civilizations into which Osama bin Laden wanted to plunge them. And ancestral hatreds are a
reductionist and unsatisfactory approach to explaining collective violence. Professor Yahya Sadowski
concluded his analysis of post-Cold War crises and wars, The Myth of Global Chaos, by stating, most of
the conflicts around the world are not rooted in thousands of years of history-- they are
new and can be concluded as quickly as they started . 60 Future
resource wars are unlikely. There are fewer and fewer conquest
wars. Between the Westphalia peace and the end of World War II, nearly half of conflicts were fought
over territory. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been less than 30 percent. 61 The invasion of Kuwait--a
nationwide bank robbery--may go down in history as being the last great resource war. The U.S.-led
intervention of 1991 was partly driven by the need to maintain the free flow of oil, but not by the
temptation to capture it. (Nor was the 2003 war against Iraq motivated by oil.) As for the current tensions
between the two Sudans over oil, they are the remnants of a civil war and an offshoot of a botched
secession process, not a desire to control new resources. Chinas and Indias energy needs are sometimes
seen with apprehension: in light of growing oil and gas scarcity, is there not a risk of military clashes over
This seemingly consensual idea rests on two fallacies. One is that
the control of such resources?
scarcity, a notion challenged by many energy experts.
there is such a thing as oil and gas
62 As prices rise, previously untapped reserves and non-conventional
hydrocarbons become economically attractive. The other is that spilling blood is a
rational way to access resources. As shown by the work of historians and political scientists such as Quincy
the economic rationale for war has always been overstated . And
Wright,
because of globalization, it has become cheaper to buy than to steal . We no
longer live in the world of 1941, when fear of lacking oil and raw materials was a key motivation for Japans
In an era of liberalizing trade, many natural resources are fungible
decision to go to war.
goods. (Here, Beijing behaves as any other actor: 90 percent of the oil its companies produce outside of
China goes to the global market, not to the domestic one.) 63 There may be clashes or conflicts in regions
in maritime resource-rich areas such as the South China and East China seas or the Mediterranean, but
they will be driven by nationalist passions, not the desperate hunger for hydrocarbons.
Russia DAs
 AT: Russian Scenarios
Reps of Russia either present it as absolutely other or as
a country that could easily become Westernizedboth of
these views are inadequate and perpetuate problematic
assumptions about relations between Russia and the West

Broda 2k2 (Marian, Russia and the West: The Root of the
Problem of Mutual Understanding, Studies in East
European Thought; Mar2002, Vol. 54 Issue 1/2, p7-24)

The question of Russias mental and cultural entanglements is no less evident

to Russian thinkers than to outside observers. Among the accepted positions a certain characteristic
On one side there is the tendency to absolutize the
polarization is perceptible.
decisive character of the specific traits of the Russian soul,
continuity, force, and
the Russian idea or Russias soul. The other side tends to the polar
opposite, it minimalizes, epiphenomenalizes or simply negates their significance,
treating them as something to grow out of. The first is based on
faith in the unique nature, history, and destiny of Russia, in its
unknowability for outsiders and in terms of rational categories, its unknowability in
general which renders impossible the application to Russia of
universal developmental standards, unmasked as exclusively
western. The second underwrites the comforting possibility of
transferring automatically to Russia western theoretical models of
social and cultural development. Neither point of view is adequate ,
both depend on a priori assumptions decreeing an unexamined
recognized order instead of granting it a heuristic status requiring unprejudiced investigation.
Nor are they free of unconscious or hidden paradoxes. In the former case, prescinding
from the metaphysical assumption of the unity of being and thought, it is clear that, considered
epistemically, the supposed premises of Russian identity understood as
the factor that predetermines the course of Russian history , its specificity
and likewise often its fatal outcome are mere theoretical constructs inacessible to
empirical confirmation and veri- fication.

Representations of Russia as developmentally or

structurally backward reify the binary between the
civilized, adult West and childish, incapable Russia

Broda 2k2 (Marian, Russia and the West: The Root of the
Problem of Mutual Understanding, Studies in East
European Thought; Mar2002, Vol. 54 Issue 1/2, p7-24)
But before this happens, Russia by virtue of her self-created alternative nature as well as her particular
character, including her maximalism, uncompromising attitude, communality, freedom from earthliness, ability to
represents a source of unease, a
transcend the prevailing order of things, eschatologism, etc.
threat and challenge to the Western way of thinking, valuating and
existence with emphasis on form, equilibrium, the person, moderation, the
individual, intellect, consciousness, and so forth. The classical distinction of two cognitional faculties, reason and
understanding, in accordance with which the former is directed to what is relative, terrestrial, and finite, and the latter to
what is absolute, divine, infinite, acquires in this light a specific cultural meaning, acting positively to set off Russia (and
To the dominant onesided reason
likewise orthodoxy) from the West (and Western Christianity).
in the West, considered as dry, abstract, external, purely analytical, Russian thought
opposes integral understanding regarded with approval as communal,
profound, intuitive, synthetic, and compatible with religious faith. The originally epistemological distinction between reason and
understanding took on an ethical, spiritual, religious and historiosophical meaning in Russia. To reason conceived as the effect and symptom
of the Fall is ascribed a break with moral principles as well as an alienating, desacralizing and desintegrative influence on the communal life of
the individual and its social bonds. The understanding that vanquishes one-sided reason and is capable of attaining a higher supra-empirical
reality (conceived in the spirit of mystical realism) gives up its purely human character: it comes in contact with and expresses divinity, steps
beyond the state of fragmentation, diremption and alienation, and acquires an eschatological meaning. It is no accident that the philosophical
system widely recognized in Russia to be the most significant and historically originary grew out of a principled opposition to the dominant
Western idea of an autonomous philosophy and an autonomous subject of knowledge. Its creator, Vladimir Solovv, . . . develops the thought
that a synthesis of philosphy and science with theology brings forth the possibility of an integral knowledge, and integral knowledge together
with integral creativity makes for integral life in the integral society,18 which, being a particular metamorphosis of Gods Kingdom, is not
a mere inner unity of intellectual, emotional, and creative stimuli, but is the living and authentic presence of the Absolute.19 The criterion of
truth becomes then the unifying character of knowledge, able finally to see the oneness in the whole and wholeness in the one.20 As a
result,in Russia rationalism becomes a concept which brings to
expression the essence of the West to which it is contrasted, that is, the
essence of that other civilization, religion, and philosophy and at the same
time the tool by which the latter are criticized. This is abetted by the tendency to
identify the complex nature of rationalism with knowing by means of reason. Rationalism treated
as hypertrophied reason is regarded in Russia as both the identity and the
sickness of the West: its formalism, superficiality, fragmentariness, artificiality, lack
of rootedness, and authentic contact with God. The reason-driven rationalism of
the West becomes hence a challenge for Russians, and its vanquishing
as well as the anticipated reconstruction of the fullness of reason, of
spiritual and social life are conceived as Russias all-human, historical mission. On
the contrary, in light of the solar,21 aristotelian perspective of the Western mind emphasising individualism,
historicity, the clear separation between history and eschatology, greater sensitivity to the lastingness of differentiation,
determination, and the limitations of the social world, underscoring the specificity and mutual irreducibility of particular
types of knowledge and orders of meaning, according in practice priority to phenomenalistically conceived particular
the
sciences, seeing progress in the separation and autonomization of particualar scientific disciplines, etc.
Russian consciousness or mentality as well as the way in which they
conceive reason are seen as archaic, developmentally retarded,
ignorant of the demarcational criteria separating specific kinds of
knowledge, insufficiently free of mythical structures. The Western
insistence on the immaturity, indeed the childishness of the
Russian consciousness and Russia itself, finds an all too obvious
basis in the fact that very often this same question is raised usually with entirely different intentions
on its native soil. The old West is contrasted with the young Russia, and
Russians, who are not fully formed, exist by premonitions,
feverishly, and are only just beginning to seek out and shape
themselves.22 As a result Russians see the West as washed out, empty of
sense and value, bereft of a vital tie with the Absolute, enslaved by its attachment to realitys material side,
atomized and disintegrated,23 thereby petrifying its Fallen state in which it found itself by reason of its own
principles and from which it is powerless to exit unaided. With recourse to a symptomatic example: Socialism, wrote Herzen, is a
religion of man, a religion of the earth, without a heaven; the fulfillment of Christianity and the realization of the revolution is a
society without government (. . .). The social idea can be the testament, the ultimate will, boundary, beyond which the Western
world will no longer be able to move. It can also be the ceremonious entrance into another existence, the vision of the male toga.
From the standpoint of
Europe is by far too rich to risk this; it has too many things to preserve . . .24
Western consciousness Russia is perceived on the other hand as a retarded
world, situated at an earlier, inferior stage of development, out of
which the West has already grown, having freed itself from the
desire for a naive synthesis and mythical oneness, [which are]
dangerous for the real autonomy of the individual in society,
undermine the distinctiveness of particular types of knowledge or
spheres of action. Russia is seen as a land still in the precritical phase,
characterized by Utopian attitudes, ambitions and thinking. The
relationship of Russians to Europe who are aware that they and
Russia as a whole are perceived this way has a certain relative character and, to use
Isaiah Berlins words, is conditioned by a singular amalgam of love and hate. On one side, there is an
evident intellectual respect, envy, awe, a sense of rivalry and surpassment; on the other,
a feeling of enmity, suspicion and resentment, as well as the feeling
that compared with Europe Russians are awkward, de trop, that they
do not belong to it. (. . .) in the eyes of Russians the West is
prospering, it is remarkably organized, intelligent and efficient, but at
the same time it is artificial, cold, calculating, shut up in itself,
incapable of great deeds and true emotions, of deep feelings which from
time to time have violently to rise forth from the fringes, of suffering renouncements in the name of certain unusual
historical challenges, and as a consequence it is condemned never to understand life in its fullness.25

These discrete views of Russia re-entrench universalizing

and Eurocentric mentalities. Vote Aff to reject

Broda 2k2 (Marian, Russia and the West: The Root of the
Problem of Mutual Understanding, Studies in East
European Thought; Mar2002, Vol. 54 Issue 1/2, p7-24)

What is more, they are treated not as independent but as de facto

dependent variables infused with a content judged to be the one they
should have in order to explain all the meanderings of Russian
history or enable deductions of its future. This occurs likewise when
an initiational meaning is ascribed to the given determinations of
Russias fate. In what was to become for this line of thought a highly significant
formulation, Vladimir Solovv wrote: The vocation, or that singular idea which Gods thought
intends for each moral entity the individual or the nation , and which is revealed to the
consciousness of that entity as its utmost obligation, acts in all cases on the being of the moral
entity, doing so, however, in two ways: its reveals itself as the law of life, when the obligation
is fulfilled, and as the law of death, when this has not occurred.9 The latter perspective in turn
conceals the scale of difficulties necessarily arising in conjunction with the need to clarify the
real extent of Russias empirically given distinctiveness, as opposed to the kind of marginality
ascribed to it on the basis of universalistic theoretical models. In the latter case, the extent of
Russias specificity fails to acquire a neutral account, but is instead
reified within ad hoc reductionist explanatory schemata favoring the
polarization of perceptions of Russian reality, its dismantling into
contrasting and absolutized extremes of normalcy and
strangeness (chudachnost). Closer attention should be paid, in my
opinion, to the by far more widespread conviction regarding the
singular significance and distinctive character of the cultural-mental
sphere in Russias historical destiny. Possibly, they are unwittingly
exaggerated, given Russias relatively greater untypicality (in
comparison withWestern nations) in relation toWestern theoretical
models, which are characterized by universalist intentions and a
recalcitrant eurocentrism.

Western images of Russia as nave or wild affect Russian

existence and create a self-fulfilling prophecythis turns
case
Zinik 2k4 (Zinovy, The Neighbours Fence: On Russian
Self-Alienation, 2004, http://www.sakharov-
museum.ru/museum/exhibitionhall/religion_notabene/zzini
k2004.htm)

The
The Western image of Russia - Russia as seen under Western eyes - has a crucial importance, too.
Western imagination tends to create an image of either uniquely
naive or uniquely wild Barbarians to extol the glory of our own
sophisticated civilisation. But what we think of as typically and
uniquely Russian most probably originated in the West. Stereotypes
are confusing and misleading. The legendary national habits usually betray the reverse
side of the national character such as the ostentatious Russian hospitality in a country notorious for its
xenophobia. Even Soviet kitsch, the most famous example of which is Lenin's Tomb in Red Square - the
Mausoleum, built in late the 1920s, was created after the Western fashion for everything Egyptian, after
the discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen, which coincided with the death of the Leader of the Great
Russia, according to an ironical observation of Anthony Burgess, is "the
Russian Revolution.
subconscious of the West". Therefore, the Western perception or
misconception of things Russian, do somehow affect Russian
existence itself. People begin to behave the way we see them, like
punks who play up their own ugliness in anticipation of our
revulsion.

Cross apply Santos from case

 AT: Russia Accidental Launch
Preventitive measures make risk of war zero

Ryabikhin et al 9 (Dr. Leonid Ryabikhin, [expert of the

Russian Science Committee for Global Security], General
(Ret.) Viktor Koltunov, Dr. Eugene Miasnikov, June 2009,
De-alerting: Decreasing the Operational Readiness of
Strategic Nuclear Forces,
http://www.ewi.info/system/files/RyabikhinKoltunovMiasni
kov.pdf //DF)

states have
The issue of the possibility of an accidental nuclear war itself is hypothetical. Both
developed and implemented constructive organizational and
technical measures that practically exclude launches resulting from
unauthorized action of personnel or terrorists. Nuclear weapons are
maintained under very strict system of control that excludes any
accidental or unauthorized use and guarantees that these weapons
can only be used provided that there is an appropriate authorization
by the national leadership. Besides that it should be mentioned that even the Soviet
Union and the United States had taken important bilateral steps
toward decreasing the risk of accidental nuclear conflict. Direct
emergency telephone red line has been established between the
White House and the Kremlin in 1963. In 1971 the USSR and USA signed
the Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Nuclear War Threat. This
Agreement established the actions of each side in case of even a
hypothetical accidental missile launch and it contains the
requirements for the owner of the launched missile to deactivate
and eliminate the missile. Both the Soviet Union and 5 the United States have developed
proper measures to observe the agreed requirements.

Early warning systems guarantee no war

NTRC 08 (Nuclear Threat Reductions Campaign U.S.-
Russian Ballistic-Missile Early-Warming Cooperation
http://www.veteransforamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/22-early-
warning-final.pdf //DF)

The United States combination of space-based sensors and land-

based radars provides reliable assurance that a missile attack from
Russia would be detected, verified, and tracked with a high degree
of confidence. Consequently, Russia is assured that the U.S. will not
perceive an attack erroneously and launch a retaliatory blow by
mistake. Russias early-warning (E-W) network as originally constructed by the
Soviet Union was similarly designed to provide notice of a missile attack
from multiple sources providing overlapping verification . Today, more than
a decade after the Soviet collapse, that now-Russian E-W system is so riddled with gaps and potential
defects that a May 2003 RAND study described it as being in tatters.2

Russias upgrading their early warning systems- no

chance of miscalc

Podvig 11 (Pavel, Spring 2011, [Center for Arms Control

Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Tech. PhD
in political science, Moscow Institute of World Economy
and International Relations,] Russias Nuclear Forces:
Between Disarmament and Modernization, http://iis-
db.stanford.edu/pubs/23256/IFRI_pp37podvig.pdf //DF)

The modernization program is not limited to the offensive strategic triad. Russia is also carrying out
a number of programs that would strengthen the infrastructure
that supports operations of its nuclear forces. As part of this effort, Russia is
undertaking a major upgrade of its network of early-warning
radars, which suffered substantial losses as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union. In 2002 it
brought into operation a radar in Baranovichi, Belarus, and in
subsequent years it completed the construction of two new-
generation radars in Lekhtusi, near St-Petersburg and Armavir. These radars are
expected to begin combat service in the near future. Two more new-
generation radars are being built in the Kaliningrad region and near Irkutsk, and one more is
planned in Barnaul. The Space Forces, which operate the early-warning
system, announced the plan to eventually replace all early-warning
radars built in the Soviet Union by radars of new generations . .
 AT Russia: Corruption

Western discourse has replaced communism with

corruption in its anti-Russian rhetoric

Yurchak 99 (Alexei, Entrepreneurial Governmentality in

Post-Socialist Russia, in The New Entrepreneurs of
Europe and Asia, edited by Victoria Bonnell and Thomas
Gold, 2002, M.E. Sharpe publishing)

In much of the Western discourse about Russia today the term

corruption seems to play the role once reserved for the term
Communism. A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, tellingly entitled The New
Russian Menace, remarked: The struggle of the last half century was to
defeat Communism; the challenge in the years ahead will be to
constrain corruption. The second struggle may well prove more
difficult, because avarice is a more fundamental aspect of human
nature than the Communist precept that people are subject to historical determinist
forces beyond the individual s control. [W]e have an obligation to insure that the
corrosive impact of foreign corruption is blocked from our shores.
America may be as challenged today by the threat of a deterioration
of values galloping corruption as it was yesterday by Marxist
ideology.
 AT Russia: Opposing Russian heg

Opposing Russian hegemony is unabashedly anti-Russian

and reinscribes a Western outlook

Trenin 2k4 (Dmitri, Russias Restless Frontier: the

Chechnya Factor in post-Soviet Russia, p. 202, Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C.)

Among Russias security, foreign policy, and military elites, the

traditional geopolitical world outlook was strengthened by
skepticism regarding Western views of Moscows policies in Central
Asia and the Caucasus (including Chechnya). The new Western image of
Russia was of a revanchist state seeking to use its military superiority
over weak and defenseless neighbors to regain dominance and
control their resources. This perspective led logically to a U.S. policy
toward opposing Russian hegemonistic ambitions. American
encouragement of a geopolitical pluralism in the former Soviet
south was perceived in Moscow as unabashedly anti-Russian.
AT Russia: Russia is (authoritarian, totalitarian,
bureaucratic, inept)

Calling Russia ( ) is part of Western discourses

strategy for ensuring Russia remains separate from the
civilized world, rendering it expendable

Zinik 2k4 (Zinovy, The Neighbours Fence: On Russian

Self-Alienation, 2004, http://www.sakharov-
museum.ru/museum/exhibitionhall/religion_notabene/zzini
k2004.htm)

The vision of Russia in the West is a double one. There is an image of

Russia as the most backward country in the world. Epithets such as
authoritarian, totalitarian, tyrannical, bureaucratic, corrupt and
technologically retarded are indispensable for taking part in any
intelligent exchange of opinions on Russia in Britain. One way or the
other, Russia is not part of the civilized Western world - Asia, most
probably, Byzantium, maybe. This image somehow doesn't exclude praise for the overrated
artistic achievements of the Russian intelligentsia which are perceived by the same chattering classes in
Britain as a persecuted minority's fight against the oppressive state with a writer's quill and an artist's
brush. We tend to forget that the Soviet system had nourished its intelligentsia as a propaganda tool in the
process of brainwashing the masses; on the whole, the intelligentsia accepted this role willingly in
exchange for bonuses and privileges. After the collapse of the Soviet system, it was primarily the
intelligentsia's tarnished image that suffered first. People were left without their guiding mentors.
 AT: But we include Russia/ PERM

Attempts (like the perm) to integrate Russia with the

West that fail to consider reps first fail

Broda 2k2 (Marian, Russia and the West: The Root of the
Problem of Mutual Understanding, Studies in East
European Thought; Mar2002, Vol. 54 Issue 1/2, p7-24)

For several centuries one of the most pressing problems within the Russian
intellectual tradition has been the relation between Russia and the West. In
the nineteenth, but especially in the 20th centuries, the growth first of
the tsarist, then the communist empires brought the question of
Russia to the forefront of the Western mind. Among the complex and
multifarious questions tied to their relations, the question of their mutual
understanding retains a vital and fundamental place, it implies a real
cognitive grasp of the partner, the possibility of communication, as well as an authentic and
fruitful dialogue with him. It is noteworthy that the widespread conviction about the difficulties,
indeed the impossibility of this kind of understanding arises as much in Russia as in Europe
with equally categorical affirmations regarding the other side, with evaluations and
reservations formulated in a most assured and certain manner and carrying a high degree of
conviction as to the self-evidence of the truths affirmed regarding the other side. But views
about the radical opposition and incommensurability of both
cultures and systems of values are often accompanied by equally
hasty projects seeking axiological and intellectual syntheses or visions
of some imminent and harmonious communion of the West and
Russia. Resisting the temptation of leaping to facile last words on
the subject, let us try to look more closely at some of the aspects and
conditions involved.
 AT Russia: We Know How to Relate to Russia/
Russia is Not That Different

The West is unable to relate to Russia because Russia is

not entirely Other. This tension is internalized by Russians
and makes them feel ashamed and inferior

Broda 2k2 (Marian, Russia and the West: The Root of the
Problem of Mutual Understanding, Studies in East
European Thought; Mar2002, Vol. 54 Issue 1/2, p7-24)
The Western image of Russia, which was all the more complicated by reason of the
Slavophile-Westernizer conflict, was divided between two opposing tendencies .
Either no attention was paid to this conflict and everything in Russia, including Westernism
itself, was seen as the expression of a non-European, Asiatic,
mongolian soul, or else the exaggeratedly European Westernizers
were contrasted with everything Russian, and then imagined as partners in political
or ideological dialogue. The mind and consciousness of the West
were treated as universal categories, nonchalantly contrasted on
both counts with the extreme anachronism or even pre-scientific
standing of the Russian mind and consciousness (though it was allowed that the
Russian Westernizers could be considered in light of the latter). The modes of mutual perception bear the
weight of numerous stereotypes resulting from, among other things, considering the partners mental and
socio-cultural reality as if it were a faithful copy of abstract ideal types or in fact a hypostasized fantasy. In
the West fails to notice that the characteristic tendency of
this case,
Russian mentality and culture to strive for eschatological totality, which is to
overcome differentiation, limitations, and contradictions, is
conceived above all as a task still to be carried out or a state the coming of
which is anticipated or felt rather than merely noted in its fulfillment in the space of Russian facticity. Nor
does the West appreciate that for post-petrine Russia, the reality and dynamics of which are determined by
the co-presence and interaction of autochthonous and Western factors, indigenous Russianness or pure
Europeanness are but abstractions the content of which is de facto highly speculative and constructed.
As Dimitr Prigov pertinently observes,
the Western world is unable, as it were, to
discover the right way to approach Russia, it lacks the ability to distinguish . . .
what here belongs to custom within family life, what belongs to ritual, religion, culture. From the outset,
everything appears to it as a unitary phenomenon, it freely mixes these spheres with one another. The
more this phenomenon is indivisible, the more it is understood to be puzzling and fascinating.29 Russia,
on the other hand, in regarding the West as drained of values, lacking the experience of the sacred,
deprived of oneness, and reduced to the merely empirical, does not notice or minimizes the fact that
allegedly absent forms of reflection or spiritual experience can in fact be found in Western religion,
mysticism, theology or in certain types of philosophy, literature, and art. What is less marked and by far
less common in the West is the tendency to inscribe such forms and experiences into every affirmation,
system, discursive formation, type of knowledge. In this way, the otherwise well-marked contrast between
the West and Russia is overstated. A tendency, however legitimate culturally, is not the same thing as
facticity, and a postulated or sought after final state of affairs does not imply its effective, actualized
realization. Quite to the contrary. Differentiation and specialization, likewise the fragmentariness and
onesidedness of individual elements, of actions and cultural products, is of course equally true of Russian
reality, though it is less than easy to talk in this case about the autotelic value of the autonomy they have
acquired. There is also a keenly felt need to overcome this autonomy or to restrict it within the scope of
the final higher synthesis (all-unity). RUSSIA AND THE WEST It would be a mistake to overestimate, but
also to minimize, the degree of similarity (and kinship) between Russia and the West, and likewise the
degree of mutual dissimilarity between them. The Russians have been aware of this for a long time. The
picture that Pyotr Chaadaev drew of Russia was hardly in simple
contrast to that of the Western Europe, compared with China or
India as societies with entirely distinct traditions and sets of values.
But there is in his work still another motif which, once generalized, became the constant frame of
reference of Russian consciousness. Our foreign upbringing, Chadaaev averred, obliges us to cleave
closely to Europe, to such an extent that, although we have not appropriated her idea, we have no
language other than the one she speaks; in this way there is nothing else left for us to do but to speak this
language.30 For the Russian intelligentsia, the consciousness of Western mediation became a quite
specific experience of initiation. Depending on the degree to which its own historical-cultural genesis and
identity were tied to the European universal education (Herzens phrase) being an intelligent and
[w]e continue to
Russian took on distinctively ambivalent tones. Herzen wrote that,
perceive Europe and Europeans the way people from the provinces
perceive city dwellers, with a sense of inferiority and personal guilt,
and we consider every difference as a fault, blushing for our
particular traits, concealing them, undergoing influences and
imitating.31 Of a no less reactive, though concealed, character is the diametrically opposite
attitude, which glorifies Russias cultural, spiritual, intellectual, social or great-power superiority. In this
case, the West is the constant though only tacitly assumed point of self-determining reference.
Russians claims about Russias special value or vocation are rarely
put forward in the absence of a contrastive comparison with the
West, and the long and rich tradition of associated justifications suggests even as it conceals
an element of self-persuasion.
 AT Russia: Realism
The Aff is a pre-req- only after we re-examine Western
representations of Russia can we genuinely do politics
with Russia
Miller2k9(Alexei,RussiaMustBeConfidentinItsProspectsfor
MembershipinWesternOrganizations,9/28/09,
http://en.rian.ru/valdai_op/20090928/156272946.html)

Aretheirexamplesfromhistory,whenWesterndiscourseaboutRussiasubstantiallychangedforthe
better?ThishappenedwhentheWestorindividualWesterncountriesneededRussiaasanallyin
thestruggleagainstaseriousthreat.Therefore,itispossibletomakeseveralpoints.First,theWest
maychangethisalienatingdiscourseifkeyWesternideologistsdeemitnecessary.Simple
normalizationofattitudestowardsRussiaaftertheendoftheColdWarsacuteconfrontationis
impossiblebecauseofthisdiscoursespowerfulinertia,andtheinvariablepresenceofpoliticalforces
strivingtosupportitforthesakeoftheirowninterests.OnlyiftheWestdecidestoinviteRussiato
becomeitsally,andRussiaisreadytoacceptthisinvitation,willweseethemarginalization,ifnot
thecompletion,ofthetwocenturieslongdiscourseofRussiaasEuropesconstitutiveOther
Saudi DA
 2AC
Their link card is terrible- yes it says Saudis fear US
abandoning the region but doesnt make the next
necessary statement which is that means relations go
down- much more likely Saudi Arabia tries to repair
relations since they consider them strong
This is the flaw within the epistemology of paranoia-
always assumes aggression and enemies instead of
reconciliation and understanding- reject this scholarship

New proliferators will build small arsenals which are

uniquely stable

Seng 98
(Jordan, PhD Candidate in Pol. Sci. U. Chicago, Dissertation, Strategy for Pandora's Children:
Stable Nuclear Proliferation Among Minor States, p. 203-206)//TR

The nuclear arsenals of

However, this "state of affairs" is not as dangerous as it might seem.
limited nuclear proliferators will be small and, consequently, the
command and control organizations that manage chose arsenals will be small as well. The small
arsenals of limited nuclear proliferators will mitigate against many of the dangers
of the highly delegative, 'non-centralized' launch procedures Third World
states are likely to use. This will happen in two main ways. First, only a small number of
people need be involved in Third World command and control. The
superpowers had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and thousands of nuclear weapons personnel in a
variety of deployments organized around numerous nuclear delivery platforms. A state that has, say, fifty
nuclear weapons needs at most fifty launch operators and only a handful of group commanders. This has
Quantitatively, the very small number
both quantitative and qualitative repercussions.
of people 'in the loop' greatly diminishes the statistical probability
that accidents or human error will result in inappropriate nuclear
launches. All else being equal, the chances of finding some guard asleep at some post increases with
the number of guards and posts one has to cover. Qualitatively, small numbers makes
it possible to centrally train operators, to screen and choose them
with exceeding care, 7 and to keep each of them in direct contact
with central authorities in times of crises. With very small control communities,
there is no need for intermediary commanders. Important information and instructions can get out quickly
and directly. Quality control of launch operators and operations is easier. In some part, at least, Third World
states can compensate for their lack of sophisticated use-control technology with a more controlled
Secondly, and
selection of, and more extensive communication with, human operators.
relatedly, Third World proliferators will not need to rely on
cumbersome standard operating procedures to manage and launch
their nuclear weapons. This is because the number of weapons will be so small, and also
because the arsenals will be very simple in composition. Third World stares simply will
not have that many weapons to keep track of. Third World states will not have the
great variety of delivery platforms that the superpowers had (various ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, long
range bombers, fighter bombers, missile submarines, nuclear armed ships, nuclear mortars, etc., etc.), or
the great number and variety of basing options, and they will not employ the complicated strategies of
international basing that the superpowers used. The small and simple arsenals of Third World proliferators
 This creates two
will not require highly complex systems to coordinate nuclear activities.
specific organizational advantages. One, small organizations, even if
they do rely to some extent of standard operating procedures, can
be flexible in times of crisis. As we have discussed, the essential problem of standard
operating procedures in nuclear launch processes is that the full range if possible strategic developments
cannot be predicted and specified before the fact, and thus responses to them cannot be standardized
fully. An unexpected event can lead to 'mismatched' and inappropriate organizational reactions. In complex
and extensive command and control organizations, standard operating procedures coordinate great
numbers of people at numerous levels of command structure in a great multiplicity of places. If an
unexpected event triggers operating procedures leading to what would be an inappropriate nuclear launch,
it would be very difficult for central commanders to get the word out' to everyone involved. The
coordination needed to stop launch activity would be at least as complicated as the coordination needed to
initiate it, and, depending on the speed of launch processes, there may be less time to accomplish it.
the small numbers of people involved in nuclear launches and
However,
the simplicity of arsenals will make it far easier for Third World
leaders to 'get the word out' and reverse launch procedures if
necessary. Again, so few will be the numbers of weapons that all launch operators could be contacted
directly by central leaders. The programmed triggers of standard operating procedures can be passed over
in favor of unscripted, flexible responses based on a limited number of human-to-human communications
Two, the smallness and simplicity of Third World
and confirmations.
command and control organizations will make it easier for leaders to
keep track of everything that is going on at any given moment. One
of the great dangers of complex organizational procedures is that
once one organizational event is triggeredonce an alarm is sounded and a
programmed response is madeother branches of the organization are likely to
be affected as well. This is what Charles Perrow refers to as interactive complexity, 8 and it has
been a mainstay in organizational critiques of nuclear command and control s ystems.9 The more complex
the organization is, the more likely these secondary effects are, and the less likely they are to be foreseen,
noticed, and well-managed. So, for instance, an American commander that gives the order to scramble
nuclear bombers over the U.S. as a defensive measure may find that he has unwittingly given the order to
scramble bombers in Europe as well. A recall order to the American bombers may overlook the European
However, when numbers of nuclear
theater, and nuclear misuse could result.
weapons can be measured in the dozens rather than the hundreds or thousands, and
when deployment of those weapons does not involve multiple theaters and forward based delivery
tight coupling is unlikely to cause unforeseen and
vehicles of numerous types,
unnoticeable organizational events. Other things being equal, it is just a lot easier to
know all of what is going on. In short, while Third World states may nor have the electronic use-control
devices that help ensure that peripheral commanders do nor 'get out of control,' they have other
The
advantages that make the challenge of centralized control easier than it was for the superpowers.
small numbers of personnel and organizational simplicity of launch
bureaucracies means that even if a few more people have their
fingers on the button than in the case of the superpowers, there will
be less of a chance that weapons will be launched without a definite ,
informed and unambiguous decision to press that button.

Uncertainty solves war

Karl 97
president of the Asia Strategy Initiative and a lecturer in IR, USC (David, Winter, Proliferation
Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2539274?seq=9)//TR

Optimists have relaxed views of the preventive-war dangers entailed in situations in which a nuclear power
The practical difficulties of ensuring a disarming
confronts a nuclearizing rival.
strike to preclude any possibility of nuclear retaliation make
preventive actions a military gamble that states are very unlikely to
take. As Waltz explains, "prevention and pre-emption are difficult games because the costs are so high if
the games are not perfectly played. . . . Ultimately, the inhibitions [against such attacks] lie in the
impossibility of knowing for sure that a disarming strike will totally destroy an opposing force and in the
states will have to
immense destruction even a few warheads can wreak." 25 To optimists,
learn to live with a rival's emerging nuclear armory. Because
strategic uncertainty is seen as having a powerful dissuasive effect,
optimists usually view the very increase in the numbers of nuclear-
armed states as an additional element of stability . Dagobert Brito and Michael
Intriligator, for instance, argue that uncertainty over the reaction of other nuclear powers will make all
hesitant to strike individually. 26 As an example, they point to the restraint the superpowers exercised on
each other in the 1960s, when first the United States and then the Soviet Union contemplated military
The net effect of the uncertain
action against China's nascent nuclear weapon sites.
reaction of others is that "the probability of deliberate nuclear
attack falls to near zero with three, four, or more nuclear nations." 27
Similarly, Waltz reasons that even in cases of asymmetric proliferation within
conflict dyads, nuclear weapons will prove "poor instruments for
blackmail" because a "country that takes the nuclear offensive has to fear an appropriately punishing
strike by someone. Far from lowering the expected cost of aggression, a nuclear offense even against a
non-nuclear state raises the possible costs of aggression to incalculable heights because the aggressor
cannot be sure of the reaction of other nuclear powers."28

Deterrence failure is very unlikely and conventional war is

worse. Proliferation saves far more lives than it costs.

Preston 7
(Thomas, Associate Prof. IRWashington State U. and Faculty Research AssociateMoynihan
Institute of Global Affairs, From Lambs to Lions: Future Security relationships in a World of
Biological and Nuclear Weapons, p. 31-32)

1.) The Cost of Deterrence Failure Is Too GreatAdvocates of deterrence seldom take
the position that it will always work or that it cannot fail. Rather,
they take the position that if one can achieve the requisite elements required to achieve a
stable deterrent relationship between parties, it vastly decreases the chances of
miscalculation and resorting to wareven in contexts where it might
otherwise be expected to occur (George and Smoke 1974; Harvey 1997a; Powell 1990,
2003; Goldstein 2000). Unfortunately, critics of deterrence take the understandable, if
unrealistic, position that if deterrence cannot be 100 percent
effective under all circumstances, then it is an unsound strategic
approach for states to rely upon, especially considering the immense destructiveness of nuclear
weapons. Feaver (1993, 162), for example, criticizes reliance on nuclear deterrence because it can fail and
that rational deterrence theory can only predict that peace should occur most of the time (e.g., Lebow and
Yet, were we to apply this standard of perfection to most
Stein 1989).
other policy approaches concerning security matters whether it be
arms control or proliferation regime efforts, military procurement
policies, alliance formation strategies, diplomacy, or sanctions none could be
argued with any more certainty to completely remove the threat of equally
devastating wars either. Indeed, one could easily make the argument that these
alternative means have shown themselves historically to be far less
effective than nuclear arms in preventing wars. Certainly, the twentieth
century was replete with examples of devastating conventional
conflicts which were not deterred through nonnuclear measures .
Although the potential costs of a nuclear exchange between small
states would indeed cause a frightful loss of life, it would be no more
costly (and likely far less so) than large-scale conventional conflicts have
been for combatants. Moreover, if nuclear deterrence raises the
potential costs of war high enough for policy makers to want to
avoid (rather than risk) conflict, it is just as legitimate (if not more so) for
optimists to argue in favor of nuclear deterrence in terms of the
lives saved through the avoidance of far more likely recourses to
conventional wars, as it is for pessimists to warn of the potential costs of deterrence failure. And,
while some accounts describing the "immense weaknesses" of deterrence theory (Lebow and Stein 1989,
1990) would lead one to believe deterrence was almost impossible to either obtain or maintain, since 1945
there has not been one single historical instance of nuclear deterrence failure (especially when this notion
is limited to threats to key central state interests like survival, and not to minor probing of peripheral
the actual costs of twentieth-century conventional
interests). Moreover,
conflicts have been staggeringly immense, especially when
compared to the actual costs of nuclear conflicts (for example, 210,000
fatalities in the combined 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic
bombings compared to 62 million killed overall during World War II ,
over three million dead in both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, etc.) (McKinzie et al. 2001, 28).3 Further,
as Gray (1999, 158-59) observes, "it
is improbable that policymakers anywhere
need to be educated as to the extraordinary qualities and quantities
of nuclear armaments." Indeed, the high costs and uncontestable,
immense levels of destruction that would be caused by nuclear weapons
have been shown historically to be facts that have not only been readily apparent and salient to a wide
have clearly been demonstrated to
range of policy makers, but ones that
moderate extreme policy or risk-taking behavior (Blight 1992; Preston 2001)
Could it go wrong? Of course. There is always that potential with human beings in the loop. Nevertheless, it
has also been shown to be effective at moderating policy maker behavior and introducing an element of
constraint into situations that otherwise would likely have resulted in war (Hagerty 1998).

No chance of miscalc or accidentsthis evidence answers

all their arguments and is way better

Quinlan 9
(Sir Michael Quinlan, Former Permanent Under-Secretary of State UK Ministry of Defense,
Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects, p. 63-69, The book reflects
the author's experience across more than forty years in assessing and forming policy about
nuclear weapons, mostly at senior levels close to the centre both of British governmental
decision-making and of NATO's development of plans and deployments, with much interaction
also with comparable levels of United States activity in the Pentagon and the State
department) //TR

Even if initial nuclear use did not quickly end the fighting, the supposition of inexorable momentum in a
overreaction amid confusion and
developing exchange, with each side rushing to
uncertainty, is implausible. It fails to consider what the situation of
the decision-makers would really be. Neither side could want
escalation. Both would be appalled at what was going on. Both
would be desperately looking for signs that the other was ready to
call a halt. Both, given the capacity for evasion or concealment
which drive modern delivery platforms and vehicles can possess,
could have in reserve significant forces invulnerable enough not to
entail use-or-lose pressures. (It may be more open to question, as noted earlier, whether
newer nuclear weapon possessors can be immediately in that position; but it is within reach of any
substantial state with advanced technological capabilities and attaining it is certain to be a high priority in
neither side can have any predisposition to
the development of forces.) As a result,
suppose, in an ambiguous situation of fearful risk, that the right
course when in doubt is to go on copiously launching weapons. And
none of this analysis rests on any presumption of highly subtle or pre-concerted rationality. The rationality
required is plain. The argument is reinforced if we consider the possible reasoning of an aggressor at a
more dispassionate level. Any substantial nuclear armoury can inflict destruction outweighing any possible
prize that aggression could hope to seize. A state attacking the possessor of such an armoury must
therefore be doing so (once given that it cannot count upon destroying the armoury pre-emptively) on a
judgment that the possessor would be found lacking in the will to use it. If the attacker possessor used
nuclear weapons, whether first or in response to the aggressors own first use, this judgment would begin
to look dangerously precarious. There must be at least a substantial probability of the aggressor leaders
concluding that their initial judgment had been mistakenthat the risks were after all greater than
whatever prize they had been seeking, and that for their own countrys survival they must call off the
aggression. Deterrence planning such as that of NATO was directed in the first place to preventing the
initial misjudgment and in the second, if it were nevertheless made, to compelling such a reappraisal. The
former aim had to have primacy, because it could not be taken for granted that the latter was certain to
work. But there was no ground for assuming in advance, for all possible scenarios, that the chance of its
working must be negligible. An aggressor state would itself be at huge risk if nuclear war developed, as its
leaders would know. It may be argued that a policy which abandons hope of physically defeating the
enemy and simply hopes to get him to desist is pure gamble, a matter of who blinks first; and that the
political and moral nature of most likely aggressors, almost ex hypothesi, makes them less likely to blink.
One response to this is to ask what is the alternativeit can be only surrender. But a more hopeful answer
lies in the fact that the criticism is posed in a political vacuum. Real-life conflict would have a political
context. The context which concerned NATO during the Cold War, for example, was one of defending vital
interests against a postulated aggressor whose own vital interests would not be engaged or would be less
engaged. Certainty is not possible, but a clear asymmetry of vital interest is a legitimate basis for
expecting an asymmetry, credible to both sides, of resolve in conflict. That places upon statesmen, as
page 23 has noted, the key task in deterrence of building up in advance a clear and shared grasp of where
limits lie. That was plainly achieved in cold-war Europe. If vital interests have been defused in a way that is
clear, and also clearly not overlapping or incompatible with those of the adversary; a credible basis has
been laid for the likelihood of greater resolve in resistance. It was also sometimes suggested by critics that
whatever might be indicated by theoretical discussion of political will and interests, the military
environment of nuclear warfare particularly difficulties of communication and controlwould drive
escalation with overwhelming probability to the limit. But it is obscure why matters should be regarded as
inevitably so for every possible level and setting of action. Even if the history of war suggested (as it
scarcely does) that military decision-makers are mostly apt to work on the principle When in doubt, lash
out, the nuclear revolution creates an utterly new situation. The pervasive reality, always plain to both
sides during the cold war, is if this goes on to the end, we are all ruined. Given that inexorable escalation
would mean catastrophe for both, it would be perverse to suppose them permanently incapable of framing
arrangements which avoid it. As page 16 has noted, NATO gave its military commanders no widespread
delegated authority, in peace or war, to launch nuclear weapons without specific political direction.
Many types of weapon moreover had physical safeguards such as
PALS incorporated to reinforce organizational ones. There were
multiple communication and control systems for passing
information, orders, and prohibitions. Such systems could not be totally guaranteed against
disruption if at a fairly intense level at strategic exchangewhich was only one of many possible levels of
conflict an adversary judged it to be in his interest to weaken political control. It was far from clear why
he necessarily should so judge. Even then, however, it remained possible to operate on a general tail-safe
presumption: no authorization, no use. That was the basis on which NATO operated. If it is feared that the
arrangements which a nuclear-weapon possessor has in place do not meet such standards in some
respects, the logical course is to continue to improve them rather than to assume escalation to be certain
and uncontrollable, with all the enormous inferences that would have to flow from such an assumption. The
likelihood of escalation can never be 100 per cent, and never zero. Where between those two extremes it
may lie can never be precisely calculable in advance; and even were it so calculable, it would not be
uniquely fixedit would stand to vary hugely with circumstances. That there should be any risk at all of
escalation to widespread nuclear war must be deeply disturbing, and decision-makers would always have
to weigh it most anxiously. But a pair of key truths about it need to be recognized. The first is that the risk
of escalation to large-scale nuclear war is inescapably present in any significant armed conflict between
nuclear-capable powers, whoever may have started the conflict and whoever may first have used any
particular category of weapon. The initiator of the conflict will always have physically available to him
options for applying more force if he meets effective resistance. If the risk of escalation, whatever its
degree of probability, is to be regarded as absolutely unacceptable, the necessary inference is that a state
attacked by a substantial nuclear power must forgo military resistance. It must surrender, even if it has a
nuclear armory of its own. But the companion truth is that, as page 47 has noted, the risk of escalation is
an inescapable burden also upon the aggressor. The exploitation of that burden is the crucial route, if
conflict does break out, for managing it to a tolerable outcomethe only route, indeed, intermediate
between surrender and holocaust, and so the necessary basis for deterrence beforehand. The working nut
of plans to exploit escalation risk most effectively in deterring potential aggression entails further and
complex issues. It is for example plainly desirable, wherever geography, politics, and available resources
so permit without triggering arms races, to make provisions and dispositions that are likely to place the
onus of making the bigger and more evidently dangerous steps in escalation upon the aggressor who
wishes to maintain his attack, rather than upon the defender. The customary shorthand fur this desirable
posture used to be escalation dominance.) These issues are not further discussed here. But addressing
them needs to start from acknowledgement that there are in any event no certainties or absolutes
available, no options guaranteed to be risk-free and cost-free. Deterrence is not possible without escalation
risk; and its presence can point to no automatic policy conclusion save for those who espouse outright
pacifism and accept its consequences. Accident and Miscalculation Ensuring the safety and security of
nuclear weapons plainly needs to be taken most seriously. Detailed information is understandably not
published, but such direct evidence as there is suggests that it always has been so taken in every
possessor state, with the inevitable occasional failures to follow strict procedures dealt with rigorously.
Critics have nevertheless from time to time argued that the possibility of accident involving nuclear
weapons is so substantial that it must weigh heavily in the entire evaluation of whether war-prevention
structures entailing their existence should be tolerated at all. Two sorts of scenario are usually in question.
The first is that of a single grave event involving an unintended nuclear explosiona technical disaster at
a storage site, for example, or the accidental or unauthorized launch of a delivery system with a live
nuclear warhead. The second is that of some eventperhaps such an explosion or launch, or some other
mishap such as malfunction or misinterpretation of radar signals or computer systemsinitiating a
sequence of response and counter-response that culminated in a nuclear exchange which no one had truly
intended. No event that is physically possible can be said to be of absolutely zero probability (just as at an
opposite extremer it is absurd to claim, as has been heard from distinguished figures, that nuclear-weapon
use can be guaranteed to happen within some finite future span despite not having happened for over
sixty years.) But human affairs cannot be managed to the standard of either zero or total probability. We
have to assess levels between those theoretical limits and weigh the reality and implications against other
There have certainly been, across the
factors, in security planning as in everyday life
decades since 1945, many known accidents involving nuclear weapons, from
transporters skidding off roads to bomber aircraft crashing with or accidentally dropping the weapons they
carried (in past days when such carriage was a frequent feature of readiness arrangements it no longer is).
A few of these accidents may have released into the nearby environment highly toxic material.None
however has entailed a nuclear detonation. Some commentators suggest that this
reflects bizarrely good fortune amid such massive activity and deployment over so many years. A
more rational deduction from the facts of this long experience would
however be that the probability of any accident triggering a nuclear
explosion is extremely low. It might be further nested that the
mechanisms needed to set of such an explosion are technically
demanding, and that in a large number of ways the past sixty years
have seen extensive improvements in safety arrangements for both
the design and the handling of weapons. It is undoubtedly possible to see respects in
which, after the cold war, some of the factors bearing upon risk may be new or more adverse; but some
The years which the world has come through entirely
are now plainly less so.
without accidental or unauthorized detonation have included early
decades in which knowledge was sketchier, precautions were less
developed, and weapon designs were less ultra-safe than they later became,
as well as substantial periods in which weapon numbers were larger, deployments immure widespread arid
diverse, movements more frequent, and several aspects of doctrine and readiness arrangements more
tense. Similar considerations apply to the hypothesis of nuclear war being mistakenly triggered by false
alarm. Critics again point to the fact, as it is understood, of numerous occasions when initial steps in alert
sequences for US nuclear forces were embarked upon, or at least called for, by indicators mistaken or
In none of these instances, it is accepted, did matters get
misconstrued.
at all near to nuclear launchextraordinary good fortune again, critics have suggested. But
the rival and more logical inference from hundreds of events
stretching over sixty years of experience presents itself once more:
that the probability of initial misinterpretation leading far towards
mistaken launch is remote. Precisely because any nuclear weapon
processor recognizes the vast gravity of any launch, release
sequences have many steps, and human decision is repeatedly
interposed as well as capping the sequences. To convey that because a first step
was prompted the world somehow came close to accidental nuclear war is wild hyperbole, rather like
asserting, when a tennis champion has lost his opening service game, that he was nearly beaten in
History anyway scarcely offers any ready example of major
straight sets.
war started by accident even before the nuclear revolution imposed an order-of-magnitude
increase of caution. In was occasion conjectured that nuclear war might be triggered by the real but
accidental or unauthorized launch of a strategic nuclear-weapon delivery system in the direction of a
 No such launch is known to have occurred in over sixty
potential adversary.
years. The probability of it is therefore very low. But even if it did
happen, the further hypothesis of it initiating a general nuclear
exchange is far-fetched. It fails to consider the real situation of decision-makers, as pages 63-
4 have brought out. The notion that cosmic holocaust might be mistakenly precipitated in this way belongs
to science fiction.

No domino effect

Alagappa 9
(Distinguished Senior Fellow, East-West Center. PhD, IR, Tufts (Muthiah, The long shadow:
nuclear weapons and security in 21st century Asia, ed. Alagappa, 521-2)//TR

It will be useful at this juncture to address more directly the set of instability arguments
advanced by certain policy makers and scholars: the domino effect of new nuclear weapon
states, the probability of preventive action against new nuclear weapon states, and the compulsion of
these states to use their small arsenals early for fear of losing them in a preventive or preemptive strike by

a stronger nuclear adversary. On the domino effect, India's and Pakistan's nuclear weapon
programs have not fueled new programs in South Asia or beyond. Iran's quest for
nuclear weapons is not a reaction to the Indian or Pakistani programs. It is
grounded in that country's security concerns about the United States and Tehran's regional aspirations.

The North Korean test has evoked mixed reactions in Northeast Asia. Tokyo is
certainly concerned; its reaction, though, has not been to initiate its own nuclear weapon program but to

reaffirm and strengthen the American extended deterrence commitment to Japan. Even if the U.S. Japan

security treaty were to weaken, it is not certain that Japan would embark on a nuclear
weapon program. Likewise, South Korea has sought reaffirmation of the
American extended deterrence commitment, but has firmly held to its nonnuclear posture.
Without dramatic change in its political, economic, and security circumstances, South Korea is highly

unlikely to embark on a covert (or overt) nuclear weapon program as it did in the 1970s. South Korea could

still become a nuclear weapon state by inheriting the nuclear weapons of North Korea should the Kim Jong

Il regime collapse. Whether it retains or gives up that capability will hinge on the security circumstances of

a unified Korea. The North Korean nuclear test has not spurred Taiwan or Mongolia
to develop nuclear weapon capability . The point is that each country's decision to
embark on and sustain nuclear weapon programs is contingent on its
particular security and other circumstances. Though appealing, the
domino theory is not predictive; often it is employed to justify policy on the basis of
alarmist predictions. The loss of South Vietnam, for example, did not lead to the
predicted domino effect in Southeast Asia. In fact the so-called dominos became drivers of
a vibrant Southeast Asia and brought about a fundamental transformation in that subregion (Lord 1993,

1996). In the nuclear arena, the nuclear programs of China, India, and
Pakistan were part of a security chain reaction, not mechanically
falling dominos. However, as observed earlier the Indian, Pakistani, and North Korean nuclear tests
have thus far not had the domino effect predicted by alarmist analysts and policy makers. Great
caution should be exercised in accepting at face value the
sensational predictions of individuals who have a vested interest in
accentuating the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Such analysts are now
focused on the dangers of a nuclear Iran. A nuclear Iran may or may not have destabilizing effects. Such

claims must be assessed on the basis of an objective reading of the drivers of national and regional

security in Iran and the Middle East.

This means we control prolif offense theres no risk of

the floodgates opening, and prolif is most stable if it
happens naturally and slowly

Waltz 3
(Kenneth Waltz, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Adjunct Senior
Research Scholar at Columbia University, 2003, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate
Renewed, p. 42-43)//TR

Some have feared that weakening opposition to the spread of

nuclear weapons will lead numerous states to obtain them because it may
seem that everyone is doing it. Why should we think that if we relax, numerous states will begin to make

nuclear weapons? Both the United States and the Soviet Union were
relaxed in the past, and those effects did not follow. The Soviet Union initially
supported Chinas nuclear program. The United States helped both Britain and France to produce nuclear

weapons. By 1968 the CIA had informed President Johnson of the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons, and

in July of 1970, Richard Helms, director of the CIA, gave this information to the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee. These and later disclosures were not followed by censure of Israel or by reductions of

economic assistance. And in September of 1980, the executive branch, against the will of the House of

Representatives but with the approval of the Senate, continued to do nuclear business with India despite

its explosion of a nuclear device and despite its unwillingness to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Many more countries can make nuclear weapons than do. One can believe
that American opposition to nuclear arming stays the deluge only by overlooking the complications of

international life. Any state has to examine many conditions before deciding whether or not to develop

nuclear weapons. Our opposition is only one factor and is not likely to be the decisive one. Many states feel

fairly secure living with their neighbors. Why should they want nuclear weapons? Some countries, feeling

threatened, have found security through their own strenuous efforts and through arrangements made with

others. South Korea is an outstanding example. Many officials believe that South Korea would lose more in

terms of American support if it acquired nuclear weapons than it would gain by having them. Further, on

occasion we might slow the spread of nuclear weapons by not opposing the nuclear weapons programs of

some countries. When we opposed Pakistans nuclear program, we were saying that we disapprove of

countries developing nuclear weapons no matter what their neighbors do. The gradual spread
of nuclear weapons has not opened the nuclear floodgates. Nations
attend to their security in the ways they think best . The fact that so many
more countries can make nuclear weapons than do says more about the hesitation of countries to enter

the nuclear military business than about the effectiveness of American nonproliferation policy. We
should suit our policy to individual cases, sometimes bringing pressure against a
country moving toward nuclear weapons capability and sometimes quietly acquiescing: No one policy is

right in all cases. We should ask what the interests of other countries require before putting pressure on

them. Some countries are likely to suffer more in cost and pain if they remain conventional states than if

they become nuclear ones. The measured spread of nuclear weapons does not
run against our interests and can increase the security of some
states at a price they can afford to pay.

The invocation of regional stability is a thinly veiled

attempt to maintain US control over world politics and can
only result in violence
Hoover, 2k11 (Joe, Fellow in the International Relations Dept at the LSE,
Egypt and the Failure of Realism, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies,
Issue 4)
Recent upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya have caught many
by surprise as the order of things has proven protean in a way that
official experts and conventional wisdom were largely blind to
reality, it seems, can be unruly. As revolution unfolded in Egypt there
were many pleas for restraint, worries that political instability would
spread, and among Western leaders a profound wariness of change
that they feared would compromise their strategic interests. There
was, in a word, an invocation of realism, intended to quell the
earnestness of fast moving and profound change. The failure of
realism as a response to recent events in Egypt is revealed through
the policies invoked by state representatives, commentators and
academics, which confirmed the given reality of world politics but proved
wanting ethically and heuristically, as those willing to support the brutal rule
of Hosni Mubarak and unable to comprehend the power of the
protesters proved to be on the wrong side of history. These banal
appeals to realism, however, do lead to a broader insight, revealing
that such appeals in world politics are actually calls to preserve
what I term the reality of dominance, which invokes the
inevitability of the existing order of things to discount the reality of
resistance to that order which calls for transformation over
preservation. In early February, before Mubaraks ouster, the Egyptian
revolution was in doubt. It was still only a fragile possibility. 1 The protestors
and Mubaraks goons waited it out in Tahrir Square while the army stood
watch. The success of the revolution would be determined by whose will was
most resilient. Would the threat of increasing violence discourage the
protestors and give Mubarak the space he needed to solidify his power till
next year and thus avoid the changes the Egyptian people were demanding?
Or would the protestors resolve hold, making clear to Mubarak that he could
no longer hope to rule Egypt? As protestors faced violence, exhaustion and
deprivation the prospect of compromise must have seemed more desirable as
the hardships mounted. The time was ripe for expressions of support from
key leaders, which could buttress the resolve of the protestors and pressure
the Mubarak regime. It was much easier for Mubarak to play for time from the
presidential palace than for protesters in the streets, yet far too many of the
men and women able to make a difference did not use their voices to share in
democracys street-choir instead their voices echoed in the halls of
disreputable power. The Obama administration has the greatest culpability in
this, as they not only had the capability to undermine Mubarak, but their
failure to do so revealed the hypocrisy of US support for democracy and
human rights in the region. The events in Egypt demonstrated that President
Barak Obama has mastered the dark art of evasive support, leaving
no doubt that he fully supported Egyptian democracy, as long as it
did not change too much, too fast, and, most importantly, as long as
US strategic interests were not compromised. The administrations
restraint is also driven by the fact that, for the United States, dealing with an
Egypt without Mr. Mubarak would be difficult at best, and downright scary at
worst. For 30 years, his government has been a pillar of American foreign
policy in a volatile region. (Sanger & Cooper, 2011) Predictably, Vice
President Joe Biden made the point with less tact, but perhaps more truth,
when he expressed his insensibility to the crimes of Mubarak against his own
people: Asked if he would characterize Mubarak as a dictator Biden
responded: Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And hes
been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the
Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing
relationship with with Israel. I would not refer to him as a dictator.
(Murphy, 2011) Clearly regional stability is the key rhetorical trope,
which justified turning a blind eye to the brutality of Mubarak s
regime and the lack of democracy in Egypt. Perhaps no issue is
more important in defining what regional stability means for the
US than the issue of Israeli security. Binyamin Netanyahu clearly exerted
pressure on the US, trying to limit the support they gave to democratic
reforms in Egypt. The prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, reportedly
ordered his cabinet to refrain from commenting publicly on the unfolding
drama, saying only that the treaty must be maintained. But as Haaretz
reported today, the government is seeking to convince the US and EU to curb
their criticism of Hosni Mubarak to preserve stability in the region, even as
Washington and its allies signal their wish for an orderly transition which
the incumbent almost certainly cannot ignore. (Black, 2011) Despite the
homilies on human rights and democratic freedom delivered by Mr Obama to
the Egyptians (Wilson and Warrick, 2011), it was a predictable set of
concerns that set the agenda for the US response to the revolution
taking place in Cairo and throughout Egypt the imperative was to
maintain order, control those changes that proved inevitable and
ensure that the political and economic interests of dominant states
were preserved. The representative for the US State Department, PJ
Crowley, who was interviewed by Al Jazeera (US urges reform in Egypt, 2011),
performed a practiced dance to the theme of restraint, gradual reform and
false equivalencies as if protesters and the agents of Mubaraks coercive
apparatus could be compared 2 as he made clear that the suffering of the
Egyptian people and their desire for democracy would not undermine US
support for the Mubarak regime. We respect what Egypt contributes to the
region. It is a stabilising force; it has made its own peace with Israel and is
pursuing normal relations with Israel. We think thats important; we think
thats a model that the region should adopt broadly speaking. At the same
time, we recognise that Egypt, Tunisia, other countries, do need to reform,
they do need to respond to the needs of their people and we encourage that
reform and we are contributing across the region to that reform. (US urges
reform in Egypt, 2011) This routine, we can assume, was an exercise in
managing expectations and making US interests clear democratic
revolution should not be allowed to upset regional stability, nor
should the suffering of the protestors be allowed to cloud our
judgment on what really matters or, more bluntly, if democratic
dreams threatened the interests of the US, then so much the worse
for those beautiful revolutionary dreams. As Tony Blair joined the
discussion he not only underlined Bidens scepticism regarding whether
Mubarak was a dictator, claiming he was immensely courageous and a force
for good (McGreal, 2011), but he also clearly articulated the managerial
worldview of a man who has learned to think of himself as a member
of a privileged group of cleareyed realists whose responsibility it is
to control all the things of world politics. Blair argued that the
region has unique problems that make political change different
from the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe. He said the
principal issue was the presence of Islamist parties that he fears will
use democracy to gain power and then undermine the freedoms
people seek... Blair said he did not doubt that change was coming to Egypt.
People want a different system of government. Theyre going to get it. The
question is what emerges from that. In particular I think the key challenge for
us is how do we help partner this process of change and help manage it in
such a way that what comes out of it is open minded, fair, democratic
government. (McGreal, 2011). Not only does this response implicitly
trade in the notion that Arab countries will not be able to handle
democracy without Western tutelage, it also trades in a degraded
notion of realism, in which serious men act as if their apologia for
imperial arrogance is sagacious wisdom gleaned from long
experience. The Egyptian protestors will be allowed their
democracy, but their democracy will be managed and defined by the
powerful, so as not to disturb the order of things or run afoul of the
realities of world politics. Yet this statist and status quo line is
actually divorced from reality, or at least the reality of the protesters
battling their corrupt leaders in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and cities
throughout Egypt it reflects the reality of dominance. Realism, as
Western leaders express it, is little more than an attempt to limit the
happenings of world politics to their own constrained vision, a
myopic self-interest that fails to take the measure of the cruelty it
justifies or realise its own analytical failings.
Their representation of Mideast instability is an orientalist
discourse defined according to imperial interests

Bilgin 4 (Pinar, Bilkent University, Whose Middle East?

Geopolitical Inventions and Practices of Security,
International Relations, 18(1), p. 28//TR)

What I call the Middle East perspective is usually associated with the United States and
its regional allies. It derives from a western conception of security which
could be summed up as the unhindered flow of oil at reasonable
prices, the cessation of the ArabIsraeli conflict, the prevention of
the emergence of any regional hegemon while holding Islamism in
check, and the maintenance of friendly regimes that are sensitive
to these concerns. This was (and still is) a topdown conception of security
that privileged the security of states and military stability. It is top-
down because threats to security have been defined largely from the
perspective of external powers rather than regional states or
peoples. In the eyes of British and US defence planners, Communist infiltration and Soviet intervention
constituted the greatest threat to security in the Middle East during the Cold War. The way to enhance
regional security, they argued, was for regional states to enter into alliances with the West. Two security
umbrella schemes, the ill-born Middle East Defence Organisation (1951) and the Baghdad Pact (1955),
were designed for this purpose. Although there were regional states such as Iraq (until the 1958 coup), Iran
(until the 19789 revolution) and Turkey that shared this perception of security to a certain extent, many
Arab policy-makers begged to differ. Traces of this top-down thinking were prevalent in the US approach to
In following a policy of dual
security in the Middle East during the 1990s.
containment, US policy-makers presented Iran and Iraq as the main
threats to regional security largely due to their military capabilities
and the revisionist character of their regimes that are not
subservient to US interests. However, these top-down perspectives, while
revealing certain aspects of regional insecurity, at the same time
hinder others. For example the lives of women in Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia are made insecure not only by the threat caused by their Gulf neighbours military
capabilities, but also because of the conservative character of their own
regimes that restrict womens rights under the cloak of religious
tradition. For it is women who suffer disproportionately as a result of
militarism and the channelling of valuable resources into defence
budgets instead of education and health. Their concerns rarely make
it into security analyses. This top-down approach to regional security in the Middle East was
compounded by a conception of security that was directed outwards that is threats to security were
assumed to stem from outside the state whereas inside is viewed as a realm of peace. Although it could be
argued following R.B.J. Walker that what makes it possible for inside to remain peaceful is the
presentation of outside as a realm of danger, the practices of Middle Eastern states indicate that this
many regional policy-makers justify
does not always work as prescribed in theory. For
certain domestic security measures by way of presenting the
international arena as anarchical and stressing the need to
strengthen the state to cope with external threats. While doing this,
however, they at the same time cause insecurity for some individuals
and social groups at home the very peoples whose security they
purport to maintain. The practices of regional actors that do not match up to the theoretical
prescriptions include the Baath regime in Iraq that infringed their own citizens rights often for the
purposes of state security. Those who dare to challenge their states security
practices may be marginalized at best, and accused of treachery and
imprisoned at worst.
Aff evidence is suspect Middle East studies package the
world according to conservative strategic interests

Gerges 91 (Fawaz A., Professor of International Affairs

and Middle Eastern Studies Sarah Lawrence, The Study
of Middle East International Relations: A Critique, British
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 18(2), Jstor//TR)
Thirdly, and closely related to the preceding problem, is the policy orientation of the field. The ideological
rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union following the Second World War and the onset of
the Cold War in the late 1940s has motivated them to invest heavily in area studies with a specific
emphasis on policy-oriented research in the hope that problems can be identified and solutions found.
Thus,the U.S. foreign policy establishment 'goaded' or 'tempted ' the
academic community into establishing graduate programmes to generate useful expertise on
such crucial foreign regions as the 'Middle East'.28 Likewise, the proliferation in
1955 of new research centres, studies and periodicals on the 'Middle East' in the Soviet Union was
anything but academic: it reflected the growing Russian interest in the area.29 This revival coincided with
the conclusion of the Egyptian-Russian arms deal in September 1955 and the perceptions of Russian
leaders that the time was ripe for a political offensive in the Arab world. Indeed, as Leonard Binder notes:
'The basic development of area studies in the United States has
been political', i.e. to gain influence and to combat hostile forces.30
Though Binder hastens to add that it is difficult to discern a consistent political line in the organization of
it is clear that a large number of works on
area studies or in the patterns of funding,
modern Middle East international relations-whether in the United States
or in the Soviet Union- are 'packaged' to satisfy the policy needs of their
respective decision- makers.31 But historically, this has always been true. The
economic and strategic importance of the area has tended to attract
the interests of outside powers which have competed for influence
and control. Since 1945, however, the development of area studies has reflected more than before
the need of the Great Powers to influence the processes of change and stability in the region. The root of
the convergence of interests between the foreign policy and academic communities lies in the former's
control of research funding and the latter's dependency on and acquiescence in this state of affairs.32 The
analyses of the 'Middle East' seem to be more
result is that many
concerned with policy-oriented prescriptions than with the
understanding of the region in a sensitive and creative manner .33 It
must be confessed, however, that the glide into policy science or policy scientism is not peculiar only to
the study of Middle East international relations in general. In reflecting on the development of international
relations in the past thirty years, Professor Stanley Hoffmann establishes a strong link between the
development of the field and the dilemmas and concerns facing U.S. foreign policy in the post- Second
World War period.
Their predictions backfire- dystopic alarmism gets twisted
to lock in oppression

Kurasawa 4 (Fuyuki, Professor of Sociology- York

University of Toronto, Cautionary Tales: The Global
Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight,
Constellations, 11(4)//TR)
Up to this point, I have tried to demonstrate that transnational socio-political relations are nurturing a
thriving culture and infrastructure of prevention from below, which challenges presumptions about the
inscrutability of the future (II) and a stance of indifference toward it (III). Nonetheless, unless and until it is
farsightedness
substantively filled in, the argument is vulnerable to misappropriation since
does not in and of itself ensure emancipatory outcomes. Therefore, this
section proposes to specify normative criteria and participatory procedures through which citizens can
determine the reasonableness, legitimacy, and effectiveness of competing dystopian visions in order to
Foremost among the possible distortions
arrive at a socially self-instituting future.
of farsightedness is alarmism, the manufacturing of unwarranted
and unfounded doomsday scenarios. State and market institutions
may seek to produce a culture of fear by deliberately stretching
interpretations of reality beyond the limits of the plausible so as to
exaggerate the prospects of impending catastrophes, or yet again, by
intentionally promoting certain prognoses over others for
instrumental purposes. Accordingly, regressive dystopias can operate as Trojan horses
advancing political agendas or commercial interests that would otherwise be susceptible to public scrutiny
the
and opposition. Instances of this kind of manipulation of the dystopian imaginary are plentiful:
invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism and an imminent
threat of use of weapons of mass destruction; the severe curtailing
of American civil liberties amidst fears of a collapse of homeland
security; the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state as the only
remedy for an ideologically constructed fiscal crisis; the conservative
expansion of policing and incarceration due to supposedly spiraling crime waves; and so forth.
Alarmism constructs and codes the future in particular ways,
producing or reinforcing certain crisis narratives, belief structures,
and rhetorical conventions. As much as alarmist ideas beget a culture of fear, the reverse is
no less true.

Apocalyptic representations are deliberately falsified to

create a particular public sentiment this geopolitics of
fear allows no room for peace by endlessly recreating
violence
Sparke 7 (Matthew, Prof. of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct
Prof. of Global Health @ U. of Washington, Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic
Hopes and the Responsibilities of Geography Edited version published:
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97.2)
The geopolitical discourse about the threats posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq was so frequently repeated
and stylized in the period leading up to the American offensive that the script is now all too familiar (for
one of the most rigorous and official surveys of the misinformation that ed up to the war see the
Two big
Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staf, 2006).
fears dominated the Bush administrations geopolitical scripting. The
first was that Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction or WMD, and the
second was that these WMD could easily be passed on to terrorists because of known ties between
Hussein and al Qaeda. Most famously perhaps it was in Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech before the
United Nations that the WMD story was told with the most effortful, and in retrospect, most tendentious
claims to represent well-documented, evidence-based truth about real grounds for fear. "What you will
see," said Powell, in an appeal to the truth of vision that is one of the classic tropes of the modern
geopolitical imagination (Agnew, 2003; Tuathail, 1996), "is an accumulation of facts and disturbing
patterns of behavior." Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500
tons of chemical-weapons agents. ... Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein
to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size
of Manhattan. ... There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to
rapidly produce more, many more. ... This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well
documented (Powell, 2003). This was also the same script from which President Bush himself spoke both
before and after Powell's speech. However, the President's speech-making (which was generally designed
for domestic consumption and not an international UN audience) explained the relevance of the WMD story
in terms of the second main fearful script: in other words, in terms of Iraq's WMD getting into the hands of
terrorists. "Today," announced the President in his 2003 State of the Union address, the gravest danger in
the war on terror, the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and
possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. These regimes could use such weapons for blackmail,
terror, and mass murder. They could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them
without the least hesitation....With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons,
Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in
that region. And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from
intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that
Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without
fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own
(Bush, 2003). Insofar as Bush explained so much of his policy as an
aggressive 'bring it on' response to the real terrorism of 9/11, these
sorts of claims were to prove very powerful indeed, creating an
affect-laden and, as such, effective means of legitimating the Iraq war (
Tuathail, 2003). With Bush setting the model, the public geopolitical script of fear
included repeated statements about overwhelming evidence
combined with the affective appeal to Americans to imagine another
9/11: another 9/11 made much more deadly with the help of Iraq's WMD. "America must not ignore the
threat gathering against us," remained the administration's main fear-mongering message. "Facing clear
evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a
mushroom cloud" (Bush, 2002). The President was, of course, ably assisted in this work of geopolitical
scripting by other members of his administration. Most especially Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Vice-President Dick Cheney continued to reiterate the same twin fears about WMD and terror ties long
after the attack on Iraq and a huge security sweep of the occupied country showed that their fearful
Rumsfeld and Cheney nevertheless also effectively
geopolitics was groundless. In doing so,
underlined two key features of what made the geopolitical scripting
of fear so convincing: namely, emotion and repetition. Thus, arguing against the
critics that WMD would eventually be found in Iraq, Rumsfeld also showed how Americans' emotions about
9/11 lay at the heart of making the Iraq-as-threat geopolitics work: The coalition did not act in Iraq because
we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. We acted
because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on 9/11
(Rumsfeld, 2003). And subsequently, even in 2004, Cheney was still demonstrating that the other key
feature of making the groundless script function was repetition: "I think theres overwhelming evidence
that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government," he intoned (Cheney, 2004). In
the real world, of course, there was no such evidence. Instead, as was later made clear by the statements
of the British intelligence chief recorded in the Downing Street memos, "the intelligence and facts were
being fixed around the policy" (Danner, 2005). By this point, though, the ways in which the grounds were
invented in order to fit the script no longer mattered. Emotion, repetition and their combined conjuring of
So successful was the scripting of fear
fear had already done their geopolitical work.
that subsequently even administration officials themselves indicated
their backstage accomplishments with occasionally explicit, even
prideful, asides about the bureaucratic expediency involved. For
example, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Defense Secretary, caused a small media storm by acknowledging
something along the lines that: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S.
government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of
mass destruction, as the core reason" (quoted in McIntyre, 2003). This admission (which was itself hedged
in various ways) later came to seem minor in comparison with a much bolder account made to a reporter
by a White House aide of the administration's more generally cavalier approach to geopolitical scripting.
Given the gung-ho hubris of the account it is not surprising that this aide remains anonymous, but what he
told Ron Suskind - the reporter - remains no less telling. The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we
call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he
continued. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you,
all of you, will be left to just study what we do (Suskind, 2004). As scholars who remain committed to
geographers (with the possible exception of non-representational
studying discernible reality,
theorists) may also be derided by those at the pinnacles of American
power as located in the same low-lying reality-based community
inhabited by journalists such as Suskind. But this has not stopped
geographical studies from documenting with critical rigor the empire
of unreality produced by the geopolitical scripting of the War on
Terror. The use of the term 'empire' here is not just metaphorical, nor just a play on the imperial hubris
enunciated by Suskind's White House aide. As Gregory's forthright critique of the
colonial present makes clear, all kinds of geopolitical discourses with
their roots and routes in imperialism - including the many imaginative geographies of
imperial Orientalism famously critiqued by Edward Said (1979 and 1993) - were revitalized and
put to work in both justifying and performing the War on Terror
(Gregory, 2004). Gregory argues persuasively in this way that geopolitical scripts about
despotic, hate-filled, orientals served to provide the fear-filled
justification for treating whole communities as if they lay outside the
bounds of humanity. Building on Gregory's analysis, Allan Pred has provided in turn a powerful
critique of the groundless terror-talk into which so much of this fear-mongering fed and out of which so
much geopolitical boundary-drawing ensued. "Terror
may be instilled by way of a
variety of strategies," Pred summarizes: Through successfully perpetuating
'imaginative geographies' of Their Terrorist/Arab/Muslim space and
Their uncivilized, subhuman barbarism. Through successfully folding
distance into monstrous Difference. Through successfully insisting
that They are a pervasive military threat to Our Civilization, to the
security of Our way of life. Through avoiding any consideration of
our role in precipitating militant radicalism, in provoking the spread
of 'political Islam in its insurrectional forms'. Through successfully
implanting a just-below-the-surface sense of fear by way of
redundant representations strewn across the paths of everyday life
(Pred, 2005). As well as providing a useful summary of the geopolitics of fear at its boundary-drawing work,
Pred's textual strategy of repetition also mimics and subverts the repetitive rhetorics of the fear-mongers
themselves. In doing so, and by underlining how such rhetorics infiltrated American everyday life and
became implanted in people's 'just- below-the-surface' sensibilities, he also draws our attention to another
enunciation became
aspect of the geopolitics of the war on terror: namely, the way in which its
a performance of sovereignty and governmentality at the same time,
a way of re-enacting the power of the traditional pre-modern
sovereign to declare war on his own terms combined with a
decidedly post-modern approach to making the war make
biopolitical sense in American everyday life. The performance of
sovereignty as governmentality by the Bush administration - its way of simultaneously
producing and ruling its 'own reality' by executive fiat - has elsewhere been
theorized by Judith Butler in relation to the suspension of the Geneva conventions and the creation of
special rules and special spaces for imprisoning 'illegal combatants' in the Guantanamo gulag (Butler,
2004). Butler's argument about this "resurgence of sovereignty within the field of governmentality" (Butler,
2004: 56) seems equally applicable to the way the administration also suspended reference to real
intelligence in its geopolitical scripting of the Iraq war. However, outside of the exceptional space of
Guantanamo (where only fear seems to rule), the field of governmentality in which the resurgence of
executive sovereignty has been staged has been co-determined by another much more hopeful discourse
too: the discourse of geoeconomics. Alongside all the fear, then, there has also been much hope, and this
hope, expressed as a discourse about the inevitably inclusive and expansive aspects of capitalist
globalization, has also, just like the geopolitical scripting, had a whole series of regulative effects both in
America and elsewhere, including inside Iraq itself. In other words, if we follow Butler in noticing how the
Bush administration has invented its own sovereign realities within a post-sovereign world, and if we
combine this with an understanding of governmentality as the organization of "the conduct of conduct"
(Foucault, 1982: 220), we need to explore how the globalist common-sense about a globe-spanning level-
playing field also came to legitimate and shape the Iraq war.

Everyday nuclear colonialism is overshadowed by the

fantasy of a global nuclear war, allowing ongoing
nuclear violence to continue unchecked

Kato 93
(Masahide Kato, Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze,
Source: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 339-360 Published by: Sage
Publications, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644779 Accessed: 24/08/2012)//TR

Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and
became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of
destruction can be historically contextualized. The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived
and thus given due recognition by the First World community are the explosions at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose
meaning is relevant only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe is confined to the realm of
fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet how can one deny the crude fact that
nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the name of "nuclear testing" since the first
nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth.28 The major perpetrators of
nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44
times), and China (36 times).29 The primary targets of warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the
sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars against the Marshall
Islands (66 times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814
times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of
Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times).30 Moreover, although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests"
in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence
accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear
wastes), we must enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the
Navaho, Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear
war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and Indigenous Nations.
The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity intervention," or the
"nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have
taken a form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations.
Thus, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the nuclear
catastrophe has never been the "unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of
repetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless,
ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe by
rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of
nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First World community. Such a
discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear warfare in the domain of
imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers
the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific: Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere . . . were global in effect. The winds and seas
carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call
the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into batde against nature itself.31 Although Firth's book is
definitely a remarkable study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific, the problematic division/distinction between the
"nuclear explosions" and the nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the
subject ("we") is located higher than the "real" of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological
division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the ongoing
processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by means of
nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized. The discursive containment/obliteration of the
"real" of nuclear warfare has been accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm
commitment to global discourse, has established the unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe over the real nuclear
catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.
Space DAs
 Defense
Space Colonization is impossible- costs, inhospitable and
takes too long- prefer terrestrial existential risks

Stross 7 (Charlie, "The High Frontier, Redux,"

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html //DF)
I'm going to take it as read that the idea of space colonization isn't unfamiliar; domed cities on Mars,
orbiting cylindrical space habitats a la J. D. Bernal or Gerard K. O'Neill, that sort of thing. Generation ships
that take hundreds of years to ferry colonists out to other star systems where as we are now discovering
there are profusions of planets to explore. And I don't want to spend much time talking about the
unspoken ideological underpinnings of the urge to space colonization, other than to point out that they're
there, that the case for space colonization isn't usually presented as an economic enterprise so much as a
quasi-religious one. "We can't afford to keep all our eggs in one basket" isn't so much a justification as an
in the hypothetical case of a planet-trashing
appeal to sentimentality, for
catastrophe, we (who currently inhabit the surface of the Earth) are dead anyway. The
future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are
already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern. Historically, crossing oceans and
setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a
the scale factor involved in space travel is
cost-effective proposition. But
strongly counter-intuitive. Here's a handy metaphor: let's approximate one astronomical unit
the distance between the Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance
1AU = 1cm. (You may want to get hold of
from the Earth to the Moon to one centimetre. Got that?
a ruler to follow through with this one.) The solar system is conveniently small .
Neptune, the outermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at a distance of almost exactly 30AU, or
30 centimetres one foot (in imperial units). Giant Jupiter is 5.46 AU out from the sun, almost exactly two
inches (in old money). We've sent space probes to Jupiter; they take two and a half years to get there if we
send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there a bit faster using some fancy orbital
mechanics. Neptune is still a stretch only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has made it out there so far. Its
journey time was 12 years, and it wasn't stopping. (It's now on its way out into interstellar space, having
passed the heliopause some years ago.) The Kuiper belt, domain of icy wandering dwarf planets like Pluto
and Eris, extends perhaps another 30AU, before merging into the much more tenuous Hills cloud and Oort
cloud, domain of loosely coupled long-period comets. Now for the first scale shock: using our handy
metaphor the Kuiper belt is perhaps a metre in diameter. The Oort cloud, in contrast, is as much as 50,000
Our planetary solar
AU in radius its outer edge lies half a kilometre away. Got that?
system is 30 centimetres, roughly a foot, in radius. But to get to the edge of
the Oort cloud, you have to go half a kilometre, roughly a third of a
mile. Next on our tour is Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. (There might be a brown dwarf or two
lurking unseen in the icy depths beyond the Oort cloud, but if we've spotted one, I'm unaware of it.)
Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away.A light year is 63.2 x 103 AU, or 9.46 x
1012 Km. So Proxima Centauri, at 267,000 AU, is just under two and a third
kilometres, or two miles (in old money) away from us. But Proxima Centauri is a poor choice,
if we're looking for habitable real estate. While exoplanets are apparently common as muck, terrestrial
Gliese 581c, the first such to be detected (and it looks like a pretty weird
planets are harder to find;
is roughly 20.4 light years away, or using our metaphor, about ten
one, at that),
miles. Try to get a handle on this: it takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches. But
the proponents of interstellar travel are talking about journeys of ten miles. That's the first point I want to
if the distances involved in interplanetary travel are
get across: that
enormous, and the travel times fit to rival the first Australian
settlers, then the distances and times involved in interstellar travel
are mind-numbing. This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary. But
to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous amounts of cheap
energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand . And in
the absence of (c) you're not going to get any news back from the
other end in less than decades. Even if (a) is achievable, or by
means of (b) we can send self-replicating factories and have them
turn distant solar systems into hives of industr y, and more speculatively find
some way to transmit human beings there, they are going to have zero net
economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us
money). What do I mean by outrageous amounts of cheap energy? Let's postulate that in the future, it will
be possible to wave a magic wand and construct a camping kit that encapsulates all the necessary
technologies and information to rebuild a human civilization capable of eventually sending out interstellar
colonization missions a bunch of self-replicating, self-repairing robotic hardware, and a downloadable
copy of the sum total of human knowledge to date. Let's also be generous and throw in a closed-circuit life
support system capable of keeping a human occupant alive indefinitely, for many years at a stretch, with
zero failures and losses, and capable where necessary of providing medical intervention. Let's throw in a
willing astronaut (the fool!) and stick them inside this assembly. It's going to be pretty boring in there, but I
think we can conceive of our minimal manned interstellar mission as being about the size and mass of a
Mercury capsule. And I'm going to nail a target to the barn door and call it 2000kg in total. (Of course we
can cut corners, but I've already invoked self-replicating robotic factories and closed-cycle life support
systems, and those are close enough to magic wands as it is. I'm going to deliberately ignore more
speculative technologies such as starwisps, mind transfer, or AIs sufficiently powerful to operate
autonomously although I used them shamelessly in my novel Accelerando. What I'm trying to do here is
come up with a useful metaphor for the energy budget realistically required for interstellar flight.)
a probe massing 1-2 tons with an astronaut on top is a bit
Incidentally,
implausible, but a 1-2 ton probe could conceivably carry enough
robotic instrumentation to do useful research, plus a laser powerful
enough to punch a signal home, and maybe even that shrink-
wrapped military/industrial complex in a tin can that would allow it
to build something useful at the other end. Anything much smaller,
though, isn't going to be able to transmit its findings to us at least, not
without some breakthroughs in communication technology that haven't shown up so far. Now, let's
say we want to deliver our canned monkey to Proxima Centauri
within its own lifetime. We're sending them on a one-way trip, so a 42 year flight time isn't
unreasonable. (Their job is to supervise the machinery as it unpacks itself and begins to brew up a bunch
This means they need to achieve a
of new colonists using an artificial uterus. Okay?)
mean cruise speed of 10% of the speed of light. They then need to
decelerate at the other end. At 10% of c relativistic effects are minor
there's going to be time dilation, but it'll be on the order of hours or days over the duration of the 42-
year voyage.So we need to accelerate our astronaut to 30,000,000
metres per second, and decelerate them at the other end. Cheating and
using Newton's laws of motion, the kinetic energy acquired by acceleration is 9
x 1017 Joules, so we can call it 2 x 1018 Joules in round numbers for
the entire trip. NB: This assumes that the propulsion system in use is 100% efficient at converting
energy into momentum, that there are no losses from friction with the interstellar medium, and that the
propulsion source is external that is, there's no need to take reaction mass along en route. So this is a
lower bound on the energy cost of transporting our Mercury-capsule sized expedition to Proxima Centauri
To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion
in less than a lifetime.
of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of
my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we
require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear
armageddon in order to move a capsule of about the gross weight of a fully loaded Volvo V70
automobile to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime. That's the same as the yield of the entire US
Minuteman III ICBM force. For a less explosive reference point,our entire planetary
economy runs on roughly 4 terawatts of electricity (4 x 1012 watts). So it
would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of
half a million seconds roughly 5 days to supply the necessary va-va-voom. But to
bring this back to earth with a bump, let me just remind you that this probe is so
implausibly efficient that it's veering back into "magic wand"
territory. I've tap-danced past a 100% efficient power transmission system capable of operating
across interstellar distances with pinpoint precision and no conversion losses, and that allows the
spacecraft on the receiving end to convert power directly into momentum. This is not exactly like any
power transmission system that anyone's built to this date, and I'm not sure I can see where it's coming
from. Our one astronaut, 10% of c mission approximates well to an unmanned flight, but what about
longer-term expeditions? Generation ships are a staple of SF; they're slow (probably under 1% of c) and
they carry a self-sufficient city-state. The crew who set off won't live to see their destination (the flight time
to Proxima Centauri at 1% of c is about 420 years), but the vague hope is that someone will. Leaving aside
our lack of a proven track record at building social institutions that are stable across time periods greatly in
excess of a human lifespan, using a generation ship probably doesn't do much
for our energy budget problem either. A society of human beings are
likely to need more space and raw material to do stuff with while in
flight; sticking a solitary explorer in a tin can for forty-something years is merely cruel and unusual, but
doing it to an entire city for several centuries probably qualifies as a crime against humanity. We therefore
Assuming the same super-efficient life support
need to relax the mass constraint.
as our solitary explorer, we might postulate that each colonist requires ten
tons of structural mass to move around in. (About the same as a large trailer home.
For life.) We've cut the peak velocity by an order of magnitude, but
we've increased the payload requirement by an order of magnitude
per passenger and we need enough passengers to make a stable society fly. I'd guess a sensible
lower number would be on the order of 200 people, the size of a prehistoric primate troupe. (Genetic
diversity? I'm going to assume we can hand-wave around that by packing some deep-frozen sperm and
By the time we work up to a minimal
ova, or frozen embryos, for later reuse.)
generation ship (and how minimal can we get, confining 200 human beings in an object weighing
aout 2000 tons, for roughly the same period of time that has elapsed since the Plymouth colony landed in
we're actually requiring much more
what was later to become Massachusetts?)
energy than our solitary high-speed explorer. And remember, this is only what it
takes to go to Proxima Centauri our nearest neighbour. Gliese 581c is five times as far away. Planets that
are already habitable insofar as they orbit inside the habitable zone of their star, possess free oxygen in
their atmosphere, and have a mass, surface gravity and escape velocity that are not too forbidding, are
likely to be somewhat rarer. (And if there is free oxygen in the atmosphere on a planet, that implies
something else the presence of pre-existing photosynthetic life, a carbon cycle, and a bunch of other
stuff that could well unleash a big can of whoop-ass on an unprimed human immune system. The question
of how we might interact with alien biologies is an order of magnitude bigger and more complex than the
question of how we might get there and the preliminary outlook is rather forbidding.) The long and the
in the absence of technology
short of what I'm trying to get across is quite simply that,
indistinguishable from magic magic tech that, furthermore, does things
that from today's perspective appear to play fast and loose with the
laws of physics interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-
dammit a non-starter. And while I won't rule out the possibility of such seemingly-magical
technology appearing at some time in the future, the conclusion I draw as a science fiction writer is that if
interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern
of historical colonization drives that are followed by mass
emigration and trade between the colonies and the old home soil.
What about our own solar system? After contemplating the vastness of interstellar space, our own solar
system looks almost comfortingly accessible at first. Exploring our own solar system is a no-brainer: we
can do it, we are doing it, and interplanetary exploration is probably going to be seen as one of the great
scientific undertakings of the late 20th and early 21st century, when the history books get written. But
when we start examining the prospects for interplanetary
colonization things turn gloomy again. Bluntly, we're not going to get
there by rocket ship. Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible, with the low cost
rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost of roughly
$15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the
cost of fuel and oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap)
then we might even get as low as $165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg
astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much more than a first-class return air fare
from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash. We primates have certain
failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly
malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen.
While the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn't sound all that serious
the
it probably totals roughly ten kilograms, if you economize and recycle the washing-up water
amount of parasitic weight you need to keep the monkey from
blowing out is measured in tons. A Russian Orlan-M space suit (which,
some would say, is better than anything NASA has come up with over the years take heed of the pre-
breathe time requirements!) weighs 112 kilograms, which pretty much puts a
floor on our infrastructure requirements. An actual habitat would need to mass a
whole lot more. Even at $165/kilogram, that's going to add up to a very
hefty excess baggage charge on that notional first class air fare to New Zealand and I
think the $165/kg figure is in any case highly unrealistic; even the
authors of the article I cited thought $2000/kg was a bit more
reasonable. Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is
going to cost not less than $50,000 and a more realistic figure, for a
mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's
before you factor in the price of bringing them back ... The moon is about 1.3
light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send
teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away
that the cost of transporting food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There
probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but only until our robot technologies are
somewhat more mature than they are today; Mission Control would be a lot happier with a pair of hands
When
and a high-def camera that doesn't talk back and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps.
we look at the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker .
Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as
"Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I
see people settling the Gobi Desert.The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as
hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to
reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that
there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no
way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because
it's so hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore is fine and dandy our robots are all over it
as a desirable residential neighbourhood it has some
already. But
shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the
sub-Antarctic nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms,
and working down from there. Actually, there probably is a good reason for sending
human explorers to Mars. And that's the distance: at up to 30 minutes, the speed of light delay means that
remote control of robots on the Martian surface is extremely tedious. Either we need autonomous roots
that can be assigned tasks and carry them out without direct human supervision, or we need astronauts in
orbit or on the ground to boss the robot work gangs around. On the other hand,Mars is a good
way further away than the moon, and has a deeper gravity well. All
of which drive up the cost per kilogram delivered to the Martian
surface. Maybe FedEx could cut it as low as $20,000 per kilogram, but I'm not holding my breath. Let
me repeat myself: we are not going there with rockets. At least, not the conventional
kind and while there may be a role for nuclear propulsion in deep space, in general there's a
trade-off between instantaneous thrust and efficiency; the more
efficient your motor, the lower the actual thrust it provides. Some
technologies such as the variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket show a good degree of flexibility,
butin general they're not suitable for getting us from Earth's surface
into orbit they're only useful for trucking things around from low earth orbit on out. Again, as with
interstellar colonization, there are other options. Space elevators, if we build them, will invalidate a lot of
what I just said. Some analyses of the energy costs of space elevators suggest that a marginal cost of
$350/kilogram to geosynchronous orbit should be achievable without waving any magic wands (other than
the enormous practical materials and structural engineering problems of building the thing in the first
place). So we probably can look forward to zero-gee vacations in orbit, at a price. And space elevators are
attractive because they're a scalable technology; you can use one to haul into space the material to build
more. So, long term, space elevators may give us not-unreasonably priced access to space, including
jaunts to the lunar surface for a price equivalent to less than $100,000 in today's money. At which point,
settlement would begin to look economically feasible, except ... We're human beings. We evolved to
flourish in a very specific environment that covers perhaps 10% of our home planet's surface area. (Earth
is 70% ocean, and while we can survive, with assistance, in extremely inhospitable terrain, be it arctic or
Space itself is a very poor
desert or mountain, we aren't well-adapted to thriving there.)
environment for humans to live in. A simple pressure failure can kill
a spaceship crew in minutes. And that's not the only threat. Cosmic radiation
poses a serious risk to long duration interplanetary missions, and unlike
solar radiation and radiation from coronal mass ejections the energies of the particles
responsible make shielding astronauts extremely difficult. And finally,
there's the travel time. Two and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to
Mars. Now, these problems are subject to a variety of approaches including medical ones: does it
matter if cosmic radiation causes long-term cumulative radiation
exposure leading to cancers if we have advanced side-effect-free
cancer treatments? Better still, if hydrogen sulphide-induced hibernation turns out to be a
practical technique in human beings, we may be able to sleep through the trip. But even so, when
you get down to it, there's not really any economically viable activity
on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to
settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their lives .
In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure
to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don't exactly scurry to move our families there. Rather,
crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take their leave. After all, there's no there there
just a howling wilderness of north Atlantic gales and frigid water that will kill you within five minutes of
exposure. And that, I submit, is the closest metaphor we'll find for interplanetary colonization. Most of the
heavy lifting more than a million kilometres from Earth will be done by robots, overseen by human
supervisors who will be itching to get home and spend their hardship pay. And closer to home, the
commercialization of space will be incremental and slow, driven by our increasing dependence on near-
earth space for communications, positioning, weather forecasting, and (still in its embryonic stages)
the domed city on Mars is going to have to wait for a magic
tourism. But
wand or two to do something about the climate, or reinvent a kind of
human being who can thrive in an airless, inhospitable environme nt.

Disease and heightened injury make space too dangerous

to survive

Matin and Lynch 5 (2005, A. C. Matin, [PhD in

Microbiology, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology
at Stanford University in Stanford, California, ]and Susan
V. Lynch, [PhD, Molcular Microbiology, Assistant Professor
In Residence, Division of Gastroenterology, UC San
Francisco,] Investigating the Threat of Bacteria Grown in
Space, Volume 71, Number 5, 2005/ASM News,
http://www.asm.org/asm/files/ccLibraryFiles/Filename/000
000001523/znw00505000235.pdf //DF)
space is an inhospitable and dangerous frontier for
Although tantalizing,
those sent to explore it. Hence, progress towards more safely navigating and perhaps
colonizing space are tasks that demand that we develop knowledge on several fronts, from designing
radically new means of space transport to determining how space conditions influence biological
processes. Several harmful effects of space on humans are documented. During extended
missions in space, for example, bones lose mass, predisposing space travelers not only
to fracture their bones but also to develop renal stones from resorbed
bone material. Moreover, muscles atrophy, decreased blood production
and volume damage the cardiovascular system, latent viruses (such as
Varicella zoster, which causes shingles) tend to reactivate, the incidence of
diseases such as bacterial cystitis increases, wound healing slows,
pharmacologic agents act differently, and pyschological conditions
such as claustrophobia and anxiety tend to be accentuated, in part
because of disrupted sleep and dietary patterns. Amid these physical and psychological conditions, there is
the added problem that astronauts in space are exposed to intense radiation,
involving high-energy protons and nuclei of heavy elements with greater penetrating power and
increased capacity to cause malignancies and other problems, than they
would be on earth. Additionally, the diminished gravity of space and planets,
referred to as microgravity, also poses a direct threat to human health.

Squo solves- NIF funding continues

GSN 12, (Global Security Newswire, 10/01, Future of

Giant U.S. Laser in Doubt Absent Fusion Success, NTI,
http://www.nti.org/gsn/article/future-giant-us-laser-doubt-
absent-fusion-success/ //DF)

the NIF project will continue to be funded

Still, a number of researchers believe
due to its uses in maintaining a safe and effective nuclear stockpile,
which has cross-aisle backing. "Contrary to what some people say, this has been a
spectacular success," insisted NIF project head Edward Moses. He acknowledged, however, that
"science on schedule is a hard thing to do ."

NIF wont shut down- tons of practical use

Hecht 12 (Jeff, 10/02, [Writer at New Scientist] Worlds

largest laser misses nuclear fusion deadline, New
Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22325-
worlds-largest-laser-misses-nuclear-fusion-
deadline.html //DF)

Even without ignition, though, the lab is unlikely to shut down because
of its ability to double up as a nuclear weapon simulator. The implosion of
hydrogen pellets is similar to the way a hydrogen bomb works. That means NIF can be used to
update knowledge about nuclear weapons and simulate how the US
nuclear weapons stockpile might be affected by its age .

No impact to debris- being tracked now

UPI 11 ([100 year running publisher and authority on

science news]
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/07/11/Space-
debris-no-threat-to-shuttle-station/UPI-
99951310423744/ //DF)

Debris from a dead Soviet-era satellite poses no threat to the International Space Station and
the shuttle Atlantis currently docked with it, NASA says. The Space Surveillance Network
operated by the U.S. military informed notified NASA of the orbiting
piece of space junk Sunday. NASA began tracking the object's path to
determine how close it might come to the station and the shuttle ,
SPACE.com reported Monday. "Mission Control has verified that the track of a
piece of orbital debris will not be a threat to the International Space
Station and space shuttle Atlantis," NASA officials in Houston said in a statement. "No
adjustments to the docked spacecraft's orbit will be necessary to avoid the debris." More than
500,000 pieces of space junk, including the chunk of the defunct
Soviet Cosmos 375 satellite currently being tracked, are cataloged
and monitored in Earth's orbit, NASA officials said.

No impact to debris- satellites can avoid them and shield against

them

Postnote 10 (Parliamentary Office of Science and

Technology [Works for the British Parliament] Space
Debris Number 355 3/2010
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/documents/upload/p
ostpn355.pdf //DF)

Satellites can be shielded against smaller

Protecting Satellites from Debris
pieces of debris and they can attempt to actively avoid larger
tracked debris. It is also important to reduce the gap between these two regimes by improving
shielding and tracking. Shielding The main problem with shielding satellites from debris is that it adds
considerable mass to the satellite. Launch costs, at several thousand pounds per kilogram, are highly
dependent on mass. Shielding is essential for manned missions such as the
ISS, which would lose pressure if there were a leak in its surface. Research continues on
light but strong materials for shielding. Collision Avoidance Tracking
information can be used to predict a collision in time for a satellite
to manoeuvre out of the way. For example, the ISS performs around one
avoidance manoeuvre each year. However, the relatively crude information available
from the SSN makes it difficult to predict collisions accurately and there are so many close approaches that
most cannot be acted on.

Debris isnt a problem- avoidance policies worked since

the 90s

Cruz 2003 (Jesusa, [JD from Barry School of Law,]

Wanted: A collective effort towards space debris
mitigation, Panton Law,
www.pantonlaw.com/uploads/5/2/6/4/526435/space_debris
_mitigation.doc+federal+government+space+debris //DF)
The government updated its orbital debris report in 1995, issuing
the following recommendations: (1) to continue and enhance debris
measurement, modeling, and monitoring capabilities; (2) conduct a
focused study on debris and emerging low earth orbit (LEO)
systems; (3) develop government/industry design guidelines on
orbital debris; (4) develop a strategy for international discussion;
and (5) review and update U.S. policy on debris. A year after the issuance of
this report, President Clinton reaffirmed the earlier policy by calling for U.S. government agencies to
The 1996 policy required NASA, DoD, the
minimize space debris.
intelligence community and the private sector to develop design
guidelines for U.S. government space hardware procurements and
stressed a United States leadership role in urging other nations to
adopt debris mitigation practices and policies.

NIF research motivates prolif

Makhijani and Zerriffi 98 (Arjun, 7/15, [Ph.D. and Pres.

Inst. for Energy and Environmental Research], and
Hisham, [Project Scientist], Dangerous Thermonuclear
Quest: The Potential of Explosive Fusion Research for the
Development of Pure Fusion Weapons, IEER,
http://ieer.org/resource/reports/dangerous-thermonuclear-
quest/ //DF)

In the long term, facilities such as the National Ignition Facility and MTF facilities
pose even greater threats to both the CTBT and the disarmament
process. As discussed above, if ignition is demonstrated in the laboratory,
the weapons labs and the DOE would likely exert considerable
pressure to continue investigations and to engage in preliminary
design activities for a new generation of nuclear weapons (even if it is just
to keep the designers interested and occupied). Ignition would also boost political
support and make large-scale funding of such activities more likely .
Even without the construction of actual weapons, these activities could put the CTBT
in serious jeopardy from forces both internal and external to the
United States. Internally, those same pressures, which could lead to the resumption of
testing of current generation weapons, could also lead to the testing of new
weapons (to replace older, less safe or less reliable weapons). Externally, the knowledge
that the United States or other weapons states were engaging in
new fusion weapons design activities could lead other states to view
this as a reversal of their treaty commitments. Comparable
pressures to develop pure fusion weapons would be likely to mount
in several countries. This would have severe negative repercussions for both non-proliferation
and complete nuclear disarmament. The time to stop this dangerous
thermonuclear quest for explosive ignition is now, before its
scientific feasibility is established.
Pure fusion warheads are incredibly destructive, cheap,
and not covered by non-proliferation: Guarantees nuclear
war

Cohen and Douglass 2 (Sam, 3-11, [nuclear weapons analyst] and Joe,
[national security analyst], [both members of the Los Alamos Tactical Nuclear
Weapons panel], Nuclear Threat That Doesnt Exist Or Does It? Rense,
http://rense.com/general35/doex.htm //DF)

The
The comparison of a pure-fusion warhead with a normal fission warhead is even more stark.
lethal area to military troops of a 10 ton (high explosive equivalent yield) pure-
fusion device would be approximately the same as the lethal area of
a fission warhead several hundred times larger; that is, one in the
kiloton range! The cost of a pure-fusion warhead is also reduced. In terms of the
precious nuclear material that is required, namely, tritium and deuterium, pure-fusion devices
are extremely cheap. Because the pure-fusion warhead does not
need active nuclear material, such as plutonium, to "trigger" the deuterium-tritium burn,
they can be made for a fraction of the cost of one fission-fusion
neutron bomb of the 1980s. The inherent consequences of a pure-fusion device go far
beyond low cost and greatly reduced explosive yield. Most significant, pure-fusion warheads, in
contrast to warheads that use fissionable material, are not covered by the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Any country can, in terms of international law,
legally possess and even sell such weapons and not be in violation of
the NPT. Also, deuterium-tritium fuel can be purchased openly on the international market. The spirit
of the NPT may be in violation, but not the letter. Still further , because there is no
fissionable component and because the explosive yield is so small,
full operational tests of a pure-fusion device could be conducted in
any country and not be detected by systems set up to monitor
nuclear weapons tests. If tests were conducted underground at a moderate depth, say 50 to
100 meters, even the local inhabitants would suspect nothing . These consequences drive a
stake through the heart of U.S. non-proliferation policie s. These policies are
based on preventing those who want to "go nuclear" from having access to the active nuclear material. A
warhead or "device" that does not use active nuclear material (uranium or plutonium) is not prohibited. To
in no sense can they be termed weapons of "mass
make matters worse,
destruction." Indeed, the pure-fusion devices are even more
discriminant than the neutron bomb because there is, in comparison,
negligible physical damage and a total absence of fission by-
products and related contaminating fallout. Because of this, the pure-
fusion device represents the worst fear of those whose personal
crusade is to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and preserve the
fire break in a hope that this will prevent a nuclear war. The pure-fusion
device is less destructive than most conventional bombs, is reasonably cheap, and can be tested with
the pure-
impunity. It produces no fission radioactive by-products or fallout of serious concern. That is,
fusion device renders the unthinkable thinkable. This is why officials do not want
to discuss the possibility of pure-fusion warheads and, as will be seen, will do their best to deny their
possible existence.
 Space Security K
The aff is an elaborate expression of the unconconscious
fantasies that motivate and sustain pro-space activism---
attention to what the 1AC takes for granted reveals that
their project is saturated in fantasies of omnipotence and
narcissism
Ormrod 9 James S. Ormrod, Lecturer in Sociology at Univ. of Brighton, 2009
Phantasy and Social Movements: An Ontology of Pro-Space Activism, Social
Movement Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, 115129, April 2009
The centrality of fantasy or daydreaming to those pursuing the human
exploration, development and settlement of space is well established.
McCurdy (1997) argues that motivation has been based on constructed romantic images
of space travel. It is reported that the early rocket pioneers like Robert Goddard were driven by
imaginative daydreams. Carl Sagan describes a young Goddard sitting in a cherry tree and envisioning
exotic new vehicles (cited in Kilgore, 2003, p. 42). My own interviews showed that pro-space
activists continue childhood daydreaming about space in later life , as Melvin, a 35
year-old parttime student from the UK testified; Me: Do you find yourself still daydreaming about space
a lot? M: [resounding] Yes. Probably too much, but its one of those things thats so rigid in my psyche I
dont suppose Ill ever be able to get it out really. Nor would I want to, I dont think. Yeah, a lot of people
say I spend too much time up there. There were also more subtle clues that vivid space fantasies lay
behind individuals activism. Middle-aged Bruce McMurray gave the most speculative talks about
space settlement at one of the pro-space conferences I attended. What was noticeable about his
talks was the authority with which he pronounced not that we could build houses for our
space colony in a particular way, but that we will build our houses in a particular
way. This was not unique to Bruce but suggested that what he was doing was not forwarding
possible solutions to potential engineering problems, but instead describing a very
elaborate fantasy he had constructed. Pro-space activists report two main catalysts for their
fantasising. The first is reading science fiction. The second is having witnessed previous space
missions. Despite crucial differences from science fiction fans (discussed later), science fiction is an
essential part of many activists paths to joining the movement. One veteran estimated that seventy
per cent of members got into the movement through reading (or, less commonly, watching) science
fiction. For many of them, the interest in science fiction began at an early age, even as young as four
(Rupert and the Spaceship). From this point, activists often developed an insatiable appetite for the
genre. Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein (along with Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury) have a
particularly close relationship with the pro-space movement. But crucially , pro-space activists did
not simply read science fiction passively, they elaborated their own fantasies
based on it. The creative aspects of science fiction fandom have been emphasised by Jenkins (1992).
When discussing how they got into space, nearly all pro-space activists will
mention something about their memories of watching space missions , usually huddled
around the family TV, or perhaps witnessing a launch in person. Again, childhood memories are
the most pertinent. Amongst those I interviewed, first memories ranged from Sputnik I, the first
satellite to be put into space in 1957, to the first launch of the American Space Shuttle in 1981. There is
a large cohort that grew up during the Apollo era, clearly the most stimulating American space
program, but there are many activists inspired by other programs. Journalist Marina Benjamin (2003)
explains how NASAs dream-peddling had filled her and others like her with inspiration when they
were young, and gave them high hopes for what mankind could achieve in the future. Looking back,
she asks reflexively whether these were delusions; Was I nave to believe wed simply hop from the
moon to other planets and thence to the stars? (Benjamin, 2003, p. 3). It is clear that for Benjamin, as
for so many pro-space activists, seeing space missions unfold before them had encouraged daydreams
and fantasies every bit as much as reading science fiction. Activists fantasies about the
future have largely been ignored in social movement research. This is despite
the fact that any utopian movement must , by definition, imagine some form of
alternative future society which exists only in the mind and not in reality , as Robin
Kelley (2002) has pointed out in his celebration of the imagination in radical social movements. There
are many theoretical positions from which fantasy can be approached, however (Ormrod, 2007), and
my psychoanalytic framework is quite different to Kelleys. Where Kelley sees the imagining of future
 conscious
worlds as a positive creative force operating on a conscious level, I argue that
imaginings are best understood as manifestations of underlying
unconscious phantasies about the self. 2 Space Fantasy and Unconscious Phantasy
One initial piece of evidence for the unconscious origins of space activists
motivation is that often they cannot explain why they want to get into space . Jim, a
software engineer from Illinois, is articulately inarticulate on the matter 3; Me: For what reasons would
you want to go? J: For the fun of it or for the . . . Its hard to say its just been a dreamofmine to be in
space, you know. So, why do you want to be in space; its exciting, you know, its not something that
everybody does but still its not trying to beat the Joneses or anything. Its just one of those desires you
grow up with from when youre a kid, its just a strong desire so you kind of loose track of the original
reason [ . . . .]. So let me think about that, I might be able to answer you better in the future, but its
not one of those things . . . Its sort of like asking somebody why do you scratch your head up here
instead of over here? Its like I just got into the habit of doing it. 118 J. S. Ormrod Jim could no longer
remember why it was he wanted to go into space (assuming he ever knew). Lots of other pro-space
activists got agitated when pushed on the origins of their selfconfessed drive.One resorted to saying
the mystics amongst us might say God put it there. My argument is that the conscious fantasies
of pro-space activists play out intrapsychic conflicts and desires relating to
the break from the state of primary narcissism experienced in the first
few years of life.4 After reading science fiction or watching space missions, these
unconscious phantasies are translated into fantasies about the exploration,
development and settlement of space. Two pleasurable aspects of the stage of
primary narcissism are relevant here. Arguably the precedent one is the unity of the
infant with the mother (the monad, Grunberger, 1989) and indeed the rest of its
universe. This is a state in which the infant does not even recognise the separate
existence of other selves. Some have suggested this begins with the pre-natal
relationship between child and mother in the womb . As the child grows older, it learns to
appreciate the independent existence of others (Mahler et al., 1975). The other aspect is the
experience of omnipotence - of power and control over the world - afforded to the
infant treated as HisMajesty the baby (Freud, 1995, p. 556). This is a world in which all
demands are satisfied. In normal development these experiences are, of course,
shattered by the realities of family life and social existence . Pro-space activists fantasies
can be understood, however, as translations of phantasies about regaining
the self of primary narcissism. I distinguish three dominant themes in pro-space fantasy,
though often they occur in combination. The first relates to trips, often just into Earths orbit, in which
the activist experiences the pleasure of floating around in zero gravity . This weightlessness
has been likened to being in the womb (Bainbridge, 1976, p. 255; White, 1987, p. 23). And if
sexual partnerships are sought in part as a return to the monad as many psychoanalysts contend, then
one activists fantasy of having zero-gravity sex perhaps represents the ultimate nirvana. An alternative
interpretation is to relate the ease of movement in zero-gravity environments to the
way in which at will infants command their parents to pick them up and carry them
around. The social and oedipal restrictions that gravity comes to represent are
symbolically escaped. A second theme is the fantasy of seeing the Earth from
space as a unified (and in many accounts insignificant) whole. This demonstrates the
activists need for separation from the mother coupled with power over
her. Earth is commonly referred to as a mother, and activists talked about being
able to obscure the Earth with their thumb literally being under the thumb . But at
the same time there is the anticipation of a new feeling of unity with the whole
Earth, seen without political boundaries. Indeed in Whites (1987) account of astronauts
experiences he describes it as the ultimate journey from part to whole. There is a
magical resolution here to the infants developmental dilemma. Mother Earth is at
once transcended and brought back into one being with the observer. The third
theme is present in fantasies about the development and settlement of other planets, the
Moon and asteroids. Here the omnipotent desire to tame, conquer, control and
consume the universe is manifest in fantasies such as playing golf on a
course on the moon, mining asteroids or building a colony on Mars (possibly having
terraformed the planet changing its climate to make itmore Earth-like ). The
envisioning of such distant objects being brought under personal control and
symbolically consumed back into the allencompassing self plays out the desired
 but impossible regaining of the phantasized omnipotent self of primary
narcissism around which the whole universe was oriented.

This space fantasy is the culmination of the long western

imperial project of organizing the world in its own image
space is merely the final frontier onto which the aff
projects its fear of instability in an attempt at total
control which creates the conditions for warfare and
extinction
Brennan 93 Teresa Brennan, 1993, Professor of at Cambridge, History After Lacan, 40-45
the lure of spatial identification in the mirror-
From the beginning, Lacan had asserted that
stage accounts for the mconnaissances that mark the ego in all its structures
(Lacan 1949, pp. 46). The mirror-stage identification is an inverse one, in which the image is outside
and opposed to the self; it is, so to speak, a reversal. This spatial lure is an energetic formation which
also structures the subject as a rival within itself. Subsequently, its energetic aspect will implicitly, as
ever with Lacan who is always implicit, bear on the link between the ego and the environment. Turning
here to the mirror-stage as an internal rivalrous structure: the key point here is that this structure not
only constitutes the subject-to-bes identity. It is also a precondition for the subjects Oedipal rivalry
with the other. Note that this means that an internal structure prefigures a similar external
one. A psychical reality, or fantasy, pre-dates its subsequent acting out. The
narcissism of the mirror-stage is inextricably bound up with
aggressiveness against this other , and is the locus of the master-slave struggle for
recognition that binds the ego as master and the ego as slave one to another. In steps that are not
clear (and to which I return) Lacan discusses this bondage and the aggressiveness it generates in the
first four theses of On Aggressivity. He introduces the fifth, final thesis by saying that Such a
notion of aggressivity as one of the intentional co-ordinates of the
human ego, especially relative to the category of space, allows us to
conceive of its role in modern neurosis and in the discontents of
civilization . (Lacan 1948, p. 25) The fifth thesis is avowedly social. It is about aggression in the
present social order (ibid., p. 25). In it, Lacan indicates how the spatial dimensions of the
environment and the ego intersect. He seems to be saying that aggression increases in the
spatial restrictions of an urban environment. He explicitly refers to the dialectic common to the
passions of the soul and the city and to the effects of the ever-contracting living space in which
human competition is becoming ever keener (ibid., pp. 267).22 For Lacan the citys spatial
restrictions result in needs to escape on the one hand, and an increased social aggressiveness on the
other. The apparent banality of Lacans statement that overcrowding leads to aggressiveness is
alleviated in that his account gestures to why overcrowding leads to aggressiveness, and as we shall
see, to a territorializing imperative whereby the ego seeks to make the globe over in its own image.
Aggressiveness motivates the drive to dominate not only the earths
surface but outer space through psycho-techniques (ibid.). It is also part of a
competitive Darwinian ethic which projected the predations of Victorian Society
and the economic euphoria that sanctioned for that society the social
devastation that it initiated on a planetary scale (ibid., p. 26). It is with
Victorian imperialism that the egos era gathers steam. The Darwinian ethic , Lacan
notes, presents itself as natural, although its true origins lie in the aggression
generated by the masterslave dialectic. In its entirety, On Aggressivity suggests a
fundamental connection between the spatial dimension of the ego and the spatial environment.
However, the precise nature of this egoic/environmental spatial dialectic needs to be constructed from
Lacans allusions. There are some indications as to how this might be done. To begin explicating them,
it is necessary to hark back to Lacans comment on anxiety, and its intersection with the spatial
dimension. Lacans introduction of anxiety at that point in the text on aggressiveness appears
somewhat ad hoc. Yet he has obliquely referred to anxiety earlier in the same text, through referring to
Melanie Klein. Lacans text is dated 1948, a time when Kleins name was associated with the view that
anxiety and aggressiveness played a dominant part in very early psychical life.23 Lacan refers to Klein
in On Aggressivity when discussing the paranoiac structure of the ego and the especial delusion of
the misanthropic belle me, throwing back onto the world the disorder out of which his being is
composed (Lacan 1948, p. 20). After referring to Kleins work, Lacan turns to aggressiveness and its
relation to narcissism (ibid., p. 21). I take this mention of the belle me as a signpost to the formation of
the modern ego, given that Lacan referred to the belle me when saying that he had indicated
elsewhere how the modern ego takes on its form. Projection is a mechanism of the
imaginary, and the subject who throws his disorder back into the world is
engaging, evidently, in the act of projection. Klein was particularly concerned with the early
operation of projection, whose force she linked to anxiety: for her, the extent of a subjects persecutory
anxiety not only affects its ability to link; it also determines the degree to which it projects bad internal
objects. Projection is the mode for putting bad feelings and bad internal objects (to
which Lacan explicitly refers) (ibid., p. 21) outside the self: this projective process in
turn generates feelings of persecution about bad objects returning,
hence paranoia . This is not the only reference to this projective process in the text on
aggressiveness. The projection of internal negativity is a mobilizing factor in war ,
as indeed is the need to dominate physical space (ibid., p. 28). Taking physical pressure, its
dialectical counterpart in the physical environment and the aggressive anxiety they trigger into
account, there are grounds for setting out how a historical, spatial dynamic might work. If, as Lacan
says, the more spatially constricted the environment is, the more anxiety and the aggressive desire to
dominate space increase, then that desire and anxiety must increase as space becomes more
constricted and more dominated. Yet as Lacan also says that this process produces an increase in
aggressive competitiveness, his dialectic requires an economic, technological
supplement. The supplement should illuminate the egos rigidity and desire for
control. The rigidity, the basis of the egos resistance to truth, is first formed in
the spatial positioning of the mirror-stage. I want to suggest here that, just as there is a
dialectic between the spatial dimensions of the ego and of the environment, so too might the egos
rigidity have a dialectical counterpart in the things the subject constructs. It is this dialectical
counterpart which accounts for the temporal process at work in the foreclosure of the sense of time,
and which explains why the sense of history is fading. As will be plain by Chapter 5, the things
constructed physically alter the perception of time. Things means the whole technological apparatus
by which the environment is controlled. The modern age begins that way of being human
which mans the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring
and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole
(Heidegger 1949, p. 132). Apart from the fact that the construction of things is one
expression of the desire to dominate space, it is also consistent with Lacans
otherwise puzzling question as to whether the master-slave dialectic will find its
resolution in the service of the machine. It fits, too, with his suspicion of reality-
testing. If the construction of things is one expression of what Lacan elsewhere
refers to as the passionate desire peculiar to man to impress his image on
reality(Lacan 1948, p. 22) then reality-testing is suspect because the ego has
constructed the reality it then proceeds to test . As the point of departure for this
supplement on how the egos rigidity has a counterpart in the environment it constructs, it is worth
recalling that Lacan ties both the egos rigidity and the social psychosis to
paranoia. The ego, in part, has a paranoid dimension because both the ego and the
egos objects are conceived of as fixed, and the ego wants them to stay fixed. Any
unregulated movement or change in these objects poses a threat to the egos
concept of itself as fixed, in that its own fixity is defined in relation to them . Here we
can locate the need to control the environment in an attempt to predict and regulate changes within it,
to subject the irregularity of living things to a form of domination in which the ego closes off to itself the
truth about itself, by making its dream of fixation come true. That is to say, at the same time as it
closes off the truth on which its psychical health depends, it also, and in a parallel manner, restricts the
regeneration of the natural environment on which it depends to stay alive. This coupling of spatial
shifts with technological expansion is repeated, although the emphasis is reversed in
Marxs account. For Marx, the division of town and country is at one and the same time the basis of
the accumulation of capital, which accelerates and requires the technological expansion necessary for
winning in the competition of the marketplace. This does not solve the problem of what triggers
aggressive competitiveness in so far as Marx himself continued to seek, and was unhappy with, his own
accounts of the cause of the accumulation of capital; he sought them in a variety of places, from the
relaxation of the churchs laws restricting usury, to the shift whereby the merchant became an
industrialist through employing small rural producers.24 Marxs critics, notably Max Weber, have
argued that he overlooked the extent to which substantial urbanization preceded capitalization
(Giddens 1981, p. 109). Yet whatever the cause of capitalization, the technological
expansion that accompanied it is the means whereby the ego is able to secure the
reversal in knowledge, as it makes the world over in its own image. It is also, and
this is critical to the dynamics of the egos era , a means of generating
continuous economic insecurity and anxiety over survival in the majority,
and guarantees their dependence on those identified with the dominant
egos standpoint. In fact to say that the above points can be made in the form of an economic
supplement is drastically to understate the case: the unelaborated relation between the economic
dimension and the ego is the subjective flaw in Lacans historical theory, because it is only through the
elaboration of this relation that the mechanism by which the social psychosis could exist
simultaneously in and around individuals will emerge. Aggressive competitiveness is tied to
imperialism (loosely) but the fact that this tie is also fundamental in the competitive
profit motive is not followed through (despite, or perhaps because of, the Heideggerian
allusions). This tie can be effected after the foundational fantasy is identified in more detail in Part II.
And once this is done, the details of the mechanism by which the fixity or rigidity that Lacan so
frequently refers to as a hallmark of the individual ego has a counterpart in the historical egos era will
be apparent. So will another reason for scepticism about reality-testing. Lacan refers to the
egos era approach to knowledge as paranoid, as it is based on a need
for control. But he does not take account of how the ego technologically constructs an
environment it can control, and how this, in turn, reinforces paranoia, precisely
because the damage done to nature in the process makes the ego fear (rightly) for
its own survival.
These pathologies distort not only how we respond to
crisis but also why and to which crises- as such, your
primary role is to investigate the negs psychological
investment in space colonization as an exercise in the
epistemology of paranoia Paranoia develops through
closed doors and closed classrooms, making certain forms
of knowledge acceptable and other hidden or de-
legitimatized. This demonstrates the way this hegemonic
epistemology becomes calcified- when the end of conflict
comes American military officials actively seek the next
war.
Dylan Rodriguez says that the act of working against the
pernicious exceptionalist myth while in the academy as
per the 1AC allows us to recognize the tension within
producing knowledge that intentionally disrupts the
academys genocide analytic and allows creative
knowledge production in institutional sites that are
supposed to be calcified. Specifically the 1ACs form of
anti-disciplinarity to the process of American
militarization is key towards reconfiguring our
epistemology- recognizing that the specter of paranoia
that pervades interpretations of external events means
that we understand academic scholarship is inherently
biased towards necessitating warfare which transforms
how we learn and act within these sites
Jose Medina says that this type of anti-disciplinarity is a
form of guerilla pluralism to inject multiple narratives
against the hegemonic interpretation. The goal of this is
to create epistemic friction- not seeking unity with
existing power structures but rather working to create
disruption. In this specific case, the 1ACs refusal to
strategically essentialize the law for a specific policy
against military presence is because that option seeks a
unity with current power structures and necessarily
sacrifices some of the objective of anti-disciplinarity; by
engaging in our revealing and antidisciplinarity without
turning to this fixed acts, we use epistemic friction
provoke conflict, seek to point out gaps and clashing
perspectives, focuses on tension and constantly re-
investigating how our knowledge is produced. The 1AC
thus isnt a single speech act that solves all problems but
rather is a constantly producing form of scholarship that
is a process rather than a product.
 AT: FW/Policy First
We dont need an alternative besides our framework of
analysis---the fantasy will reveal itself as long as we
continue asking questions to expose their concealment of
the lack---in other words, its your job to confuse and
frustrate them via a refusal to partake in their politics---
this crushes the permutation

Dean 6
Jodi, Prof of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 2006, Zizeks Politics.
Xviii-xx

in his formula for

iek emphasizes that Lacan conceptualized this excessive place, this place without guarantees,

the discourse of the analyst (which I set out in Chapter Two). In psychoanalysis, the analyst

just sits there, asking questions from time to time . She is some kind of object or cipher onto which
the analysand transfers love, desire, aggression, and knowledge. The analysand, in
other words, proceeds through analysis by positing the analyst as someone who
knows exactly what is wrong with him and exactly what he should do to get rid of his symptom and
get better. But, really, the analyst does not know . Moreover, the analyst steadfastly refuses to

provide the analysand with any answers whatsoever . No ideals, no moral certainty, no goals, no
choices. Nothing. This is what makes the analyst so traumatic , iek explains, the fact that she refuses to
establish a law or set a limit, that she does not function as some kind of new master.7 Analysis is over when the
analysand accepts that the analyst does not know, that there is not any secret meaning or explanation, and then takes
responsibility for getting on with his life. The challenge for the analysand, then, is freedom, autonomously determining his
own limits, directly assuming his own enjoyment. So, again, the position of the analyst is in this excessive place as an
Why is the analyst
object through which the analysand works through the analytical process.

necessary in the first place? If she is not going to tell the analysand what to do , how he should be
then why does he not save his money, skip the whole process , and figure out things for himself?
living,

There are two basic answers. First, the analysand is not self-
transparent. He is a stranger to himself, a decentered agent
struggling with a foreign kernel.8 What is more likely than self-understanding, is self-
misunderstanding, that is, ones fundamental misperception of ones own condition. Becoming aware of this
misperception, grappling with it, is the work of analysis . Accordingly, second, the
analyst is that external agent or position that gives a new form to our activity. Saying things
out loud, presenting them to another, and confronting them in front of this
external position concretizes and arranges our thoughts and activities in a
different way, a way that is more difficult to escape or avoid. The analyst then
provides a form through which we acquire a perspective on and a relation to our selves. Pauls Christian collectives and
Lenins revolutionary Party are, for iek, similarly formal arrangements, forms for a new type of knowledge linked to a
collective political subject.9 Each provides an external perspective on our activities, a way to concretize and organize our
spontaneous experiences. More strongly put, a political Party is necessary precisely because politics is not given; it does
not arise naturally or organically out of the multiplicity of immanent flows and affects but has to be produced, arranged,
and constructed out of these flows in light of something larger. In my view, when iek draws on popular culture and
inserts himself into this culture, he is taking the position of an object of enjoyment, an excessive object that cannot easily
be recuperated or assimilated. This excessive position is that of the analyst as well as that of the Party. Reading iek as

occupying the position of the analyst tells us that it is wrong to expect iek to tell us what to do, to provide an
ultimate solution or direction through which to solve all the worlds problems . The analyst
does not provide the analysand with ideals and goals; instead, he occupies the place of an
 object in relation to which we work these out for ourselves . In adopting the position of the
analyst, iek is also practicing what he refers to as Bartleby politics, a politics rooted in a kind of
refusal wherein the subject turns itself into a disruptive (of our peace of mind!) violently passive

object who says, I would prefer not to .10 Thus, to my mind, becoming preoccupied with ieks style is
How is this
like becoming preoccupied with what ones analyst is wearing. Why such a preoccupation?
preoccupation enabling us to avoid confronting the truth of our
desire, our own investments in enjoyment? How is complaining that iek (or the analyst) will not tell us what to do a
way that we avoid trying to figure this out for ourselves?11 Reading iek in terms of an excessive object also means

seeing his position as analogous to the formal position of the Party. Here it tells us that rather than a set of
answers iek is providing an intervention that cuts through the
or dictates,

experiences in which we find ourselves and organizes them from a

multiplicity of affects and
specific perspective. As we shall see, for iek, this perspective is anchored in class struggle as the
fundamental antagonism rupturing and constituting the social. So again, he does not give us an answer ; he

does not know what we should do, but his thought provides an external point in relation to which we
can organize, consider, and formalize our experiences as ideological subjects .

Intellectualization = projection of responsibility---that

theyve come to a debate tournament and demanded
political action is laughable and demonstrative of their
delusions

Dodds 12
Joseph, MPhil, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK, MA, Psychoanalytic Studies,
Sheffield University, UK BSc, Psychology and Neuroscience, Manchester University, UK,
Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) of the British Psychological Society (BPS), and a member of
several other professional organizations such as the International Neuropsychoanalysis
Society, Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos p 48

The split can also take the form of an intellectualization , separating abstract awareness
of the crisis from real emotional engagement (by writing a book on psychoanalysis and climate change or
making a presentation to a conference on the ecological crisis, reached by flying on a
low-cost airline ). General principles are at times more easy to face emotionally than
our personal contributions , the threats to other species easier to acknowledge than the threat to our own. Thus the abstractness of
the issue that can be such a barrier to action can be partly artificially induced to
protect us from feeling . The affect refused in intellectualization can also be dealt with through displacement onto a different, less threatening target. Winter & Koger (2004:
36) suggest that environmental concern can be displaced in ineffective but more comfortable

activities such as buying a T-shirt with a whale picture or 'reconnecting' with nature by going on
carbon-emitting flights to exotic lands. On the other hand, eco-anxiety can be displaced onto other
groups and scapegoats, exasperating existing hatred of immigrants or conflicts such as the War on Terror. Scapegoating mechanisms are always around but they tend to increase during times

of anxiety and uncertainty . A good example is the witch persecutions of the Early Modern Era, which became a focal point, a lightning rod for all kinds of anxieties (religious, existential, sexual, relational, social and psychological) connected to the
transitional period from the medieval-religious to the modern-scientific world. (For psychoanalytic explorations of this history see Lyndal Roper's [1994] Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe and Evelyn
Heinemann' s [2000] Witches: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Killing of Women) Displacement can also result in 'blaming the ecological messenger', in a way comparable to how the unpalatable insights of psychoanalysis still provoke enough emotion for
a whole 'Freud-burying' (Tallis 2009) industry (but like the undead, one burial never seems enough). As Marshall (2005) writes: Climate change is deeply threatening to anyone whose world view sees increasing personal consumption as a fair reward for a
lifetime's dedication to the growth economy. We all feel small and powerless in the face of a huge and daunting problem and although we are not actively punished for speaking out against it, we are hardly well rewarded ... Try bringing it up when a friend
shows you their holiday tan and you will see what I mean. One relevant example here is the Czech President Vaclav Klaus who not only denies outright the existence of anthropogenic climate change, but even compares environmentalism with Nazism, Fascism
and Stalinism (Dujisin 2007). Others evoke the phrase 'ecofascist' to describe anyone with a vaguely green agenda. All these responses need to be explored by psychoanalytically informed social theorists and environmental researchers. In terms of

New Age trends, which, while leading many to care

displacement, it is interesting also to consider Marshall's (2005) comments on certain

deeply about ecology through a 'mother earth' spirituality, may provide space for defensive
displacements . He relates the story of a manager of a chain of luxury hotels in Mauritius
who said 'we take these environmental problems very seriously ... we are the first
company in Mauritius to open a Feng Shui hotel' where people 'can reconnect with the
natural environment' including 'special Feng Shui meals' where 'everything is rounded to help the movement of the chi forces' (ibid.). Marshall sees this
as emblematic of a certain response to ecological threat, shared by 'the tourists who
identify with the New Age marketing and will pay a premium for the eco-theming of
their air conditioned room' (ibid.). Furthermore, on visiting a large well-known bookshop he found that while they sold over 30 books on feng shui, they stocked not a
single volume on home energy efficiency. In the face of a problem which 80% of people say is a major issue,

vastly more people wish to control and manage the movement of chi energy around their house than
the real energy going out through their windows ... It is hard not to think of Feng Shui as
the ideological equivalent of dioxins which occupy and block key receptors in the body
which should be engaging with nutrients ... We chose to replace the daunting and terrifying environmental

problems ... with manageable and entertaining pseudo-environmentalism. (ibid.)

Given our positions as debaters and academics our

alternative is less utopian and more pragmatic---as critical
theorists our role is to ask questions to open heuristic
spaces for reflection---obviously we dont change politics,
but its better than pretending to reform a fantasmic
system from a cloistered college campus---this is also a
DA to the perm

Pepper 10
Prof Geography Oxford, Utopianism and Environmentalism, Environmental Politics, 14:1, 3-22,
SAGE

Conclusion Utopian endeavour is necessary for

Academic and activist opinion nonetheless frequently argues that

Utopianism is
radical environmentalism and for related movements such as feminism, anarchism and socialism.

important within these movements to inspire hope and provide 'transgressive'

spaces , conceptual and real, in which to experiment within alternative paradigms . To be
truly transgressive, rather than lapsing into reactionary fantasy , ecotopias
need to emphasise heuristic spaces and processes rather than laying down blueprints , and
must be rooted in existing social and economic relations rather than being merely a form of abstraction unrelated to the processes and
situations operating in today's 'real' world. This paper suggests that by these criteria, the transgressiveness of ecotopianism is
Deep ecological and bioregional literature, for instance, can
ambiguous and limited.
seem regressively removed from today's world. Anti-modernism is evident, for
instance, in the form of future primitivism and the predilection for small-scale 're-embedded' societies echoing "traditional
Blueprinting is also suggested by the strong metanarratives
cultures'.
driven by (ecological) science. There is a remarkable consensus
amongst ideologically diverse ecotopian perspectives about what
should be in ecotopia, leaving relatively little as provisional and
reflexive. Additionally, idealism in the negative sense is often rife in ecotopianism. However, idealism
pervades reformist as well as radical environmentalism , and the principles behind ecological
modernisation - the much-favoured mainstream policy discourse about the environment

are founded on premises that can be described as 'Utopian* in the pejorative sense used by

Marxists. That is, they do not adequately and accurately take into account the
socioeconomic dynamics of the capitalist system they are meant to reform . Thus they
fail to recognise that social-democratic and 'third way' attempts to
realise an environmentally sound, humane, inclusive and egalitarian
capitalism are ultimately headed for failure . Notwithstanding these limitations of ecotopianism, given that
the environmental problems featured in dystopian fiction for over a century seem increasingly to be materialising, it may be that we will soon
be clutching at ecotopias as beacons affirming Bloch's 'principle of hope* (1986). And what of those who, despite these
deepening environmental problems, still maintain that 'ecotopia' is Utopian fantasy in the worst sense,
while considering their reformist visions to be pragmatic and attainable? These " hard-nosed
realists*, as Terry Eagleton (2000, p.33) ironically calls them, "who behave as though
chocolate chip cookies and the IMF will be with us in another 3000
years time", should realise that although the future may or may not
be pleasant: to deny that it will be quite different in the manner of
post-histoire philosophising, is to offend against the very realism on
which such theorists usually pride themselves. To claim that human
affairs might feasibly be much improved is a n eminently realistic
proposition .
 AT: Securitizing Inevitable
It is possible to overcome defensive anxiety
mechanisms---dont be blackmailed by their inevitability
args---you can just vote neg

Smith 12
Daniel Smith is the author of Muses, Madmen, and Prophets and a contributor to numerous
publications, including The American Scholar, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and
Slate "Its Still the Age of Anxiety. Or Is It?" opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/its-
still-the-age-of-anxiety-or-is-it/
Its hard to believe that anyone but scholars of modern literature or paid critics have read W.H. Audens dramatic poem The Age of
Anxiety all the way through, even though it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948, the year after it was published. It is a difficult work allusive,
allegorical, at times surreal. But more to the point, its boring. The characters meet, drink, talk and walk around; then they drink, talk and walk
around some more. They do this for 138 pages; then they go home. Audens title, though: that people know. From the moment it appeared,
has been used to characterize the consciousness of our era, the
the phrase

awareness of everything perilous about the modern world: the degradation of the environment,
nuclear energy , religious fundamentalism, threats to privacy and the family, drugs, pornography, violence,
terrorism. Since 1990, it has appeared in the title or subtitle of at least two dozen books on subjects ranging from science to politics
to parenting to sex (Mindblowing Sex in the Real World: Hot Tips for Doing It in the Age of Anxiety). As a sticker on the bumper of the
the age of anxiety has been ubiquitous for more than six
Western world,

decades now. But is it accurate? As someone who has struggled with chronic anxiety for many years, I have my doubts. For one
thing, when youve endured anxietys insults for long enough the gnawed fingernails and sweat-drenched underarms, the hyperventilating
and crippling panic attacks calling the 20th century The Age of Anxiety starts to sound like calling the 17th century The Age of the
Throbbing Migraine: so metaphorical as to be meaningless. From a sufferers perspective, anxiety is always and absolutely personal. It is an
experience: a coloration in the way one thinks, feels and acts. It is a petty monster able to work such humdrum tricks as paralyzing you over
your salad, convincing you that a choice between blue cheese and vinaigrette is as dire as that between life and death. When you are on
intimate terms with something so monumentally subjective, it is hard to think in terms of epochs. And yet it is undeniable that ours is an age
in which an enormous and growing number of people suffer from anxiety. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety
disorders now affect 18 percent of the adult population of the United States, or about 40 million people. By comparison, mood disorders
depression and bipolar illness, primarily affect 9.5 percent. That makes anxiety the most common psychiatric complaint by a wide margin,
and one for which we are increasingly well-medicated. Last spring, the drug research firm IMS Health released its annual report on
pharmaceutical use in the United States. The anti-anxiety drug alprazolam better known by its brand name, Xanax was the top
psychiatric drug on the list, clocking in at 46.3 million prescriptions in 2010. Just because our anxiety is heavily diagnosed and medicated,
however, doesnt mean that we are more anxious than our forebears. It might simply mean that we are better treated that we are, as
individuals and a culture, more cognizant of the minds tendency to spin out of control. Earlier eras might have been even more

Fourteenth-century Europe, for example, experienced

jittery than ours.
devastating famines, waves of pillaging mercenaries, peasant
revolts, religious turmoil and a plague that wiped out as much as
half the population in four years. The evidence suggests that all this resulted in mass
convulsions of anxiety, a period of psychic torment in which, as one historian has put it, the more one

knew, the less sense the world made . Nor did the monolithic presence of the
Church necessarily help; it might even have made things worse . A firm
belief in God and heaven was near-universal, but so was a firm belief in their opposites: the Devil and hell.
And you could never be certain in which direction you were headed. Its hard to imagine that we
have it even close to as bad as that . Yet there is an aspect of anxiety that we
clearly have more of than ever before: self-awareness . The inhabitants of earlier
eras might have been wracked by nerves, but none fixated like we do on the condition. Indeed, none even
Anxiety didnt emerge as a cohesive psychiatric
considered anxiety a condition.
concept until the early 20th century, when Freud highlighted it as
the nodal point at which the most various and important questions
converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light upon our
whole mental existence. After that, the number of thinkers and artists who sought to solve this riddle increased exponentially. By
1977, the psychoanalyst Rollo May was noting an explosion in papers, books and studies on the subject. Anxiety, he wrote, has certainly
come out of the dimness of the professional office into the bright light of the marketplace. None of this is to say that ours is a
serene age. Obviously it isnt. It is to say, however, that we shouldnt be possessive about our
uncertainties , particularly as one of the dominant features of anxiety is
its recursiveness. Anxiety begins with a single worry , and the more you concentrate on
that worry, the more powerful it gets, and the more you worry. One of the best things you
can do is learn to let go : to disempower the worry altogether . If you start to believe
that anxiety is a foregone conclusion if you start to believe the hype about the times we
live in then you risk surrendering the battle before its begun.
 AT: PsychoAnalysis Bad/Unfalsifiable
Its falsifiable, but even if not its irrelevant [explain]
also good AT: but social sciences are a good heuristic
model

Dean 5
COLIN LESLIE DEAN, BSC, BA, B.LITT(HON) ,MA, B.LITT(HON), MA, MA(PSYCHOANALYTIC
STUDIES), "THE IRRATIONAL AND ILLOGICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE
DEMARCATIONOF SCIENCE AND NON-SCIENCE IS A PSEUDO PROBLEM"
gamahucherpress.yellowgum.com/books/psychoanalysis/THE_IRRATIONAL_AND_ILLOGICAL_NAT
URE_OF_SCIENCE_AND_PSYCHOANA.pdf
although perhaps more
Grunbaum, in 1984, published a book which took issue with the positivist attack upon the un-falsifiablity of psychoanalysis Grunbaum " argues that,

difficult to study than in the physical sciences, cause-effect principles apply just as
strongly in psychology as in physics. He also shows that many psychoanalytical postulates are
falsifiable ..." A, Bateman, & J, Holmes claim that repression, unconscious awareness, identification and
internalization are scientifically proven . Now despite Grunbaum's apparent demonstration of the falsifablity of psychoanalysis some theorists claim
that the external validation of psychoanalysis is doomed to fail. These theorists follow Ricoeur in claiming a hermeneutic understanding of psychoanalysis. They claim that instead of a correspondence with

there are
reality, as being the criteria upon which to assess psychoanalysis, they claim that ". internal coherence and narrative plausibility as the basis for settling disputes." Thus we see

those, like Grunbaum, who argue that psychoanalysis can be tested against the facts of
reality and potentially its postulates can be falsified by reality. On the other hand there are
those, like Ricoeur, who advocate a hermenutical approach where it is not a
correspondence with reality that matters but whether the psychoanalytic theory is
internally consistent and its interpretations or narratives satisfying or not. A theory is falsifiable, in the
correspondence theory of 'truth' if it does not agree with reality. In the coherence theory of 'truth' a theory is falsifiable ifit is inconsistent in terms of the system. I will argue that both criteria are flawed and

the debate on the falsifiablity of psychoanalysis is a debate

lack epistemological support. In this regard we see that

between correspondence and coherence theorists. Now the correspondence and coherence theories of 'truth'
are philosophically flawed. I will show how they are flawed and lack epistemological support. What I will
draw from this is my claim that it does not matter whether psychoanalysis is falsifiable or not
either in terms of the correspondence or coherence theories of 'truth' because both lack epistemological support. A way of looking at a theory is to see at as a set of statements which say something about a state

the issue is what is the relation between the statement and reality that
of affair about reality. Under this viewpoint

makes it 'true' or 'false'. O'Hear notes 'true' statements correspond or picture reality .
But the problem with this is that " how can a statement- something linguistic -
correspond to a fact or state of affairs. Certainly it cannot be a replica of a state of affairs , nor does it fit with it in the way a nut might be said to correspond with a nut. Further, even
if we could make some sense of a simple affirmative factual statement .... There are considerable problems with knowing just what it is other statements are supposed to correspond to." What

about negative statements that say something is not or does not exist? What
aboutcounterfactural statements? Do mathematical and moral statements correspond to
something in reality? Are there universal statements that correspond to reality? The correspondence theory of 'truth'
that sees statements as corresponding to reality is thus problematic. The problems are such that, as O'Hear notes " ... the correspondence relation are simply shadowy reflections of statements we regard as true

for other reasons rather than as generally mind-independent realities." When we realize that there is no non-conceptual view about reality we realize that even 'reality' is a
value-laden conceptual laden term . As some argue all theory is value laden there are no facts uncontaminated by epistemological, metaphysical, other theories,
and ontological views. The result of all this is to undermine the claims of the correspondence theory such that "... there is something futile in thinking that

what we know is achieved by direct access to a mind-independent reality, which would

suggest that a naive correspondence view of truth , at least, is likely to be able to give us little
guidance in our actual inquiries and researches." We shall see that the coherence theory of 'truth' fares no better in guiding our research or
acessing our actual statements about 'truth' or falsidity. In the coherence theory of 'truth' the criteria of 'truth' is that a statement does not contradict other statements. O'Hear notes that "systems here are
regarded as being governed by nothing more mysterious than normal relations of implication and contradiction." But as has been pointed out it is quite easy to avoid contradiction by dropping inconsistent
statements . If a statement is inconsistent with theory or observation we can just drop either the theory or observational statement. Also many scientific theory suffer from empirical counter-evidence which we
nevertheless still accept. What happens when two or more theories i.e. Kleinian, Lacanian, Freudian, ego-psychology etc, are lets say coherent but contain mutually contradictory statements in regard to each
other. In other words what about the situation when theories are coherent but contradict each other. O'Hear points out " that many would regard this as a conclusive objection to the coherence theory of truth,
for surely whether a statement is true or not depends on the facts and not on the systems we are using to interpret the facts." But here is the big problem. We showed above that facts are themselves value
conceptual laden. The correspondence theory of 'truth' in fact is not epistemologically or metaphysically etc neutral- we see the facts through other theories. But we have just seen that in seeing the facts
through other theories assumes that the theories are coherence, but coherence theories of 'truth' as we have seen are epistemologically flawed. Thus we see that epistemologically both the correspondence and

it does not matter whether psychoanalysis is falsifiable.

coherence theories of 'truth' are flawed. This to my mind say that

Whether it is, or is not is based upon a particular theory of 'truth' that has no
epistemological support. Now regardless of these philosophical investigations I will show
that in terms of each theory there is evidence that even though their criteria are not met
for some theories these theories are still used with ongoing validity. This evidence will
also lend weight to my claim that it does not matter whether psychoanalysis is falsifiable
or not, it can still have validity. There are examples from physics where correspondence
with reality has not resulted in the abandonment of the theory. A theory has been falsified yet
nevertheless it is still used. A classic example is that of Newtonian physics. Newtonian prediction of black-body
radiation failed -this was left to quantum physics to do. Also Newtonian physics failed to predict the motion of three bodies in combined gravitational motion i.e. planets . Kuhn points out that no one denied
that Newtonian physic was not as science because it could not predict the speed of sound, or Newton's laws of gravitation failed to predict and account for the perigee of the moon or the motion of the moon; as
he states " no one seriously questioned Newtonian theory because of the long recognized discrepancies between predictions from the theory and both the speed the speed of sound and the motion of Mercury."

Thus we see that even if psychoanalysis is falsified in terms of the correspondence theory
of 'truth ,the case of Newtonian physics shows us that it need not matter in the least. In this
regard there is truth in Freud's provocative idea, when he states, " even if psychoanalysis
showed itself as unsuccessful in every other form of nervous and psychical disease as it does in delusions, it would still remain
completely justified as an irreplacable instrument of scientific research. It is true that in that case we should not
be in a position to practice it." Now even in science and mathematics there are un-falsifiable entities but this

does not stop them being used in those disciplines. At the very core of science and
mathematics there are un-falsifiable entities. Such things as matter, the mathematical
point, anti-matter force etc. are unfalsifiable. Freud notes the presence of un-falsiable objects in psychoanalysis when he states " too it will be entirely in
accord with our expectations if the basic concepts and principles of the new science (instincts, nervous energy, etc) remain for a considerable time no less indeterminate than those of the older sciences (force,
mass, attraction, etc)." Thus we see that even if psychoanalysis is not falsifiable, in terms of the correspondence theory of 'truth'. just like in mathematics and science, it does not matter for a theories validity.
The coherence theory of 'truth's says that if a theory or statement is inconsistent then it is false. But there are examples where this is the state of affairs but nevertheless the theories are still used.
 AT: Threats Real
Security is a psychological constructthe affs scenarios
for conflict are products of paranoia that project our
violent impulses onto the other

Mack 91
Doctor of Psychiatry and a professor at Harvard University (John, The Enemy System
http://www.johnemackinstitute.org/eJournal/article.asp?id=23 *Gender modified)

The threat of nuclear annihilation has stimulated us to try to understand what it is about
(hu)mankind that has led to such self-destroying behavior . Central to this inquiry is an exploration
of the adversarial relationships between ethnic or national groups. It is out of such enmities
that war, including nuclear war should it occur, has always arisen. Enmity between groups of people
stems from the interaction of psychological, economic, and cultural elements. These include fear
and hostility (which are often closely related), competition over perceived scarce resources,[3] the need
for individuals to identify with a large group or cause,[4] a tendency to disclaim and assign
elsewhere responsibility for unwelcome impulses and intentions, and a peculiar susceptibility to
emotional manipulation by leaders who play upon our more savage inclinations in the name of national security or the
national interest. A full understanding of the "enemy system"[3] requires insights from many
specialities, including psychology, anthropology, history, political science, and the humanities. In their statement on violence[5]
twenty social and behavioral scientists, who met in Seville, Spain, to examine the roots of war, declared that
there was no scientific basis for regarding (hu)man(s) as an innately aggressive animal, inevitably
committed to war. The Seville statement implies that we have real choices . It also points to a hopeful paradox of the
nuclear age: threat of nuclear war may have provoked our capacity for fear-driven polarization
but at the same time it has inspired unprecedented efforts towards cooperation and
settlement of differences without violence. The Real and the Created Enemy Attempts to explore the
psychological roots of enmity are frequently met with responses on the following lines: "I can
accept psychological explanations of things, but my enemy is real . The Russians [or Germans, Arabs,
Israelis, Americans] are armed, threaten us, and intend us harm. Furthermore, there are real
differences between us and our national interests, such as competition over oil, land, or
other scarce resources, and genuine conflicts of values between our two nations. It is essential that we be
strong and maintain a balance or superiority of military and political power, lest the other
side take advantage of our weakness". This argument does not address the distinction between
the enemy threat and one's own contribution to that threat -by distortions of perception, provocative words,
and actions. In short, the enemy is real, but we have not learned to understand how we have created
that enemy , or how the threatening image we hold of the enemy relates to its actual
intentions. "We never see our enemy's motives and we never labor to assess his will, with anything
approaching objectivity ".[6] Individuals may have little to do with the choice of national enemies. Most Americans, for
example, know only what has been reported in the mass media about the Soviet Union. We are largely unaware of the
forces that operate within our institutions, affecting the thinking of our leaders and
ourselves, and which determine how the Soviet Union will be represented to us . Ill-will and a
desire for revenge are transmitted from one generation to another, and we are not taught to think critically about
how our assigned enemies are selected for us. In the relations between potential adversarial nations there will
have been, inevitably, real grievances that are grounds for enmity. But the attitude of one people towards another is usually determined
by leaders who manipulate the minds of citizens for domestic political reasons which are generally unknown to the public. As Israeli
sociologist Alouph Haveran has said, in times of conflict between nations historical accuracy is the first
victim.[8] The Image of the Enemy and How We Sustain It Vietnam veteran William Broyles wrote: " War begins in the
mind, with the idea of the enemy ."[9] But to sustain that idea in war and peacetime a nation's leaders
must maintain public support for the massive expenditures that are required. Studies of
enmity have revealed susceptibilities, though not necessarily recognized as such by the governing elites that provide
raw material upon which the leaders may draw to sustain the image of an enemy.[7, 10] Freud[11]
in his examination of mass psychology identified the proclivity of individuals to surrender
personal responsibility to the leaders of large groups. This surrender takes place in both totalitarian and democratic
societies, and without coercion. Leaders can therefore designate outside enemies and take actions against them with little opposition.
Much further research is needed to understand the psychological mechanisms that impel individuals to kill or
allow killing in their name, often with little questioning of the morality or consequences of such
actions. Philosopher and psychologist Sam Keen asks why it is that in virtually every war "The enemy is seen as less than human?
He's faceless. He's an animal"." Keen tries to answer his question: " The image of the enemy is not only the soldier's most
powerful weapon; it is society's most powerful weapon. It enables people en masse to participate in
acts of violence they would never consider doing as individuals".[12] National leaders become skilled in presenting the
adversary in dehumanized images. The mass media, taking their cues from the leadership, contribute powerfully to the process.
Terror DAs
 Generic 2AC shell
Turn- Terrorism is the 21st century manifestation of the
specter of paranoia: it develops through closed doors and
closed classrooms, making certain forms of knowledge
acceptable and other hidden or de-legitimatized. This is
why the manifestation of US imperialism pre-9/11 was
primarily covert: without an obvious and aggressive
enemy the vision of American imperialism was harder to
sell to the general population, but following 9/11 the
image of a world out to hate America and its values and
freedom has become the national icon. This demonstrates
the way this hegemonic epistemology becomes calcified-
when the end of conflict comes American military officials
actively seek the next war. McClintock uses three
examples to demonstrate the military-academic-political
complex: Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of
the US Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use
having an army that did nothing but train, he said.
Theres got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we
exist for. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for
the New American Century produced a remarkable report
in which they stated that to make such an invasion
palatable would require a catastrophic and catalyzing
eventlike a new Pearl Harbor. The 9/11 attacks came as
a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the
problem of legitimacy, offering the military unimaginable
license to expand its reach. General Peter Schoomaker
would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense
boon: There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War
is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing
opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have
actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some
oomph. This means that you need to be inherently
suspicious of their impact scenarios- their ___ scenario is
particularly
Our Muzaffar evidence proves that even the way the
Negative constructs their impact scenarios is the same
logic and rhetoric used for years to further US neo-
imperialism in the Middle East particularly: this neo-
imperialism has resulted in failed states, increased
tensions, overall destabilization and the formation of
terror groups as a last resort to fight these policies;
essentially a geo-political factory of crises to sustain the
necessity of hegemony. Muzaffar explains the original
premise behind the War on Terror was hegemonic
expansion of control over land and resources, specifically
control over oil commodities and a key strategic point to
monitor Central Asia (much like how the drones are
currently being pitched as monitoring points for the
volatile Middle East). All of Bushs advisors had
specifically been planning and orchestrating a grand
scheme to manipulate Middle Eastern politics and
interests, including sabotaging the democratically elected
Hamas in Palestine and trying to replace it with a
leadership that is subservient to Israels interest,
attempting to eliminate an autonomous movement like
Hizbullah in Lebanon with the aim of bolstering a weak
pro-U.S. regime in Beirut, and targeting the independent-
minded government in Damascus. Insert how their position
furthers US control in region
This is already beginning to manifest in anti-American
sentiment within the originally pro-West Yemen, as
Yemeni daily reality turns into the site of an undeclared
US war: this is the cyclical turn of imperialism to produce
the crisis it then saves
Schwedler 9/27 (Jillian, [Professor of Political Science at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York, and a member of the Editorial Committee of The Middle East
Research and Information Project, publishers of Middle East
Report] Is the U.S. drone program in Yemen working? 9.27.15
https://lawfareblog.com/us-drone-program-yemen-working //DF)
For al-Qaida, the drone program is a gift from the heavens. Its
recruiting narrative exploits common misperceptions of American
omnipotence, offering an alternative route to justice and
empowerment. Regardless of American perceptions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the
attacks, what Yemeni could now deny that the United States is waging
an undeclared war on Yemen? Most recently, this narrative of direct U.S.
intervention has been further substantiated by U.S. material and
intelligence support for the Saudi-led military campaign aimed at the
return to power of the unpopular and exiled-President Abed Rabbo Mansour
Hadi. Photographs of spent U.S.-made cluster bombs are widely
circulated. Nor have drone attacks ceased; alongside the often
indiscriminate Saudi-led bombing, American drones continue their
campaign of targeted assassination. One might think that the Saudi
attacks would not help al-Qaida, but it is contributing to al-Qaidas
growth in Yemen. The indiscriminate targeting of the Saudi-led
campaign undermines any sense of security, let alone Yemeni
sovereignty. And AQAP-controlled areas like the port of Mukalla are
not being targeted by Saudi or Gulf troops at all. The United States aims to take
up the job of targeting AQAP while the Saudi-led (and U.S.-backed) forces focus on defeating the Houthis
and restoring Hadi to power. But the overall situation is one in which those
multiple interventions in Yemen are creating an environment in
which al-Qaida is beginning to appeal in ways it never had before .
For these reasons, the U.S. use of drones to kill even carefully
identified AQAP leaders in Yemen is counterproductive: it gives
resonance to the claims of the very group it seeks to destroy. It
provides evidence that al-Qaidas claims and strategies are justified
and that Yemenis cannot count on the state to protect them from
threats foreign and domestic. U.S. officials have argued that the drone program has not
been used as a recruiting device for al-Qaida. But it is hard to ignore the evidence to the
contrary, from counterinsurgency experts who have worked for the U.S.
government to Yemeni voices like Farea Muslimi . Its not just that
drone strikes make al-Qaida recruiting easier, true as that probably
is, but that they broaden the social space in which al-Qaida can
function. America does not need to win the hearts and minds of Yemenis in the service of some
grand U.S. project in the region. But if America wants to weaken al-Qaida in
Yemen, it needs at a minimum to stop pursuing policies that are
bound to enrage and embitter Yemenis who might otherwise be
neutral. There is an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look
like a nail. The U.S. military let alone its drones is not the only tool on
which the United States can rely. But when the measure of success is
as narrow as the killing of a specific person, the tool gets used with
increasing frequency. Indeed, drone strikes have significantly expanded under the Obama
administration. It is crucial to see the bigger picture, the one in which
long-time Yemeni friends tell me of growing anti-U.S. sentiment
where there was previously very little. Public opinion toward
America has clearly deteriorated over the past decade, and to
reverse it may take much longer. But the use of drones to kill people
deemed enemies of the United States, along with the Saudi-led war
against the Houthis, is expanding the spaces in which al-Qaida is
able to function.

Terrorism the result of technological domination of the

world it is an attempt to break free from the standing
reserve.

Mitchell 5
 [Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, "Heidegger
and Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume 35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 181-218]//TR

Nothing stable, this juncture in being itself must be followed and traced. It
trembles. Terror takes a situation that looks hopelessly doomed and
finds the essential within it, but terror contains its own demise, too. We
flee from it. We respond to it with a hardening of our own ways; we
reaffirm the identity of being instead of opening ourselves to others.
The American response to terror has been one of Americanism, there can be
no doubt about that. Terror ends in this, and there is no commemoration,
just a forgetting. The commemorative aspect of terror allows us to
remember the fallen and understand how they can still be with us today in
our American way of being. Terrorism will take place in the withdrawal
of beyng, in the unworld of machination. The modem configuration
of war is surpassed by the technological plan of homogenized
circulation, and the distinction between war and peace falls away in
their mutual commitment to furthering the cycle of production and
consumption. The abandonment of being that forms this unworld by
draining the world of its being does not occur without a trace, however, and
terror in its trembling corresponds to that trace. Terrorism necessarily results
from such a devastation-or, "becoming-desert," Vendiistung-of the world;
terrorism is always born in the desert. Terrorism is metaphysical because
it touches everything, every particular being, all of which may be
attacked and annihilated. The circulation of the standing-reserve
sets an equivalence of value among things with a resulting
worldlessness where existence is another name for exchangeability.
The exchanged and replaceable things are already replaced and exchanged,
not serially, but essentially. They are not fully present when here. Terrorism
names this absence, or rather is the effect of this absence, which is to say it
is that absence itself, since here we are not dealing with an absence that
could be the effect of any loss of presence. The absence in question is not an
absence of presence, but an absence in and through presence. It would
be ridiculous to think that such a change in being would lack a corresponding
change in beings. This change in' the nature of being shows itself in
the fact that all beings today are terrorized. They all stand under a
very real threat of destruction via -terrorist acts. There would be no
terrorist threat were it not for these terrorists, yet there would be
no possibility of a threat were it not for being. Certainly terrorism is not
the only "effect" of this absence in presence; Heidegger frequently refers to
the atomic bomb in precisely this regard. Terrorism's claim, however, is
distinct from that of atomic war. Like the atomic bomb, terrorism
operates at the level of threat. Insofar as it calls into question all
beings, terrorism is itself a metaphysical determination of
being. Terrorism makes everything a possible object of terrorist
attack, and this is the very terror of it. Everything is a possible
target, and this now means that all beings exist as possible
targets, as possibly destroyed. But this should not be taken to mean that
there are discrete beings, fully present, now threatened with destruction. The
ineradicable threat of destruction transforms the nature ofthe being itself.
The being can no longer exist as indifferent to its destruction; this destruction
does not reside outside of the being. Instead, destruction inhabits the being
and does so, not as something superadded to the being, but as the essence
of the being itself. Beings are henceforth as though destroyed. Terror brings
about an alteration in the very mode of being of reality, the real is
now the terrorized. Reality is already terrorized; the change has
already taken place, -and this regardless of whether an attack comes or
not. Beings exist as endangered, as terrorized, and this means as no longer
purely self-present. It means that, in terms of pure presence, beings exist
as already destroyed. Destruction is not something that comes at a
later date, nor is it something that may or may not already have
taken place. Destruction exists now as threat. The effectiveness of
terror lies in the threat, not the attack.
 2AC Extra Cards
With everything in the standing reserve, consumption can
go on forever and the distinction between war and peace
is blurred the result is endless war and terrorism.

Mitchell 5
[Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, "Heidegger
and Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume 35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 181-218]//TR

Strategy's demise is the ascendancy of planning. What this means is that war
can now go on interminably, subject to no other logic or obligation than its
own. Nothing can resist it. But without resistance, war must end. Peace can
now go on interminably as well, subject to no other logic or obligation than its
own. The logic in question for both war and peace is the logic of replacement,
the obligation for each is the obligation to consume. There is no law that
would supervene or subtend consumption; there is no order outside of it that
could contain it. Clausewitz's ideal is realized in a manner that collapses the
very distinctions that gave it birth. "War" is no longer a duel; it recognizes no
authority outside of itself. The name for this new amalgam of war and peace
is terrorism. Terrorism is Clausewitz's absolute war in the mirror of
technology. War and peace come to complete agreement and lose their
oppositional identity in the age of value and the ersatz. Without concern for
resources, consumption continues untroubled, since war is a kind of
"consumption of beings" no different from peace: "War no longer battles
against a state of peace, rather it newly establishes the essence of peace"
(GA 69: 180). The essence of peace so established is a peace that defines
itself in regards to war, which binds itself inseparably to war, and which
functions equivalently to war. In either case, it is simply a matter of resource
consumption and replenishment. In Clausewitzian terms, there is perhaps too
much continuity or "continuation" between war and peace, "War has become
a distortion of the consumption of beings which is continued in peace" (GA 7:
89/EP, 104). The peace that technology brings is nothing restful; instead it is
the peace of unhindered circulation. We cannot even ask when there will be
peace or when the war will end. Such a question, Heidegger specifies, cannot
be answered, "not because the length of the war cannot be foreseen, but
because the question itself asks for something which no longer is, since
already there is no longer a war that would be able to come to a peace" (GA
7: 89/EP, 104; tm). The basic oppositionsof Clausewitzian warfare are undone
at this point, an undoing that includes the distinction between ideal and real.
It also includes the distinction between soldier and civilian. Since such
distinctions depend upon a difference between war and peace, they too can
no longer apply. Everyone is now a civilian-soldier, or neither a civilian nor a
soldier-a "worker," one might say, or otherwise put, a target. With everyone
involved in the same processes of consumption and delivery, everyone is
already enlisted in advance. There are no longer any "innocent" victims or
bystanders in this, and the same holds true of terrorism. Terrorism is not the
use of warfare against civilians (pace Carr), for the simple reason that there
no longer are any civilians.14 It is equally not war against soldiers, and for
this reason we go wrong to even consider it war. Terrorism is the only conflict
available and the only conflict that is in essence available and applicable . It
can have everything as its target. Terrorism follows from the
transformation in beings indicative of the technological age . This
transformation remains important at each point of a Heideggerian thinking of
terrorism and is the ultimate consequence of the abolition of war and peace;
beings have become uncommon. What was common to the beings of the
modern era, their objectivity, is lost. In place of the constant presencing of
things, we are surrounded by the steady circulation of resources. It is in the
complete availability of these resources that we might encounter the
uncommon: The disappearance of the distinction between war and peace
compels beings as such into the uncommon; the reverberation
[Erschiitterung] of this compulsion through everything common becomes all
the more uncommon, the more exclusively that the common persists and is
further pursued. What were once common, the beings to which we were
accustomed, are now made uncommon. But the common endures
nonetheless. Beings are made uncommon, and this is overlooked so that they
may continue to be regarded as the same beings to which we were
accustomed. What is uncommon is that this alteration in the nature of being
goes unremarked. There is a dissembling here (and we will return to this as
decisive for the mood of terror), but the dissemblance is not to be thought as
solely on the part of the human. A few pages later, Heidegger comes to
specify what it is that is truly uncommon in all of this, "that beyng veils itself"
(GA 69: 187). The veiling of being describes the same movement that
compels beings into the uncommon. This uncommon situation grows ever
more uncommon the more that it is ignored and unacknowledged, i.e., the
more common that it becomes. In effect, the veil is the veil of the common,
beyng veils itself in commonality. That beings have become uncommon is
ignored. The transformations that Heidegger sees operative in contemporary
warfare ultimately signal a change in the nature of being . Taking the above
three points as transfiguratively inaugurating the Clausewitzian ideal of
absolute war, it is not difficult to guess where this ideal is most perfectly
realized. If we wished to name that "country" where the Clausewitzian ideal
of absolute war is most demonstrably visible-where terrorism is almost
celebrated-then it could be no other than America. In the 1969 Le Thor
seminar, Heidegger seems to imply an inability for America to think "the
question of being" and couches this inability in the current reality of the
American situation: As to the interest of America for the "question of being,"
the reality of that country is veiled from the view of those interested: the
collusion between industry and the military (the economic development and
the armament that it requires). (IVS, 97/56) America is the place where
the identification of peace and war is fully realized in the collusion of
industry and the military. Industry increasingly determines the
options available for the everyday life of the populace . That same
industry now has at its disposal the military power of society. Where free
trade is hindered, where natural resources are not completely available to the
market for "political" reasons, military intervention is called for. Democracy is
another name for free trade, it is solely an economic term, and democracy
must be spread across the globe, not due to any respect for "human rights,"
but in order to allow industry to exceed its own expectations and expand its
trade routes. Resistance to free trade is met with "liberating" martial force.
Conversely, military spending is a driving force in the economy. Due to sheer
size alone, economic effects attend the military as employer and as
contributor to local economies. The military provides access to higher
education for many who would otherwise have to make dowithout it. It
likewise allows citizens to learn employable skills for work in society. The
presence of the military in a community is valued as a sign of prosperity. We
might also add that military vehicles (the Hummer) and military clothing
("camouflage") have penetrated mainstream American fashion. Nowhere is
the abolishment of the distinction between war and peace more evident than
in today's America. But if we attend closer to Heidegger's words, it may be
possible to hear in them a hope for America in the thinking of being. Those
who are interested in the question of being do not see the reality of their
country. Without this situated awareness of one's "homeland," the question of
being cannot be posed. The question remains an abstract and academic
matter, something for quotation marks, the "question of being." Would a
proper understanding of American reality make possible an asking of this
question, or is the question simply impossible for America? Is America, as the
epitome of all Americanism, still a homeland or has technology completely
ravished the country of all specificity and uniqueness? These are the
questions that the age of technological machination raises for America.
Heidegger names the fundamental attunement of this age "terror"
(Erschrecken).
 Terror Talk
A) The strategic binaries constructed by terror talk
escalate into a pathology of fear that demands war and
extermination and sanctions every kind of violence in
defense of our own collective identity.
James Der Derian, 2002, Research Professor of IR @ Brown University and
Prof of PoliSci @ UMass Amherst, 9.11: Before, After, and In Between, p.
http://www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/der_derian_text_only.htm

Strategic binaries were also legion in President Bushs war statement,

incongruously delivered from the Treaty Room of the White House: as we
strike military targets, we will also drop food; the United States is a friend to
the Afghan people and an enemy of those who aid terrorists'; the only way
to pursue peace is to pursue those who threaten it . And once more, the ultimate
either/or was issued: Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict there is no neutral ground.
But the war programming was interrupted by the media-savvy bin Laden. Shortly after the air strikes
began, he appeared on Qatars al-Jazeera television network (the Arab worlds CNN) in a pre-taped
statement that was cannily delivered as a counter air-strike to the U.S. Kitted out in turban and battle
bin Laden presented his own bipolar view of the world: these events
fatigues,
have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp
of infidels. But if opposition constituted his worldview, it was an historical
mimic battle that sanctioned the counter-violence : "America has been filled with horror
from north to south and east to west, and thanks be to God what America is tasting now is only a copy of
what we have tasted."
Without falling into the trap of moral equivalency, one can discern striking similarities. Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld and others have made much of the asymmetrical war being waged by the terrorists.
And it is indeed a canny and even diabolical use of asymmetrical tactics as well as strategies when
terrorists commandeer commercial aircraft and transform them into kinetic weapons of indiscriminate
Yet, a fearful
violence, and then deploy commercial media to counter the military strikes that follow.
symmetry is also at work, at an unconscious, possibly pathological
level, a war of escalating and competing and imitative oppositions, a
mimetic war of images.
A mimetic war is a battle of imitation and representation, in which the
relationship of who we are and who they are is played out along a wide
spectrum of familiarity and friendliness, indifference and tolerance,
estrangement and hostility. It can result in appreciation or denigration,
accommodation or separation, assimilation or extermination. It draws
physical boundaries between peoples, as well as metaphysical boundaries
between life and the most radical other of life, death. It separates human
from god. It builds the fence that makes good neighbors; it builds the wall
that confines a whole people. And it sanctions just about every kind of
violence.
More than a rational calculation of interests takes us to war. People go to war
because of how they see, perceive, picture, imagine, and speak of others:
that is, how they construct the difference of others as well as the sameness
of themselves through representations. From Greek tragedy and Roman
gladiatorial spectacles to futurist art and fascist rallies, the mimetic mix of
image and violence has proven to be more powerful than the most rational
discourse. Indeed, the medical definition of mimesis is the appearance, often caused by hysteria, of
symptoms of a disease not actually present. Before one can diagnose a cure, one must study the
symptoms or, as it was once known in medical science, practice semiology.
B) Their discursive choice culminates in a state of
exception where execution of the law against terrorists
becomes our sole preoccupation and can take on any form
of violence. This causes continuation of a failed counter-
terror policy that encourages more terrorism and risks
creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Joseba Zulaika, winter 2003, Prof in Center for Basque Studies @ U of
Nevada, The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Counterterrorism, Radical History Review 85, p
EBSCOhost

Welcome to the promised land of terrorism. At the turn of the eighties, the problem with the terrorism
industry might have been to convince the rest of us that a phenomenon that for years had not produced
Soon the problem is
one single fatality was still the most dangerous threat to national life.
going to be to convince the rest of us that not everything is
terrorism. The self-fulfilling prophecies of the 1980s and 1990s pale compared with the new scenario
between Good and evil that George Bush has laid down for us, apparently to everyones approval. The
danger with such morality plays is that by constantly repeating
them, one ends up believing them. Splitting the world radically in
Good/Evil terms, calling all Evil terrorism, and declaring that the destiny of
the Good side is to combat the Evil one to death, must surely be a preface to
political silliness. [continues] The critical point, one that can be illustrated with
countless examples from Great Britain, Spain, Israel, Chechnya, South America, India, and other nation-
states,has to do with the inevitable tendency of how the semantics of
terrorism work in relation to law. By charging the other with terrorist
lawlessness, it allows oneself to dispense with the rule of law. The final
result is what Agamben describes as the state of exception, in which
it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from the
execution of the law, such that what violates a rule and what
conforms to it coincide without any reminder.13
To the postSeptember 11 question of why they hate us, a generalized
response was because of our freedoms, rather than because of the legal,
political, and social justice implications of our policies, and because of our
main ally in the Middle East, Israel. By letting terrorism become the main
United States public discourse and by thus enshrining categorical
totalization and moral fundamentalism, we are blinded so as not to see the
everyday realities of history, culture, and politics. As a consequence, we
become immune to the one realization that really matters: the
extent to which our own counterterrorism policies foster more
terrorism.
C) This sacrificial logic sustains the worst violence,
including Nazism, genocide and war it results in
extinction.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, April 2003, leading Portuguese social theorist,

the director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra ,
Collective Suicide? Bad Subjects, Issue 63, p. http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2003/63/santos.html

According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the
illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a
salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to
radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and
political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it
was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African
slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused
millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how
it was under Stalinism, with the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the Holocaust.
And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of
the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war
against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and
It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not
what its scope might be.
herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the Western illusion:
destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it.
Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion manifested in the belief
that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality , and that the
problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of
development to ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the
Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of market laws not having
If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the
been fully applied.
conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total
violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists
and potential terrorists.
This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge,
and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it
aims to reproduce infinitely the status quo . Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history.
During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen
three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism,
with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market.
The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it
in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the state and international
institutions in their favor. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social
fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public
opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by
supposedly democratic rulers.
At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates,
the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive
destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other
and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes .
In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and
Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable
populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and
consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of
innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable
calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand
civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a
nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest
countries for four years.
Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically, sacrificial destruction has
always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the imperial design
of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling
efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as though
hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through
times of primitive accumulation, legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by
In today's version, the period of
definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed.
primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic
globalization with the globalization of war. The machine of democracy and
liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction.

VOTE NEGATIVE to reject the absolutist mentality of affs

terrorist discourse and to question our own innocence in
relation to global violence if we dont change the nature
of political discourse about non-state actor violence then
were doomed to an endless cycle of violence and global
oppression.

Joseba Zulaika, winter 2003, Prof in Center for Basque Studies @ U of

Nevada, The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Counterterrorism, Radical History
Review 85, p EBSCOhost

As widely reported at the time, the Reagan administration, led by Alexander

Haig, would self-servingly confuse terrorism with communism.24 As the
cold war was coming to an end, terrorism became the easy substitute for
communism in Reagans black-and-white world . Still, when Haig would voice his belief
that Moscow controlled the worldwide terrorist network, the State Departments bureau of intelligence
By the 1990s, the Soviet
chief Ronald Spiers would react by thinking that he was kidding.25
Union no longer constituted the terrorist enemy and only days after the
Oklahoma City bombing, Russian president Yeltsin hosted President Clinton in
Moscow who equated the recent massacres in Chechnya with Oklahoma City
as domestic conflicts. We should be concerned as to what this new Good-
versus-Evil war on terror substitutes for. Its consequences in legitimizing the
repression of minorities in India, Russia, Turkey, and other countries are all
too obvious. But the ultimate catastrophe is that such a categorically ill-
defined, perpetually deferred, simpleminded Good-versus-Evil war echoes
and re-creates the very absolutist mentality and exceptionalist
tactics of the insurgent terrorists. By formally adopting the terrorists
own gameone that by definition lacks rules of engagement, definite
endings, clear alignments between enemies and friends , or formal
arrangements of any sort, military, political, legal, or ethical the inevitable
danger lies in reproducing it endlessly. One only has to look at the Palestinian-Israeli
or the Basque-Spanish conflicts to see how self-defeating the alleged victories against terrorism can be
in the absence of addressing the causes of the violence. A
war against terrorism, then,
mirrors the state of exception characteristic of insurgent violence, and in so
doing it reproduces it ad infinitum. The question remains: What politics might
be involved in this state of alert as normal state? Would this possible scenario
of competing (and mutually constituting) terror signify the end of politics as
we know it?27 It is either politics or once again the self-fulfilling
prophecy of fundamentalist crusaders who will never be able to
entirely eradicate evil from the world. Our choice cannot be between
Bush and bin Laden, nor is our struggle one of us versus them. Such a
split leads us into the ethical catastrophe of not feeling full solidarity with the
victims of either sidesince the value of each life is absolute, the only
appropriate stance is the unconditional solidarity with ALL victims. 28 We
must question our own involvement with the phantasmatic reality of
terrorism discourse, for now even the USA and its citizens can be
regulated by terrorist discourse. . . . Now the North American territory has
become the most global and central place in the new history that terrorist
ideology inaugurates.29 Resisting the temptation of innocence regarding the
barbarian other implies an awareness of a point Hegel made and that applies
to the contemporary and increasingly globalized world more than ever: evil,
he claims, resides also in the innocent gaze itself, perceiving as it does evil all
around itself. Derrida equally holds this position. In reference to the events of
September 11, he said: My unconditional compassion, addressed to the
victims of September 11, does not prevent me from saying it loudly: with
regard to this crime, I do not believe that anyone is politically guiltless .30 In
brief, we are all included in the picture, and these tragic events must
make us problematize our own innocence while questioning our own
political and libidinal investment in the global terrorism discourse.
 Terrorism Defense
Bioterror doesnt cause extinction
ONeill 4 ONeill 8/19/2004 [Brendan, Weapons of Minimum Destruction
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA694.htm]

David C Rapoport, professor of political science at University of California, Los Angeles and editor of
the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, has examined what he calls 'easily available evidence'
relating to the historic use of chemical and biological weapons. He found
something surprising - such weapons do not cause mass destruction . Indeed, whether used by
states, terror groups or dispersed in industrial accidents, they tend to be far less destructive than
conventional weapons. 'If we stopped speculating about things that might
happen in the future and looked instead at what has happened in the past,
we'd see that our fears about WMD are misplaced', he says. Yet such fears remain
widespread. Post-9/11, American and British leaders have issued dire warnings about terrorists getting hold of WMD and
causing mass murder and mayhem. President George W Bush has spoken of terrorists who, 'if they ever gained weapons
of mass destruction', would 'kill hundreds of thousands, without hesitation and without mercy' (1). The British
government has spent 28million on stockpiling millions of smallpox vaccines, even though there's no evidence that
terrorists have got access to smallpox, which was eradicated as a natural disease in the 1970s and now exists only in two
high-security labs in America and Russia (2). In 2002, British nurses became the first in the world to get training in how to
deal with the victims of bioterrorism (3). The UK Home Office's 22-page pamphlet on how to survive a terror attack,
published last month, included tips on what to do in the event of a 'chemical, biological or radiological attack' ('Move away
from the immediate source of danger', it usefully advised). Spine-chilling books such as Plague Wars: A True Story of
Biological Warfare, The New Face of Terrorism: Threats From Weapons of Mass Destruction and The Survival Guide: What
to Do in a Biological, Chemical or Nuclear Emergency speculate over what kind of horrors WMD might wreak. TV
docudramas, meanwhile, explore how Britain might cope with a smallpox assault and what would happen if London were
'dirty nuked' (4). The term 'weapons of mass destruction' refers to three types of weapons: nuclear, chemical and
biological. A chemical weapon is any weapon that uses a manufactured chemical, such as sarin, mustard gas or hydrogen
cyanide, to kill or injure. A biological weapon uses bacteria or viruses, such as smallpox or anthrax, to cause destruction -
inducing sickness and disease as a means of undermining enemy forces or inflicting civilian casualties. We find such
weapons repulsive, because of the horrible way in which the victims convulse and die - but they appear to be less
'destructive' than conventional weapons. 'We know that nukes are massively destructive, there is a lot of evidence for
when it comes to chemical and biological weapons, 'the
that', says Rapoport. But
evidence suggests that we should call them "weapons of minimum
destruction", not mass destruction', he says. Chemical weapons have most commonly been used by states, in
military warfare. Rapoport explored various state uses of chemicals over the past hundred years: both sides used them in
the First World War; Italy deployed chemicals against the Ethiopians in the 1930s; the Japanese used chemicals against
the Chinese in the 1930s and again in the Second World War; Egypt and Libya used them in the Yemen and Chad in the
postwar period; most recently, Saddam Hussein's Iraq used chemical weapons, first in the war against Iran (1980-1988)
and then against its own Kurdish population at the tail-end of the Iran-Iraq war. In each instance, says Rapoport, chemical
weapons were used more in desperation than from a position of strength or a desire to cause mass destruction. 'The
evidence is that states rarely use them even when they have them', he has written. 'Only when a military stalemate has
developed, which belligerents who have become desperate want to break, are they used.' (5) As to whether such use of
chemicals was effective, Rapoport says that at best it blunted an offensive - but this very rarely, if ever, translated into a
decisive strategic shift in the war, because the original stalemate continued after the chemical weapons had been
deployed. He points to the example of Iraq. The Baathists used chemicals against Iran when that nasty trench-fought war
had reached yet another stalemate. As Efraim Karsh argues in his paper 'The Iran-Iraq War: A Military Analysis': 'Iraq
employed [chemical weapons] only in vital segments of the front and only when it saw no other way to check Iranian
offensives. Chemical weapons had a negligible impact on the war, limited to tactical rather than strategic [effects].' (6)
According to Rapoport, this 'negligible' impact of chemical weapons on the direction of a war is reflected in the disparity
between the numbers of casualties caused by chemicals and the numbers caused by conventional weapons. It is
estimated that the use of gas in the Iran-Iraq war killed 5,000 - but the Iranian side suffered around 600,000 dead in total,
meaning that gas killed less than one per cent. The deadliest use of gas occurred in the First World War but, as Rapoport
points out, it still only accounted for five per cent of casualties. Studying the amount of gas used by both sides from1914-
1918 relative to the number of fatalities gas caused, Rapoport has written: 'It took a ton of gas in that war to achieve a
single enemy fatality. Wind and sun regularly dissipated the lethality of the gases. Furthermore, those gassed were 10 to
12 times as likely to recover than those casualties produced by traditional weapons.' (7) Indeed, Rapoport discovered that
some earlier documenters of the First World War had a vastly different assessment of chemical weapons than we have
today - they considered the use of such weapons to be preferable to bombs and guns, because chemicals caused fewer
fatalities. One wrote: 'Instead of being the most horrible form of warfare, it is the most humane, because it disables far
more than it kills, ie, it has a low fatality ratio.' (8) 'Imagine that', says Rapoport, 'WMD being referred to as more
humane'. He says that the contrast between such assessments and today's fears shows that actually looking at the
evidence has benefits, allowing 'you to see things more rationally'. According to Rapoport, even Saddam's use of gas
against the Kurds of Halabja in 1988 - the most recent use by a state of chemical weapons and the most commonly cited
as evidence of the dangers of 'rogue states' getting their hands on WMD - does not show that unconventional weapons
are more destructive than conventional ones. Of course the attack on Halabja was horrific, but he points out that the
circumstances surrounding the assault remain unclear. 'The estimates of how many were killed vary greatly', he tells me.
'Some say 400, others say 5,000, others say more than 5,000. The fighter planes that attacked the civilians used
conventional as well as unconventional weapons; I have seen no study which explores how many were killed by chemicals
and how many were killed by firepower. We all find these attacks repulsive, but the death toll may actually have been
greater if conventional bombs only were used. We know that conventional weapons can be more destructive.' Rapoport
says that terrorist use of chemical and biological weapons is similar to state use -
rare and, in terms of causing mass destruction, not very effective. He
in that it is
cites the work of journalist and author John Parachini, who says that over the past 25 years only four
significant attempts by terrorists to use WMD have been recorded. The most
effective WMD-attack by a non-state group, from a military perspective, was carried out by the Tamil
Tigers of Sri Lanka in 1990. They used chlorine gas against Sri Lankan soldiers guarding a fort,
injuring over 60 soldiers but killing none. The Tamil Tigers' use of chemicals angered their
support base, when some of the chlorine drifted back into Tamil territory - confirming
Rapoport's view that one problem with using unpredictable and unwieldy chemical and biological weapons over
the cost can be as great 'to the attacker as to the
conventional weapons is that
attacked'. The Tigers have not used WMD since.

No nuclear lashout
Jenkins-Smith 04 professor of government at Texas A&M (Hank, U.S.
Public Response to Terrorism: Fault Lines or Bedrock,
http://www.spp.gatech.edu/current-students/exams/Fall-
2004_reviewmanuscript.pdf)
Our final contrasting set of expectations relate to the degree to
which the public will support or demand retribution against
terrorists and supporting states. Here our data show that support for using
conventional U.S. military force to retaliate against terrorists
initially averaged above midscale, but did not reach a high level of
emotional demand for military action. Initial support declined significantly across all
demographic and belief categories by the time of our survey in 2002. Furthermore, panelists both in 2001
and 2002 preferred that high levels of certainty about culpability (above 8.5 on a scale from zero to ten) be
established before taking military action. Again, we find the weight of evidence supporting revisionist
expectations of public opinion.
results are inconsistent with the contention that highly charged
Overall, these
events will result in volatile and unstructured responses among mass publics that prove
problematic for policy processes. The initial response to the terrorist strikes, in the immediate aftermath of
the event, demonstrated a broad and consistent shift in public assessments toward a greater perceived
even in
threat from terrorism, and greater willingness to support policies to reduce that threat. But
the highly charged context of such a serious attack on the American
homeland, the overall public response was quite measured. On average,
the public showed very little propensity to undermine speech protections, and initial willing-ness
to engage in military retaliation moderated significantly over the
following year.

Terrorists are unwilling and unable to use biological weapons

Moodie 9 (Michael Moodie is an independent consultant on

international security affairs, he currently serves as Executive Editor of WMD
Insights, an on-line publication focused on non-US perspectives on critical
proliferation issues. Dangerous Hands Responding to the Challenges of
Chemical and Biological Terrorism, Summer 2009, pg. 16)

Some experts argue that terrorists are both unwilling and unable to exploit the
life sciences. Milton Leitenberg, for example, says with respect to biological weapons that,
Advanced genetic engineering capabilities are not likely to become available
to real world terrorist groups in the near future. Judgments based on the
prevalence of genetic engineering competence in the general academic
molecular research community are still not useful guides to terrorist
capabilities.5 Other commentators disagree or at least are not so sure. One assessment contends,
for example, that increasingly sophisticated practical knowledge related to the life sciences is available to
many Advanced Placement Biology students in high school.6 David Relman agrees, arguing that today,
anyone with a high school education can use widely available protocols and prepackaged kits to modify
the sequence of genes or replace genes within a microorganism; one can also purchase small, disposable,
self-contained bioreactors for propagating viruses and microorganisms. Relman concludes that the full
potential of past programs was never unleashed, and BW use by smallgroups historically was relatively
unsophisticated and far from representative of what moderately well informed groups might do today.7

Bio attacks will never happen

Palmquist 2008 (Matt, How and why the threat of bioterrorism has been so
greatly exaggerated. 5-19-08. http://www.miller-
mccune.com/politics/bioterror-in-context-355)
Clark: The more I looked into it, I thought, "Jeez, what are these guys talking about?" What are the
odds that a terrorist group, no matter how well financed, would be able to
create a bioterror weapon? I began looking into what it takes to really make a successful bioterrorism
agent, and I just became very skeptical of this whole thing. The (United States ) military gave
up bioweapons 30 years ago. They're too undependable; they're too hard to
use; they're too hard to make. Then I started checking around, and I found there's a whole
literature out there of people who've been screaming for years that this whole
bioterrorism thing is really overblown; it's not practical; it's never going to work.
Aum Shinrikyo couldn't get it to work; those guys put millions and millions of dollars
into it. So you think of a bunch of guys sitting in a cave in Afghanistan they're
sure as hell not going to do it. Is any government going to do it? No . So that
made me very skeptical, and I went back to Oxford and said, "This whole thing's a crock." And they said,
"But that's even more interesting!"
M-M: Thus the question mark at the end of the title, Bracing for Armageddon?
Clark: Yeah, exactly. Scientifically, it is a crock. And this really verges into the political, but we've spent $50
billion on it. So Oxford paid for me to take a trip back East and talk to a bunch of these voices that haven't
been heard and interview them.
M-M: How much research was involved?
The science is pretty straightforward on paper. The kind of an
Clark: A couple of years.
organization you'd have to put together, with the varying expertise that is
required to make one of these things and deploy it, takes a whole group of
people with all kinds of different skills, from engineers to meteorologists.
That's just not going to happen. You can run an airplane into an office tower,
and you get instant everything you could ever possibly hope for. So why
would anybody sit around for years and years? The Aum Shinrikyo guys tried for six,
seven years and couldn't get it to work. And a lot of them had Ph.D.s.

No motivationterrorists want political attention not extinction

Moodie 2 president of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute
(Brad Roberts and Michael Moodie, Biological Weapons: Toward a Threat
Reduction Strategy, http://www.ndu.edu/inss/DefHor/DH15/DH15.htm)

Terrorists generally have not killed as

The argument about terrorist motivation is also important.
many as they have been capable of killing. This restraint seems to derive from
an understanding of mass casualty attacks as both unnecessary and
counterproductive. They are unnecessary because terrorists , by and large, have
succeeded by conventional means. Also, they are counterproductive because they might
alienate key constituencies, whether among the public, state sponsors, or the terrorist
 terrorists want a lot of people watching,
leadership group. In Brian Jenkins famous words,
not a lot of people dead. Others have argued that the lack of mass casualty terrorism and
effective exploitation of BW has been more a matter of accident and good fortune than capability or intent.
Adherents of this view, including former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, argue that its not a matter
of if but when.
September 11 would seem to settle the debate about whether
The attacks of
terrorists have both the motivation and sophistication to exploit weapons of
mass destruction for their full lethal effect. After all, those were terrorist attacks of unprecedented
sophistication that seemed clearly aimed at achieving mass casualties had the World Trade Center
towers collapsed as the 1993 bombers had intended, perhaps as many as 150,000 would have died.
Moreover, Osama bin Ladens constituency would appear to be not the Arab street or some other political
entity but his god. And terrorists answerable only to their deity have proven historically to be among the
most lethal.
But this debate cannot be considered settled. Bin Laden and his followers could have killed many more on
September 11 if killing as many as possible had been their primary objective. They now face the core
dilemma of asymmetric warfare: how to escalate without creating new interests for the stronger power and
Asymmetric adversaries want their
thus the incentive to exploit its power potential more fully.
stronger enemies fearful, not fully engaged militarily or otherwise. They seek to
win by preventing the stronger partner from exploiting its full potential. To kill
millions in America with biological or other weapons would only commit the United Statesand much of
the rest of the international communityto the annihilation of the perpetrators.

Terrorism wont and cant cause extinction

Friedman 6 MIT security studies program (Ben, 2/19, The War on Hype,
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
file=/c/a/2006/02/19/INGDDH8E2T1.DTL&type=printable)

Most homeland security experts say that Hurricane Katrina's flooding of New Orleans shows how
vulnerable we are to terrorists. In fact, it shows that most Americans have better things to worry about.
By any statistical measure, the terrorist threat to America has always been
low. As political scientist John Mueller notes, in most years allergic reactions to peanuts, deer in
the road and lightning have all killed about the same number of Americans as terrorism.
In 2001, their banner year, terrorists killed one twelfth as many Americans as the flu and one fifteenth the
number killed by car accidents.
They contend that because both weapons technology
Most experts dismiss this history.
and Sunni extremism are spreading, the terrorist danger is ahistorical . Although
both these trends are real, we should not leap to the conclusion that the threat is
growing or greater than more mundane dangers. There is no obvious reason to believe
that Sept. 11 was the start of an era of ever deadlier terrorism, rather than its high-water mark.
Both terrorism and unconventional weapons have existed for a long time, but
terrorists have always done their damage conventionally . Today the remnants
of al Qaeda and its fellow-travelers appear to lack the organizational capacity to operate
in the United States or harness complex weapons technologies.
This argument does not endorse complacency among government officials. Even a small threat of nuclear
terrorism should provoke a better organized non-proliferation policy than the United States now has. Nor
does this argument imply that another terrorist massacre in America is unlikely. If enough people try,
attacks are likely to be rare and
eventually some attack may well succeed. But
conventional, on the scale of the London attacks, not apocalyptic nightmares.
Even if attacks killing thousands were certain, the risk to each of us would remain close to zero, far smaller
than many larger risks that do not alarm us, or provoke government warnings, like driving to work every
day. And if something far worse than Sept. 11 does occur, the country will
recover. Every year, tens of thousands Americans die on the roads. Disease preys on us. Life goes on for
the rest. The economy keeps chugging. A disaster of biblical proportions visited
New Orleans. The Republic has not crumbled . The terrorist risk to the United
States is serious, but far from existential, as some would have it.

Early detection checks

TMC 2009 global online communications and news research cite. 10-22-
2009. Breaking News!! UNDT- Universal Detection Technology to Present
Hand-Held Bioterrorism Detection for 2012 London Olympics at the Terrorism
& Security 2009 Conference, Endorsed by ACPO TAM and NYPD Intelligence.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2009/10/22/4437777.htm//TS Universal
Detection Technology (www.udetection.com)

OTCBB: UNDT), a developer of early-warning monitoring technologies and counter-terrorism

training programs to protect people from bioterrorism and other infectious health threats, announced
today that it will present its rapid response biodetection kits to the 2012 London
Olympics organizers at the 2009 Terrorism & Security Conference, held in London on November 17th and
18th. "The security risks associated with high-profile international events, such as the 2012 London
Olympics, cannot be underestimated," said Jacques Tizabi, CEO of Universal Detection Technology. " Bio-
weapons should be a particular concern to organizers , because for terrorists, they can
be purchased or engineered at relatively low costs, can induce mass casualties and are oftentimes
Universal Detection Technology is prepared
undetected by on-the-ground law enforcement;
to meet the bioterrorism detection needs of the 2012 London Olympics and similar global
venues," continued Tizabi.
UNDT was invited by the conference to present to the 2012 London Olympics organizers and security
directors of international "high-value, soft-targets," including airports, sports stadiums, national
infrastructure, shopping centers, prestigious hotels and mass transport hubs to and from the United
Kingdom and Europe.
Universal Detection Technology
Following the 2009 Terrorism & Security Conference in London,
will also be presenting its bioterrorism detection equipment at the upcoming 2009
Milipol Conference in Paris, November 17-20.
Universal Detection Technology's 5-agent biodetection kits, recently certified by United States Department
of Homeland Security as an "Approved Product for Homeland Security" under the Support Anti-terrorism by
the industry's only hand-held
Fostering Effective Technologies (SAFETY) Act of 2002, are
assay designed to detect and identify up to five separate threats using one
sample in a single, easy-to-use device. The kits equip first responders with an
effective tool for the rapid onsite detection of up to five biological warfare agents: anthrax,
ricin, botulinum toxin, Y. pestis (plague) and Staphylococcal Enterotoxin B (SEB). Detection time is under
three minutes.

No WMD terrorism- they see it as counterproductive.

Brad Roberts, Inst Dfnse Analyses, and Michael Moodie, Chem &
Bio Arms Cntrl Inst, 2 (Defense Horizons 15, July)

The argument about terrorist motivation is also important.

Terrorists generally have not killed as many as they have been
capable of killing. This restraint seems to derive from an
understand ing of mass casualty attacks as both
unnecessary and counterproductive . They are unnecessary
because terrorists , by and large, have succeeded by
conventional means . Also, they are counterproductive
because they might alienate key constituencies , whether
among the public, state sponsors, or the terrorist
leadership group. In Brian Jenkins' famous words, terrorists
want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead. Others
have argued that the lack of mass casualty terrorism and
effective exploitation of BW has been more a matter of accident
and good fortune than capability or intent. Adherents of this
view, including former Secretary of Defense William Cohen,
argue that "it's not a matter of if but when." The attacks of
September 11 would seem to settle the debate about whether
terrorists have both the motivation and sophistication to exploit
weapons of mass destruction for their full lethal effect. After all,
those were terrorist attacks of unprecedented sophistication that
seemed clearly aimed at achieving mass casualties--had the
World Trade Center towers collapsed as the 1993 bombers had
intended, perhaps as many as 150,000 would have died.
Moreover, Osama bin Laden's constituency would appear to be
not the "Arab street" or some other political entity but his god.
And terrorists answerable only to their deity have proven
historically to be among the most lethal. But this debate cannot
be considered settled. Bin Laden and his followers could
have killed many more on September 11 if killing as
many as possible had been their primary objective . They
now face the core dilemma of asymmetric warfare: how to
escalate without creating new interests for the stronger power
and thus the incentive to exploit its power potential more fully.
Asymmetric adversaries want their stronger enemies
fearful, not fully engaged --militarily or otherwise. They seek
to win by preventing the stronger partner from exploiting its full
potential. To kill millions in America with biological or other
weapons would only commit the United States--and much of the
rest of the international community--to the annihilation of the
perpetrators.
High risk aversion means no motivation.

Maerli (Science Program Fellow, Center for Intl Security &Cooperation, Stanford
Univ.) 2K [Morten Bremer, Relearning the ABCs: Terrorists and Weapons of Mass
Destruction, The Nonproliferation Review, Summer, pp. 108-119// -delo]

Furthermore, a groups interest in ABC weaponry is not the same as obtaining such
capabilities. Before any decision to deploy either conventional or non-conventional
weapons, a terrorist group will have to judge its competence to use the weapon
effectively. This will involve practical assessments of the level of training, skills, and
technical and logistical capabilities requires. Terrorists are dependent on success, as
failure could threaten the cohesiveness or the very existence of the group. This
creates an environment of risk aversion where known and proven tactics will be
preferred. Surely, if the stakes are high, terrorists , as others, can accept further risks.
But there have always been enormous gaps between the potential of a weapon and
the abilities and/or will to employ it by terrorists. Most terrorist groups, even those
pursuing suicidal ends, protect their resources. Wasting personnel and money will
inevitably harm the group and its long-term goals. Consequently, new means and
methods of violence with unknown outcomes would be less appealing.

They prefer conventional weapons.

Craig Whitlock, Washington Post Foreign Service, July 5, 2007, The Washington
Post, Homemade, Cheap and Dangerous: Terror Cells Favor Simple Ingredients In
Building Bombs,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/07/04/AR2007070401814_pf.html
Counterterrorism officials have warned for years that Osama bin Laden and his
lieutenants have tried to obtain weapons of mass destruction, such as a nuclear
device or chemical or biological weapons. In response, U.S. military and intelligence
agencies have invested vast amounts of money to block their acquisition. So far,
however, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have relied almost solely on simple, homemade
bombs crafted from everyday ingredients -- such as nail-polish remover and fertilizer
-- when plotting attacks in Europe and the United States. The makeshift bombs lack
the destructive potential of the conventional explosives that rake Iraq on a daily
basis. They are also less reliable, as demonstrated by the car bombs that failed to go
off in London last week after the culprits tried to ignite them with detonators wired to
cellphones. But other attempts have generated plenty of mayhem and damage,
including the kitchen-built backpack bombs that killed 52 people in the London public
transit system on July 7, 2005. "It makes no difference to your average person if
somebody puts a car bomb out there that is crude or one that is sophisticated," said
Chris Driver-Williams, a retired British major and military intelligence officer who
studies explosive devices used by terrorist groups. "If it detonates, all of a sudden
you've got a very serious device and one that has achieved exactly what the
terrorists wanted." The advantages of homemade explosives are that they are easy
and cheap to manufacture, as well as difficult for law enforcement agencies to
detect. According to one expert, the peroxide-based liquid explosives that an al-
Qaeda cell allegedly intended to use to blow up nine transatlantic airliners last
summer would have cost as little as $15 a bomb.
Their evidence relies on a misinformation campaign.

Adam Dolnik, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 3 (Studies in Conflict &

Terrorism, 26.1)

Groups Motivated Predominantly by Islamist Ideology (al Qaida, PIJ). Groups in this category are
even less discriminatory in their suicide bombings than those of the preceding category. But despite
the religious justifications that allow them to dehumanize civilians more effectively, the CBRN
involvement of thes e groups remains on the level of declared interest. And even though
many open-source reports and court testimonies document Al Qaidas
attempts to acquire CBRN agents , no hard evidence of Al Qaidas CBRN

capabilities exists .91 Further, the fact that Al Qaidas attempted acquisition of CBRN is public
knowledge suggests that not much effort was invested into concealing
this information; quite the contrary . Under Lesson 9 subsection d) of the Al
Qaida training manual, the groups members are instructed exactly on
what to say when captured and interrogated. 92 It is quite possible
that the existing claims of CBRN activities by the groups members are
part of a deliberate misinformation campaign designed to spread fear and to
divert the U.S. governments attention from other forms of attack. In terms of agent selection, it is
interesting to note that these groups tend to claim possession of all types of CBRN weapons.
Water DAs
 K Discourse Turn
Water wars are an ideological fiction hegemonic concept
manipulated to serve the interests of powerful social
actors and dominant interest groups regard claims with
suspicion theyre mindlessly repeating the soundbytes
theyve been programmed to proliferate.

Trottier 4
(Julie, Lecturer, Department of Politics, University of Newcastle upon Tyne ,Water Wars: the
Rise of a hegemonic Concept World Water Assessment Programme, p. 2-4)//TR

The concept of hegemony was developed by Gramsci in order to explain how a state managed to assert its
power over a population living in a given territory. State power, said Gramsci, does not consist only of
coercion. The means of repression at the disposal of a state are only the most visible element of its power.
The other fundamental element of state power, and probably the most important one, is persuasion. A
social group can become dominant and gather state power in its hands only if it succeeds in developing its
hegemony within the civil society by persuading the subordinate groups to accept the values and ideas
that it has adopted and by building a network of alliances based on these values (Simon, 1991, p. 18).
The hegemony of the dominant group is therefore very much ideological in
nature. The dominant group generates common sense, the uncritical and
partly unconscious way in which people perceive the world. This common sense is maintained by the
relations existing within the civil society, as churches, political parties, trade unions, mass media, and
other institutions propagate it. Gramsci therefore distinguishes the state apparatuses, which have a
monopoly over the legitimate use of violence and coercion, from the civil society institutions, which build
and maintain the hegemonic common sense that allows the population to accept the states power as
legitimate. Gramsci defined civil society as the set of all institutions that do not belong either to the state
or to the realm of economic production. The media, churches, and trade unions all belonged to this civil
society within which hegemonic concepts took root and flourished. He included schools within civil society,
on the basis that the educative relation is essentially a voluntary one even though the state usually
subsidizes schools and sets the curriculum (Gramsci, 1957). Other authors have defined civil society
differently, and bodies such as the EU commonly consider private companies to be part of civil society.
Private enterprises clearly play an important role in propagating
hegemonic concepts that structure the modern common sense
concerning water and water wars, and institutions such as the media are often private
enterprises. Their role will therefore be included in this article along with that of the other members of civil
society. Ideologically hegemonic conceptions provide stabilizing distortions and rationalizations of complex
realities, inconsistent desires, and arbitrary distributions of valued resources. They are presumptions that
exclude outcomes, options, or questions from public consideration; thus they advantage those elites well
positioned to profit from prevailing cleavage patterns and issue definitions. That hegemonic beliefs do not
shift fluidly with changing realities and marginal interest is what makes them important. That they require
some correspondence to objective realities and interests is what limits their life and the conditions under
which they can be established and maintained. (Lustick, 1993, p. 121) Gramsci paid much attention to
what he termed a war of position. Such a struggle is subtle and nonviolent. It is conducted in the press,
in educational and religious institutions, and in the political arena (Gramsci, 1957). The outcome of a war
of position is either the persistence of ideologically hegemonic concepts, the destruction of formerly
ideologically hegemonic concepts, or the emergence of new ones. Such wars of position certainly do not
imply any kind of conspiracy. Various social groups promote certain values and certain definitions they
wish to become hegemonic. This will in turn affect the resilience of other hegemonic concepts in an
unpredictable manner. Many social groups and many institutions act as vehicles for the propagation of
hegemonic concepts without benefiting from them at all. The example of the female vote in Europe
illustrates this very well. The idea of females voting seemed, at best, preposterous a hundred years ago. In
England, a number of suffragettes were sent to Holloway Prison because of their activism. Their war of
position proved successful and no one in the European political landscape now challenges the legitimacy of
the right to vote for women. This successful war of position later affected many other hegemonic concepts
concerning gender, such as the legitimacy of womens presence in the work force. Whether or not a social
group is successful at imposing or toppling a hegemonic concept largely hinges on the echo it will find for
this idea among other institutions and social groups. This article will examine the rise of the hegemonic
concept concerning water wars. It will investigate the mechanisms whereby such an idea emerged and
was propagated. It will also briefly examine the war of position that is now being waged against the
concept of water wars. Hegemonic concepts are not created in a vacuum. They emerge within a context
where other hegemonic concepts have already taken hold and where other wars of position are being
waged. Before examining empirically the emergence of the concept of water wars, other hegemonic
concepts concerning water and concerning war will need to be reviewed. These, and the accompanying
The idea
wars of position, are the soil in which the concept of water wars is taking root and is growing.
according to which water should be brought where it is needed
has a long history in western society and has led to the emergence
of a hegemonic concept of water development. The water
literature is rife with introductory declarations concerning the great
quantity of freshwater available on the planet and the crucial
necessity of redistributing this wealth more adequately . Globally,
freshwater is abundant. Each year an average of more than 7,000 cubic meters per capita enters rivers
and aquifers. Unfortunately it does not all arrive in the right place at the right time write Turner and
Durbourg (1999) in a vein that is very representative of a dominant assumption. Such a statement implies
It implies a clear hierarchy of
that there is a right place and a right time for water.
values concerning water users. Some are deemed to be more
deserving than others. Indeed, water will be used wherever it flows, but fish and algae living
in northern Canada rate as less important than human beings in need of drinking water, food, and
sanitation. Such an anthropocentric vision of water is widely shared by most social actors. It is also
coherent with the conservationist trend in environmentalism. Two types of environmentalism can be
distinguished: that of conservationists and that of preservationists. Conservationists want to protect nature
as a resource for human use whereas preservationists seek to protect nature itself from human use (Milton,
1996). It is fair to say that the idea of water as a basic human right is well entrenched as a hegemonic
concept around the planet. The right of thirst has long been enshrined in Muslim law and is not questioned
in any international forum (Faruqui et al., 2001). It satisfies the essential criteria to qualify as a hegemonic
concept: anyone evoking the possibility of a distribution system that would not ensure a minimum supply
of freshwater and food to every human being would apologize for mentioning such a thought. Were that
person to advocate such an idea, they would be regarded as monstrous. At best, the person would be
laughed at. The organizations that struggle against the construction of big dams always put forward their
adherence to the principle of water as a human right. They demonstrate how such projects, while claiming
to bring water where it is needed, would actually compromise this right for the social group they defend
(see for example: Roy, 1999). This first ideologically hegemonic concept of water and food as basic human
rights has provided the rationalization for what has become another hegemonic concept: water
As humans have a basic right to food and water, water
development.
development would bring clean water to them for their domestic
needs, provide sanitation, and allow the development of irrigation to
provide food. Lusticks reference to hegemonic concepts rationalizing complex realities and
excluding options or questions from public consideration is very relevant here. Transferring populations
from water-scarce areas to water-rich areas could have satisfied the human right to water and food. It
could have been satisfied by populations deciding to prioritize their use of water and resorting to virtual
water. But water development came to signify exactly the opposite: water would be brought to the people
for domestic consumption and for irrigation even if these people elected to settle in the middle of the
desert. Which groups, which elites in Lusticks terms, benefited from such an issue definition?
Construction companies appear as obvious candidates, as they grew
out of this version of water development. They clearly participated
in maintaining this belief and in propagating it. But many other
groups participated in the making of water development, as it is
understood today.

The Rhetoric of water wars sanitizes and legitimizes

violence and obscures its underlying causes.

Trottier 4
(Julie, Lecturer, Department of Politics, University of Newcastle upon Tyne ,Water Wars: the
Rise of a hegemonic Concept World Water Assessment Programme, p. 5-6)//TR
A main achievement of state power in modern times has been the
persuasion of the population concerning the legitimacy of the use of
violence. In the western world, the idea according to which the state has a monopoly over
the legitimate use of violence has become hegemonic. This legitimacy or lack of it confers the
status of either murder or execution to what would otherwise be, technically, the same act.
State violence is referred to as war or police operation whereas
violence from another source is referred to as terrorism or
banditism. The labeling of identical acts as war acts or terrorist
acts is often enough to categorize them as legitimate or not, since
the cognitive map of each citizen has been structured according to
this hegemonic concept. Any group carrying out violent acts strives to label them as
acts of war in order to secure that legitimacy. In the case of a body that is not a state, this has
generally implied, over the last century, claiming to be a liberation movement that will
eventually create a state. The objective of creating a state became necessary to acquire this
legitimacy, even for groups such as the Kurds, whose form of political organization was not the
The water war discourse started growing in a
territorial state (Badie, 1992).
fertile soil where a very specific definition of water development had
become hegemonic and where the only legitimate violent conflicts
were believed to be wars between opposing states. Of course other
hegemonic concepts contributed to this fertile ground: the idea
according to which the state is the only institution spelling out the
rules of social control and determining who will exercise this social
control, for example. Investigating this assumption, Joel Migdal demonstrated how it
rarely reflects reality, especially in the developing world . He developed
his state-in-society model in order to account for the interaction between the state and the
multiple other institutions that spell out the rules and exercise social 6 control (Migdal, 1988,
How western hegemonic concepts concerning the states role in
2001).
society have obscured the understanding of water conflicts in the
non-western world has been explored elsewhere (Trottier, 2003). The
eventual growth of the idea of water wars as a hegemonic concept must be analyzed within
the context of other pre-existing and well-entrenched hegemonic concepts that distorted and
rationalized unequal distributions of resources and specific distributions of power in various
These acted as building blocks supporting the growth of new
societies.
concepts, they limited the range of options that appeared possible
and they provided fences limiting the issue definitions: states
wanted water development at all cost, therefore states might wage
war in order to secure it. Such an issue definition precluded any
consideration of the fact that water development could have a
different meaning for various social groups, that states may not be
the only social actors that benefit from water development, that
other social groups may actually benefit from it more than the state
itself while the state may loose from it, or that states rarely choose
to go to war over one issue alone.
 AT: Nuke Desal
Status quo solves and nuclear desalination is ineffective

Smith 11
(Gar, Editor Emeritus of Earth Island Journal, a former editor of Common Ground magazine, a
Project Censored Award-winning journalist, and co-founder of Environmentalists Against War,
"NUCLEAR ROULETTE: THE CASE AGAINST A NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE," June, International
Forum on Globalization series focused on False Solutions,
http://ifg.org/pdf/Nuclear_Roulette_book.pdf)//TR

By 2025, 3.5 billion people will face severe fresh-water shortages.Nuclear proponents groping
for justifications to expand nuclear powerhave argued that the waste heat from
power plants can provide a cheap and clean solution to the
inherently costly process of removing salt from seawater.
Desalination plants (there are 13,080 worldwide, mostly oil- and gas-fired and mostly in wealthy
desert nations) already produce more than 12 billion gallons of drinkable
water a day. 153 The first nuclear desalinator was installed in Japan in the late 1970s and scores of
reactor-heated desalination plants are operating around the world today. But nuclear
desalination is another False Solution. The problem with atomic water-purifiers is that
using heat to treat seawater is an obsolete 20 th -century technology. Thermal desalination
has given way to new reverse osmosis systems that are less energy
intensive and 33 times cheaper to operate. 154 Nuclear desalination advocates
claim that wind, solar, and wave power arent up to the task while new low-temperature evaporation
technology may be able to produce high purity water at temperatures as low as 122 Fahrenheit. 155
Promoting reactors as a solution to the worlds water shortage is
especially ludicrous since nuclear power plants consume more water
than any other energy source. 156 Even proponents admit there is a potential
risk that running seawater through a radioactive environment might
contaminate the drinking water produced. 157 Undeterred, scientists in Russia and
India have proposed anchoring small atom-powered water-plants offshore near densely populated coastal
cities. But this would provide no relief for the billions of people living inland in water-starved regions of
Desalination is merely a way of giving a marginal new
North Africa and Asia.
purpose to existing reactors whose balance sheets would be
improved if they were retrofitted with desalination chambers. As with
power generation, so with desalination: efficiency in water use (better irrigation technology, crop selection,
A real solution to the growing
eliminating transit losses, etc.) beats new production.
global water shortage needs to address the increasing amount of
water diverted to wasteful agricultural and industrial practices and
concentrate on preventing the water from being contaminated in the
first placeby, among other things, capping the size of local populations to match locally available
water supplies.

Corporate control negates any benefits

Barlow 8
(Maude, The American Prospect, Where has all the Water Gone? Vol. 19, Iss. 6, pg. A2, June,
Proquest)//TR

THREE SCENARIOS COLLUDE TOWARD disaster. Scenario one: The world is

running out of freshwater. It is not just a question of finding the money to
hook up the 2 billion people living in water-stressed regions of our world.
Humanity is polluting, diverting, and depleting the Earth's finite water resources at a dangerous and steadily increasing rate.
The abuse and displacement of water is the ground-level equivalent of
greenhouse-gas emissions and likely as great a cause of climate change.
Scenario two: Every day more and more people are living without access to
clean water. As the ecological crisis deepens, so too does the human crisis.
More children are killed by dirty water than by war, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and traffic accidents
combined. The global water crisis has become a powerful symbol of the growing inequality in our world. While the wealthy enjoy boutique
Scenario three:
water at any time, millions of poor people have access only to contaminated water from local rivers and wells.

A powerful corporate water cartel has emerged to seize control of every

aspect of water for its own profit. Corporations deliver drinking water and
take away wastewater; corporations put massive amounts of water in plastic bottles and sell it to us at exorbitant prices;
corporations are building sophisticated new technologies to recycle our dirty water and sell it back to us; corporations extract and move water
by huge pipelines from watersheds and aquifers to sell to big cities and industries; corporations buy, store, and trade water on the open
market, like running shoes. Most important, corporations want governments to deregulate the
water sector and allow the market to set water policy. Every day, they get
closer to that goal. Scenario three deepens the crises now unfolding in
scenarios one and two. Imagine a world in 20 years in which no substantive
progress has been made to provide basic water services in the Third World; or
to create laws to protect source water and force industry and industrial
agriculture to stop polluting water systems; or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker,
and other diversions, which will have created huge new swaths of desert. Desalination plants will ring the

world's oceans, many of them run by nuclear power; corporate-

controlled nanotechnology will clean up sewage water and sell it to
private utilities, which will in turn sell it back to us at a huge profit ; the rich will drink
only bottled water found in the few remaining uncontaminated parts of the world or sucked from the clouds by corporate-controlled machines,
while the poor will the in increasing numbers from a lack of water .
 1NC No Impact (Short)
No water wars- empirically it ends in cooperation at worst

Allouche 11 (Jeremy, January 2011, [Currently a Research

Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the
University of Sussex,] "The sustainability and resilience of
global water and food systems: Political analysis of the
interplay between security, resource scarcity, political
systems and global trade" Food PolicyVolume 36,
Supplement 1, Pages S3-S8 Accessed via: Science Direct
Sciverse //DF)
The question of resource scarcity has led to
Water/food resources, war and conflict
many debates on whether scarcity (whether of food or water) will lead to
conflict and war. The underlining reasoning behind most of these discourses over food and water
wars comes from the Malthusian belief that there is an imbalance between the economic availability of
natural resources and population growth since while food production grows linearly, population increases
exponentially. Following this reasoning, neo-Malthusians claim that finite natural resources place a strict
limit on the growth of human population and aggregate consumption; if these limits are exceeded, social
it seems that most empirical studies
breakdown, conflict and wars result. Nonetheless,
do not support any of these neo-Malthusian arguments.
Technological change and greater inputs of capital have dramatically
increased labour productivity in agriculture. More generally, the neo-Malthusian
view has suffered because during the last two centuries humankind has
breached many resource barriers that seemed unchallengeable . Lessons
from history: alarmist scenarios, resource wars and international
relations In a so-called age of uncertainty, a number of alarmist
scenarios have linked the increasing use of water resources and food
insecurity with wars. The idea of water wars (perhaps more than food wars) is a
dominant discourse in the media (see for example Smith, 2009), NGOs (International Alert, 2007) and
within international organizations (UNEP, 2007). In 2007, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared that
water scarcity threatens economic and social gains and is a potent fuel for wars and conflict (Lewis,
2007). Of course, this type of discourse has an instrumental purpose; security and
conflict are here used for raising water/food as key policy priorities
at the international level. In the Middle East, presidents, prime
ministers and foreign ministers have also used this bellicose
rhetoric. Boutrous Boutros-Gali said; the next war in the Middle East will be over water, not politics
(Boutros Boutros-Gali in Butts, 1997, p. 65). The question is not whether the sharing
of transboundary water sparks political tension and alarmist
declaration, but rather to what extent water has been a principal
factor in international conflicts. The evidence seems quite weak.
Whether by president Sadat in Egypt or King Hussein in Jordan, none of these declarations
have been followed up by military action. The governance of transboundary water
has gained increased attention these last decades. This has a direct impact on the global food system as
The
water allocation agreements determine the amount of water that can used for irrigated agriculture.
likelihood of conflicts over water is an important parameter to
consider in assessing the stability, sustainability and resilience of
global food systems. None of the various and extensive databases
on the causes of war show water as a casus belli. Using the
International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data set and supplementary data from the University
of Alabama on water conflicts, Hewitt, Wolf and Hammer found only seven
disputes where water seems to have been at least a partial cause for
conflict (Wolf, 1998, p. 251). In fact, about 80% of the incidents relating to
water were limited purely to governmental rhetoric intended for the
electorate (Otchet, 2001, p. 18). As shown in The Basins At Risk (BAR) water event database ,
more than two-thirds of over 1800 water-related events fall on the
cooperative scale (Yoffe et al., 2003). Indeed, if one takes into account a much longer period,
the following figures clearly demonstrate this argument. According to studies by the United Nations Food
between the year 805
and Agriculture Organization (FAO), organized political bodies signed
and 1984 more than 3600 water-related treaties, and approximately
300 treaties dealing with water management or allocations in
international basins have been negotiated since 1945 ([FAO, 1978] and [FAO,
1984]). The fear around water wars have been driven by a Malthusian outlook which equates scarcity with
no direct correlation between water
violence, conflict and war. There is however
scarcity and transboundary conflict. Most specialists now tend to agree that the
major issue is not scarcity per se but rather the allocation of water
resources between the different riparian states (see for example [Allouche,
2005], [Allouche, 2007] and [Rouyer, 2000]). Water rich countries have been involved in a number of
disputes with other relatively water rich countries (see for example India/Pakistan or Brazil/Argentina).
The perception of each states estimated water needs really
constitutes the core issue in transboundary water relations. Indeed,
whether this scarcity exists or not in reality, perceptions of the amount of available
water shapes peoples attitude towards the environment (Ohlsson, 1999).
In fact, some water experts have argued that scarcity drives the process of co-operation among riparians
the
([Dinar and Dinar, 2005] and [Brochmann and Gleditsch, 2006]). In terms of international relations,
threat of water wars due to increasing scarcity does not make much
sense in the light of the recent historical record. Overall, the water war
rationale expects conflict to occur over water, and appears to suggest that
violence is a viable means of securing national water supplies, an argument which is highly
contestable. The debates over the likely impacts of climate change have again popularised the idea
of water wars. The argument runs that climate change will precipitate worsening ecological conditions
contributing to resource scarcities, social breakdown, institutional failure, mass migrations and in turn
cause greater political instability and conflict ([Brauch, 2002] and [Pervis and Busby, 2004]). In a report for
the US Department of Defense, Schwartz and Randall (2003) speculate about the consequences of a worst-
case climate change scenario arguing that water shortages will lead to aggressive wars (Schwartz and
Despite growing concern that climate change will lead
Randall, 2003, p. 15).
to instability and violent conflict, the evidence base to substantiate
the connections is thin ([Barnett and Adger, 2007] and [Kevane and Gray, 2008]).
 1NC No Impact (Long)
No risk of water wars

Lawfield 10
( Thomas Lawfield is an MA candidate at the University for Peace. Water Security: War or
Peace? Thomas Lawfield May 03, 2010, http://www.monitor.upeace.org/innerpg.cfm?
id_article=715, ZBurdette) *note: changed to BC[E])//TR

In reality, water does not cause war. The arguments presented above,
although correct in principle, have little purchase in empirical evidence. Indeed, as
one author notes, there is only one case of a war where the formal declaration of war was over water.[20]

This was an incident between two Mesopotamian city states, Lagash and
Umma, over 2,500 years BC[E], in modern day southern Iraq. Both the initial premises and
arguments of water war theorists have been brought into question . Given
this, a number of areas of contestation have emerged : "Questioning both the
supply and demand side of the water war argument [...] Questioning
assumptions about the costs of water resources [...and] Demonstrating the
cooperative potential of the water resource."[21] Why then is water not a cause
of war? The answer lies in two factors: first, the capacity for adaptation to
water stresses and, second, the political drawbacks to coupling water and
conflict. First, there is no water crisis, or more correctly, there are a number of
adaptation strategies that reduce stress on water resources and so make
conflict less likely. Unlike the water war discourse, which perceives water as
finite in the Malthusian sense, the capacity for adaptation to water
stress has been greatly underestimated. For instance, I will discuss in
particular a trading adaptation known as virtual water, which refers to the
water used to grow imported food. This water can be subtracted from the
total projected agricultural water needs of a state, and hence allows water
scarce states to operate on a lower in-country water requirement than would
otherwise be expected.[22] This means that regions of the world that are
particularly rich in water produce water intense agricultural products more
easily in the global trade system, while other water scarce areas produce low
intensity products.[23] The scale of this water is significant - Allan famously pointed out that more
embedded water flows into the Middle East in the form of grain than flows in the Nile.[24] In addition, there are significant

problems around the hegemonic doctrine of the water crisis. Many authors point
to relatively low water provision per capita by states, and suggest that this will increase
the likelihood of a state engaging in war with a neighbouring state, to obtain the water necessary for its population. This
is normally a conceptual leap that produces the incorrect corollary of conflict,
but is also frequently a problem of data weaknesses around the per capita
requirements. For instance, Stucki cites the case of the Palestinians being
under the worst water stress, with a per capita provision being in the region of 165m/year.[25]
Unfortunately, such an analysis is based on false actual provision data in this
region. Based on the authors work on water provision in Lebanese Palestinian refugee camps, the actual provision is over 90m/month. Such a
figure is highly likely to be representative of other camps in the region.[26] If this example is representative of trends to exaggerate water
we should be sceptical about claims of increasing
pressures in the region, then

water stress. Furthermore, given that many water systems have a pipe leakage
rate of fifty per cent, combined with a seventy per cent loss of agricultural
water, significant efficiency enhancements could be made to existing
infrastructure. Combined with desalination options in many water shortage prone states, there
is an overall capacity for technological and market driven solutions to water
scarcity.[27]

Water war statistics go our way- the last war happened

4500 years ago, conflict is low, and all legitimate studies
point to cooperation if anything

Katz 11 (David, February 2011, [Director of the Akirov

Institute for Business and Environment at Tel Aviv
University, PhD,] Hydro-Political Hyperbole, Global
Environmental Politics, 11; 1)
A number critiques have been leveled against both the theory and the empirical evidence behind the
water wars hypothesis. One critique of the environmental security literature ,
of which much of the published material on water wars is guilty, is that warnings and
threats of future violence are often considered as evidence .28
Statements from the 1980s that the next war in the Middle East will
be over water have already proven false. Research has shown, however, that even
the more general predictions of imminent water wars that are based
on comments by officials may be suspect. Leng, for instance, found no
correlation between the frequency of threats of war and the onset of
war.29 Examining conflict and cooperation over water resources, Yoffe and colleagues
noted over 400 incidents of water-related verbal exchanges by
political figures between 1948 and 1999 that were conflictual in
nature, but only 37 instances of violent conflict of varying levels of
intensity. Thirty of these were from the Middle East, none were more recent than
1970, none were all-out wars, and in none was water the central
cause of conflict.30 Proponents of water war scenarios often premise their dire conclusions on the
fact that water is essential for life and non-substitutable.31 Yet water for basic needs
represents a small share of total water use, even in arid countries.32
Economists and others point out that over 80 percent of world freshwater
withdrawals are for the agricultural sector, a relatively low-value use and one in
which large gains in efficiency could be made by changes in irrigation techniques and choice of crops.
Thus,economic critiques of the water war hypothesis stress that the
value of water that would be gained from military conflict is unlikely
to outweigh the economic costs of military preparation and battle,
much less the loss of life.33 Some authors have even questioned the
empirical basis for the conclusion that freshwater is increasingly
scarce, 34 an assumption on which the water war hypothesis relies. Such a cornucopian
view claims that people adapt to scarcity through improvements in
technology, pricing, and efficiencyrendering water less scarce , not
more so. Perhaps the strongest case against the likelihood of water wars is
the lack of empirical evidence of precedents. Wolf found only one
documented case of war explicitly over water, and this took place
over 4500 years ago.35 Moreover, he could document only seven cases of
acute conflict over water. Yoffe and colleagues also find that armed conflict over
water resources has been uncommon.36 They found that cooperation was
much more common than conflict, both globally and in all world
regions except the Middle East/North Africa. This pattern may explain why only a
 Analysts
limited number of case studies of water conflict are presented in the water wars literature.
have criticized environmental security arguments that are based on
case studies because such works tend to have no variation in the
dependent variable.37 Many large sample statistical studies have attempted to address such
shortcomings, however, in several cases these studies too have come under fire. For instance, a
number of large-sample statistical studies find correlations between
water-related variables and conflict, however, few, if any, provide
convincing support for causal relationships. Moreover, several studies
found that water availability had no impact on the likelihood of
either domestic or international conflict, 38 including at least one study that
attempted to replicate earlier studies [End Page 16] that claimed to have found such correlations.39
the results of several studies that do find correlations
Moreover,
between water and conflict are either not robust or are contrasted
by other findings. For instance, Raleigh and Urdal find that the statistical
significance of water scarcity variables is highly dependent on one
or two observations, leading them to conclude that actual effects of
water scarcity are weak, negligible or insignificant .40 Jensen and Gleditsch
find that the results of Miguel and colleagues are less robust when using a recoding of the original
dataset.41 Gleditsch and colleagues found that shared basins do predict an increased propensity for
conflict, but found no correlation between conflict and drought, the number of river crossings, or the share
of the basin upstream, leading them to state that support for a scarcity theory of
water conflict is somewhat ambiguous.42

Scientists have an agenda to overstate the impacts of

water wars, hold all of their evidence suspect

Katz 11
David Katz, faculty member at the University of Haifa's Department of Geography and Environmental
Studies, where he teaches courses in environmental and resource economics, water management, and
economic and political geography. He also serves as an adjunct lecturer at Tel Aviv University's Recanati
School of Management and Porter School for Environmental Studies, where he teaches courses on
economics of the environment and natural resources and on corporate environmental strategy. Hydro-
Political Hyperbole: Examining Incentives for Overemphasizing the Risks of Water Wars, written in Global
Environmental Politics, February 2011 http://www.bupedu.com/lms/admin/uploded_article/eA.726.pdf
Accessed 6/23/12

various actors may have

Incentives Presented in Existing Literature Observers have noted that
incentives to stress or even exaggerate the risks of water wars. Lonergan notes, for
instance, that in many cases, the comments are little more than media hype ; in
others, statements have been made for political reasons. 49 Beyond mere
acknowledgement of the possibility of such incentives, however, little research has attempted to
understand what these incentives are and how they may differ between actors. An understanding of the
different motivations of various groups of actors to stress the possibility of imminent water wars can help
explain the continued seemingly disproportionate popularity of such messages and help to evaluate such
warnings more critically. Mueller offers a general explanation for a focus on violence in public discourse by
following the end of the Cold War, policy-makers, the press, and
postulating that,
various analysts seek to fill a catastrophe quota . 50 According to this theory,
various actors seek out new areas of potential violence to justify fears that
had become commonplace during the Cold War period . Simon, while not specifically
addressing environmental conflict, suggests four possible reasons for academic researchers to offer what
he claimed were overly gloomy scenarios resulting from resource scarcity. 51 The first reason is that
international funding organizations are eager to fund research dealing with
crises, but not work that produces good news . The second is that bad news sells
more newspapers and books. The third is a psychological predisposition to focus
on bad news or worst-case scenarios . The fourth is a belief that sounding alarm
bells can mobilize action to improve environmental issues . Haas offers two
reasons why exaggerated beliefs about resource scarcity and their possible
threats to environmental security persist. The first is the absence of any
consensual mechanism for reconciling inter-discourse (or interparadigm) disputes.
This, Haas argues, allows for ideological disputes to con- tinue unresolved . The
second reason is the elective affinity between environmental and security
discourses on the one hand, and other dominant discourses in social discussions . . . on the other hand.
Consequently self-interested political actors can borrow from discourses that are
similar in their ontology and structure and that justify pre-existing political
ambitions. 52 Trottier, addressing the risks of water wars specifically,
suggests that certain private-sector actors in the water industry may stress
the risks of water wars in order to promote waterrelated infrastructure.

Technology moots any conflict, and pro-water war

literature is fraught with statistical fallacies

Bernauer et al 10 (Thomas [Professor of political science

at ETH Zurich,] Anna Kalbhenn [PhD candidate at the
Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS),
Zurich] Vally Koubi [Senior fellow at the Center for
Comparative and International Studies (CIS) at the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology Zurich] Gabriele Ruoff
[Postdoctoral researcher in the International Political
Economy group of Thomas Bernauer at the Center for
Comparative and International Studies, Climate Change,
Economic Growth, and Conflict]
climsec.prio.no/papers/Climate_Conflict_BKKR_Trondheim_
2010.pdf //DF)
Other scholars, commonly referred to as cornucopians or resource optimists, do not share this pessimistic
view. They acknowledge that environmental degradation may negatively affect
human wellbeing. But they argue that humans can adapt to resource
scarcity by using market mechanisms (pricing), technological innovation, and
other means (Lomborg 2001; Simon 1998). Simon (1998) for instance notes that, although
population growth can lead to shortages or increased economic burdens in the short run, the ability
of society to respond to such circumstances by improvements in
technology and efficiency usually outstrips the constraints imposed
by an increasing population. The neo-Malthusian argument has also been criticized for
being overly complex and deterministic, and for ignoring important economic and socio-political factors
(e.g. Gleditsch 1998; de Soysa 2002a,b; Barnett and Adger 2007; Salehyan 2008). Critics have argued that
scarcity of renewable resources is just one of the factors in the
overall relationship between climate change and conflict . Buhaug et al.
(2008:20) note that climate change may increase the risk of armed conflict only under certain conditions
reject the idea that climate
and in interaction with several socio-political factors. They
change has a direct effect on the likelihood of conflict and propose
several causal pathways through which economic and political
instability, social fragmentation, and migration could increase the
probability of climate change leading to armed conflict. Qualitative case
studies (e.g. Baechler et al. 1996) provide some, albeit anecdotal evidence that climate change induced
environmental degradation (such as water scarcity, soil degradation, or deforestation) has contributed to
it remains unclear to what
conflict in some parts of the world (e.g. the Sahel region). But
extent these case specific findings can be generalized. Large-N
studies have, so far, not been able to provide conclusive evidence. One
part of this variance in empirical evidence is certainly due to the use
of different measures of climate change and environmental
degradation, data problems, and different sample sizes and time
periods. Another part, we submit, is due to the fact that past research
has focused on identification of a direct link between climatic
conditions and conflict. Conditional effects that stem from key
factors such as economic development and the political system
characteristics may thus have been overlooked.
 No Impact: Indo/Pak
No Indo-Pak impact

Mutti 9
Masters degree in International Studies with a focus on South Asia, U Washington. BA in
History, Knox College. over a decade of expertise covering on South Asia geopolitics,
Contributing Editor to Demockracy journal (James, 1/5, Mumbai Misperceptions: War is Not
Imminent, http://demockracy.com/four-reasons-why-the-mumbai-attacks-wont-result-in-a-
nuclear-war/,)

Fearful of imminent war, the media has indulged in frantic hand wringing about Indian and Pakistani nuclear arsenals and renewed fears about the
Indian subcontinent being the most dangerous place on earth. As an observer of the subcontinent for
over a decade, I am optimistic that war will not be the end result of this event. As horrifying as the Mumbai attacks were, they are not likely to drive India and Pakistan

seems the result of the media being

into an armed international conflict. The media frenzy over an imminent nuclear war

superficially knowledgeable about the history of Indian-Pakistani relations, of feeling compelled to follow the most
sensationalistic story, and being recently brainwashed into thinking that the only way to respond to a major terrorist attack was the American way a war. Here are four

reasons why the Mumbai attacks will not result in a war: 1.For both countries, a war would be a disaster. India
has been successfully building stronger relations with the rest of the world over the last decade. It has
occasionally engaged in military muscle-flexing (abetted by a Bush administration eager to promote India as a counterweight to China and Pakistan), but it has

much more aggressively promoted itself as an emerging economic powerhouse and a moral,

democratic alternative to less savory authoritarian regimes. Attacking a fledgling democratic Pakistan would not improve Indias reputation in
anybodys eyes. The restraint Manmohan Singhs government has exercised following the attacks indicates a desire to avoid rash and potentially regrettable actions. It

is also perhaps a recognition that military attacks will never end terrorism.Pakistan , on the other hand, couldnt possibly win a war
against India, and Pakistans military defeat would surely lead to the downfall of the new democratic government. The military would regain control, and Islamic

Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari has

militants would surely make a grab for power an outcome neither India nor Pakistan want.

shown that this is not the path he wants his country to go down. He has forcefully spoken out against terrorist groups operating
in Pakistan and has ordered military attacks against LeT camps. Key members of LeT and other terrorist groups have been arrested. One can hope that this is only the

both countries
beginning, despite the unenviable military and political difficulties in doing so. 2. Since the last major India-Pakistan clash in 1999,

have made concrete efforts to create people-to-people connections and to improve economic relations. Bus
and train services between the countries have resumed for the first time in decades along with an easing of the issuing of visas to cross the

border. India-Pakistan cricket matches have resumed, and India has granted Pakistan
most favored nation trading status. The Mumbai attacks will undoubtedly strain relations, yet it is hard to believe that both sides
would throw away this recent progress. With the removal of Pervez Musharraf and the election of a democratic government (though a shaky, relatively weak one), both

the Indian government and the Pakistani government have political motivations to ease tensions and to proceed with efforts to improve relations. There are
growing efforts to recognize and build upon the many cultural ties between the populations of India and Pakistan and a decreasing sense of
also

Both countries also face difficult internal problems that present

animosity between the countries. 3.

more of a threat to their stability and security than does the opposite country. If they are wise, the governments of both countries will work more
towards addressing these internal threats than the less dangerous external ones. The most significant problems facing Pakistan today do not revolve around the
unresolved situation in Kashmir or a military threat posed by India. The more significant threat to Pakistan comes from within. While LeT has focused its firepower on
India instead of the Pakistani state, other militant Islamic outfits have not. Groups based in the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan have orchestrated frequent deadly

The battle that

suicide bombings and clashes with the Pakistani military, including the attack that killed ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007.

the Pakistani government faces now is not against its traditional enemy India, but against militants
bent on destroying the Pakistani state and creating a Taliban-style regime in Pakistan. In order to deal with this threat, it must strengthen the structures of a democratic,
inclusive political system that can also address domestic problems and inequalities. On the other hand, the threat of Pakistani based terrorists to India is significant.
However, suicide bombings and attacks are also carried out by Indian Islamic militants, and vast swaths of rural India are under the de facto control of the Maoist
guerrillas known as the Naxalites. Hindu fundamentalists pose a serious threat to the safety of many Muslim and Christian Indians and to the idea of India as a diverse,
secular, democratic society. Separatist insurgencies in Kashmir and in parts of the northeast have dragged on for years. And like Pakistan, India faces significant
challenges in addressing sharp social and economic inequalities. Additionally, Indian political parties, especially the ruling Congress Party and others that rely on the
support of Indias massive Muslim population to win elections, are certainly wary about inflaming public opinion against Pakistan (and Muslims). This fear could lead
the investigation into the Mumbai attacks to fizzle out with no resolution, as many other such inquiries have. 4. The international attention to this attack somewhat
difficult to explain in my opinion given the general complacency and utter apathy in much of the western world about previous terrorist attacks in places like India,
Pakistan, and Indonesia is a final obstacle to an armed conflict. Not only does it put both countries under a microscope in terms of how they respond to the terrible
events, it also means that they will feel international pressure to resolve the situation without resorting to war. India and Pakistan have been warned by the US, Russia,
and others not to let the situation end in war. India has been actively recruiting Pakistans closest allies China and Saudi Arabia to pressure Pakistan to act against
militants, and the US has been in the forefront of pressing Pakistan for action. Iran too has expressed solidarity with India in the face of the attacks and is using its
regional influence to bring more diplomatic pressure on Pakistan.
 No Impact Treaties
Treaties solve water wars

Tir and Stinnett 12

Jaroslav Tir, associate professor of international affairs in the University of Georgia School of Public and
International Affairs, Jaroslav Tir is a specialist in international relations as well as war and international
conflict. Douglas M Stinnett, Ph. D, professor of International affairs at UGA. Weathering climate change:
Can institutions mitigate international water conflict? Journal of Peace Research 49(1) 211225.
http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/49/1/211.full.pdf+html Accessed 6/24/12

Transboundary river treaties and international conflict While this study is motivated by the premise that
we echo some of the skepticism
water scarcity can contribute to militarized international conflict,
regarding the water wars scenario. As Salehyan (2008) observes, proponents of the
deterministic view that environmental scarcity leads to armed conflict tend to
overlook the role of human agency and the moderating effects of institutions .
International institutions, in particular, are one important factor that helps explain
why international conflicts over water are comparatively rare . Rather than simply
being the opposite of conflict, formal international cooperation is one method for
managing transboundary water sources and thereby preventing the
emergence and escalation of international water disputes. We thus view international
institutions as critical explanatory variables that have been largely overlooked in many discussions of
International treaties have become an increasingly
international water conflict. 5
common means of managing transboundary rivers. International
organizations, such as the United Nations and World Bank, often advocate the formation of
river treaties. In the case of tensions in the Aral Sea basin, for example, the UN Secretary General has
recommended a formal international accord to better manage the rivers feeding the Aral Sea (Heintz,
2010). This trend has been reflected in recent academic research investigating the conditions leading to
River
river treaty formation (e.g. Tir & Ackerman, 2009; Stinnett & Tir, 2009; Tir & Stinnett, 2011).
treaties can specify how the river will be shared, set water quality targets,
determine acceptable water withdrawal rates, or balance navigation, water
level, and water quality needs; this will, in turn, help minimize the stresses
placed on the river and make use more effective in the long run . By helping to
resolve the underlying problems that occur because of the competing use of
rivers and which are likely to be exacerbated by increased water scarcity treaties can
alleviate political tensions and reduce international conflict (Wolf, Yoffe & Giordano,
2003).

Multiple stipulations in international agreements mitigate

the risk of climate induced water conflicts

De Stefano, et. Al 12
Lucia De Stefano, Expert in Soil & Groundwater and Geologist at Oregon State University, Climate change
and the institutional resilience of international river basins, Written in Journal of Peace Research, 2012 49:
193 http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/49/1/193.full.pdf+html Accessed 6/23/12

while an
Institutional sources of resilience to climate change Recent research has found that
international water agreement may not necessarily prevent the emergence of
country grievances, these grievances usually result in negotiations (or
peaceful management) when an agreement already governs the basin
(Brochmann & Hensel, 2009). Institutions such as international water treaties can
contribute to transparency, decrease the transaction costs of cooperation,
and clarify expectations among the parties, thus stabilizing hydropolitical
relations (McCaffrey, 2003: 157). While a handful of empirical works have studied the general
phenomenon of water treaty signature (Espey & Towfique, 2004; Song & Whittington, 2004; Tir &
Ackerman, 2009; Dinar, Dinar & Kurukulasuriya, 2011), less research has examined the institutional
The presence (absence)
components such treaties embody in a global context (Stinnett & Tir, 2009).
of institutional stipulations may further reflect on the resilience of treaties,
given water variability and climatic change (Gleick, 2010). The international relations and
hydropolitics literature has shed insight into which mechanisms could possibly enhance treaty resilience
and cooperation. Guided by the availability of global data as to the existence of particular stipulations and
we consider the presence of (a) water
buttressed by existing analysis in the literature,
allocation mechanisms, (b) variability management mechanisms, (c) conflict
resolution mechanisms, and (d) river basin organizations . While we have elected to
concentrate on only four major stipulations, we recognize that additional stipulations may add
to resilience. Side-payments and issue-linkage, for example, may act as a contract enforcing
mechanism specifically in asymmetric contexts (LeMarquand, 1977; Bennett, Ragland & Yolles, 1998;
Dinar, 2006). Our underlying assumption is that the existence of these four institutional
stipulations provides a valid first approximation at the global scale of the
institutional resilience of transboundary basins to present and future climate
change-induced water variability. Below we discuss these four major components. While these
stipulations are quite distinct, in some cases one single treaty provision can include
information on two different stipulations. For example, it is possible that an
allocation mechanism also includes specific stipulations for variability
management. In that case we will consider the mere presence of an
allocation mechanism as one positive feature of the agreement, and the
existence of explicit references to flow variability management as another
asset of the treaty.

Your authors overstate the risk of water wars multiple warrants

Katz 11
David Katz, faculty member at the University of Haifa's Department of Geography and Environmental
Studies, where he teaches courses in environmental and resource economics, water management, and
economic and political geography. He also serves as an adjunct lecturer at Tel Aviv University's Recanati
School of Management and Porter School for Environmental Studies, where he teaches courses on
economics of the environment and natural resources and on corporate environmental strategy. Hydro-
Political Hyperbole: Examining Incentives for Overemphasizing the Risks of Water Wars, written in Global
Environmental Politics, February 2011 http://www.bupedu.com/lms/admin/uploded_article/eA.726.pdf
Accessed 6/23/12

Raise the Profile of Water-related Development or Environmental Needs: Several observers have noted
that the process of securitization of issues is a strategic practice done in a
conscious way to achieve specific goals , which need not be security-related. 54
Grifths noted that the rhetoric of security is used to attract attention to new concerns. 55 A desire
to bring attention to aspects of water management that may otherwise be
deemed as less deserving of attention or funding is an incentive common to
all actors examined in this study. Raising the specter of war can draw attention to
issues such as inequitable allocation, sanitation, pollution, or other
environmental or development concerns that may not otherwise be on many
peoples political agendas. By tying their primary cause to conflict over water,
actors increase their visibility and offer those who sympathize with their
mission an additional reason to offer support or take action . Of the actors discussed
herein, NGOs, which often have public education and awareness-raising as goals, face perhaps the
strongest incentive to emphasize the risks of water wars in order to raise the
profile of water-related development or environmental goals they are championing. On the
rst page of a report on improving access to water in poor communities, for instance, the NGO CARE, an
organization dedicated to ghting global poverty, 56 states in bold letters that conicts over water are
predicted to contribute to most wars in the future. 57 The British-based NGO World Development
Movement provocatively named its water campaign Stop Water Wars, though the primary goals of the
campaign are advocacy in support of provision of basic water and sanitation services to the poor and
Other actors also may highlight the
opposition to privatization of the water industry. 58
risks of water wars in order to bring attention to other environmental goals .
Several books and articles have the phrase water war in the title , although
actual discussion of violent conict over water represents a relatively minor focus of the texts, with the
The intent of such works
bulk being dedicated to various water management issues. 59
appears to be an effort to raise attention to some aspect of water
management. Risk of violent conict is used as a motivational device to
highlight the potential dangers of failing to take action . Policy-makers, too,
may attempt to securitize water in order to bring attention to water
management issues. For instance, former US Senator Paul Simon warns of water wars in a book on
water policy. 60 British diplomat John Ashton, the United Kingdoms Climate Ambassador, reportedly said
that global warming should be recast as a security issue to help mobilize support for cuts in global
greenhouse gas emissions. 61 While the previous comment addressed climate change in general rather
than water shortages specically, such a rationale seems reasonable in explaining declarations concerning
water wars made by other ofcials in government and at bodies such as UNDP and UNESCO, which are
formally charged with development and educational issues, not conict resolution, and which make such
declarations in reports that primarily focus on other aspects of water or environmental management. 62
Similar to the desire to draw attention to a
Raise the Profile of the Author or Organization:
cause, framing water issues in a security context can be a means of raising
the profile of an organization or author. Again, this incentive is probably most
dramatic for NGOs. Many observers have noted that NGOs and other non-elites can face serious
challenges in attracting attention. Some have resorted to exceptionally strange or
violent acts as a substitute for their lack of status or resources in order to
attract the medias eye. 63 However, as some have noted, while the benefit of outlandish
behavior is media attention, the price is that you get stuck in this role or caricaturization. 64 In order for
their organization and message to be taken more seriously, many environmental organizations have
moved away from such tactics. 65 Increasing the severity of their message is one tactic to attract attention
while toning down behavior. In the case of academics, conn ecting
water to security also offers
researchers a way to raise the profile of their work, given the salience of
security issues in high-level policy circles and with the general public . Doing so
increases the potential to gain access to policy-makers and the media. There is some evidence that
water research stressing conflict potential may be more likely to be published .
66 Furthermore, combining environmental and security issues expands the
number and types of journals in which academics can publish . Moreover, by
gaining exposure to audiences outside their particular field of expertise,
researchers also expand possibilities for further research collaboration . Expand
Pools of Available Funding: Several actors face financial incentives to reference the
possibilities for water wars. Conflict can affect terms and levels of investment .
There is some evidence to support Trottiers claim that certain private industry actors may
stress the risks of war in order to encourage policy-makers to invest in water
infrastructure. 67 A representative of a desalination facility un- der construction in Israel commented,
for instance, that unfortunately water is one of the reasons that create war. If you compare the cost of one
F-16, it is more or less the cost of this desalination plant. I believe at the end of the day it will be much
cheaper to solve conflict based on this type of plant than through buying new F-16s. 68 The website of a
developer of large bags that can be filled with water and towed quotes World Bank Vice President Ismail
Serageldins statement that the next centurys wars will be over water and then claims that Waterbag
technology will have a direct impact on the Peace Process in the Middle East. 69 Other types of actors
Many NGOs are engaged in a
also face financial incentives to stress risks of water wars.
constant search for funding, as are many academics. Both NGOs and
academics with a focus on environmental, development, or security stand to
benefit by expanding their focus to include some aspect of environmental
security, as adding additional elds increases the pools of funding available. This is especially
true for those adding the security element to their core focus, given the large
pools of funding frequently available for security issues . In addition, many NGOs
use press coverage as evidence of their effectiveness in awareness-raising vis-
-vis current and future sources of funding. As already mentioned, stressing war can increase the likelihood
of media exposure. Cite Signicant Statements by Primary Definers: The media and academic
researchers may cite statements of policy-makers, regardless of their own
personal beliefs as to the veracity of the claims, simply because they view
statements by public officials as legitimate subjects of study . Elites, including
political elites, are considered inherently worthy of media coverage . 70 Davis states
that journalists are drawn to government and institutional sources in positions of power . 71 Also, the
media rely on these policy-makers to provide expert knowledge. Thus, Davis
concludes that the media grant offcials primary definer status. 72 The prospect of imminent
water wars was first presented by authorities with such primary definer
status. Once the notion was established, it has remained a popular theme in the press,
despite subsequent empirical studies . Furthermore, if political leaders continue to
make reference to the possibilities of water wars, the media can be expected
to continue to report such comments, regardless of the state of research
supporting or refuting such claims. Academic researchers, too, may choose to focus on
statements of leading gures. Furthermore, because of the multitude of possible methodological
Even if such
approaches, the topic of water-based conict invites numerous research studies.
studies do not promote the water war hypothesis, they keep the issue alive in
public affairs and academic circles.
 No Impact Allocation Solves
Allocation mechanisms provide treaties with the flexibility
to manage water shortages

De Stefano, et. al, 12 Lucia De Stefano, Expert in Soil & Groundwater and Geologist at Oregon
State University, Climate change and the institutional resilience of international river basins, Written in
Journal of Peace Research, 2012 49: 193
http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/49/1/193.full.pdf+html Accessed 6/23/12

The presence of allocation mechanisms in agreements

Allocation mechanism
pertaining to water quantity and even hydropower may suppose greater
certainty in the water sharing among riparian countries (as opposed to allocation
uncertainty), which could be preferable in the context of climate uncertainty. Drieschova, Giordano &
Fischhendler (2008), for example, enumerate a variety of stipulations including direct and indirect
Direct allocation includes
allocation mechanisms and general principles for allocation.
stipulations that divide specific water quantities among the protagonists (see,
for example, Cooley et al., 2009). Indirect allocations can include such stipulations as
consultations or prioritization of uses, while general principles can include
stipulations such as equitable utilization or needs-based approaches (Drieschova,
Giordano & Fischhendler, 2008; Wolf & Hamner, 2000). Many of the above-cited authors seem to agree
thatin light of climatic change, treaties that exhibit flexibility are likely to be
more suitable for dealing with water variability. Nevertheless, the authors all seem to
have slightly different definitions of how flexibility may be operationalized in an
international treaty. Drieschova, Giordano & Fischhendler (2008) suggest that a more flexible water
allocation mechanism is one that divides water by percentage (as opposed to fixed amounts). Despite the
any
advantages of this more flexible mechanism, Drieschova, Giordano & Fishhendler recognize that
direct allocation mechanism is sometimes buttressed with additional indirect
mechanisms that also have some built-in flexibility, because they implicitly
recognize that water availability may change and therefore establish the
process for which allocations will be determined . McCaffrey (2003) argues that flexible
allocation mechanisms are those that recognize that water allocations may have to be reduced due to
water availability in particular circumstances. Finally, Cooley et al. (2009) emphasize allocations that
specify that an upstream riparian deliver a minimum flow to a downstream riparian and, like McCaffrey,
praise mechanisms that permit countries in specific situations to make up owed water allocations in a
Because treaties may include a range and
future period when more water is available.
combination of stipulations that jointly achieve flexibility (in a context of water
variability), it is often difficult to assess agreements for their flexibility in a
uniform fashion. Moreover, the effectiveness of the particular allocation
mechanisms can vary widely due to the influence of local context and
hydrological regime, making it difficult to establish a general rule on which specific allocation
stipulations are more suitable (relative to others) to deal with water variability. For these reasons, we
it is the general presence of allocation stipulations, as opposed to
assume that
treaties that neglect to codify any allocation division at all, that may
contribute to institutional resilience of a basin in light of water variability.
 No Impact Variability

Variability management stipulations allow effective

mitigation of the effects of water shortages

De Stefano, et. al, 12 Lucia De Stefano, Expert in Soil & Groundwater and Geologist at Oregon
State University, Climate change and the institutional resilience of international river basins, Written in
Journal of Peace Research, 2012 49: 193
http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/49/1/193.full.pdf+html Accessed 6/23/12

Variability management Variability management stipulations are designed to deal

with climatic extremes such as droughts and floods or other specific
variations. Such extreme events inflict severe damage on the environment and populations resulting in
both tangible and intangible effects (Bakker, 2006). Variability thus increases the demand
for infrastructure development and the need to manage water demand and
supply (Global Water Partnership, 2000). The mere existence of such stipulations
implies that the treaty parties not only acknowledge the temporal variability
of water availability but may also better prepare basin states to deal with
extreme events. The literature points to a number of specific treaty
mechanisms that enhance resilience to drought . Combined with some of the allocation
mechanisms discussed above, authors have pointed to immediate consultations
between the respective states, stricter irrigation procedures, water allocation
adjustments, specific reservoir releases, and data sharing (McCaffrey, 2003; Turton,
2003). Examples of treaties that have stipulated these mechanism s in some form
include the 1996 Ganges River Agreement, the 1997 Cuareim River
Agreement, the 1970 Lake Lanoux Agreement, and the 1989 Vuoksi
River/Lake Saimaa Agreement. Pertaining to flood issues, the establishment of
specific flood-control mechanisms is likewise important. Examples of specific
stipulations to mitigate floods include transboundary warning systems,
information exchange, the construction of reservoirs and levees, floodwalls,
channelization, and the regulation of land use (Rossi, Harmancioglu & Yevjevich, 1994).
In her study of transboundary flood and institutional capacity, Bakker (2009) finds that, on average,
death and displacement tolls were lower in the basins with flood-related
institutional capacity (which included flood-related treaty mechanisms). Based on the above
discussion, we expect that treaties that stipulate specific variability management
mechanisms (whether they are intended for drought or flood mitigation), as opposed to those
that do not stipulate such mechanisms, will bode better for treaty resilience,
especially in the context of variability.
 No Impact No Escalation

Conflict resolution mechanisms in existing water treaties

prevent escalation

De Stefano, et. al, 12 Lucia De Stefano, Expert in Soil & Groundwater and Geologist at Oregon
State University, Climate change and the institutional resilience of international river basins, Written in
Journal of Peace Research, 2012 49: 193
http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/49/1/193.full.pdf+html Accessed 6/23/12

Conflict resolution mechanisms, such as third-party involvement

Conflict resolution
or arbitration, could prove invaluable, especially when there are conflicting
interpretations of the agreement or when the actions of one country are perceived to negate
the agreements conditions (Global Water Partnership, 2000). Conflict resolution mechanisms
also provide a forum for discussing resource and environmental changes not
envisioned in the treaty (Drieschova, Giordano & Fishhendler, 2008). The extent to which
a treaty stipulates how disputes are to be resolved among the parties relates
to the level of confidence the parties may have that their concerns will be
met in a fair and safe environment. The 1992 Agreement between South Africa and Swaziland
pertaining to the Maputo and Incomati Basins, for example, stipulates three stages of dispute resolution
including direct negotiations between the parties, an arbitral tribune, and a United Nations appointed
extreme events of conflict over water have
arbitrator. As mentioned before, historically,
been statistically somewhat more frequent in regions characterized by high
interannual hydrologic variability. Therefore, the existence of established conflict
resolution mechanisms can be crucial for assuaging tensions that may arise
during extreme climatic events and in a context of climate uncertainty . River
basin organizations Joint commissions, governing councils, directorates, or river
basin organizations (which we herein refer to collectively as RBOs) may also contribute to
resilience. According to Chasek, Downie & Brown (2006) regime effectiveness may be at
the heart of the success of treaties and institutions . Effectiveness, according to
Haas, Keohane & Levy (1993), implies that there exists a hospitable contractual
environment (among other necessary conditions). This environment, in turn, provides
states with the ability to negotiate with reasonable ease, comply with the
treatys tenets without fear that others are cheating or free-riding, monitor
each others behavior, and enforce decisions (see also Susskind, 1994). Depending on
their form and function, RBOs can provide such a medium for achieving
effectiveness and an appropriate environment for facilitating cooperation
(Dombrowsky, 2007). In addition to being mandated with implementing any treaty obligations and
proposing future water plans, projects, and models (Cooley et al., 2009),the RBO is often
entrusted with a monitoring mandate (e.g. 1995 Agreement over the Mekong River). As
implied above, monitoring stipulations are particularly important since states
often fear that fellow states to an agreement may cheat or free-ride ( Keohane &
Martin, 1995). A conflict resolution mandate, while more often delegated to an external agency
(see above), is sometimes consigned to the RBO at least as a first phase of dispute
settlement (e.g. 1998 Agreement over the Zarumilla River). Enforcement mechanisms, when
they are directly present in a given water treaty, are also undertaken by the
RBO (e.g. a Governing Council in the case of the 1973 Agreement between Brazil and Uruguay over the
Parana River). In her study of the Indus Basin, for example, Zawahri (2009) finds that the joint
commission established has essentially played an invaluable role in the Indus
Waters Treatys implementation since 1960. According to Zawahri, it is in large part
due to the overwhelming success of the joint commission to negotiate,
monitor, and manage the Indus regime that stable cooperation over water
has existed between the two riparians since the treatys inception. Along the lines
of this example, we expect that basins equipped with a transboundary RBO will deal
better with present and projected water variability.
 No Impact Third Party

Provisions for third party management of water treaties

ensure peaceful conflict resolution

Tir and Stinnett 12

Jaroslav Tir, associate professor of international affairs in the University of Georgia School of Public and
International Affairs, Jaroslav Tir is a specialist in international relations as well as war and international
conflict. Douglas M Stinnett, Ph. D, professor of International affairs at UGA. Weathering climate change:
Can institutions mitigate international water conflict? Journal of Peace Research 49(1) 211225.
http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/49/1/211.full.pdf+html Accessed 6/24/12

Conflict management To cope with disagreements among signatories, some river

treaties specify a variety of formal procedures for dispute management . The
Permanent Indus Commission, for example, is responsible for resolving
disputes between India and Pakistan over the implementation of the Indus
Waters Treaty. Disputes are managed primarily through regular meetings of the
officials that make up the two national sections of the Commission (Zawahri,
2009b). At the opposite end of the spectrum lie mandates for binding
arbitration or adjudication by an existing international institution . For example,
Hungary and Slovakia have resorted to the ICJ to resolve a dispute involving a 1977 treaty governing water
Dispute resolution provisions can
infrastructure projects on the Danube (McCaffrey, 2003).
address different sources of noncompliance, including those related to
anticipated consequences of climate change. A formal process of resolving
disputes can address overt cheating by raising the visibility of noncompliance
(Abbott & Snidal, 2000). By increasing the costs of violations some of which may appear
particularly tempting due to the effects of climate change (e.g. unilaterally increase withdrawal rates to
dispute settlement mechanisms
compensate for lack of water due to a number of dry years)
can improve compliance. Conflict management institutions can also address
disputes over an agreements exact obligations. If climate change causes changes to a
river system that were not envisioned at the time of the treaty signing, such as lower flow or greater
seasonal variation, then these conditions will make the treaty less effective and increase the risk of
conflict. In these circumstances, provisions in a treaty for dealing with unforeseen conditions will become
The rulings of a third-party arbitration panel, court, or even
important for preventing conflict.
can clarify the terms of a
informal mediation through a secretariat or intergovernmental body
treaty (Chayes & Chayes, 1995). This enhances compliance by limiting the
occurrence of unintended violations that result from treaty ambiguities or
changed circumstances.
 No Impact Enforcement
Enforcement mechanisms in existing water treaties
prevent violent dispute

Tir and Stinnett 12

Jaroslav Tir, associate professor of international affairs in the University of Georgia School of Public and
International Affairs, Jaroslav Tir is a specialist in international relations as well as war and international
conflict. Douglas M Stinnett, Ph. D, professor of International affairs at UGA. Weathering climate change:
Can institutions mitigate international water conflict? Journal of Peace Research 49(1) 211225.
http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/49/1/211.full.pdf+html Accessed 6/24/12

Formally specified procedures for enforcement can improve

Enforcement provisions
a treatys ability to prevent and deal with disputes in multiple ways . First, the
reduction in the transaction costs of punishing cheaters increases the costs of
non-compliance and deters violations and thus supports the decentralized
self-enforcement of an agreement by its signatories (Keohane, 1984). Furthermore,
sanctioning according to the rules laid out in an international agreement will
be seen as more legitimate than direct, unilateral retaliation by an aggrieved state; punishments
seen as legitimate will help prevent dispute escalation and relations from collapsing in a spiral of
even in the absence of strong punitive
retaliatory and counter-retaliatory measures. Finally,
sanctions, institutionalized enforcement procedures can deter violations by
increasing the reputational consequences of non-compliance by
disseminating information. 216 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 49(1)If climate change introduces a
host of unexpected shocks to the relationship between riparian states, then the frequency of both
Enforcement provisions can help
intentional and unintentional defection is likely to grow.
force states to comply with the agreement while coping with the changes,
punish cheaters to assure broader compliance, and manage disputes so that
the mutually-retaliatory, escalating conflicts are avoided.
 No Impact Gov Solves

Intergovernmental organizations provide effective conflict

resolution and clarification to existing river treaties

Tir and Stinnett 12

Jaroslav Tir, associate professor of international affairs in the University of Georgia School of Public and
International Affairs, Jaroslav Tir is a specialist in international relations as well as war and international
conflict. Douglas M Stinnett, Ph. D, professor of International affairs at UGA. Weathering climate change:
Can institutions mitigate international water conflict? Journal of Peace Research 49(1) 211225.
http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/49/1/211.full.pdf+html Accessed 6/24/12

some river treaties delegate authority to new or

Intergovernmental organizations Lastly,
existing intergovernmental bodies. These organizations vary widely in their structure and
functions. An example of a complex organization is the Mekong River Committee, which consists of the
Secretariat, a permanent executive; the Joint Committee, which makes technical decisions and oversees
the Secretariat; and the Council, which is composed of representatives from each member state and has
the authority to make policy decisions. Some organizations also include technical committees made up of
engineers and other experts, responsible for daily operations. These bodies include the Permanent Indus
Commission, the IsraelJordan Joint Water Committee, and the International Joint Commission for rivers
shared by Canada and the United States. Finally, simpler organizations are basically consultative
committees that facilitate diplomacy. Intergovernmental bodies can help manage disputes through several
different means. In the event that treaty violations occur, intergovernmental
bodies, as centralized venues for communication and diplomacy, will enhance
the reputational consequences of noncompliance and thus help sustain
cooperation over time (Keohane, 1984). By facilitating diplomacy between member states,
intergovernmental bodies can also help clarify the understanding of an
agreements obligations and prevent the escalation of disputes. For technical
committees, conflict management is enhanced by the fact that water experts,
engineers, and regulators from member states will often address issues in a
nonpolitical manner. For example, the success of cooperation on the Komati River
in southern Africa under the Komati Basin Water Authority has been attributed to the fact
that most issues have been addressed by technical experts , rather than at a political
level (Keevy, Malzbender & Petermann, 2009). Finally, intergovernmental organizations can
address shortfalls in technical or economic capacity by coordinating national
efforts through a centralized administrative structure and by pooling
members technical capacities (Abbott & Snidal, 1998). All these functions will
enhance treaty signatories ability to weather the water-related effects of
climate change while keeping their relationship from devolving toward violent
confrontations. As climate change introduces new challenges and unanticipated scenarios, river
treaties supported by intergovernmental organizations will be better able to
enhance the signatories technical capacity, promote treaty compliance,
deter violations, and provide unbiased interpretation of signatories
obligations.
 No Impact Monitoring Solves
Monitoring capabilities enable greater transparency of
river data, preventing cheaters and more effectively
enabling water allocation

Tir and Stinnett 12

Jaroslav Tir, associate professor of international affairs in the University of Georgia School of Public and
International Affairs, Jaroslav Tir is a specialist in international relations as well as war and international
conflict. Douglas M Stinnett, Ph. D, professor of International affairs at UGA. Weathering climate change:
Can institutions mitigate international water conflict? Journal of Peace Research 49(1) 211225.
http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/49/1/211.full.pdf+html Accessed 6/24/12

treaty provisions mandating collection and sharing of river data ,

Monitoring Formal
can improve the functioning of river agreements . Given the
such as flows,
complexities of transboundary river systems and the natural variability in
river conditions, assessing treaty compliance often requires highly specialized
and detailed data (Elhance, 2000; Dombrowsky, 2007). This uncertainty will be exacerbated by
climate change; for example, reduced flow can be caused by drought rather than excessive diversion by
the upper riparian. In addition, hydrological data can be difficult and costly to collect, especially for
Greater transparency and data sharing can
developing countries (Elhance, 2000).
reduce fears that the other parties are violating the treaty, though it is certainly no
panacea (Feitelson & Chenoweth, 2002). This function of formal monitoring will be even
more important if climate change reduces total annual river flow or flow
during the critical dry-season. In such cases, better information will help the
parties distinguish between the effects of climate change versus the actions
of other riparians and provide the basis for addressing water-related
consequences of climate change in a comprehensive manner. In other cases,
a signatory may be deterred from temptation to cheat because the likelihood
of being caught is greater. Finally, provisions for coordinated monitoring can
help address capacity limitations by sharing these costs .

Regulatory institutions ensure compliance

Tir and Stinnett, 12 Jaroslav Tir, associate professor of international affairs in the University of
Georgia School of Public and International Affairs, Jaroslav Tir is a specialist in international relations as
well as war and international conflict. Douglas M Stinnett, Ph. D, professor of International affairs at UGA.
Weathering climate change: Can institutions mitigate international water conflict? Journal of Peace
Research 49(1) 211225. http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/49/1/211.full.pdf+html
Accessed 6/24/12 BJM
River treaty design and conflict management Our central expectation is that river treaties that
utilize formal institutions will be more likely to prevent riparian conflicts and
alleviate the deleterious consequences of water scarcity for international
security. This expectation is based on two related causal logics. First, international institutions
help make treaties more effective at preventing conflicts by minimizing the
various causes of noncompliance listed above, including those that are generated
or exacerbated by the consequences of climate change. For instance, specific
institutional provisions can help monitor behavior, facilitate enforcement,
resolve disagreements over treaty obligations, and help boost the capacity of
member countries. In the event of growing scarcity, better treaty compliance will help
preserve available water provided by the corresponding river . This will lessen
the stress placed on the river and minimize the temptation to engage in
unilateral river diversion. Second, in the event that disputes emerge between
signatories, institutions can prevent escalation by facilitating conflict
resolution. If climate change, by placing countries in conditions of increasing water scarcity,
generates new or intensifies existing conflicts between riparian states, highly
institutionalized treaties will be better able to diffuse such situations than
their less institutionalized counterparts. We focus on four specific institutional features of
river treaties. Among treaties signed between 1950 and 2000, taken from the
International Freshwater Treaties Database (Hamner & Wolf, 1998), 72% contain at least one
institutional provision. The remainder of this section discusses each institutional feature in detail,
namely, monitoring provisions (found in 47% of the treaties), enforcement (7%), conflict management
(35%), and delegation of authority to an intergovernmental organization (35%).
 Cooperation Turns
Water scarcity causes cooperation not conflict

Raimo Vayrynen, Professor of Government and International Studies at Notre

Dame, former director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies,
2001, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy, 15 ND J.L. Ethics &
Pub Poly 593, p. Lexis

predictions
On the other hand, while the scarcity of groundwater is becoming a major political issue,
about water wars over shared rivers seem to be overblown . According
to Gleditsch and Hamner, more than 250 river systems are shared between
two or more countries. In an empirical study of these rivers, they
find that water scarcity only has a limited tendency to foster
conflicts. Moreover, if scarcity is coupled with a shared river, the
probability of cooperation, rather than conflict, between countries
increases significantly. A common resource problem can also prompt closer cooperation.
This is evidenced, for instance, by the move towards cooperation in the
utilization of the water resources of the Nile. The main change has been the
increasing willingness of Egypt to cooperate with Ethiopia and Sudan, which concluded in an agreement on
the use of Blue Nile waters in 1991. The new phase of cooperation is managed by the Nile Basin Initiative
(N.B.I.), which is a formal organization set up by the riparian States, and with the support of the World
Bank, to implement the 1996 Nile River Basin Action plan on the preservation and distribution of the river
water.

Water shortages cause cooperation, not war

Dan Deudney, Center for Energy and Environment Studies at Princeton, April
1991, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, p. 26
Water wars. The most frequently mentioned scenario is that disputes over water supplies will become
acute as rainfall and runoff patterns are altered by atmospheric warming. Many rivers cross international
it seems less
boundaries, and water is already becoming scarce in several arid regions. But
likely that conflicts over water will lead to interstate war than tha t the
development of jointly owned water resources will reinforce peace.
Exploitation of water resources typically requires expensive and
vulnerable civil engineering systems such as dams and pipelines. Large
dams, like nuclear power plants, are potential weapons in the hands of an
enemy. This creates a mutual hostage situation which greatly
reduces the incentives for states to employ violence to resolve conflicts.
Furthermore, there is evidence that the development of water resources by
antagonistic neighbors creates a network of common interests.
WTO DAs
 AT WTO: General

WTO will fail to resolve long-term tensions and will be

unable to reform. Our only option is to orient ourselves
against it

PEET 9 (Richard, professor of human geography, Graduate

School of Geography @ Clark U., Unholy Trinity: the IMF,
World Bank and WTO, pp. 239-243)//TR

After the Second World War trade reassumed the crucial position for the growth of economies it
had held in the second half of the nineteenth century. Increasingly trade became the single most
important part of the expansion of economies linked into a globalizing system. Global institutions
governing the conditions of trading relations among countries were, at least potentially, placed in
positions of great political-economic power. But the recognition by nation-states, particularly the
USA, that the global governance of trade might exert signicant control over national economies,
and the apprehensions aroused by this in a system riven by international competition, long
prevented this potential from being formalized in an institution. Instead international trade was
intermittently regulated through rounds of bilateral and multinational negotiations and the set of
agreements known as the GATT intermittently because agreements could be unilaterally
abrogated, retaliatory actions could easily be initiated, especially by powerful countries, and there
was little in the way of an enforcing mechanism. But the number of countries involved in the
GATT rounds grew, the proportion of world trade that came under its aegis increased, and a
system of power relations stabilized under the domination of the USA, so that nally the GATT
could be concretized as the WTO. The basic power of the GATT and the WTO resides in GATT
Article I, the general most favored nation treatment clause, saying that any advantage, privilege
or immunity granted by any member country to another shall be immediately and unconditionally
accorded to all other member countries. That is, lower tariffs granted to a favored nation are
automatically extended to all members of GATT/WTO, but are not necessarily granted to non-
members, unless negotiated separately through bilateral agreements. By joining GATT/WTO a
country can gain far freer access to global markets for its exports, with the WTO deciding if
access rights are granted and exercised. This places the WTO at the center of power in the
regulation of the global economy, in a position different in emphasis from (in that trade is the
focus), but at least equal in importance to, that occupied by the other IFIs. And given the
extensions made to the power arena of the GATT during the Uruguay Round into services,
intellectual property rights and the governance of certain capital movements, even as it came into
being the WTO was also assuming a dominant position in the global economic governance
structure. The WTO is an institution formed through the interactions of governments under
certain conditions. Governments meet at the WTO through their trade ministers, trade
representatives and delegates under specic circumstances to discuss trade issues; with declared
immediate objectives in mind to reduce trade barriers and settle trade-related problems; and
with an overall purpose to increase the volume of trade, increase production and raise incomes.
Even more than an institution, the WTO is a place, or a restrictive discursive space, where
intergovernmental meetings occur, experts congregate, expertise is employed, and decisions are
made within a common understanding expressed in a specic, political-economic language. In
other words, the WTO is an agent dominating a center of hegemonic power, as outlined in
Chapter 1, part of a broader complex of institutions, mostly UN-connected, in Geneva, and
ensconced within a broader geo-economic regime. In the dialog that occurs within this power-
space, economies are viewed from entrenched positions, and discourse is contained within limits
on what is taken seriously, as part of a constructive dialog, and what is regarded as irrelevant,
frivolous, not constructive or, recently, obstructionist. The approved dialog now centers on free
trade, within an overall neoliberal conception of economic growth, justied through the
universalistic belief that everyone benets (mainly as consumers) from trade and growth. This
discursive hegemony rests on the assumption that free trade is good for everyone concerned and
this in turn is based in Ricardos theory of comparative advantage here we raise issues
discussed previously in Chapter 1. Pascal Lamy, WTO director-general, said in 2006: There is a
popular story among economists that when a critic asked Paul Samuelson, a Nobel-prize laureate,
to provide a meaningful and non-trivial result from his discipline, Samuelson responded:
comparative advantage. The theory by David Ricardo, who uses the example of England
producing cloth and Portugal producing wine, and both of them growing their output of these
products through specialization, is the basis for the idea of the benefits of open trade. By
producing goods and services in which it has a comparative advantage and importing others a
country manages to create more value than it would otherwise do. In ideal conditions, trade
allows countries to specialize in products that they produce best and import others, and
everyone stands to gain. As a consequence, the economies of all countries grow. (Lamy 2006) But
if we examine the EnglandPortugal trade exchange closely, we find that free trade between
cloth and wine did not benefit both countries equally, but benefited England exclusively (Sideri
1970). From the beginning of modern economics, comparative advantage and free trade moved
understanding in a direction that has not only been biased, but in one main part at least (universal
advantage) has been fundamentally wrong in the positivistic terms normatively accepted by the
discipline of economics truth as representational accuracy. Economists who have proclaimed on
this basis that free trade is universally beneficial have been equally mistaken all along, and are
wrong now. Trade policy based in this theory is equally without foundation it is simply biased
opinion. Free trade creates a global space within which benefits accumulate to a few people
(industrialist capitalists, multinational corporations, finance capital) in a few dominant countries
(Britain, the USA, Japan, and now China), and this does not benefit humanity but renders it into
unequal parts, the rich and the poor. By comparison, the guardian of the resulting global free-
trade system, the WTO, says that it serves the interests of all equally in that free trade produces
economic growth which produces higher incomes for everyone. When everyone is equal, we
suspect that some might be more equal than others. In thinking further about this, consider the
items whose international movements are liberalized under WTO agreements commodities,
services and the capital associated with their production. Who produces these? Corporations. And
what movements are not covered? Workers wishing to move to areas where wages are higher or
working conditions better. Consider too that issues of worker rights can hardly be raised, let alone
discussed, within the WTO, and that the institutions record on the regulation of environmental
relations belies its rhetoric on multilateral agreements. Consider as well that intellectual
property rights apply mostly to multinational corporations, not singers desperate for the
revenues lost by pirated CDs. And remember the influence of the investment bankers on trade
missions. From these and the many other considerations arising from our detailed examination,
we conclude that the WTO acts in the interests of multinational corporations in creating a global
economic space freed from governmental regulations that might otherwise restrict the movement
of capital. We nd that governments interact within the WTO under conditions that limit
discussion to an approved set of topics using the language of neoliberal optimism. Furthermore,
the WTO itself, as an organization, is active in the formation, promotion and protection of the
free-trade component of an overall neoliberal ideology. It promotes the extension of its own
powers of regulation into vast new areas, such as intellectual property rights, which are governed
in the most undemocratic of ways within closed rooms, where an already committed expertise
rationalizes foregone conclusions. Under the influence of the US Trade Representative, the WTO
was a nasty, reactionary organization, employing personal attacks on those who disagreed with its
positions and tactics. This led, over the last few years, to resistance from Third World countries
within the organization, to the degree that each time the WTO tried to meet under the Doha
Round, it disintegrated into dissensus. Meanwhile, as with the BrazilUS cotton case, the
dominance of the USA is finally being seriously questioned. The power of Third World countries
such as Brazil, China and India is rapidly increasing. The days when a few First World countries
could dominate trade discussions are over, and the WTO finds itself having to change radically, or
be dismissed as a serious global governance institution. The center of power around trade is a
focal point of controversy. As a crucial dimension of contemporary economic life, trade is an
activity that can be used for political and social change. This need not be reform that benets
corporations. Trade is a discursive space that has to be opened to a broader, democratic process,
where social movements represented by highly informed NGOs are active agents, and alternative
conceptions such as fair trade, under which workers get a living wage and environments are
actively protected, contend with equal force. Unless these kinds of fundamental changes are
made, and regardless of the increasing independence of Third World countries, the WTO is a
dangerous new form of global state that has to go!

WTO is a Trojan horse that ensures dispossession and

global imperialism. All claims otherwise is part of an
ideological apparatus that creates the illusion of possible
credibility

SCREPANTI 14 (Ernesto, Prof. of Political Economy @ U. of

Siena, Global Imperialism and the Great Crisis: The
Uncertain Future of Capitalism, pp. 110-113)
Of the international economic organizations, those that work most effectively
to achieve the expansion of freedom are the World Trade Organization, the
International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, the three main political
institutions charged with preparing the world for capitalist penetration. The
WTO was founded with the primary aim of favoring the expansion of
international trade, and was equipped with effective instruments for
disciplining opportunist countries. It fulfills the function of issuing
international trade rules and rendering them enforceable better than any
national empire has ever managed to do. It achieves this through
multilateral agreements carrying binding commitments for signatory states.
With the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) these agreements are
enforceable. The judgments handed down by the WTOs Dispute
Settlement Body (DSB) oblige noncompliant countries to conform to the
rules, under the threat of economic sanctions ranging from compensating an
injured country for damages to the implementation of retaliatory measures.
The rules, especially those known as nondiscriminatory clauses, are
supposed to foster the expansion of free trade. In reality, they effectively
force member states to accept penetration by multinational corporations. The
National Treatment clause, for example, obliges governments to extend the
best treatment afforded to national firms, including state-owned companies,
to foreign ones. The Market Access clause, in turn, prohibits governments
from hindering the entrance of multinational firms.60 Together these rules
have contributed to creating a norm that encapsulates the essence of the
whole set of regulations, a sort of most favored firm clause. If an
advantage is granted to a firm, for example, a national company, it must be
granted to all firms. This implies, among other things, that once a state-
owned company has been privatized there is hardly any going back, even if it
results in a market failure. The TRIPs (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights) serve to safeguard the ownership of the products of
scientific and technological research, trademarks, and the like, and thus to
guarantee the profitability of their use. Patents, which are mainly registered
in the countries of the imperial Center, cannot be used by developing
countries unless they pay the royalties established by the multinational
companies to which the patents belong, often even if they apply to vital
drugs.61 In the TRIPs, the World Trade Organization clearly reveals its nature
as a political organization with the purpose of safeguarding the interests of
multinationals. Not by chance, the big corporations played a key role in
drawing up the TRIPs agreements.62 While all the other agreements formally
have the aim of expanding competition and free trade, the TRIPs agreement
takes the form of a protectionist regulation. It explicitly seeks to protect
monopoly positions and the monopoly profits provided by scientific and
technological research, an activity in which the big multinationals of the
North excel. Even more blatant are the agreements known as TRIMs (Trade-
Related Investment Measures). Their content is essentially disciplinary, as
they prohibit the adoption of the economic policy instruments 63 that the
governments of many countries use to protect their economies from certain
negative consequences of foreign direct investments. The TRIMs serve to
disarm states in their attempts to implement industrial and commercial
policies for the benefit of local populations. They mete out discipline in the
interests of the multinationals.
HE CONTINUES
Joining the WTO implies acceptance of the rules of national treatment and
market access, as well as the principle that public monopolies and public
services are unacceptable. Then, when a serious economic crisis arises and
leaves a country in need of financial help from the IMF and the WB, the
government is forced to sell off state-owned companies and commons to the
multinationals. The WTO has become a partial substitute for gunboats in
imperial governance. Through it, the big capital clears and paves the way for
expansion and accumulation on a global scale. What is more, it does so with
the consent of the exploited countries, which are induced to join the
organization to gain access to flows of foreign direct investments from
multinationals, assistance from advanced countries, and financial aid from
the IMF and WB.

Regulations fail for online gambling and will foster

increases in violence

Thackston 14, James Thackston, is a Florida-based

independent software engineer with a background in the
aerospace, manufacturing and energy industries. Earl L.
Grinols is distinguished professor of economics at Baylor
University, former senior economist for the President's
Council of Economic Advisers, and author of "Gambling In
America: Costs and Benefits.",
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/column-online-
gambling-is-a-strategic-national-threat/2151317
Online gambling, now operating from U.S.-based websites, is the new face of gambling expansion. We
there is now the
should not be naive, however. Beyond the known social costs of gambling,
threat from online criminal activity, money laundering and , potentially,
even al-Qaida funding. What is happening? Pandora's box was unwittingly
opened by the Justice Department in a December 2011 opinion that
erroneously, we believe declared that the Wire Act of 1961
applies solely to sports betting, and thus appearing to open the door
to other online gambling. Expansion followed. Nevada now has two online poker sites operating; Delaware
launched its gambling website with blackjack, roulette, slots and poker on Oct. 31; and New Jersey will launch on Nov. 21.
Remote gambling is fundamentally different from brick-and-mortar
casino gambling because the website operator never has complete
control. Using technology undetectable to website operators and
their regulators, it is possible for gamblers to play games from
physical locations that are not what they seem. We know, because
we have done it. Recently, House Energy and Commerce Committee staff and others in the Capitol Hill office of
U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Miss., witnessed a demonstration in which a single remote computer took control of two computers and
used them as alias machines to play poker online. The Harper demonstration showed the
technology and techniques that terror and crime organizations could
use to operate untraceable money laundering built on a highly liquid
legalized online poker industry just the environment that will
result from the spread of poker online. One of us set up a website
undetectablelaundering.com to help communicate the problem to
a broader audience. No one should doubt the ability of criminals to
exploit the inherent weakness in online gambling. A drug cartel
could arrange for buyers' machines to be remotely linked and lose to
the aliased cartel machines. Drug buyers would not even need to
play from their own machines. Illegal drug money would appear to
be legal online winnings. A single poker game takes just a few hours
to transfer $5 million as was recently demonstrated legally by
American player Brian Hastings with his Swedish competitor half a
world away. An established al-Qaida poker network could extract
from the United States enough untraceable money in six days to
fund an operation like the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The
threat is real. Last month a Texas lawyer was found guilty of trying to
launder $600 million in drug money for a Mexican cartel . Caesar's Entertainment
is currently under investigation by the Justice Department and IRS, accused of money laundering and Bank Secrecy Act violations. In
December 2012, the FBI's Tampa field office asked us to take down the website explaining the threat. We complied. This May, special
agents at FBI headquarters in Washington responsible for enforcing the Wire Act and all other federal gambling laws were briefed on
the vulnerability. In July, a Senate Commerce Committee hearing seemed to reinforce concerns. Rep. C.W. Bill Young wrote a letter of
concern to FBI director Robert Mueller on Aug. 7. But since then action seems to have stalled. And the threat moves on. With the
passing of Young, we have put the website back up and joined together in hopes of spurring action. Since it remains
true that gambling regulations in Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey
are no match for determined terrorists and criminals, we feel duty-
bound as responsible citizens to ensure knowledge of the threat
reaches as many policymakers as possible. We have proved it is
possible to make money laundering undetectable. Gambling should
be firmly restricted to stay offline.

The way we speak about trade frames the outcomes of our policies the
affirmative's apocalyptic rhetoric about the collapse of the global trading system
causes impulsive action that dooms alleged solutions to irrelevance

Wilkinson, Professor International Political Economy

University of Manchester, '12 (Rorden- Research Director
Brooks World Poverty Institute, July, "What Needs to be
Done Before We Reform the WTO" pub in 'The Future and
the WTO: Confronting the Challenges')

We need to think about the language we use when talking about the
ills of the multilateral trading system and recognize that particular
ways of speaking about trade may be unhelpfuland bound up with
particular interests and ideological positions and dispositions.
Moreover, we need to recognize that much of the debate about the
WTO has become as adversarial as trade negotiations themselves,
falling all too quickly into a pattern of accusation and counter-
accusation. The recent exchange between Guy de Jonquires and Michael Hindley on the CUTS Trade Forum
provides ample example.5 One of the most striking features of recent
commentary about the WTO has been the use of dramatic and high-
stakes language. All too often the state of the round, and the
organizations very existence, is presented in life and death terms . In
this presentation commentators frequently claim that the organization is doomed, or else they compete to be the
first to proclaim the round dead (and to write the obituary).6 In many cases, commentators choose
to underline this life and death struggle with a metaphor or two.
These metaphors are often medical such as likening the state of
the round to a coma or else encouraging us to imagine that it is
on life support though other metaphors are also used. Jagdish Bhagwati has, for instance, suggested
that there might be some utility in seeing the round as a hanging as a way of focusing minds. He has also likened
proclamations of the death of Doha to Mark Twains premature obituary.7 Drawing on a slightly different, rather
undead metaphor, Duncan Green has suggested that the WTO is sliding into a zombie state of irrelevance.8 The
point here is that in pursuing a line of argument these metaphors
are taken to their logical conclusion to reinforce the need to pursue
a particular course of action. So, if the commentator is of the opinion that the Doha Round is, for
whatever reason, no longer of value, we are encouraged to let the patient die, engage in a spot of euthanasia, or
mount an assassination.9 For those that see value in continuing the negotiations, metaphors are used
to drum up support for dramatic intervention to salvage the
negotiations in a manner akin to surgery, an essential amputation,
or else advocate a pharmaceutical cure. The problem with talking in
such dramatic ways is that they presuppose and necessitate that
quite dramatic action is necessary. In so doing, they hook readers into a
form of argumentation that suggests that only a particular action
consistent with the commentators predisposition is worth
pursuing. This, in turn, limits discussion to those options associated
with a diagnosis that sees the situation as chronic and the solution
as dramatic. The issue here is that the use of such high-stakes
language crowds out discussion of solutions that are not dramatic
and that do not speak to the solutions proposed by the original
commentator. Talking about trade in this way also encourages
respondents to engage with the chosen metaphor, twisting it to fit
their point of view. The consequence, however, is that in so doingparticipants become
bound up in a language and a realm of what is held to be politically
possible. Hence, counter-claims of the need for intensive treatment, incisive surgery, palliative care and the
like fail to get us beyond Doha as life and death struggle. Moreover, they force us to think about
solving the ills of Doha, and of the WTO, in too high pressured a
fashion, crowding out time for measured contemplation . In turn, they take us
too quickly into a realm of discussion about the state of the round or reform of the WTO in a way that is too
panicked. Metaphors have long been a staple of trade commentary, often being rolled out, as George Orwell put it in
his critique of the state of the English language, like sections of a prefabricated henhouse simply because they make
trade politics dramatic, theatrical, and newsworthy.10 As Bhagwati notes in suggesting that we should perceive the
round as if it were a hanging, these metaphors and the ways of talking that accompany them, are powerful, bringing
to the fore particular solutions given rise to by the forms of logic that underpin the language used.11 During previous
rounds metaphors were used to help maintain or provoke forward
momentum in trade negotiations by encouraging us to believe that if
progress was not maintained a catastrophic event would ensue . More
often than not, the metaphor used was that of a bicycle. At those moments when the toppling over of a bicycle
proved insufficiently powerful for describing what might happen should a trade deal fail, other metaphors were
deployed. Occasionally this involved a train, with train wreck and coming off the rails being important aspects of
unpacking the metaphor. Sometimes a ship was used, most often with wreck as a corollary. Less frequently, but not
uncommonly, liberalization was likened to a juggernaut, often to suggest that it was inevitable and all barriers to its
progress should be removed tout de suite. Yet, as with the use of terminal medical metaphors, these requests for us
to think of trade rounds (and, in extension, the WTOs vital signs) as akin to material things that need to be kept, or
just are, in motion are unhelpful. They create a pressure to act with speed that is
not always helpful. And they are also discursive tools that belie
ideological dispositions and claims about how trade ought to be
organized. In short, they encourage us to take a leap of faith. The bicycle
metaphor cajoles us into assuming that liberalization must take place or else the bicycle will crash and the world
economy collapse, in much the same way that the only way to offer sustenance to the patient is to give them what
they lack that is, sustenance in the form of further market openings. The trouble, however, is that these
metaphors are all too often taken literally and arguments pursued
by trying to outsmart opponents with new twists and turns on the
theme. Moreover, they are deployed not just because of the images they conjure up. They are also
used precisely because they bring with them certain entailments
that flow logically from their application . So, as Glenn Hook points out, the depiction of
something as cancerous necessitates that both dramatic and interventionist action be taken.12 Likewise, the
momentum of the bicycle must be maintained; the train must be prevented from coming off the rails; and a patient
in terminal decline must either be treated immediately and robustly or else put out of his or her misery (both courses
of action requiring political will). The point here is that the entailments that accompany a metaphor, or for that
matter the manner about which a subject is spoken, set the boundaries of what is understood to be politically
possible. The message is clear: bridge the divides and conclude the
round, or else the breakdown of the multilateral trading system
and something akin to the nightmare of the 1930s (which is almost always
presented in stylized Orwellian terms) will be upon us. Yet, the perceived urgency of the
situation ensures that we continue to think inside the box, to carry
on doing things just the way we have without allowing space and
time for thinking about how we might solve the ills of the
multilateral trading system.
WTO doesn't increase trade newest stats prove

Johnson et al, Professor PolSci Kansas State, '13 (Jesse

Johnson, Mark Souva- Professor PolSci at Florida State,
and Dale Smith- Professor PolSci at Florida State,
"Market-Protecting Institutions and the World Trade
Organization's Ability to Promote Trade" International
Studies Quarterly, p 1-8)

In a 2004 article Do We Really Know That the World Trade Organization (WTO) Increases Trade?, Andrew K.Rose finds that
pairs of states belonging to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the WTO,
do not have higher trade levels than nonmember dyads. Prior to Roses research, the
GATT and WTO were commonly perceived as significant institutions in expanding global
trade. The WTO aims to promote trade, and the protestors who have attempted to disrupt every WTO ministerial meeting since
1999 in Seattle must think it promotes trade. National governments also seem to think that the WTO promotes trade, or else it is
difficult to understand why they spend so much time and effort negotiating new agreements. So, what explains Roses counterintuitive
finding? The GATT/WTO is supposed to increase trade by reducing tariffs.
We argue, however, that tariffs
are only one factor affecting trade flows, and often a
relatively minor one. Market-protecting institutions (MPIs), which are domestic institutions that
protect market activity, exert a considerable influence on international trade (Anderson
and Marcouiller 2002; Anderson and van Wincoop 2004; Berkowitz, Moenius and Pistor 2006; Iwanow and Kirkpatrick 2007; Nunn
2007; Ranjan and Lee 2007). MPIs
promote trade by reducing transaction costs, and because high
transaction costs can prohibit trade, we argue that the relationship between
GATT/WTO membership and dyadic trade is conditional on the strength of MPIs in
the dyad. When MPIs are strongly developed, trade is able to flow
relatively freely and GATT/WTO tariff reductions further increase
trade; thus, dyads with strong MPIs are likely to see an increase in trade upon GATT/WTO accession. On the other
hand, in dyads with weak MPIs, GATT/WTO membership is unlikely to
promote trade because the marginally lower tariffs provided by
GATT/WTO membership are unable to offset the high transaction
costs associated with weak MPIs. In brief, the WTO does promote trade, but its
effect is conditional on the strength of the MPIs in the dyad.

WTO collapse is inevitable over the long term

Subramanian, Senior Fellow Peterson Institute for

International Economics, 1-13-'13 (Arvind, "Too Much
Legitimacy Can Hurt Global Trade" Financial Times,
http://www.piie.com/publications/opeds/oped.cfm?
ResearchID=2312)

The list of candidates to succeed Pascal Lamy as director-general of the World Trade Organization has just
been finalized. Astonishingly, not one of the nine aspirants is from the world's four big
major trading entitiesthe United States, Europe, Japan, or Chinathat together account for more than 55 percent of
global merchandise exports. Thatis both a metaphor for what ails the supervisory body for
global trade and a signal of its bleak prospects. Over time the WTO has become an
institution where smaller and poorer countries have acquired a stake and voice. This
transformation may seem a welcome sign of legitimacy. But it has gone too far. For its future effectiveness,
indeed survival, the WTO needs to be de-democratized, with the large countries
reasserting themselves. Otherwise, trade will become more fragmented and friction-
prone, undermining the very system from which the smaller countries stand to
benefit and slowing global growth momentum. The multilateral trading system faces an existential
threat with liberalization increasingly taking place outside the WTO, either through
unilateral reform or via increasingly popular regional trade agreements. But these
agreements did not jeopardize the WTO for the important reason that none of them
was between the large trading nations themselves. Ominously, that now stands to change.
The United States has thrown its weight behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership which
could potentially include Japan.
It is also seriously contemplating a transatlantic
agreement with Europe. Soon, there will be a scramble among other large nations
to conclude deals with each other. Multilateral trade as we have known it will
progressively become history. So too might the WTO's importance and relevance
because it was the institution where the United States, Europe, Japan, and China liberalized trade and settled disputes. Leaving aside
the experience of European integration, which had its unique post-second world war imperatives, it
is the United States
that will bear history's burden for these new developments. The United States,
which began the process of undermining the non-discriminatory trading system by
negotiating regional agreements with Israel and Canada in the 1980s, will have effectively ensured
its completion by embarking on these new agreements. How can this be addressed? The
effectiveness of the WTO as a forum for fostering further
liberalization has been undermined by at least two factors. The first
is the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations . Launched in the aftermath of
9/11, the world has neither been able to conclude nor bury them
successfully. As a result, it has become impossible to move to a more
relevant agenda that can expand market opportunities for the
private sector and deal with the current concerns of governments. An
example is food, where a decade ago subsidies and barriers to imports were the important issue. Today, high prices and barriers on
exports are more important. Similarly, currency manipulation is now a pressing issue
but is not on the Doha agenda. Emerging powers such as China and
India must be more active in shaping this new agenda and
constructive about liberalization in the WTO or risk their trading
partners seeking alternatives to it. But interring Doha will not be enough
to revitalize the WTO's effectiveness. Unlike the IMF which has suffered from a democratic deficit and
legitimacy problem, the WTO has suffered from too much democracy and associated blocking powers. A few small
countries can effectively exercise their veto if, say, cotton subsidiesan issue of legitimate concern to them
but not necessarily of systemic importanceare not addressed. This veto must be taken away or future negotiations
could be stymied by any of the WTO's 157 members. This outcome can be achieved by allowing the
larger countries to negotiate among themselves while offering assurances to the
smaller countries that they would receive the benefits of such negotiations and be spared any burdens. Unless this
change occurs, the WTO cannot deliver on its key mandate of being
a forum for further liberalization. And if it cannot, it will be reduced
to a body that settles trade disputes between countries based on
rules that are increasingly overtaken by those negotiated under
regional agreements. Recently the legitimacy of the IMF and World Bank was under question because the procedure
for selecting their leaders appeared rigged in favor of Europe and the United States. It is perhaps ironic that, in the case of the other
part of the Bretton Woods troikathe WTOthe
absence of candidates from the most economically
powerful countries would be seen as lamentable. But it is, as it signals that the world's largest
trading nations have relinquished responsibility in making it an effective and
relevant multilateral institution. That is a situation that threatens to make everyone a loser.

The World Trade Organization demands free-trade policies

that hurt the interests of people in the developing world.

Peet 03 (Richard Peet, professor of human geography at

Clark University, visiting professor at the University of
Witwatersrand, Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank, and
the WTO, 193 195)//AW
WemustfirstdealwiththeWTOasaninstitutionregulatingtheconditionsoftrade.TheWTOpresentsitselfasaneutralplacewhere
governmentscanmakeagreementsabouttradeandresolvethedisputesthatinevitablyariseinanequitableway.TheWTOconveys
theimpressionthatmembergovernments,meetinginthevariouscouncilsandcommitteesthatconveneunderWTOauspices,make
theWTO,andlistedabove,
thebasicdecisions,andtheorganizationmerelycarriesthemout.Yetasthetenbenefitscitedby

clearlyshow,theorganizationdoesnotadoptaneutralstanceontradepolicy.Itis

passionatelyagainstprotectionismandjustasprofoundlyfortrade
liberalization.TheWTOsaysthatitmerelyprovidestheforumwithinwhichcountriesdecidehowlowbarriersshouldfall
andthatitadjudicatestheruleswrittenintoagreementsonhowliberalizationtakesplacethatbarriersbeloweredgraduallysothat
domesticproducerscanadjust,forinstance,orthatspecialprovisionsfordevelopingcountriesbetakenintoaccount.Here,theWTO
says,itsobjectiveisfairtrade,asinnondiscrimination,orensuringthatconditionsfortradearestable,predictableandtransparent.
theWTOsinterpretationoffairnessislimitedtotheexactconditionsunderwhich
Inotherwords,

freetradeoccursthatcountriesfollowtherules,actintransparentways,andsoon.Withthisnarrow
restriction,tradecanoperatefairlyunderasystemthatmoregenerally
favorssomeinterestswhileharminganother.Take,forexample,thebenefitsandcostsoftrade.
Whenitcomestoevidenceprovingthegrowthandincomebenefitsofthe1994UruguayRound,forinstance,theWTOissatisfied
withinvestigativemethodsthatyieldestimatesofbetween$109billionand$510billionaddedtoworldincome,dependingonthe
heWTOiswillingtotakedubious
assumptionsbehindthecalculations(seepoint6above).Inotherwords,t

evidence(thehigherfigurebeingfivetimesthelower!)asproofofthevalidityofapositionon
freetradesbeneficialeffectsongrowthandincome.Butwhenitcomestofreetradeseffectson
workersandunemployment(point7inthelistabove),analyticalproblemssuddenlyemerge,sothatreliableestimatesbecome
impossibleandtheissuecanbedeemedstatisticallynonresolvable,andtherebypolitelydropped.Well,notquiteonitswebsite,the
WTOalsoaddressestenmisunderstandingsofitsownoperations.Itcountersthemisunderstandingthat theWTO
destroysjobsandwidensthegapbetweenrichandpoor asfollows:Nottrue:The
accusationisinaccurateandsimplistic.Tradecanbeapowerfulforceforcreatingjobsandreducingpoverty.Oftenitdoesjustthat.
Sometimesadjustmentsarenecessarytodealwithjoblosses,andherethepictureiscomplicated.Inanycase, the
alternativeofprotectionismisnotthesolution(WTOn.d.:10commonmisunderstandings).Itthen
addstwosupportivearguments:thatinmanycases,workersinexport(tradeoriented)sectorsofeconomiesenjoyhigherpayandhave
greaterjobsecurity;andthatamongproducersandtheirworkerswhowerepreviouslyprotectedbytariffs,butarenowexposedto
foreigncompetition,somesurvivebybecomingmorecompetitive,whileothersdonot,andsomeworkersadaptquickly,byfinding
newemployment,whileotherstakelonger.Sotheconsequencesoffreetradeincreatingunemploymentdependontheworkers
adaptabilityandtheproducerscompetitivenesshowtheyrespondtothechallengeofrapidchange(challengebeingtheneoliberal
euphemismforlosingonesjob),ormoregenerallyhowthefittestsurviveSocialDarwinisminabravenewglobalizedworld!Yet
globalorganizations,evenwhenunelected,mustseekmassapproval.Whataspectoftheperson(asworker,consumer,citizen,andso
on)doestheWTOsidewith?Underpoints4,5and6abovetheWTOsaysthatweareallconsumersandthatwebenefitfromfree
tradethroughhigherpersonalincomes,lowerprices,morechoice,lowercostsofliving,andsoon.Thisisavisionofsocietiesas
consumer,ratherthanworker,democracies,withconsumptionratherthanlaborassourceoffreedomanice,populistconsumerist
theWTOdoesnotpracticeorganizational,bureaucratic
additiontotheoverallneoliberaldiscourse.Thegeneralpointisthis:

neutrality.Asanorganizationithasatotalcommitmenttoasingle,welldefinedandelaborated,carefullydefended,

ideologicalposition:freetradefairlyadjudicatedthatbenefitspeopleasconsumers.Inwhatfollows,theWTOwillbe

takentobeanorganizationwithanideologicalmission.WecanglimpsethismissioninthechoiceofMichael
MooreasdirectorgeneraloftheWTObetween1999and2002.MoorehadbeenministerofexternalrelationsandtradeintheNew
ZealandLaborgovernmentthatcametopowerin1984.Thatgovernment,ledbyPrimeMinisterDavidLangeandFinanceMinister
RogerDouglas,introducedaradicalprogramofneoliberalrestructuringthatrapidlyremovedallrestrictionsonforeigninvestment,
eliminatedimportcontrols,erasedmosttariffbarriers,floatedtheNewZealanddollarandcreatedanindependentReserveBankwith
responsibilityforcontrollinginflation,conductingextensivecorporatizationandprivatizationandradicallyrestructuringthepublic
service(Kelsey1995).Asaresult,NewZealandwentintoarecessionmarkedbythehighestunemploymentratesthecountryhad
seensincethe1930sdepression.In1990,withtheLaborgovernmentindisarray,andonitswaytoamassivedefeatintheNovember
elections,Moorewasinstalledascaretaker(or,rather,undertaker)primeministerbyhispartycaucus,thethirdsuchleaderwithina
year.OustedasleaderoftheLaborPartyin1993,hehasnotrepudiatedthepoliciesfollowedbytheLange/Douglasgovernmentand,
untilappointedtotheWTO,wasacorememberoftherightwingoftheLaborPartyinopposition.InhisbookABriefHistoryofthe
Future,Moore(1998:71)saysthattheWorldBankandInternationalMonetaryFund(IMF)haveunearnedreputationsbornofthe
ColdWarofbeingantipoor,antidevelopingcountries...[but]noonebelievesthatanymore,exceptafewderangedmisfitsonthe
edgesofobscureuniversities,peoplewhotucktheirshirtsintotheirunderpants,theremnantsofpressuregroupsandafewgeriatrics
whoclaimthatMarxism,likeChristianity,hasnotbeentriedyet.Despitethiskindofrightwingdiatribe(orperhapsbecauseofit!)
Moorewasanactiveparticipantininternationaldiscussionsontradeliberalization.Asministerofoverseastradeandmarketingin
theNewZealandgovernment,heplayedaleadingroleinlaunchingtheUruguayRoundofGATTnegotiations.Hewasamemberof
theInternationalEminentPersonsGrouponWorldTrade(formedin1989tosupporttheUruguayRound)andheattendedkey
GATTmeetingsinPuntadelEste(1986),Montreal(1988),Brussels(1990)andMarrakesh(1994).Andon1September1999Moore
becamedirectorgeneraloftheWTOjustintimeforthedebacleatSeattle,afittingreward.Themainpoint,however,isnot
personalitiesbutwhetherindeedtradeproduceseconomicgrowthandhigherincomesforpoorcountries.TheUNCTADTradeand
DevelopmentReportfor2002addressedthequestion:whyaredevelopingcountriestradingmore,yetearningless?Thereportnotes
thatthepasttwodecadeshaveseenarapidopeninguptotradeindevelopingcountries.Indeed,tradevolumesindevelopingcountries
havegrownfasterthantheworldaverage.Developingcountriesnowaccountforonethirdofworldmerchandisetrade,andmuchof
massiveincrease
theincreaseintradingvolumehasbeeninmanufactures.TheUNCTADreportnotes,however,thatthis

inexportshasnotaddedsignificantlytodevelopingcountriesincome.Why,it
asks,havedevelopingcountriesnotbenefitedfromtheincreasedopennesstotradethatinmanycasesisaconditionforassistance
countrieshavebeenunabletoshiftproductionoutof
frommultilateralinstitutions?Many

primarycommoditiessuchasagricultureandnaturalresources.Themarketsforthese
productshavebeenstagnantandpricestendedtogodowninthelongrun(withtheexceptionoffuel).Countriesthatshifted
productionfromprimarycommoditiestomanufacturesfocusedonresourcebased,laborintensiveproducts,whichgenerallylack
dynamisminworldmarketsandhavealowervalueadded. Relianceonexportsoflaborintensive
manufacturestogalvanizegrowthinthefaceofdecliningcommoditypriceshasbeenacommon
developmentpolicy.Thisledtomanysimultaneousexportdrives,causingfallingpricesandintensecompetitionfor
foreigndirectinvestment(FDI),andhenceaweakenedbargainingpositionfordevelopingcountries.Asaresult, developing

countriesendupcompetingwitheachotheronthebasisofwagelevels .

The World Trade Organization masks rampant capitalism

with trade liberalization.

Peet 03 (Richard Peet, professor of human geography at

Clark University, visiting professor at the University of
Witwatersrand, Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank, and
the WTO, 197 199 )//AW
 theTradePolicyReviewMechanism(TPRM),originallysetup
AspartoftheMarrakeshagreement,

undertheGATTin1989,wasconfirmedasanintegralcomponentoftheWTO. The
purposeoftheTPRM,accordingtotheWTO,istocontributetoimprovedadherencebyallMemberstorules,disciplinesand
commitmentsmadeunderthe...Agreementsandhencetomakingthetradingsystemfunctionmoresmoothlybyachievinggreater
transparencyin,andunderstandingof,thetradepoliciesandpracticesofMembers.Throughtradepolicyreviews,membersofthe
WTOundertaketheregularcollectiveappreciationofthetradepoliciesandpracticesoftradingpartnersthatis,thewhole
membershipoftheWTOdiscussesthetradepolicyofeachmembergovernmentatregularintervals(everytwoyearsforthelargest
countries,lessregularlyforsmallercountries).ATradePolicyReviewBody(TPRB)madeupoftheWTOGeneralCouncil,operating
underspecialrulesandprocedures,andopentoallmembercountries,electsachairpersontosupervisetheprocessandsummarizeits
results.Reviewsaresetagainstthebackgroundofthecountryswidereconomicpolicies.Foreachreview,twomaindocumentsare
prepared:apolicystatementbythegovernmentofthemembercountryunderreview;andadetailedreportwrittenindependentlyby
theTradePolicyReviewDivision(TPRD)oftheWTOSecretariat,basedoninformationfromthecountry,butalsousingmaterial
fromothersourcesthattheSecretariatfindsappropriate.TheprocessincludesavisitbyaSecretariatteam(twoorthreestaffmembers
oftheTPRD)tothecountryunderreview,wheretheyconsultwithgovernmentalagencies,chambersofcommerce,researchinstitutes
andothereliteorganizations.TheTPRDassistssmall,developingcountriesinpreparingforatradepolicyreview.Thisisdescribed
asanonerousprocessthatneverthelessencouragestradepolicymakingindirectionsforeseenintheWTOagreementswhich
contributetoamembercountrysgreaterintegrationintothemultilateraltradingsystem.Tradepolicyreviewscoverallaspectsof
thecountrystradepolicies,includingitsdomesticlawsandregulations,theinstitutionalframework,bilateral,regionalandother
preferentialagreements,widereconomicneedsandexternal(socioeconomic)environment.Thetwodocumentsarethendiscussedby
theWTOsfullmembershipintheTPRB,employingtwodiscussantsadvisedbytheTPRDSecretariat,andwithotherinter
governmentalorganizations(IMF,WorldBank,OECD,UNCTAD)attendingasobservers.Theprocessendswithsummary
observationsbytheSecretariatandconcludingremarksbythechairpersonoftheTPRB,withalldocumentseventuallybeing
tradepolicyreviewappearstobeahelpful,
published(WTO).AsdescribedbytheWTOSecretariat,

democraticprocess,usingproceduresthatcomeclosetoresemblinganeutralsociopoliticalscientificendeavor.Yet
withinthediscursivespaceofacenterofpower,phrasessuchasencourage,
assistandcollectivelyappreciatesuggestsomethingmorethananeutral
review,somethingmorelikedisciplining,directing,promptingandeven
warningcountriesthattheyshouldadheretoagivenlinesotheycanbemoreintegratedintothe
multilateraltradingsystemadministeredbytheWTOwhich,bytheway,istheonlygamein
town,or,inthecaseofinternationaltrade,theonlygameintheworld.Withthissuspicionraised,letuslookatacaseexamplein
somedetailtheTPRBsthirdreviewofBrazilstradepolicies,withmeetingsheldattheWTOon30Octoberand1November2000.
TheBraziliandelegationsreporttotheTPRBdiscussedhowitstradepolicywasdirectedatminimizingtherisksofglobalizationand
AdjustingtheBrazilian
maximizingopportunitiesforthenationalsocioeconomicdevelopmenteffort.

economytothenewinternationalcontexthadbeentranslated,onthedomesticfront,
intoprocessesofderegulationandprivatizationoftheeconomy.Andtheopeningofthe
Brazilianeconomy,implementedthroughoutthe1990s,hadledtoundeniablebenefitsintheareasofmodernization,productivityand
competitiveness.ButBrazilsdelegationcomplainedthatopeninguptheeconomyhadalsogeneratedasignificantgrowthinimports.
Thesustainabilityofthisprocesswouldrequire,inthelongterm,acorrespondingaccesstoforeignmarketsforBraziliangoodsand
services.AndwhilethesuccessiveGATTnegotiationroundshadproducedasignificantreductionoftarifflevels,anumberof
sophisticated,andnotentirelytransparent,nontariffmeasuresandregulationsonthepartsofmostdevelopedcountriesweremajor
restrictionstointernationalmarketaccess.Developingcountries,Brazilcomplained,stillfaceddiscriminationintermsofmarket
access,especiallyfortheiragriculturalproducts.TheprocessofbroadmarketopeningundertakenbyBrazilsincethebeginningofthe
1990shadnotresultedincommensurateaccesstoforeignmarkets,andthissituationwasreflectedinlargetradedeficitswiththe
EuropeanUnion,theUSAandJapan.OnbehalfofThirdWorldcountries,Brazilcomplainedof problemsderiving
fromtheimplementationoftradepoliciesandpractices,declaredveryoftenonaunilateral
basis,bydevelopedcountries,whichhadanadverseimpactonbalanceoftraderelationsat

theinternationallevel.(AllthisprovedprescientwhenBrazilexperiencedsignificantcurrencyandbalanceof
paymentsproblemstwoyearslaterseeChapter4.)Bycomparison,theTPRDSecretariatreportonBrazilmentioned

noneofthis.ItcongratulatedBrazilforcontinuingaprogramofeconomicreform,
initiatedoveradecadeago,thathadledtomoreopentradeandinvestmentregimes.Amoremarketdriven,decentralizedenvironment
hademergedthroughthederegulationofstatemonopoliesandprices,investmentliberalizationandprivatization.TheSecretariat
thoughtthatthismusthaveresultedinimprovedresourceallocationandgreaterflexibilitythathelpedtheBrazilianeconomydeal
successfullywithexternalandothershocksfacilitating,inparticular,rapidrecoveryfromthefinancialcrisisthatledtothefloatingof
theBraziliancurrency,thereal,in1999(again,rememberthe2002Braziliancrisis).AndtheSecretariatthoughtthatmarketset
exchangerateswouldnowprovidetheopportunityforBraziltoreduce,andperhapsremove,somemeasurestakentorestrictimports
orsupportexports,andtomakeadefinitivebreakfromthelastremainingtracesofitsinwardlookingpoliciesofthepast.

Trade advantage turns their framework since corporate

interests prevents public influence on politics

HALL 14 (Wynton, STUDY: YOU HAVE 'NEAR-ZERO'

IMPACT ON U.S. POLICY, Breitbart, August
12,http://www.breitbart.com/Big-
Government/2014/08/12/Study-You-Have-Near-Zero-
Impact-on-U-S-Policy)
A startling new political science study concludes that corporate interests and
mega wealthy individuals control U.S. policy to such a degree that "the
preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-
zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy." The startling
study, titled "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups,
and Average Citizens," is slated to appear in an upcoming issue of
Perspectives on Politicsand was authored by Princeton University Professor
Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Professor Benjamin Page. An early
draft can be found here. Noted American University Historian Allan J.
Lichtman, who highlighted the piece in a Tuesday article published in The Hill,
calls Gilens and Page's research "shattering" and says their scholarship
"should be a loud wake-up call to the vast majority of Americans who are
bypassed by their government." The statistical research looked at public
attitudes on nearly 1,800 policy issues and determined that government
almost always ignores the opinions of average citizens and adopts the policy
preferences of monied business interests when shaping the contours of U.S.
laws.
 AT WTO: Regionalism Turn

GATT/WTO decline key to development of regionalism which is a better check on

protectionism and war

Brkic 13, Economics Prof at U of Sarajevo (Snjeana, 3/25,

Regional Trading Arrangements Stumbling Blocks or
Building Blocks in the Process of Global Trade
Liberalization?, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=2239275)
Besides those advocating the optimistic or pessimistic view on regionalism effect on global trade liberalization, some economists,
such as Frankel and Wei, hold a neutral position, in a way. Frankel and Wei believe that forms and achievements of international
economic integrations can vary and that, for this reason, regionalism
can be depending on
circumstances linked to greater or smaller global trade liberalization . In the years-long
period of regional integration development, four periods have been identified during which the integration processes were becoming
particularly intensive and which have therefore been named "waves of regionalism". The first wave was taking place during the
capitalism development in the second half of the 19th century, in the course of British sovereign domination over the world market.
Economic integrations of the time primarily had the form of bilateral customs unions; however, owing to the comparative openness of
international trading system based on the golden standard automatism, this period is called the "era of progressive bilateralism". The
next two waves of regionalism occurred in the years following the world wars. Since the disintegration processes
caused by the wars usually spawned economic nationalisms and autarchic tendencies, it is not surprising that post-war regionalisms
were marked by discriminatory international economic integrations, primarily at
the level of so-called negative integration, with expressedly beggar-thy-neighbor
policies that resulted in considerable trade deviations. This particularly refers to the regionalism
momentum after the First World War, which was additionally burdened by the consequences of Big Economic Crisis. The
current wave of regionalism started in late 1980s and spread around the world to a
far greater extent than any previous one did: it has covered almost all the continents and almost all the
countries, even those which have mis to join all earlier regional initiatives, such as the USA, Canada, Japan and China.
Integration processes, however, do not show any signs of flagging. Up till now, over 200 RTAs
have been registered with GATT/WTO, more than 150 of them being still in force, and most of these valid
arrangement have been made in the past ten years. Specific in many ways, this wave was dubbed "new regionalism". The
most specific characteristics of new regionalism include: geographic spread of RTAs in terms of
encompassing entire continents; greater speed; integration forms success; deepening of
integration processes; and, the most important for this theoretical discussion, generally non-negative
impact on outsiders, world economy as a whole, and the multilateral liberalization process. Some theorists (Gilpin)
actually distinguish between the "benign" and "malign" regionalism. On the one hand, regionalism can advance the international
economic stability, multilateral liberalization and world peace. On the other, it can have mercantilist features leading to economic
well-being degradation and increasing international tensions and conflicts. Analyses of trends within the
contemporary integration processes show that they mainly have features of "benign"
regionalism. Reasons for this are numerous. Forces driving the contemporary
regionalism development differ from those that used to drive earlier regionalism periods
in the 20th century. The present regionalism emerged in the period characterized by the
increasing economic inter-dependence between different world economy subjects,
countries attempts to resolve trade disputes and multilateral framework of trade relations. As opposed to the 1930s
episode, contemporary regional initiatives represent attempts to make the members'
participation in the world economy easier, rather than make them more distant from it.
As opposed to 1950s and 1960s episode, new initiatives are less frequently motivated exclusively by
political interests, and are less frequently being used for mercantilist purposes . After
the Second World War, more powerful countries kept using the economic
integration as a means to strengthen their political influence on their weaker
partners and outsiders. The examples include CMEA and European Community arrangements with its members' former
colonies. As opposed to this practice, the new regionalism, mostly driven by common
economic interests, yielded less trade diversion than previous one, and has also contributed
to the prevention of military conflicts of greater proportions. Various analyses have shown that
many regional integrations in earlier periods resulted in trade deviations, particularly those
formed between less developed countries and between socialist countries. In recent years, however, the newly formed or
revised regional integrations primarily seem to lead to trade creation. Contrary to the beggar
thy- neighbor model of former international economic integrations, the
integrations now offer certain advantages to outsiders as well, by stimulating growth and
spurring the role of market forces. The analyses of contemporary trends in world
economy also speak in favor of the "optimistic" proposition. The structural analysis shows that the
world trade is growing and that this growth results both from the increase in intra-regional and
from the increase in extra-regional trade value (Anderson i Snape 1994.)28. Actually, the intraregional trade
has been growing faster, both by total value and by its share in world GDP. The extra-
regional trade share in GDP was increasing in some regions in North America, Asia-Pacific and Asian developing countries.
However, the question arises as to whether the extra-regional trade would be greater without regional integrations or not? The answer
would primarily depend both on the estimate of degree of some countries' trade policy restrictedness in such circumstances, and on
factors such as geographic distance, transport communications, political relations among states. One
should also take into
account certain contemporary integration features the primarily economic, rather
than strategic motivation, and continuous expansion, which mostly includes
countries that are significant economic partners. With respect to NAFTA, many believe
that the negative effects on outsiders will be negligible, since the USA and Canada
have actually been highly integrated economies for a long time already, while the Mexican
economy is relatively small. The same view was pointed out by the EU, with respect to its
expansion. It particularly refers to the inclusion of the remaining EFTA countries,
because this will actually only complete, in institutional terms, the EU strong
economic ties with these countries. Most EFTA countries have been part of the
European economic area (EEA), i.e. the original EC-EFTA agreement, for a few years already, and
conduct some 70% of their total international exchange with the Union countries. EU countries are also the most
significant foreign-trade partners of Central and East Europe countries, and the
recent joining the Union of several of them is not expected to cause a significant
trade diversion. Besides, according to some earlier studies, during the previous wave of regionalism, in the 1967-70 period,
the creation of trade in EEC was far greater than trade diversion: trade creation
ranged from 13 to 23% of total imports, while trade diversion ranged from 1 to 6%.
In Latin America, the new regionalism resulted in the faster growth of intra-regional
trade, while the extra-regional exports and imports also continued to grow . Since early
1990s, the value of intra-regional imports registered the average annual growth of 18%. In the same time, the extra-regional exports
were also growing, although at a lower rate of 9% average a year; its share in the total Latin America exports at the end of decade
amounted to 18% as compared to 12% in 1990. In the 1990-1996 period, the intraregional imports grew by some 18% a year. The
extra-regional imports were also growing very fast, reaching the 14% rate. These data reflect a great unbalance in the trade with extra-
regional markets, since the imports from countries outside the region grew much faster the exports.30 Since
the described
trends point to the continued growth of extra-regional imports and exports, they
also show that regional integration in Latin America has had the open regionalism
character. Besides, the pending establishment of FTAA Free Trade Area of Americas will gather,
in the same group, the so-called "natural" trade partners countries that have had an extremely extensive
mutual exchange for years already, and the outsiders are therefore unlikely to be affected by
strengthening of regionalism in this part of the world. Contemporary research shows that
intra-regional trade is growing, however, same as interdependence between North
America and East Asia and between the EU and East Asia. It can also be seen that the biggest
and the most powerful countries, i.e. blocs, are extremely dependent on the rest of
the world in terms of trade. For the EU, besides the intra-European trade , which is ranked
first, foreign trade has the vital importance since it accounts for 10% of European GDP.
In early 1990s, EU exchanged 40% of its foreign trade with non-members, 16% out of which with North America and East Asia
together. EU therefore must keep in mind the rest of the world as well. The growing EU interest in
outsiders is confirmed by establishing "The Euro-Med Partnership", which proclaimed a new form of cooperation between the EU and
the countries at its South periphery32. Besides, the past few years witnessed a series of inter-regional
agreements between the EU on the one hand, and certain groups from other regions on
the other (MERCOSUR, CARICOM, ASEAN and GCC). In case of North America the ratio between intra-regional and inter-
regional trade is 40:60, and in East Asia, it is 45:55. Any attempt to move towards significantly closed
blocs ("fortresses") would require overcoming the significant inter-dependence
between major trading blocs. Besides the analysis of contemporary trends in extra- and
intra-regional trade, other research was conducted that was supposed to point to the reasons why the
new regionalism has mainly a non-negative impact on outsiders and global
liberalization. The distinctive features of new regionalism were also affected to
characteristics of international economic and political environment it sprouted in. In
the 1980s, economic nationalisms were not so expressed as in the interventionism
years following the Second World War; however, the neo-liberalism represented by GATT activities did not
find the "fertile ground in all parts of the world. Regionalism growth in the circumstances of
multilateral system existence is, among other things, the consequence of distrust in
multilateralism. The revival of the forces of regionalism stemmed from frustration
with the slow pace of multilateral trade liberalization... If the world trade regime could
not be moved ahead, then perhaps it was time for deeper liberalization within more
limited groups of like-minded nations... Such efforts would at least liberalize some trade... and might even prod
the other nations to go along with multilateral liberalization.33 Kennedy's round and Tokyo round of trade negotiations under GATT
auspices brought a certain progress in the global trade liberalization. However, the
1980s witnessed significant
changes in the world economy that the GATT trade system was not up to. Besides. GATT
had not yet managed to cover the entire trade in goods, since there were still exceptions in the trade in agricultural and textile products
that particularly affected the USA and developing countries. GATT system of conflict resolutions, and its organizational and
administrative mechanism in general also required revision. In
this vacuum that was created in promoting trade and
investment multilateralism from the point when GATT inadequacy became obvious until the start of
the Uruguay round and the establishment of World Trade Organization, the wave of regionalism started
spreading across the world again. Prodded by the Single European Act and the success of European integration, many
countries turned to an alternative solution establishment of new or expansion and
deepening of the existing economic integrations. Even the USA, the multilateralism bastion until then,
made a radical turn in their foreign-trade policy and started working on designing a North American integration.

Multilateral trade weakens ties between proximate countries causes conflicts to

escalate

Thoma 2007 - Economics Prof, U of Oregon- '7 Mark, Trade

Liberalization and War, July,
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/
07/trade-liberaliz.html
Globalisation is by construction an increase in both bilateral and multilateral trade
flows. What then was the net effect of increased trade since 1970? We find that it
generated an increase in the probability of a bilateral conflict by around 20% for
those countries separated by less than 1000kms, the group of countries for which the
risk of disputes that can escalate militarily is the highest. The effects are much smaller
for countries which are more distant. Contrary to what these results (aggravated by our
nationality) may suggest, we are not anti-globalisation activists even though we are aware
that some implications of our work could be (mis)used in such a way. The result that
bilateral trade is pacifying brings several more optimistic implications on
globalisation. First, if we think of a world war as a war between two large groups or
coalitions of countries, then globalisation makes such a war less likely because it
increases the opportunity cost of such a conflict. Obviously, this conclusion cannot be
tested but is a logical implication of our results. From this point of view, our work
suggests that globalisation may be at the origin of a change in the nature of conflicts, less
global and more local. Second, our results do confirm that increased trade flows
created by regional trade agreements (such as the EU) are indeed pacifying as
intended. Given that most military conflicts are local, because they find their origins
in border or ethnic disputes, this is not a small achievement. These beneficial
political aspects of regional trade agreements are not usually considered by
economists who often focus on the economic distortions brought by their
discriminatory nature. Given the huge human and economic costs of wars, this
political effect of regional trade agreements should not be discounted. This opens
interesting questions on how far these regional trade agreements should extend a topical
issue in the case of the EU. The entry of Turkey in the EU would indeed pacify its
relations with EU countries (especially Greece and Cyprus), but also increase the
probability of a conflict between Turkey and its non-EU neighbours. However, our
simulations suggest that in this case, the first effect dominates the second by a large
margin. More generally, our results should be interpreted as a word of caution on
some political aspects of globalisation. As it proceeds and weakens the economic ties
of proximate countries, those with the highest risk of disputes that can escalate into
military conflicts, local conflicts may become more prevalent. Even if they may not
appear optimal on purely economic grounds, regional and bilateral trade agreements,
by strengthening local economic ties, may therefore be a necessary political
counterbalance to economic globalisation.

Regional coalition blocks solve conflict better than

multilateral institutions

Kupchan, Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown

University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, '9 (Charles, Spring, "The Autonomy Rule: The
end of Western dominance means a new foreign policy
principle is needed to advance international order"
Democract: A Journal of Ideas,
http://www.cfr.org/publication/18737/)
Institutional Reform The diffusion of global power ultimately necessitates the
devolution of international responsibility from a handful of liberal democracies
clustered in North America and Europe to states in good standing around the globe.
The need for a more inclusive order stems not only from the
diffusion of power, but also from recognition that addressing many
of todays challenges depends on global cooperation, not just
teamwork among democracies. Stopping nuclear proliferation, fighting
terrorism, curbing global warming, stabilizing financial marketsthese tasks
require a broad multilateralism that cuts across region and regime type. Institutions
like NATO and the EU have the resources, but membership is limited to
democracies located around the North Atlantic. An institution like the UN has the
global reach, but falls short on efficacy. The institutional structures that assume and
allocate international responsibility should reflect both the diffusion of power and
the practical need for widespread international cooperation. Rather than envisaging
the worldwide extension of the Wests prerogative through a global NATO or a league
of democracies, Western institutions should remain regional in scope and at the same
time provide a model for governance elsewhere. By encouraging the independence and
capacity of regional bodies beyond the North Atlantic, the Western democracies can
purposefully devolve international responsibility to competent and committed actors
in other quarters of the globe. Just as NATO and the European Union have fostered
collective security, good governance, and economic integration among their members,
institutions such as ASEAN, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the African Union, and
the defense union taking shape in South America can promote the same objectives in
their regions. As these and other organizations mature, they should focus not only on
security, but also on collective approaches to managing development, health, water, and
the environment. Regional devolution has a number of distinct advantages. First, in
many crises a swift and effective response is most likely to come from parties that,
due to proximity, have a direct interest in the matter. Second, regional bodies should
enjoy more support from relevant local actors than Atlantic institutions, which are
often seen as instruments of Western power. Third, interventions by regional bodies
are likely to proceed according to local values and principles, making the solution
more legitimate and durable. Lastly, with the West overstretched by ongoing
missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and taxed by the economic downturn, regional
devolution offers the Atlantic democracies a welcome form of burden-sharing.

Lack of US trade leadership collapsing the WTO, causes shift to RTAs

Huang, Professor Law Wuhan University, 11 (Zhixiong-

Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, "Rise
and Fall of Trade Multilateralism: A Proposal for "WTO la
Carte" as an Alternative Approach for Trade Negotiations"
Front Law China, Vol 6 No 1, p 35-43, SpringerLink)

the crisis that the WTO currently faces is of a

It has to be admitted that
systematic nature, arising out of a number of factors. For example, the waning
 the lack of leadership on
public support for multilateral trade liberalization and hence
the part of major developed countries, the imbalance between the political and
judicial branches of the WTO, the energies devoted to and challenges of regionalism, to varying degrees,
one of the root problems for the
are all responsible for the status quo. However,
WTO is that its governance structure failed to address the
diverse needs and preferences of its members in the new
international trade environment of 21st century. Contrary to the purpose of fully
involving developing countries into the negotiation package of the Uruguay Round, the US and the EU has
led the MTS to the direction that can be characterized by one size for all. Unfortunately, it has not
strengthened the multilateral trading system, but rather has weakened it. To be sure, it should not be
underestimated that in the light of the stricter consensus decision-
making rule, the single undertaking principle has increasingly
become a trouble-maker for the WTO. In view of the frequent
stalemate in the multilateral trading system, countries now
tend to negotiate with like-minded groups and enter into
Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) at regional or bilateral level . To a large
extent, it accounts for the relative rise and fall between
regionalism and multilateralism.

WTO collapse causes the formation of regional trade that is more effective in
sustaining

Wolf 01, Associate Editor Financial Times (Martin, Role of

the World Trade Organization in Global Governance, ed.
Gary P. Sampson, p. 194-5)

For all its great merits, the

WTO has limits as a tool for liberalizing trade. The first such limit is that
the WTO is not the only way to liberalize. On the contrary, both high-income and
developing countries have liberalized extensively, both unilaterally and in the
context of preferential trading arrangements. The second limit is that international rule-
making is not always and necessarily liberalizing. Anti-dumping is an egregious
example of bad trade policy that is enshrined in the WTO. The balance of payments
exemption for import restrictions is another. The third limit is that the WTOs clout has
become attractive to those who have no interest in liberalization. The extension of the trading
system beyond the explicit goal of trade liberalization began, in the Uruguay Round, with TRIPs. Nowadays, however, commercial
interests are no longer alone in recognizing what they can gain by employing WTO-authorized sanctions against imports. A rich
assortment of activists have realized the potential value of the WTOs enforcement mechanisms for their own varied purposes. Yet a
WTO that raises regulatory barriers worldwide and eliminates both valid diversity among
regulatory regimes and competition among them could even be worse than no WTO
at all.

Loss of faith in multilateral trade causes shift to regional agreements

Benini, Professor Economics University of Bologna, and

Plummer, Professor International Economics Johns
Hopkins University, 8 (Roberta and Michael, December,
"Regionalism and multilateralism: crucial issues in the
debate on RTAs" Econ Change Restruct, Vol 41, p 267-287)

Disillusionment with progress at Doha may be one additional reason for the proliferation of
regional agreements in Asia and the rest of the world, particularly accords between developed and
developing countries. The ambitious agenda of Doha, from both developed- and developing-country
viewpoints, could be more easily managed bilaterally or between a small group of countriese.g.,
regional areasthan in an organization of 151 highly-divergent economies: what is needed to
integrate global markets further, from non-tariff barriers to non-border issues, might go beyond the
WTO scopes and capacity. In some ways, the supposed North-South conflict at the WTO is a sign of maturity.

RTAs are better for a stronger base for interdependence and recognizes
environmental treaties

Bullard 04, Researcher with Focus on the Global South

(Nicola, Why we must keep the WTO "train" off the tracks,
http://www.boell.de/alt/downloads/global/taz_WTO_nicola
%20Bullard.pdf)

The world will not collapse into trade wars if the WTO is dismantled. Quite the
reverse: without the heavy burden of unfair trade agreements, developing countries
would, at last, be free to develop economic and trade policies that are in their
interests, rather than in the interests of the rich countries and the corporations. Countries
will, of course, continue to trade and there must be some rules, most importantly to
regulate transnational corporations, to stabilise commodity prices and to ban the
dumping of subsidised agricultural products. Beyond that, we already have a vast
body of international human rights and environmental treaties which provide all the
tools necessary to ensure that trade takes place in a way that promotes workers
rights, creates employment and prosperity and does not damage the environment. In
short, to do exactly what the WTO is meant to do but fails so miserably to achieve.

RTAs gradually builds to a stronger global trade system

Brkic 13, Economics Prof at U of Sarajevo (Snjeana, 3/25,

Regional Trading Arrangements Stumbling Blocks or
Building Blocks in the Process of Global Trade
Liberalization?, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=2239275)

There are over 180 independent states in the modern world, most of which differ enormously
in economic development and power. World economy is therefore a battlefield of varied interests expressed in
the action of different national economic policies. In
such conditions, attempts to integrate world
economy by global liberalization of international trade cannot yield significant
results overnight. Global free trade is considered the first best solution, but is not feasible immediately
and at once, since too many people believe that they would lose with global
liberalization. According to the view believed to be optimistic, creation of international economic
integrations could be a distinctive inter-step in the process of free world market
creation. Lester Thurow points out: "In the long run, regionalism development could be favorable for the world. Free trade
within regions and regulated trade between regions could be the proper road to free world trade in
a long term. The shift from national to world economy at once would be too big a
jump. One should first make a few smaller inter-steps, and pseudo-trading blocs coupled
with regulated trade could be such a necessary inter-step." The essential rationale of this
view is actually the speed of reforms - the gradual versus big bang approach.
Many contemporary economists, in their analyses of world economy trends, conclude that political
forces behind regional integration show signs of consistency with those acting
towards global world trade. According to the optimistic view, the multilateralization process is
slowed down by different standpoints on the free trade usefulness, by economic
nationalisms, even by varying political interests, and therefore another way had to be
found in order to achieve the world market integration a slower one, but more effective in
the existing constellation of international economic relations. This view denies the opposition
between regionalism and multilateralism, and explains it as follows: Since integration improves economic relations between members
through removing trading and other barriers, and since all these integrated regions are part of the world territory, the
advancement of economic relations within regions can be understood as the
advancement of global economic relations. Regional trading, i.e. economic blocs would in this case be only a
bypass towards the creation of unified world market. "... What could not be achieved in global relations
was achieved within regions, through multilateralization of the European economic area. These achievements were
later followed by many countries in other world regions, in their mutual relations practice. Practically, we thus got regional
multilateralisms." Regionalism advocates also point out that the formation of economic integrations could facilitate the pending WTO
negotiation rounds. Actually, the Uruguay round was partly protracted due to a great number of participants and the "free riders" issue.
Viewed in broader context, one could say that regionalism
contributes to overall globalization as well,
since these are processes motivated from the same source. Both regionalism and globalization are driven by big
capital interests, and that these two phenomena are actually ways to make the
centuries-long capitalism aspiration unified world market - come true. According to this
view, the globalization process as a process of world economy functional integration under the circumstances of imperfect market and
hegemony weakening early in the 20th century has to be supported by the institutional component, either on a multilateral basis
through international organizations and institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, or on regional scale through
regional trading arrangements.

RTAs are faster and more tailored to local conditions

CTIP 2 COMMISSION ON TRADE AND INVESTMENT POLICY

02 ~International Chamber of Commerce, November,
online~

It is to be expected that trading

partners and neighbours will try to advance liberalization through
regional and bilateral trade agreements. There is an array of such initiatives in progress or contemplated at the
present time. A total of 162 regional trade agreements notified under the GATT and the WTO are in force today. Between 100 and 200
new regional trade formations are anticipated by 2005. Regional
or bilateral agreements may bring faster
results than the multilateral process, may enable parties to conclude levels of
liberalization beyond the multilateral consensus, and may be able to address specific
issues that do not register on the multilateral menu.

Multilateralism reduces bilateral dependence which

increases likelihood of war

Martin et al, Professor Econ rue des Saints Peres, Mayer,

Professor Econ rue des Saints Peres, and Thoenig,
Professor University of Lausanne, 12 (Philippe, Thierry,
and Mathias, June 16, "The geography of conflicts and
regional trade agreements" Politics, Economics and Global
Governance: The European Dimensions,
http://econ.sciences-
po.fr/sites/default/files/file/tmayer/fta-war-final.pdf)

Consider now the effect of multilateral openness. One theoretical and empirical result in Martin et al. (2008a) is that
multilateral trade openness reduces the opportunity cost of a bilateral war and
therefore increases the probability that a dispute escalates into a war. The rationale is that
multilateral trade openness provides alternative trade partners and reduces
bilateral trade dependence with the countries with which a dispute could escalate .
Hence, in the context of our framework, an increase in multilateral openness has two opposite effects. It
corresponds to a decrease in the cost of war W and an increase in the probability of escalation e. Assuming
that a change in multilateral openness has these effects, we can write the cost of war as W = (1!)W0 and the probability of escalation
as e = (1 + "cost!)e0 with ! as a measure of multilateral openness, W0 is the cost of war and e0 the escalation likelihood when ! = 0.
Substituting into equation (4) we obtain: T + "pol e0W0 + ("cost 1)( e0 T) + ("cost 1)("polW0 + "costT)( e0 !) c (5) The coefficient
of the interaction term ( e0 !) is positive when "cost > 1. Hence, when
the elasticity of escalation e to the cost
of war is large enough, multilateral trade openness and the probability of war are
expected to have a positive and complementary impact on the probability of RTA
formation. Political motives therefore imply that multilateral trade openness gives an incentive to sign RTAs to country pairs
prone to conflict. The intuition is that an RTA is a way to compensate the potentially destabilizing
consequence of multilateral trade openness. The incentive to do so increases with the probability of war. This
result supports the view that the development of multilateralism during the 80s and early 90s could have triggered the wave of
regionalism in the late 90s. This echoes a recent empirical finding by Fugazza and Robert-Nicoud (2009) that in the US case
multilateralism has pushed towards regionalism. They indeed find that the extent of post Uruguay Round RTAs (in term of included
tariff lines) is positively affected by the extent of MFN tariff cuts negotiated by the US during the Urugay Round. While Fugazza and
Robert-Nicoud provide no theory for their intriguing finding, our results suggest that this emulator effect of multilateralism on
regionalism could also be driven by security purposes.

RTAs specifically solve

Vicard, Senior Research Economist Banque de France, 12

(Vincent, January, "Trade, conflict, and political
integration: Explaining the heterogeneity of regional
trade agreements" European Economic Review, Vol 56, p
54-71, ScienceDirect)
The results are presented in Table 3. All
specications include the basic determinants of war put
forward by the literature in political science: contiguity, distance and the number of peaceful years between
the two countries (Beck et al., 1998). I rst present the results from a simple probit estimator. Column 1 shows that RTA membership
has no signicant effect on war probabilities on the full sample of dyad-years. When only countries separated by less than 1000 km are
considered, belongingto a deep RTA, but not a shallow one, does signicantly reduce war
probabilities (specication (2)). These crude results emphasize the need to account for heterogeneity in dispute occurrence.
Specication (3) reports estimates using the bivariate probit accounting for selection. The rst and second columns present the results
of the escalation into war and dispute initiation equations respectively. As expected, landlocked countries face a lower probability of
dispute. The
coefcient on the exclusion variable is signicant at the 1% level in all
specications. The results conrm that membership of a deep RTA does signicantly
reduce the probability that a dispute escalates into war. In this specication, membership of a shallow
RTA is found to have a lower, albeit signicant, effect on escalation into war probabilities. It is however not signicant when
additional controls are included. Specication (4) in Table 3 includes several potential co-determinants of regionalism and war (see
Appendix A for data source). First, I include year dummies to control for any global shock affecting war probabilities and regionalism
over time. Other controls can be divided into two sets: trade and political variables. Regarding
trade, we control for
both bilateral (the log of the mean of bilateral imports as a percentage of GDP) and multilateral (the log of the mean
of multilateral (excluding bilateral) imports as a percentage of GDP) trade openness. 16 Martin et al. (2008) indeed argue that
trade has an ambiguous effect on peace. Bilateral trade does reduce war probabilities but
multilateral trade openness, by reducing the dependence on a particular partner,
increases war probabilities. The results conrm that multilateral trade openness increases the
probability that a dispute escalates into war, but show no signicant effect of bilateral trade. 17 A dummy
variable for zero trade ows is included as well as dummies indicating countries sharing a common language, countries that have had
a colonial relationship or a common colonizer. Countries sharing a colonial history are indeed more likely to have unresolved disputes.
They also share historical, cultural and institutional traits that make them more likely to create a RTA. The set of political variables
control for political regime, the size of countries, alliances and diplomatic relations. The level of democracy is included as a control
since democracies have been found to be less likely to wage wars (see Levy and Razin (2004) and Jackson and Massimo (2007) for a
theoretical treatment, and Oneal and Russett (1997) among others for empirical evidence). Democratic status has also been argued to
affect the choice to create an RTA (Manseld et al., 2002). The (sum of the log of the) area of the two countries is included since a
bigger territory is exposed to more opponents. Larger countries also depend less on foreign trade, which could affect their incentives
to create RTAs. Finally, I control for diplomatic afnity between countries using a dummy variable for common membership of a
defense alliance and the correlation of voting in the UN General Assembly (lagged four years). Controlling
for all these
potential co-determinants of war and regionalism, specication (4) conrms that deep
RTAs promote the peaceful settlement of disputes between members. Membership of shallow
RTAs has no effect on war probabilities. Moreover, the insignicant impact of bilateral trade on the likelihood of a dispute escalating
into war conrms that the institutional channel dominates in regional integration. It is worth noting that when all these controls are
added, the Wald test of independent equations is no longer signicant, meaning that the two equations estimated simultaneously are
independent.

Better studies: The most extensive studies that estimate PTAs of all continents
together show benefits of regionalism

Rojid 06, In-country researcher for the yearly SADC Trade

Review project (Are Existing Trading Blocks Building or
Stumbling Blocks?,
https://www.gtap.agecon.purdue.edu/resources/res_displa
y.asp?RecordID=1936)

As discussed above, a PTA can be categorized as a building block or a stumbling block

depending on the net trade effects of the particular PTA. Based on our estimates of the coefficients of the dummy
variables for each PTA, table 3 shows whether a particular PTA is a building bloc or stumbling bloc. Building blocks are
blocks that liberalized trade more internally than have diverted trade from the rest of the world. From the
results obtained, we see that out of the eleven blocks studied, two of them are stumbling blocks and the remaining
nine are building blocks. We compare our estimates with some of the past estimates in table 3 below. An important point
to note here is that we did not find any study in existing literature which took into account
African trading blocks. Thus, we believe that our study is the first of its sort to estimate
PTAs of all continents together. The two African trading blocks taken into consideration for analysis are the SADC
and COMESA and both of these blocks seems to be building blocks. Our estimates comes to reinforce previous studies stating that
NAFTA and CER are indeed stumbling blocks and ANDEAN, EU and SPARTECA are building blocks. As far as MERCOSUR and
EFTA is concerned, some past studies show that they are building blocks while some other past studies show that they are stumbling
blocks. Our estimates show that they are both building blocks. 6. CONCLUSION In this study we estimated whether existing PTAs
are building blocks or stumbling blocks. Our
study is different from past studies on 2 aspects: first, it
takes into account more countries and more years and most recent data; second, it includes
two African PTAs. So far we have not come across any such studies which include African PTAs. Our estimates show that both these
African PTAs- SADC and COMESA- are building blocks. Our estimates also reinforce some past studies in their conclusions on
whether some PTAs are building or stumbling blocks. We also report the coefficients on the observable effects determining bilateral
trade. Except real effective exchange rate, all the other variables are as expected and highly significant.
 AT WTO: CITES Turn

WTO credibility waters down Multilateral Environmental Agreements eliminating

their effectiveness particularly CITES

Millimet 14, Professor of Economics at SMU (Daniel, May

12, Multilateral Environmental Agreements and the WTO,
www.freit.org/WorkingPapers/Papers/TradePolicyMultilate
ral/FREIT745.pdf)
In light of the positive time trends in WTO membership and the number of MEAs in force, the time series
evidence does not suggest a `chilling' effect of WTO membership on the creation of new MEAs.
theoretical models of MEAs
Nonetheless, there are reasons to be concerned. First,
emphasize the need for full participation to achieve success, and full
participation requires punishments (or rewards) which typically are
enacted through trade policies such as trade sanctions, import tariffs, or export
subsidies. Absent such punishments (or rewards), full participation is difficult to sustain in theory.
Moreover, trade leakage due to nonparticipants may undermine the effectiveness of MEAs (Barrett 2005).
vulnerability
In practice, Eckersley (2004, p. 26) states that increasing international awareness of
to a WTO challenge has given rise to a conservative or cool
implementation of trade restrictive obligations under existing MEAs
to avoid the threat of legal challenge." Second, some MEAs must impede
free trade by definition to achieve their objectives. For example, the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) aims to
ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and
plants does not threaten their survival." Thus, the underlying
premise of the MEA is to impede trade in certain goods for the sake
of environmental preservation. Given that many MEAs are
incompatible with the objectives of the WTO to further the principles of
liberalization" through commitments to lower custom tariffs and other trade barriers" and
agreements to require governments to make their trade policies
transparent by notifying the WTO about laws in force and measures adopted,"
countries may be wary of joining MEAs that distort free trade due to
fear of violating WTO rules (Rauscher 2005). Thus, even though an increasing
number of MEAs have entered into force, less than full participation
may, in part, be attributable to the WTO and may undermine the
effectiveness of these agreements. Alternatively, attempts by relatively recent
MEAs to ensure compatibility with multilateral trade rules through the
avoidance of trade issues do so at the expense of effectiveness, making them less
appealing to potential participants. For example, Eckersley (2004, p. 26) concludes that the
expanding reach of the WTO's trade agreements does serve to
cramp the scope and operation of MEAs ..."

CITES is key to ocean biodiversity and global food security

Vincent 13, Canada Research Chair in Marine Conservation

at the Fisheries Centre at the University of British
Columbia (Amanda, June, The role of CITES in the
conservation of marine fishes subject to international
trade, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/faf.12035/full)

Ensuring sustainable extraction of marine fishes is crucial to the conservation of

biodiversity in the oceans, well-being of local communities and food security globally. The Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) indicates that 57% of all fisheries it tracks are fully
exploited and require effective management to avoid decline and that a further 30% are
overexploited, depleted or recovering from depletion; the latter is a notable increase from 10% in 1974 to 26% in 1989 (FAO 2012a).
Over 80% of global catches, however, are derived from fisheries lacking formal assessment, and small unassessed fisheries are in
substantially worse condition than assessed fisheries (Costello et al. 2012). There is, today, no doubt that populations of
marine fishes can indeed be extirpated or become globally threatened, notwithstanding their typically
high fecundity and capacity for wide dispersal (Hutchings 2001; Sadovy 2001; Reynolds et al. 2005). It is also evident that a
tremendous number of people depend on fishing for livelihoods (up to 820 million people) and food security (some 3 billion people)
(FAO 2012a). The economic value of many species draws greatly from their international trade. Approximately 38% of all fish
products (from both wild and cultured sources) were exported in 2010 (FAO 2012a). Increased trade is facilitated by improvements in
storage and transport capabilities and stimulated by the increasing use of fish in expanding cash economies and for foreign exchange
earnings (e.g. Bn et al. 2007; Asche and Smith 2009). It is also enabled by the spiralling prices attained by some species, such as
bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) (Collette et al. 2011). Seafood has become one of the most widely traded of all commodities, with a
total export value of the seven principal fishery commodity groups (94.66% of world total) reaching 109 billion US dollars in 2010
(FAO 2012a). A study by TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, in the early 1990s found that fisheries constituted about
25% of international trade in wild species, which has a total worth of about $160 billion (TRAFFIC as cited in Dickson 2002). In
addition, many millions of tonnes of low trophic level fishes are used as fishmeal for agriculture and aquaculture or for other non-food
purposes. Conservation and sustainable use of fish stocks, populations and species has largely been vested in fisheries management
agencies and organizations at national, regional and global levels. At the national level, fisheries and/or marine affairs agencies tend to
be production oriented and distant from the forestry and environment agencies that are typically charged with conservation policy and
activity. The approximately 17 Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs: FAO 2012b) have a mandate for managing
high seas, straddling and highly migratory fish stocks, either by taxon or by geographical region. Increasingly, however, there have
been calls for RFMOs to improve their conservation and management of fishery resources (see refs in Gilman et al. 2013). Most
RFMOs, for example, have large governance deficits in areas such as by-catch, with binding measures addressing about one-third of
by-catch problems (Gilman et al. 2013), and many fisheries are not covered by any RFMO. FAO, often argued to be the arbiter of
fisheries issues and concerns, has no fisheries management mandate or capacity per se, nor can it insist on agreed action (FAO 1995).
Rather, FAO works primarily through its voluntary Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (CCRF) across a wide range of
fisheries issues, provides important capacity building assistance to many countries and collates and analyses fisheries data. The
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora ( CITES)
is ideally placed to
complement national and regional management of fish species subject to
international trade. First, CITES was crafted specifically to prevent international
trade from contributing to the extinction of commercially exploited species. To that
end, it has a precautionary mandate to regulate international trade of species that
are or may become threatened by such commerce. Second, it has a long history of
engagement with difficult issues and has achieved notable successes by catalysing
improvements in the conservation status of taxa ranging from crocodiles to orchids (Kievit 2000; Dickson
2002). Third, CITES is the only multilateral environmental agreement that has legal
mechanisms in place to promote compliance with agreed restrictions on exports .
Fourth, CITES has a global reach with 177 member States (Parties), representing over 90% of the
world's countries. CITES can be seen as both a trade Convention serving to address conservation concerns, and a conservation
Convention that addresses threats by regulating trade.

Ocean biodiversity key to all life

Craig 03, Law Prof at Indiana (Robin, Taking Steps Toward

Marine Wilderness Protection? Fishing and Coral Reef
Marine Reserves in Florida and Hawaii, 34 McGeorge L.
Rev. 155)
Biodiversity and ecosystem function arguments for conserving marine ecosystems also exist, just as they do for terrestrial ecosystems,
but these arguments have thus far rarely been raised in political debates. For example, besides significant tourism values - the most
economically valuable ecosystem service coral reefs provide, worldwide - coral reefs protect against storms and dampen other
environmental fluctuations, services worth more than ten times the reefs' value for food production. n856 Waste treatment is another
significant, non-extractive ecosystem function that intact coral reef ecosystems provide. n857 More generally, " ocean
ecosystems play a major role in the global geochemical cycling of all the elements
that represent the basic building blocks of living organisms, carbon, nitrogen,
oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, as well as other less abundant but necessary elements." n858 In a very real
and direct sense, therefore, human degradation of marine ecosystems impairs the
planet's ability to support life. Maintaining biodiversity is often critical to
maintaining the functions of marine ecosystems. Current evidence shows that, in
general, an ecosystem's ability to keep functioning in the face of disturbance is
strongly dependent on its biodiversity, "indicating that more diverse ecosystems are
more stable." n859 Coral reef ecosystems are particularly dependent on their biodiversity. Most ecologists agree that the
complexity of interactions and degree of interrelatedness among component species is higher on coral reefs than in any other marine
environment. This implies that the ecosystem functioning that produces the most highly valued components is also complex and that
many otherwise insignificant species have strong effects on sustaining the rest of the reef system. n860 Thus, maintaining
and restoring the biodiversity of marine ecosystems is critical to maintaining and
restoring the ecosystem services that they provide. Non-use biodiversity values for marine ecosystems
have been calculated in the wake of marine disasters, like the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. n861 Similar calculations could derive
preservation values for marine wilderness. However, economic value, or economic value equivalents, should not be "the sole or even
primary justification for conservation of ocean ecosystems. Ethical arguments also have considerable force and merit." n862 At the
forefront of such arguments should be a recognition of how little we know about the sea - and about the actual effect of human
activities on marine ecosystems. The United States has traditionally failed to protect marine ecosystems because it was difficult to
detect anthropogenic harm to the oceans, but we now know that such harm is occurring - even though we are not completely sure
about causation or about how to fix every problem. Ecosystems like the NWHI coral reef ecosystem should inspire lawmakers and
policymakers to admit that most of the time we really do not know what we are doing to the sea and hence should be preserving
marine wilderness whenever we can - especially when the United States has within its territory relatively pristine marine ecosystems
that may be unique in the world. We may not know much about the sea, but we do know this much:
if we kill the ocean
we kill ourselves, and we will take most of the biosphere with us. The Black Sea is almost dead,
n863 its once-complex and productive ecosystem almost entirely replaced by a monoculture of comb jellies, "starving out fish and
dolphins, emptying fishermen's nets, and converting the web of life into brainless, wraith-like blobs of jelly." n864 More importantly,
the Black Sea is not necessarily unique.
 AT WTO: Cho Evidence

Their Cho card claims regionalism will cause World War III but thirty years of
rapid expansion of regionalism empirically denies their impact

Brkic 13, Economics Prof at U of Sarajevo (Snjeana, 3/25,

Regional Trading Arrangements Stumbling Blocks or
Building Blocks in the Process of Global Trade
Liberalization?, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=2239275)

In the years-long period of regional integration development, four periods have been identified during which the integration processes
were becoming particularly intensive and which have therefore been named "waves of regionalism". The first wave was taking place
during the capitalism development in the second half of the 19th century, in the course of British sovereign domination over the world
market. Economic integrations of the time primarily had the form of bilateral customs unions; however, owing to the comparative
openness of international trading system based on the golden standard automatism, this period is called the "era of progressive
bilateralism". The next two waves of regionalism occurred in the years following the world wars. Since the disintegration processes
caused by the wars usually spawned economic nationalisms and autarchic tendencies, it is not surprising that post-war regionalisms
were marked by discriminatory international economic integrations, primarily at the level of so-called negative integration, with
expressedly beggar-thy-neighbor policies that resulted in considerable trade deviations. This particularly refers to the regionalism
momentum after the First World War, which was additionally burdened by the consequences of Big Economic Crisis. The
current wave of regionalism started in late 1980s and spread around the world to a
far greater extent than any previous one did: it has covered almost all the continents
and almost all the countries, even those which have mis to join all earlier regional initiatives, such as the USA, Canada,
Japan and China. Integration processes, however, do not show any signs of flagging. Up till now, over
200 RTAs have been registered with GATT/WTO, more than 150 of them being still in force, and most of these
valid arrangement have been made in the past ten years

Cho says that the WTO is needed to manage regionalism

but WTO regulation of regionalism fails and undermines
the legitimacy of both

Legal Frontiers 10 (Regional trade agreements, neither

building blocks nor stumbling blocks: dismantling a tired
dichotomy, http://www.legalfrontiers.ca/2010/04/regional-
trade-agreements-neither-building-blocks-nor-stumbling-
blocks-dismantling-a-tired-dichotomy/)

Since the establishment of the Committee on Regional Trade Agreements (CRTA) in 1996, the
WTO has scrambled to
find ways to effectively control the impact of RTAs. This futile mission to tighten RTA
regulation has been driven by a persistent fear of trade diversion, as well as by the
assumption that regionalismand the agreements springing from itis subordinate to the
multilateral regime. WTO regulation of RTAs has evolved since 1947, notably with the introduction of the 1994
Understanding on the Interpretation of Article XXIV of the GATT 1994 and the creation of the Transparency Mechanism for RTAs in
2006. These regulations remain however, narrow and ambiguous. Article XXIV thus
continues its long history of being systematically flouted by member states with the
WTO as little more than an innocent bystander to the overwhelming spread of
regionalism. Under the GATT 1947, regionalism was permitted as an exception. RTAs were accepted, but only to the extent that
they complied with the terms of GATT Art. XXIV. It is this exception ethos that reinforces the
conceptual primacy of multilateralism, which undermines the legitimacy of RTAs.
In many respects, this attitude has contributed to the disregard of GATT Art. XXIV.
 AT WTO: No Conflict Between MEAs and WTO
Actual WTO disputes arent necessary to cause our impact the threat of a WTO
challenge is enough to chill and weaken MEAs

Chaytor 03, International Trade Lawyer (Beatrice, January,

Interactions with the World Trade Organisation: The
Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and the International
Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas,
www.ecologic.eu/download/projekte/850-899/890/in-
depth/world_trade_organization.pdf)
the World Trade Organisation (WTO) interacts
The international trading regime governed by
with many international environmental regimes. The WTO is often a source of
the interaction, invoking reactions from international environmental regimes in the
design and implementation of rules which is responsive to WTO
prescriptions. The vast number of WTO Members, the institutions economic significance and its
unparalleled ability to enforce its rules through its rigorous dispute settlement mechanism, contribute to
the WTOs tendency to be more effective as a source of interaction rather than as a target. Nevertheless,
the WTO is also a target of interaction by international environmental regimes which are typically more
The effect of the interaction with the
proactive in seeking to inform and co-operate with the WTO.
WTO as a source is largely disruptive, in the sense that the WTOs primary
objective of facilitating free trade generates conflicts with the
principal objectives of environment regimes aimed at promoting environmental
protection and sustainable development. The mere possibility of a WTO challenge
can inhibit negotiations and the implementation of measures under the
international environmental regimes. Moreover, ambiguities in the meaning and
application of the WTO rules with respect to environmental measures make it
difficult to design and implement the international environmental
regimes in a manner that complements the WTO system. Despite these challenges, compromises are
generally reached that ensure the complementary co-existence of the international trade and environment
regimes This chapter examines the nature and effects of interaction between the WTO and two
international environmental regimes in particular: the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and the
International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). It commences with a description
of the WTO in Part 1 and follows in Part 2 with a summary of the experience of interaction between the
WTO and each of the environmental regimes considered in the GATT/WTO inventory which was prepared
in the research for this chapter. In Part 3, the interaction between the WTO and the Biosafety Protocol and
ICCAT is studied in-depth, and general observations about the interaction between the WTO and the two
environment regimes are set out in Part 4. 1. Introduction to World Trade Organisation 1.1 General The
WTO is an intergovernmental organisation established in 1995 and has a Membership of over 140
countries and customs territories.1 The WTO is responsible for administering the multilateral trade
agreements regulating the international trade in goods and services and the protection of intellectual
property rights, for providing a forum for the negotiation of new trade rules, and for operating procedures
for the settlement of disputes among its Members (the WTO Agreements). The WTO aims to liberalise
markets, recognising the need to make use of the worlds resources in accordance with the objective of
sustainable development and to protect and preserve the environment in a manner consistent with
[the Members] respective needs and concerns at different levels of economic development.2 The WTOs
institutional framework comprises its governing body, the General Council, and several other councils and
committees that are supported by the Secretariat in Geneva. The principal organ responsible for trade and
environment issues at the WTO is the Committee on Trade and Environment (CTE). Other WTO bodies that
consider issues of environmental relevance include the Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT
Committee) and the Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Committee). The General
Council and specialist councils and committees administer the WTO Agreements on a day-to-day basis and
Members convene a Ministerial Conference approximately every two years.3 1.2 The WTO Agreements The
WTO Agreements will interact with any environmental regulation that has an impact on the international
trade in goods and services among its Members, including those regulations enacted pursuant to
multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). The WTO pursues its objective of market liberalisation by
requiring its Members to maintain both relative and absolute standards of treatment of goods and services
in the international and domestic market place. The WTOs relative standards prohibit WTO Members from
the discriminatory treatment of like goods, services and service suppliers on the basis of country of
origin. The WTOs absolute standards prohibit or discourage Members from putting in place certain types
of measures that directly or indirectly interfere with the trade in products and services. The three main
WTO Agreements that have been of particular relevance to international environmental regimes are the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994 (GATT), the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT
Agreement), and the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement).4 At the most
basic level, all three agreements share the common purpose of ensuring that measures that affect the
trade in products do not discriminate on the basis of a products country of origin (National and Most-
Favoured Nation Treatment), and that these measures are no more trade restrictive than is necessary to
achieve the purpose for which they were designed. Each agreement has detailed rules, and a growing body
of practice that develops these disciplines further. The so-called environmental exceptions in Article XX of
the GATT and similar provisions in the TBT and SPS Agreements deserve special mention. 5 Under Article
XX, a measure which is necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health or which relates to
the conservation of exhaustible natural resources is permitted under the GATT provided it is not being
applied in an arbitrary or unjustifiable manner, or as a disguised restriction on international trade.6 The
WTO Agreements are backed by a compulsory dispute settlement system with the ability to authorise
bilateral trade sanctions (known as suspensions of concessions). Any Member that feels benefits it
expected to derive from the WTO Agreements have been undermined by a trade measure put in place by
another Member can initiate dispute settlement procedures. If the Members are unable to settle their
differences between themselves, an ad hoc arbitral Panel of trade experts will be established, and will seek
to resolve the dispute. The report of the Panel can be appealed to a permanent Appellate Body of seven
independent trade jurists, appointed by the WTO Membership. The outcome is formally reviewed by the
WTO Dispute Settlement Body, a committee of all Members, which can only reverse the conclusion of a
Panel or the Appellate Body by consensus. The main objective of the dispute settlement system is to
ensure that any trade measure that is found to be inconsistent with WTO rules be removed or made
consistent. If a Member fails to correct the offending measure, it can agree to compensate the affected
Member, or find itself subject to trade sanctions imposed by the affected Member at a level equivalent to
the continuing harm done by the offending measure.7 The WTO Agreements, both on paper and in
practice, also anticipate the need to take into account other existing international agreements, such as
MEAs, and other relevant state practice. Both the SPS and the TBT Agreements make reference to
international standards developed by competent international organisations operating outside the WTO
system. Under the SPS Agreement, a WTO Member is required (unless it can justify the need for a higher
standard) to base its SPS measures on international standards, guidelines or recommendations adopted by
those international agencies specifically identified in the SPS Agreement or that may be later agreed by
the SPS Committee (Article 3.1). SPS measures that are in conformity with these international standards
are rebuttably presumed to be consistent with the SPS Agreement (Article 3.2). No MEA has thus far been
recognised as a standard setting instrument under the SPS Agreement. Under the TBT Agreement, a WTO
Member is also required to use international standards as the basis of its technical regulation (Article 2.4).
A technical regulation that is put in place for an identified legitimate objective (which includes the
protection of human heath or safety, animal or plant life or health, or the environment) and is in
accordance with relevant international standards is rebuttably presumed to be TBT compatible (Article
2.5). Unlike the SPS Agreement, the TBT does not identify which international standards would qualify for
this presumption. Many MEAs would, however, appear to meet the TBTs general requirement that
standards derive from a recognised body or system whose membership is open to the relevant bodies of
at least all of the Members.8 1.3 Institutional Development of Trade and Environment Agenda Since the
WTOs establishment, its Committee on Trade and Environment (CTE) has had the mandate to explore the
relationship between the WTO and MEAs.9 In the CTE, and other WTO organs dealing with environmental
matters, Members have discussed a range of trade and environment issues. These include: the application
of the WTO rules to trade measures taken pursuant to a MEA; the application of the WTO rules to measures
based on process and production methods (PPMs); environmental (or eco) labelling (especially with respect
to genetically modified organisms); the relevance of the precautionary principle to risk assessments based
on scientific evidence (particularly in the context of the SPS Agreement); and the environmental impacts of
certain subsidies, especially fisheries subsidies.10 Most observers acknowledge the usefulness of the CTEs
work in promoting a better understanding of the WTO-MEA relationship and acknowledging the legitimate
role of MEAs in promoting environmental objectives. However, the CTEs work has thus far been general
and inconclusive, other than recognising that international trade rules and international environmental
rules should be designed and implemented in a manner that is mutually supportive.11 The CTE has been
widely criticised for failing to produce any conclusions or recommendations of a substantive nature that
would, for example, instruct the WTOs dispute settlement system on how to deal with a conflict should
one arise.12 At the fourth WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha, November 2001, the WTO Membership
agreed to include as part of a new round, substantive negotiations: without prejudging their outcome, on [.
. .] the relationship between existing WTO rules and specific trade obligations set out in multilateral
environmental agreements (MEAs). The negotiations shall be limited in scope to the applicability of such
existing WTO rules. as among parties to the MEA in question. The negotiations shall not prejudice the WTO
rights of any Member that is not a party to the MEA in question.13 The mandate is both vague and
restrictive. It does, however, suggest that for the first time the WTO may produce substantive rules aimed
directly and intentionally at trade-related measures contained in MEAs to which its Members are also
parties. In fulfillment of the WTOs obligation to make arrangements for cooperation with
intergovernmental organisations,14 the CTE has granted observer status to intergovernmental
organisations, including the Secretariats of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and ICCAT, and
hosts meetings with MEA Secretariats to discuss issues relevant to the WTO and MEAs.15 The fourth WTO
Ministerial Conference encouraged efforts to promote cooperation between the WTO and relevant
international environmental organisations16 and launched negotiations between the Members on
procedures for regular information exchange between MEA Secretariats and the relevant WTO
committees, and the criteria for the granting of observer status.1 There is a wary co-existence between
the WTO and the institutions overseeing the design and implementation of MEAs (environment regimes).
The WTO Agreements anticipate the need to take into account MEAs, and the Appellate Body has been
inclined to consider existing MEAs when clarifying relevant provisions of the GATT/WTO. Some recent MEAs,
such as the Biosafety Protocol, have included language that acknowledges WTO rights and obligations. At
the interaction between the WTO and environment regimes is
the outset,
generated by differences in regime objectives and by differences in
the institutional features designed to achieve those objectives. The
WTO is designed to promote free trade; the environment regimes in
varying degrees require or authorise trade restrictions in order to
discourage the production and consumption of specific products with
negative environmental consequences The WTO Agreements are backed by a
compulsory dispute settlement system with the ability to authorise bilateral trade sanctions, while the
arrangements for dispute settlement within most MEAs are looser and less binding .
Membership
of the WTO and environment regimes substantially overlaps since
each regime aims for universal membership. The WTO and the five environment
regimes examined in the inventory prepared in researching this chapter Montreal Protocol, Biosafety
Protocol, Basel Convention, ICCAT and CCAMLR18 have each played roles as a source and a target of
The GATT/WTO consistency of trade restrictions has
interaction for the other.
been a concern that has constrained the respective rules and
regulations of the environment regimes (Biosafety, Montreal, ICCAT). Yet,
some environment regimes have been cited in the WTO as examples of properly functioning, multilaterally
negotiated, and narrowly drawn exceptions to free trade rules (CCAMLR, Montreal).19 A summary of the
nature of the interactions between the WTO and the five environment regimes is contained in Table 1.
The effect of the WTO on the design of primary rules within the
environment regimes has been viewed as chilling, disrupting or
slowing negotiation processes (Montreal, Biosafety), and limiting the
composition and reach of trade measures (Biosafety, Basel), and their
further development and application (Montreal). The WTO and the Conferences
of the Parties of the various environment regimes each has the mandate to act in areas that lie in the
others jurisdiction. Thus the nature of their influence over each other, though implicit, is as powerful as
Although a dispute challenging a MEA provision has
if it were expressly stated.
never been brought before the WTO dispute settlement system, the
threat of a WTO challenge under the WTOs dispute settlement
system further influences the design of rules under the environment
regimes, and the membership of the environment regimes remains
acutely conscious of this interaction. While some rules and behaviour of the
environment regimes have developed to accommodate WTO rules, adjustments have tended
to come at the expense of the environment regimes objectives . In
particular, there has been no satisfactory resolution of the distinctions, if any, to be made between
otherwise like products on the basis of their process and production methods.
Warming
Warming Frontlines
 1NC You Cause Warming Frontline
Environmental apocalypticism causes eco-
authoritarianism and mass violence against those deemed
environmental threats---also causes political apathy which
turns case

Buell 3
Frederickcultural critic on the environmental crisis and a Professor of English at Queens College and the
author of five books, From Apocalypse To Way of Life, pages 185-186

crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it

Looked at critically, then,
seems to have become a political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and
effective opposition with its predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too
vulnerable to refutation by events. It also exposes environmentalists to being called grim
doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further, concern with crisis has all too often
tempted people to try to find a total solution to the problems involved a phrase that, as
an astute analyst of the limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too
reminiscent of the Third Reichs infamous final solution .55 A total crisis of society
environmental crisis at its gravestthreatens to translate despair into inhumanist
authoritarianism; more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional authority in place. It thus
leads, Barry suggests, to the belief that only elite- and expert-led solutions
are possible.56 At the same time it depoliticizes people, inducing them to accept their
impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people today feel, ironically and/or
passively, that since it makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or her own, one might
as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of environmental crisis is,
though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep cultural and psychological as
the worse one feels
well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple proposition:
environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn ones back on the environment.
This means, preeminently, turning ones back on natureon traditions of nature feeling,
traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the different
departments of ecological science), and traditions of nature-based activism.If nature is thoroughly
wrecked these days, people need to delink from nature and live in postnaturea conclusion that,
as the next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millenium. Explorations of how
deeply nature has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and dependent on human actions it is
can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to nature-based environmental issues, not
greater concern with them. But what quickly becomes evident to any reflective consideration of the
difficulties of crisis discourse is that all of these liabilities are in fact bound tightly up with one
specific notion of environmental crisiswith 1960s- and 1970s-style environmental apocalypticism.
Excessive concern about them does not recognize that crisis discourse as a whole has significantly
changed since the 1970s. They remain inducements to look away from serious reflection on environmental
crisis only if one does not explore how environmental crisis has turned of late from apocalypse to dwelling
place. The apocalyptic mode had a number of prominent features: it was preoccupied
with running out and running into walls; with scarcity and with the imminent rupture of limits; with actions
that promised and temporally predicted imminent total meltdown; and with (often, though not always)
the need for immediate total solution . Thus doomsterism was its
reigning mode; eco-authoritarianism was a grave temptation; and as crisis was
elaborated to show more and more severe deformations of nature, temptation increased to refute
it, or give up, or even cut off ties to clearly terminal nature.
That causes mass wars

Brzoska 8
Michael Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, The securitization
of climate change and the power of conceptions of security, Paper prepared for the International Studies
Association Convention 2008

when a problem is securitized it is

In the literature on securitization it is implied that
difficult to limit this to an increase in attention and resources devoted to
mitigating the problem (Brock 1997, Waever 1995). Securitization regularly leads
to all-round exceptionalism in dealing with the issue as well as to a shift in
institutional localization towards security experts (Bigot 2006), such as the military and police.
Methods and instruments associated with these security organizations such as
more use of arms, force and violence will gain in importance in the discourse on
what to do. A good example of securitization was the period leading to the
Cold War (Guzzini 2004 ). Originally a political conflict over the organization of
societies, in the late 1940s, the East-West confrontation became an
existential conflict that was overwhelmingly addressed with military
means, including the potential annihilation of humankind . Efforts to
alleviate the political conflict were, throughout most of the Cold War, secondary to
improving military capabilities. Climate change could meet a similar
fate . An essentially political problem concerning the distribution of the costs
of prevention and adaptation and the losses and gains in income arising from change in the
human environment might be perceived as intractable , thus necessitating the
build-up of military and police forces to prevent it from becoming a
major security problem. The portrayal of climate change as a security
problem could, in particular, cause the richer countries in the global North, which are
less affected by it, to strengthen measures aimed at protecting them from the spillover of
violent conflict from the poorer countries in the global South that will be most affected by
climate change. It could also be used by major powers as a justification for improving
their military preparedness against the other major powers, thus leading to arms races.

Vote Aff to reframe environmental crisis away from crisis

discourse---this moves the debate away from top-down
expertism that causes serial policy failure [Kind of goes
with McClintock and Burke]

Foust et al. 8
Christina R. Foust, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Communication Studies at the
University of Denver, et al., with William O. Murphy, Doctoral Student and Graduate Teaching Instructor in
the Department of Human Communication Studies at the University of Denver, and Chelsea Stow, Doctoral
Student and Graduate Teaching Instructor in the Department of Human Communication Studies at the
University of Denver, 2008, Global Warming and Apocalyptic Rhetoric: A Critical Frame Analysis of US
Popular and Elite Press Coverage from 1997-2007, Paper Submitted to the Environmental Communication
Division of the National Communication Association Convention in San Diego, 11/20, p. 22-23

In conclusion, we hope to inspire more scholarship in the spirit of Moser and Dillings (2007) call for a
greater inter-disciplinary conversation on climate change. The methodological tool of frame analysis
can help foster common ground between humanities scholars, social scientists, and climate scientists,
 be a valuable tool in identifying
concerned about global warming. Frame analysis can also
the troubling aspects of how a discourse evolves and is communicatedand
in so doing, it can lead to more effective communication . Deconstructing the
harmful effects of an apocalyptic frame, we feel some responsibility to try to
offer alternative frames which might balance the need to communicate the urgency of
climate change, without moving people to denial and despair . We would like to
see the press inspire more of a public dialogue on how we can mitigate climate change, rather than
encouraging readers to continue to be resigned to the catastrophic telos. This does not mean that we
should ignore the potentially devastating consequences of global warming (now and in the future); but it
does mean that we must begin a conversation about how to change our daily
routines to make things better. We believe that the press could promote greater human agency
in the issue of climate change, so that people do not become resigned to the telos of
global warming. This includes encouraging more personal and civic responsibility,
rather than suggesting that experts will take care of it (or that we can do
nothing to mitigate the impacts of climate change). Journalists could acknowledge the expertise of
scientists, balanced with an acknowledgement of the power of common sense and morality such a move
Through a less tragic, more productive
may help avoid casting scientists as prophets.
framing of the issues of climate change, we may expand the common ground
needed to build a political will for dealing with climate change .

Catastrophe representations of climate change collapse

action against warming new psychological studies prove
We control the uniqueness catastrophe based climate
appeals are high now but belief in warming is dropping

Feinberg and Willer (Psychology Dept and Sociology Dept, UC Berkeley) 11

(Matthew and Robb, Apocalypse Soon? Dire Messages Reduce Belief in Global Warming by
Contradicting Just-World Beliefs, Psychological Science January 2011 vol. 22 no. 1 34-38)//TR

in the United
Though scientific evidence for the existence of global warming continues to mount,
States and other countries belief in global warming has stagnated or
even decreased in recent years. One possible explanation for this pattern is that
information about the potentially dire consequences of global
warming threatens deeply held beliefs that the world is just, orderly,
and stable. Individuals overcome this threat by denying or
discounting the existence of global warming , and this process ultimately
results in decreased willingness to counteract climate change. Two
experiments provide support for this explanation of the dynamics of belief in global warming, suggesting
that less dire messaging could be more effective for promoting public
understanding of climate-change research. Although scientific evidence attests to
the existence and severity of global warming, high percentages of people in the
United States and elsewhere increasingly see global warming as
nonexistent, exaggerated, or unrelated to human activity (BBC Climate
Change Poll, 2010; Gallup Poll, 2009, 2010; Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2009).
Because scientists agree that large-scale action will be necessary to counteract the effects of global
warming, environmental advocates often engage in public appeals
designed to increase rates of proenvironmental behaviors and
promote support for initiatives aimed at counteracting climate
change. These appeals often emphasize the severity of potential
consequences, relying on messages that highlight the dire risks associated with unchecked global
warming (Kerr, 2007). But what if these appeals are in fact counterproductive? We
contend thatone cause of skepticism concerning global warming may be
that such dire messages threaten individuals need to believe that
the world is just, orderly, and stable, a motive that is widely held
and deeply ingrained in many people (Lerner, 1980; Lerner & Miller, 1978). Research
shows that many individuals have a strong need to perceive the world as
just, believing that rewards will be bestowed on individuals who
judiciously strive for them and punishments will be meted out to
those who deserve them (Dalbert, 2001; Furnham, 2003). Research on just-world theory has
demonstrated that when individuals need to believe in a just world is
threatened, they commonly employ defensive responses, such as
dismissal or rationalization of the information that threatened their
just-world beliefs (for reviews, see Furnham, 2003; Hafer & Bgue, 2005). Information
regarding the potentially severe and arbitrary effects of global
warming should constitute a significant threat to belief in a just
world, and discrediting or denying global warmings existence could
serve as a means of resolving the resulting threat. Many dire messages aimed
at stopping global warming make salient the impending chaos and unpredictable catastrophe that global
these messages often emphasize the harm
warming will bring with it. Moreover,
that will be done to children and future generations who have done
nothing themselves to cause global warming. Such messages
contradict the belief that the world is predictable and fair by
suggesting that good people will suffer and that the innocent will be
the primary victims. Because these messages contradict just-world
beliefs, individuals who most strongly hold such beliefs should be
the most threatened. When such people are exposed to dire
messages concerning global warming, they are thus likely to
discount the evidence. By increasing skepticism about global
warming, these dire messages should, in turn, also reduce peoples
willingness to engage in behaviors aimed at combating global
warming. We conducted two experiments testing these claims. In the first, we measured participants
tendencies to hold just-world beliefs, varied the type of global-warming message participants were
exposed to, and then measured their levels of skepticism regarding global warming. In the second study,
we investigated the role of just-world beliefs more directly, manipulating the salience of these beliefs
before exposing participants to a dire global-warming message. We then measured both levels of
skepticism and participants willingness to curb their daily carbon emissions.

Growth causes warming- transition plus exacerbated

carbon usage

Martenson 9 (Dr. Chris, Dec 24, [An independent economist and

author of a popular website, ChrisMartenson.com. Chris earned a
PhD in neurotoxicology from Duke University, and an MBA from
Cornell University. A fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, Chris's
work has appeared on PBS and been cited by the Washington
Post. He is a contributor to SeekingAlpha.com and
FinancialSense.com, and former VP of Pfizer and SAIC,]
Copenhagen & Economic Growth - You Can't Have Both,
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51229 //DF)
 massive discrepancy exists between the
I want to point out that a
official pronouncements emerging from Copenhagen on
carbon emissions and recent government actions to spur
economic growth. Before and during Copenhagen (and after, too, we can be sure),
politicians and central bankers across the globe have worked tirelessly to return the global economy to
a path of growth. We need more jobs, we are told; we need economic growth, we need more people
consuming more things. Growth is the ever-constant word on
politicians' lips. Official actions amounting to tens of trillions of dollars speak to the fact that
this is, in fact, our number-one global priority. But the consensus coming out of
Copenhagen is that carbon emissions have to be reduced by
a vast amount over the next few decades. These two ideas
are mutually exclusive. You can't have both. Economic
growth requires energy, and most of our energy comes from
hydrocarbons - coal, oil, and natural gas. Burning those fuel sources
releases carbon. Therefore, increasing economic activity will
release more carbon. It is a very simple concept. Nobody has yet
articulated how it is that we will reconcile both economic
growth and reduced use of hydrocarbon energy. And so the
proposed actions coming out of Copenhagen are not
grounded in reality, and they are set dead against trillions of
dollars of spending. There is only one thing that we know about which has curbed, and
even reversed, the flow of carbon into the atmosphere, and that is the recent economic contraction.
This is hard proof of the connection between the economy and energy. It should serve as proof that
any desire to grow the economy is also an explicit call to
increase the amount of carbon being expelled into the
atmosphere. The idea of salvation via the electric plug-in car or other renewable energy is a
fantasy. The reality is that any new technology takes decades to
reach full market penetration, and we haven't even really
begun to introduce any yet. Time, scale, and cost must be
weighed when considering any new technology's potential to
have a significant impact on our energy-use patterns. For example,
a recent study concluded that another 20 years would be required for electric vehicles to have a
significant impact on US gasoline consumption. Meaningful Numbers of Plug-In Hybrids Are Decades
Away The mass-introduction of the plug-in hybrid electric car is still a few decades away, according to
the
new analysis by the National Research Council. The study, released on Monday, also found that
next generation of plug-in hybrids could require hundreds of
billions of dollars in government subsidies to take off. Even
then, plug-in hybrids would not have a significant impact on
the nations oil consumption or carbon emissions before
2030. Savings in oil imports would also be modest, according to the report, which was financed with
the help of the Energy Department. Twenty to thirty years is the normal
length of time for any new technology to scale up and fully
penetrate a large market. But this study, as good as it was in calculating the time,
scale, and cost parameters of technology innovation and penetration, still left out the issue of resource
scarcity.Is there enough lithium in the world to build all these
cars? Neodymium? This is a fourth issue that deserves
careful consideration, given the scale of the overall issue. But
even if we did manage to build hundreds of millions of plug-in vehicles, where would the
electricity come from? Many people mistakenly think that
we are well on our way to substantially providing our
electricity needs using renewable sources such as wind and
solar. We are not. Renewable timetable is a long shot Al Gore's
well-intentioned challenge that we produce "100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and
truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years" represents a widely held delusion that we can't afford
to harbor. The delusion is shared by the Minnesota Legislature, which is requiring the state's largest
One of the
utility, Xcel Energy, to get at least 24 percent of its energy from wind by 2020.
most frequently ignored energy issues is the time required
to bring forth a major new fuel to the world's energy supply.
Until the mid-19th century, burning wood powered the world. Then coal gradually surpassed wood into
the first part of the 20th century. Oil was discovered in the 1860s, but it was a century before it
surpassed coal as our largest energy fuel. Trillions of dollars are now invested in the world's
infrastructure to mine, process and deliver coal, oil and natural gas. As distinguished professor Vaclav
Smil of the University of Manitoba recently put it, "It
is delusional to think that
the United States can install in a decade wind and solar
generating capacity equivalent to that of thermal power
plants that took nearly 60 years to construct." Texas has three times the
name plate wind capacity of any other state 8,000-plus megawatts. The Electric Reliability Council of
Texas manages the Texas electric grids.ERCOT reports that its unpredictable
wind farms actually supply just a little more than 700 MW
during summer power demand, and provide just 1 percent of
Texas' power needs of about 72,000 MW. ERCOT's 2015
forecast still has wind at just more than 1 percent despite
plans for many more turbines. For the United States, the
Energy Information Administration is forecasting wind and
solar together will supply less than 3 percent of our electric
energy in 2020. Again it turns out that supplanting even a
fraction of our current electricity production with renewables
will also take us decades. And even that presumes that we have a functioning
economy in which to mine, construct, transport and erect these fancy new technologies. Time,
scale, and cost all factor in as challenges to significant
penetration of new energy technologies as well. So where will all
the new energy for economic growth come from? The answer, unsurprisingly,
is from the already-installed carbon-chomping coal, oil, and
natural gas infrastructure. That is the implicit assumption that lies behind the calls
for renewed economic growth. It's The Money, Stupid As noted here routinely in my writings and in the
we have an exponential monetary system. One
Crash Course,
mandatory feature of our current exponential monetary
system is the need for perpetual growth. Not just any kind of growth;
exponential growth. That's the price for paying interest on
money loaned into existence. Without that growth, our
monetary system shudders to a halt and shifts into reverse,
operating especially poorly and threatening to melt down
the entire economic edifice. This is so well understood, explicitly or implicitly,
throughout all the layers of society and in our various institutions, that you will only ever hear
politicians and bankers talking about the "need" for growth. In fact, they are correct; our system does
need growth. All debt-based money systems require growth. That is the resulting feature of loaning
one's money into existence. That's the long and the short of the entire story. The growth may seem
modest, perhaps a few percent per year ('That's all, honest!'), but therein lies the rub. Any
continuous percentage growth is still exponential growth.
Exponential growth means not just a little bit more each
year, but a constantly growing amount each year. It is a
story of more. Every year needs slightly more than the prior year - that's the requirement.
The Gap Nobody has yet reconciled the vast intellectual and
practical gap that exists between our addiction to
exponential growth and the carbon reduction rhetoric
coming out of Copenhagen. I've yet to see any credible plan that illustrates how we
can grow our economy without using more energy. Is it somehow possible to grow
an economy without using more energy? Let's explore that concept for a
bit. What does it mean to "grow an economy?" Essentially, it means more jobs for more people
An economy, as we measure it,
producing and consuming more things. That's it.
consists of delivering the needs and wants of people in ever-
larger quantities. It's those last three words - ever-larger
quantities - that defines the whole problem. For example, suppose our
economy consisted only of building houses. If the same number of houses were produced each year,
we'd say that the economy was not growing. It wouldn't matter whether the number was four hundred
thousand or four million; if the same number of new homes were produced each year, year after year,
this would be considered a very bad thing, because it would mean our economy was not growing. The
same is true for cars, hair brushes, big-screen TVs, grape juice, and everything else you can think of
Each year, more needs to be sold than
that makes up our current economy.
the year before, or the magic economic-stimulus wands will
come out to ward off the Evil Spirits of No Growth. If our economy
were to grow at the same rate as the population, it would grow by around 1% per year. This is still
exponential growth, but it is far short of the 3%-4% that policymakers consider both desirable and
necessary. Why the gap? Why do we work so hard to ensure that 1% more people consume 3% more
stuff each year? Out of Service It's not that 3% is the right number for the land or the people who live
upon it. The target of 3% is driven by our monetary system,
which needs a certain rate of exponential growth each year
in order to cover the interest expense due each year on the
already outstanding loans. The needs of our monetary
system are driving our economic decisions, not the needs of the people,
let alone the needs of the planet. We are in service to our money system,
not the other way around. Today we have a burning need for an economic model that can operate
tolerably well without growth. But ours can't, and so we actually find ourselves in the uncomfortable
position of pitting human needs against the money system and observing that the money system is
winning the battle. The Federal Reserve exists solely to assure that the monetary system has what it
needs to function. That is their focus, their role, and their primary concern. I assume that they assume
that by taking care of the monetary system, everything else will take care of itself. I think their
our primary institutions and
assumption is archaic and wrong. Regardless,
governing systems are in service to a monetary system that
is dysfunctional. It was my having this outlook, this lens, more than any other, that allowed
me to foresee what so many economists missed. Only by examining the system
from a new, and very wide, angle can the enormous flaws in
the system be seen. Economy & Energy Now let's get back to our main problem of
economic growth and energy use (a.k.a. carbon production). There is simply no way to build houses,
produce televisions, grow and transport grape juice, and market hair brushes without consuming
We need liquid fuel to
energy in the process. That's just a cold, hard reality.
extract, transform, and transport products to market. More
people living in more houses means we need more electricity.
Sure, we can be more efficient in our use of energy, but unless our efficiency gains
are exceeding the rate of economic growth, more energy will
be used, not less. In the long run, if we were being 3% more efficient in our use of fuel and
growing our economy at 3%, this would mean burning the same amount of fuel each year.
Unfortunately, fuel-efficiency gains are well known to run
slower than economic growth. For example, the average fuel
efficiency of the US car fleet (as measured by the CAFE standards) has
increased by 18% over the past 25 years, while the economy
has grown by 331%. Naturally, our fuel consumption has grown, not fallen, over that
time, despite the efficiency gains. So the bottom line is this: There is no
possible way to both have economic growth (as we've known it in the
past) and cut carbon emissions. At least not without doing things very differently.

Tipping point rhetoric breeds inaction in the face of

alarmism, and are of questionable scientific basis

Revkin 9 (Andrew C., March 29, 2009, [Senior fellow at

Pace University's Pace Academy for Applied
Environmental Studies, has taught at Columbia's
Graduate School of Journalism and the Bard College
Center for Environmental Policy,] Among Climate
Scientists, a Dispute Over Tipping Points, The New York
Times, online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29revki
n.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print //DF)

But the idea that the planet is nearing tipping points thresholds at which
change suddenly becomes unstoppable has driven a wedge between scientists
who otherwise share deep concerns about the implications of a
human-warmed climate. Environmentalists and some climate experts
are increasingly warning of impending tipping points in their efforts
to stir public concern. The term confers a sense of immediacy and menace to potential threats
from a warming climate dangers that otherwise might seem too distant for people to worry about. But
other scientists say there is little hard evidence to back up specific
predictions of catastrophe. They worry that the use of the term
tipping point can be misleading and could backfire, fueling
criticism of alarmism and threatening public support for reducing
greenhouse gas emissions. I think a lot of this threshold and tipping
point talk is dangerous, said Kenneth Caldeira, an earth scientist at Stanford University and
the Carnegie Institution and an advocate of swift action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. If we say
we passed thresholds and tipping points today, this will be an
excuse for inaction tomorrow, he said. While studies of climate patterns in the distant
past clearly show the potential for drastic shifts, these scientists say, there is enormous
uncertainty in making specific predictions about the future . In some
cases, there are big questions about whether climate-driven disasters
like the loss of the Amazon or a rise in sea levels of several yards in a century are even
plausible. And even in cases where most scientists agree that rising
temperatures could lead to unstoppable change, no one knows
where the thresholds lie that would set off such shifts .
Short time-frame tipping point rhetoric is a fallacy-
impacts take decades If not centuries to happen, and we
need to focus on the long term

Mendelsohn 9 (Robert O., June 2009, [The Edwin

Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor, Yale School of Forestry
and Environmental Studies, Yale University,] Climate
Change and Economic Growth, online:
http://www.growthcommission.org/storage/cgdev/docume
nts/gcwp060web.pdf //DF)

debate about climate change comes from a number of

The heart of the
warnings from scientists and others that give the impression that
human-induced climate change is an immediate threat to society (IPCC
2007a,b; Stern 2006). Millions of people might be vulnerable to health effects (IPCC 2007b), crop
production might fall in the low latitudes (IPCC 2007b), water supplies might dwindle (IPCC 2007b),
precipitation might fall in arid regions (IPCC 2007b), extreme events will grow exponentially (Stern 2006),
and between 2030 percent of species will risk extinction (IPCC 2007b). Even worse, there may be
catastrophic events such as the melting of Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets causing severe sea level rise,
which would inundate hundreds of millions of people (Dasgupta et al. 2009). Proponents argue
there is no time to waste. Unless greenhouse gases are cut dramatically today, economic
growth and wellbeing may be at risk (Stern 2006). These statements are largely
alarmist and misleading. Although climate change is a serious problem that deserves
attention, societys immediate behavior has an extremely low
probability of leading to catastrophic consequences. The science and
economics of climate change is quite clear that emissions over the
next few decades will lead to only mild consequences. The severe
impacts predicted by alarmists require a century (or two in the case of Stern
2006) of no mitigation. Many of the predicted impacts assume there
will be no or little adaptation. The net economic impacts from
climate change over the next 50 years will be small regardless. Most
of the more severe impacts will take more than a century or even a
millennium to unfold and many of these potential impacts will
never occur because people will adapt. It is not at all apparent that immediate and
dramatic policies need to be developed to thwart longrange climate risks. What is needed are
longrun balanced responses.
 Apo Rhet (Feinberg and Miller) Extensions
Apocalyptic representations of climate change kill
environmental movements
a. Uniqueness Apocalyptic reps are the dominant mode
of global warming rhetoric but belief and action against
global warming is actually declining thats Feinberg
b. Psychological Studies a large body of studies have
shown that dire descriptions of climate change reduce peoples
willingness to engage in behaviors aimed at combating global warming thats
Feinberg/ Prefer empirical studies of the supposed
common sense of their author
c. Expertism apocalyptic discourse creates it and makes
common people feel either helpless or complacent
Foust and Murphy 9 (Assistant Professor in the Department of Human
Communication Studies at the University of Denver; doctoral student in the
Department of Human Communication Studies at the University of Denver)
(Christina R. Foust & William O'Shannon Murphy, Revealing and Reframing
Apocalyptic Tragedy in Global Warming Discourse, Environmental
Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, pages 151-167,Volume 3,
Issue 2, 2009)//TR
Along with supporting diverse sites of human agency, rhetors may want to avoid the inherent conservatism
of apocalyptic discourse. Apocalyptic rhetoric suggests that received sense-making systems (i.e., common
sense) cannot explain great changes, but that various prophets can (Brummett, 1991). In the case of
climate change, apocalyptic framing endows an array of experts and elites (including scientists, actuaries,
politicians, and journalists) with the power to understand, frame, and perhaps resolve the issue; helping fuel
the common sentiment that ordinary people cannot do anything to reduce global warming (Lorenzoni et al.,
2007), or that they will not need to because "'someone will invent the gizmo' that solves the problem "
(Gregg Easterbrook, quoted in Nocera, 2007, p. C1). Perhaps by linking climate change solutions to
common sense-especially Americans' notions of sacrifice, conservation, community, and family (Moser &
Dilling, 2004)-we may free scientists from their role as controversial prophets, while expanding agency
beyond Fate. As our analysis suggests, simply creating awareness of an issue is not enough to create an
active public. Rather, that awareness needs to work toward arousing the public toward action (Hallahan,
2001).

d. Polarization they play easily into the conservative

narrative and even if they do spur action it will be divise
which collapses chances of success
Foust and Murphy 9 (Assistant Professor in the Department of Human
Communication Studies at the University of Denver; doctoral student in the Department of
Human Communication Studies at the University of Denver) (Christina R. Foust & William
O'Shannon Murphy, Revealing and Reframing Apocalyptic Tragedy in Global Warming
Discourse, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, pages 151-
167,Volume 3, Issue 2, 2009)//TR

apocalyptic frame is that it invites naysayers to discredit scientists as

A second implication of the tragic
false prophets and label environmentalists as alarmists. As Gleiberman (2006) notes: "The right-wing
strategy, which has been to paint global warming as a lofty hypothetical-an alarmist scenario pushed by
pesky Chicken Littles-is a way of relegating it back to the era of '60s paranoia" (p. 65). Apocalyptic
framing serves as fodder for naysayers to continue portraying global warming as "overblown" or arguing
"that it may not exist" (Stevens, 1997, p. F1). Ultimately, such a discourse polarizes readers, who are forced
to choose sides because they were not given more nuanced options for addressing the issue. But if not
through a tragic apocalypse, how might the narrative of global warming be framed to promote political
action? Participants in a recent Environmental Communication forum speak to this question, in light of
Schwarze's discussion of melodrama (Kinsella, 2008). As Schwarze (2006) argues, the polarizing structure
of melodrama may inspire action: "Promoting division and drawing sharp moral distinctions can be a fitting
response to situations in which identification and consensus have obscured recognition of damaging
material conditions and social injustices" (p. 242). Though melodrama and apocalyptic tragedy differ, they
share a tendency to divide audiences, for instance, into heroes against villains (Schwarze, 2006) or
believers against non-believers (Brummett, 1991). Perhaps the polarizing rhetoric of melodrama may shift
the ground of the climate change debate away from economic costs and benefits, to the moral stakes of
decimating the earth, as Peterson suggests (Kinsella, 2008). Drawing clear distinctions between heroes
and villains could motivate identifications to mitigate emissions. As Check counters, the complex issue of
climate change may not lend itself to divisive, melodramatic structure, for it does not have a single clear
"rhetorical devil that is powerful, ubiquitous, deceitful, and identifiable" (Kinsella, 2008, p. 98). We, too,
worry that divisive rhetoric, particularly in the form of tragic apocalypse, has precluded and will continue
to suffocate opportunities for a widespread collective will to form. If we accept the view advocated by a
number of experts-that global warming represents a challenge to every aspect of modern development- it is
imperative for as many different sectors of society as possible to contribute to positive change. Polarizing
the community while denying the potential for action, as in apocalyptic tragedy, seems an untenable
rhetorical strategy for encouraging the public to become active participants in climate change mitigation .

e. Tradeoff total environmental collapse is inevitable

even if warming is solved. Even if they do spur action it
will be narrowly focused to only technical, short terms
solutions which tradeoff with broader protection
Crist (Prof in Department of Science and Technology in Society @ Virginia Tech) 7
(Eileen, Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse, Telos 4 (Winter
2007): 2955) //TR

While the dangers of climate change are real, I argue that there are even greater dangers in representing it
as the most urgent problem we face. Framing climate change in such a manner deserves to be challenged
for two reasons: it encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to the technical realm , by powerfully
insinuating that the needed approaches are those that directly address the problem; and it detracts attention
from the planets ecological predicament as a whole, by virtue of claiming the lime- light for the one issue
that trumps all others. Identifying climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into
center stage as the highest priority problem, has bolstered the proliferation of technical proposals that
address the specific challenge. The race is on for figuring out what technologies, or portfolio thereof, will
solve the problem. Whether the call is for reviving nuclear power, boosting the installation of wind
turbines, using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use,
developing carbon-sequestering technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect the suns rays, the
narrow character of such proposals is evident: confront the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by
technologically phasing them out, superseding them, capturing them, or mitigating their heating effects.
In his The Revenge of Gaia, for example, Lovelock briefly mentions the need to face climate change by
changing our whole style of living._6 But the thrust of this work, what readers and policy-makers come
away with, is his repeated and strident call for investing in nuclear energy as, in his words, the one
lifeline we can use immediately._7 In the policy realm, the first step toward the technological fix for
global warming is often identified with implementing the Kyoto protocol. Biologist Tim Flannery agitates
for the treaty, comparing the need for its successful endorsement to that of the Montreal protocol that
phased out the ozone-depleting CFCs. The Montreal protocol, he submits, marks a signal moment in
human societal development, representing the first ever victory by humanity over a global pollution
problem._8 He hopes for a similar victory for the global climate-change problem. Yet the deepening
realization of the threat of climate change, virtually in the wake of stratospheric ozone depletion, also
suggests that dealing with global problems treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the planets pre- dicament.
Just as the risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long
underappreciated climate crisis, so it would be nave not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely
unforesee- able) catastrophe arising after the (hoped-for) resolution of the above two. Furthermore, if
greenhouse gases were restricted successfully by means of technological shifts and innovations, the root
cause of the ecological crisis as a whole would remain unaddressed. The destructive patterns of
production, trade, extraction, land-use, waste proliferation, and consump- tion, coupled with population
growth, would go unchallenged, continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological richness of
the Earth. Industrial-consumer civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to
its expansiveness within, and perceived entitlement to, the entire planet._9 But questioning this
civilization is by and large sidestepped in climate-change discourse, with its single-minded quest for a
global-warming techno-fix.20 Instead of confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the
climate crisisamong numer- ous other catastrophesclimate-change literature often focuses on how
global warming is endangering the culprit, and agonizes over what tech- nological means can save it from
impending tipping points.2_
The dominant frame of climate change funnels cognitive and pragmatic work toward specifically
addressing global warming, while muting a host of equally monumental issues. Climate change looms so
huge on the environmental and political agenda today that it has contributed to downplaying other facets
of the ecological crisis: mass extinction of species , the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing,
continued old-growth deforestation, topsoil losses and desertification, endocrine dis- ruption, incessant
development, and so on, are made to appear secondary and more forgiving by comparison with
dangerous anthropogenic inter- ference with the climate system. In what follows, I will focus specifically
on how climate-change discourse encourages the continued marginalization of the biodiversity crisisa
crisis that has been soberly described as a holocaust,22 and which despite decades of scientific and
environmentalist pleas remains a virtual non-topic in society, the mass media, and humanistic and other
academic literatures. Several works on climate change (though by no means all) extensively examine the
consequences of global warming for biodiver- sity,23 but rarely is it mentioned that biodepletion predates
dangerous greenhouse-gas buildup by decades, centuries, or longer, and will not be stopped by a
technological resolution of global warming. Climate change is poised to exacerbate species and
ecosystem lossesindeed, is doing so already. But while technologically preempting the worst of climate
change may temporarily avert some of those losses, such a resolution of the cli- mate quandary will not
put an end towill barely addressthe ongoing destruction of life on Earth.
 Tipping Point Extensions
Tipping point rhetoric is a new phenomena that lays its
claim not to science but the media- and this rhetoric
inspires try-or-die environmental fatalism

Russill 8 (Chris, July 2008, [Assistant Professor in the

Department of Writing Studies at the University of
Minnesota,] Tipping Point Forewarnings in Climate
Change Communication: Some Implications of an
Emerging Trend, Environmental Communication, Vol. 2,
No. 2, p. 133-153 //DF)

use of tipping points does not simply

Finally, there is the fact that Hansens
reflect the primary science. I replicated the methodology used by Naomi
Oreskes (2004) to survey the climate change research literature and found no uses of
tipping point between 1993 and 2003. I then extended the search through the end
of 2006 and broadened the parameters. This resulted in two research articles. The dearth of
tipping point references in the scientific literature prompts
questions regarding its accuracy as a description of climate change .
In addressing this question for Nature, Gabrielle Walker (2006) reviewed the scientific literature and
there are several danger zones that
interviewed IPCC climate scientists to conclude
may deserve to be called tipping points (p. 802). In particular, the
elements of threshold crossing, irreversibility, and positive feedback
appear to characterize key climatic mechanisms quite well. It is odd,
however, that Walkers non-committal conclusion suggests the
popularity of the concept, while failing to observe its very rare use
in the primary research literature (p. 802). In fact, both Walker and an
accompanying Nature editorial are unclear on this point . As the Editors
Summary (2006) puts it, The idea that passing a hidden threshold could
drastically worsen man-made climate change has been current in the
scientific literature for many years. Now it has a new name, a
tipping point, and suddenly the news magazines and other media
have picked up on it. ( 1) This is an important point. If tipping point
warnings do not simply reflect advancing scientific understanding,
then why is it now preferred? There are other functionally equivalent and more clearly
elaborated conceptions of change available, both in the scientific literature and in popular environmental
writing. For example, Al Gores (1992) Earth in the Balance attempts to revise received views of causality
in a way very similar to Gladwells perspective, enrolling ideas of non-linearity from chaos theory (p. 34,
pp. 361!363). Walker does not say it is an inaccurate description of climate systems and the editors of
The perspective is almost
Nature suggest its use is akin to old wine in new bottles.
nominalist in its conclusion regarding the appropriateness of tipping
points. Climate systems might be described in a variety of manners,
either using tipping points or other concepts. Its importance derives not from better
describing climate systems but in making available an image of
crisis useful for registering public concern and opening avenues for
response. It is on this point that advocates and critics of tipping
point forewarnings disagree. The editors of Nature, for example, believe there are
three dangers attendant on focusing humanitys response to the
climate crisis too much on tipping points (p. 785). They believe such
warnings underplay the uncertainties inherent to climate science,
that they distort human responses by focusing on avoidance rather
than adaptation, and that can induce fatalism, since tipping points,
may encourage a belief that a complete solution is the only
worthwhile one, as any other course may allow the climate system to
tumble past the crucial threshold (p. 785).

Tipping point claims are contrary to how the environment

works and force alarmism that produces inaccurate
solutions

Russill 8 (Chris, July 2008, [Assistant Professor in the

Department of Writing Studies at the University of
Minnesota,] Tipping Point Forewarnings in Climate
Change Communication: Some Implications of an
Emerging Trend, Environmental Communication, Vol. 2,
No. 2, p. 133-153 //DF)
Second, in trying to make clear the threat to the planet, Hansen describes tipping point change in the
following manner: A
tipping point occurs in a system with positive
feedbacks. When forcing toward a change, and change itself become
large enough, positive feedbacks can cause a sudden acceleration of
change with very little, if any, additional forcing (p. 3). This explanation
accords well with Gladwells attempt to capture changes that are sensitive to small perturbations and
which selfsustain the pattern of change without further forcing.In this situation, one passes
the threshold where past climate responses are a reliable guide to
future predictions. This is also the explication Gabrielle Walker (2006) found acceptable in her
review of tipping point uses in climate change science for Nature. It is an accelerated
change against a background of slower or more gradualist change
that distinguishes a tipping point. This creates imprecision since the rate of change is
only accelerated when pictured upon a more gradually shifting set of relations. Hypothetically,
the tipping point might be a snap of the fingers or a century long
moment, if considered on geological timescales. In practice, however, the intent of
tipping point warnings is to transform our perception of climatic and
geological system change by using more familiar event-based
frames of reference. Imprecision does not result simply from the
complexity of the processes involved, but from the effort to fit these
almost imperceptible changes to temporal scales based more firmly
in typical human experiences. Put another way, Hansen is re-characterizing
climatic processes in terms of events so as to recalibrate the
dangers represented by shifts in these processes to our sense of
significant change. This entails a necessary transformation of
scientific research and opens Hansen to charges of alarmism.
Tipping points are false- the globe has survived and
thrived in much worse

Taylor 11 (James M., October 2, 2011, [Senior Fellow, The

Heartland Institute; Managing Editor, Environment and
Climate News,] Case Against Climate-Change Alarmism,
online: http://heartland.org/editorial/2011/10/12/case-
against-climate-change-alarmism //DF)

While it is
The first principle we need to keep in mind regarding climate change alarmism is context.
true that global temperatures have risen somewhat during the past
100-plus years since the Little Ice Age ended, there was little room
for temperatures to go at the time but up. The Little Ice Age, lasting from
approximately 1300-1900 A.D., brought the planets coldest extended
temperatures during the last 10,000 years. Saying that
temperatures have risen by 1 degree or so since the end of the Little
Ice Age tells us essentially nothing in the long-term temperature
context because the arbitrary baseline of the Little Ice Age was an
exceptionally cold climate anomaly. Keeping this long-term
temperature context in mind, global warming alarmists frequently
assert that a given month, year, or decade was the hottest in
recorded history, but that statement only holds true because
alarmists conveniently define recorded history as the past 130
years or so since the depths of the Little Ice Age. Alarmists justify this
convenient definition of recorded history based on the establishment of a relatively global system of
weather and temperature stations approximately 130 years ago. Fair enough, but proxy climate
data from a variety of sources, including ice cores drilled in the Greenland and Antarctic
ice sheets, demonstrate that global temperatures were warmer than
today for most of the past 10,000 years. Human civilization first
developed, and thereafter thrived, during climate conditions warmer than
today. Todays temperatures, in a more appropriate long-term context, are
unusually cold, not hot. The second principle we need to remember is that the earths
long-term temperature history gives us proof that warmer
temperatures have in the real world always been better for human
civilization than colder temperatures. The Little Ice Age was typified
by crop failures, famines, plagues, extreme weather events and
human population contractions. By contrast, our recently warming
temperatures have been a welcome reprieve from the harsh and
unusually cold conditions of the Little Ice Age. During the past century, as global
temperatures have risen forests have expanded, deserts have retreated, soil moisture has improved, crops
have flourished and extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes have become less
frequent. While our ability to document the frequency of famines, plagues, droughts, hurricanes, etc., is
more limited in the millennia before the Little Ice Age, we do know that during these warmer millennia
human civilization thrived and the planets climate was not thrown into a chaotic downward spiral. Indeed,
the earths climate remains quite benign despite these thousands of
years of recent warmer temperatures. This really gets to the heart of the Sandia
paper. If we have real-world evidence that temperatures were warmer
than today during most of the past 10,000 years (and also during several
interglacial warm periods during the past few million years), and if we also have real-world
evidence that human civilization thrived during these warmer
temperatures and the warmer temperatures did not trigger so-called
tipping points sending the planet into a climate catastrophe, then
we have very little reason to believe that our presently and
moderately warming temperatures are now poised to send the
planet into a climate catastrophe. For many scientists, this distinction
between theory and real-world conditions is what typifies the
differences between so-called alarmists and skeptics . As Colorado State
University emeritus professor and hurricane expert William Gray frequently explains, alarmists base their
climate alarmism on speculative computer models programmed and run within the confines of cubicles
and drywall. Skeptics, on the other hand, base their skepticism on real-world data and observations. The
global warming may produce an
Sandia paper may present an interesting theory that
imminent climate catastrophe within a chaotic global atmosphere,
but the theory is strongly contradicted by thousands of years of
real-world data and real-world climate observations. The Scientific
Method dictates that real-world observations trump speculative
theory, not the other way around.
 AT: Nuclear Solves Warming
Nuclear power produces heat emissions which exacerbate
global warming

Science Daily 9 (July 13th, Trapping Carbon Dioxide Or

Switching To Nuclear Power Not Enough To Solve Global
Warming Problem, Experts Say,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090713085
248.htm)
Attempting to tackle climate change by trapping carbon dioxide or switching
to nuclear power will not solve the problem of global warming ,
according to energy calculations published in the July issue of the
International Journal of Global Warming. Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet of the
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Lule University of Technology in Sweden have
calculated the total energy emissions from the start of the industrial revolution in the 1880s to the modern
day.They have worked out that using the increase in average global
air temperature as a measure of global warming is an inadequate
measure of climate change. They suggest that scientists must also take into account the
total energy of the ground, ice masses and the seas if they are to model climate change accurately. The
researchers have calculated that the heat energy accumulated in the atmosphere corresponds to a mere
6.6% of global warming, while the remaining heat is stored in the ground (31.5%), melting ice (33.4%) and
sea water (28.5%). They point out that net heat emissions between the industrial revolution circa 1880 and
the modern era at 2000 correspond to almost three quarters of the accumulated heat, i.e., global warming,
during that period. Their calculations suggest that most measures to combat global warming, such as
reducing our reliance on burning fossil fuels and switching to renewables like wind power and solar energy,
will ultimately help in preventing catastrophic climate change in the long term. But the same calculations
also show that trapping carbon dioxide, so-called carbon dioxide sequestration, and storing it deep
net heat
underground or on the sea floor will have very little effect on global warming. "Since
emissions accounts for most of the global warming there is no or little reason
for carbon dioxide sequestration," Nordell explains, "The increasing carbon dioxide emissions merely show
how most net heat is produced. The "missing" heat, 26%, is due to the greenhouse effect, natural
variations in climate and/or an underestimation of net heat emissions, the researchers say. These
calculations are actually rather conservative, the researchers say, and the missing heat may be much less.
The researchers also point out a flaw in the nuclear energy
argument. Although nuclear power does not produce carbon dioxide
emissions in the same way as burning fossil fuels it does produce
heat emissions equivalent to three times the energy of the
electricity it generates and so contributes to global warming
significantly, Nordell adds.

The gas emitted from nuclear enrichment is ten thousand

times worse than CO2

Caldicott, 6 Founder and President of the Nuclear Policy

Research Institute(Helen, Nuclear Power is not the
answer, pg. viii)

Nuclear power is not "clean and green," as the industry claims, because
large amounts of traditional fossil fuels are required to mine and refine the uranium needed to run nuclear
power reactors, to construct the massive concrete reactor buildings, and to transport and store the toxic
radioactive waste created by the nuclear process. Burning of this fossil fuel emits significant quantities of
large
carbon dioxide (C0 2 )-the primary "greenhouse gas"-into the atmosphere. In addition,
amounts of the now-banned chlorofluoro carbon gas (CFC) are emitted
during the enrichment of uranium. CFC gas is not only 10,000 to
20,000 times more efficient as an at mospheric heat trapper
("greenhouse gas") than CO 2 , but it is a classic "pollutant" and a potent
destroyer of the ozone layer.

Solving warming requires almost 100 reactors a year---

and requires several new states get enrichment
capabilities

Sharon Squassoni 8, senior associate in the Nonproliferation Program at the

Carnegie Endowment, former director of Policy Coordination in the
Nonproliferation Bureau of the State Department, March 12, 2008, Nuclear
Energy and Global Warming, Testimony before the Committee on House
Select Energy Independence and Global Warming, lexis

A rough approximation of where reactor capacity would expand in a

climate change scenario is based on the high scenario of the 2003 MIT
Study, "The Future of Nuclear Power." For 1500 GW capacity, MIT estimated
that 54 countries (an additional 23) would have commercial nuclear
power programs. This essentially means a five- fold increase in the
numbers of reactors worldwide and an annual build rate of 35 per year. In
the event that smaller-sized reactors are deployed in developing countries -
which makes eminent sense - the numbers could be much higher. If nuclear
energy were assumed to be able to contribute a reduction of
between 2 and 6 billion tons of carbon per year as outlined in the Stern
Report, the resulting reactor capacity would range between 1800 GWe and
4500 GWe - increases ranging from six times to ten times current capacity.
This would require building between 42 and 107 reactors per year
through 2050. Impact on Uranium Enrichment Such increases in reactor
capacity would certainly have repercussions for the front and back
ends of the fuel cycle. Almost 90 percent of current operating reactors use
low-enriched uranium (LEU). Presently, 11 countries have commercial
uranium enrichment capacity and produce between 40 and 50 million SWU. A
capacity of 1070 GWe - the one "wedge" scenario - could mean tripling
enrichment capacity, requiring anywhere from 11 to 22 additional enrichment
plants. A capacity of 1500 GWe would require quadrupling enrichment
capacity (see slide 4). Further, if Stern Report nuclear expansion levels are
achieved, enrichment capacity would have to increase ten-fold. In
assessing where new uranium enrichment capacity might develop,
the MIT Study assumed that 18 states would have 10 GWe reactor
capacity - the point at which domestic uranium enrichment becomes
competitive with LEU sold on the international market - and thus
might enrich uranium. (See slide 4 for a more modest approach, with 9 additional countries
enriching uranium).
Takes too long for SMRs to solve global warming

PR Newswire 9/29/10 ([Building on more than 57 years'

experience, PR Newswire's comprehensive suite of
solutions empowers you to engage opportunity
everywhere it exists. We offer solutions for businesses,
budgets, and projects of all sizes. Our services allow you
to target and engage your audiences, deliver your
message quickly and accurately, and measure, monitor
and analyze it without ever breaking stride.] IEER/PSR:
'Small Modular Reactors' No Panacea for What Ails
Nuclear Power http://www.prnewswire.com/news-
releases/ieerpsr-small-modular-reactors-no-panacea-for-
what-ails-nuclear-power-104024223.html) //am

The IEER/PSR fact sheet points out: "Efficiency and most renewable
technologies are already cheaper than new large reactors. The long
time -- a decade or more -- that it will take to certify SMRs will do
little or nothing to help with the global warming problem and will
actually complicate current efforts underway. For example, the
current schedule for commercializing the above-ground sodium
cooled reactor in Japan extends to 2050, making it irrelevant to
addressing the climate problem. Relying on assurances that SMRs
will be cheap is contrary to the experience about economies of scale
and is likely to waste time and money, while creating new safety and
proliferation risks, as well as new waste disposal problems."

Cradle to grave demonstrates nuclear inherently bad for

warming

Smith 11 (Gar Smith et al , June 2011, GAR SMITHEditor

Emeritus of Earth Island Journal, a former editor of
Common Ground magazine, a Project Censored Award-
winning journalist, and co-founder of Environmentalists
Against War. ERNEST CALLENBACHAuthor of Ecotopia,
Ecotopia Emerging, Ecology: A Pocket Guide and was
coauthor of EcoManagement. For many years, he edited
film books and natural history guides for the University of
California Press. AILEEN MIOKO-SMITHFounder and
Director of Green Action in Kyoto and is a leading anti-
nuclear campaigner in Japan. JERRY MANDERFounder,
Distinguished Fellow, International Forum on
Globalization. NUCLEAR ROULETTE THE CASE AGAINST A
NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE.)MO
Meanwhile, the argument that clean nuclear power can help
fight Global Warming has been given the cold shoulder by
climate activists. It turns out that nuclear reactors are only
marginally useful in countering climate changeand an
examination of the complete life-cycle costs reveals that
nuclear energy actually helps stoke Global Warming. While it is
true that a fully functioning reactor releases little CO2, an honest greenhouse-gas assessment
cannot overlook the significant volumes of CO2 generated by the overall operations of the
nuclear industry. | Vast amounts of CO2 are generated by all the fossil-fuel-powered drills,
trucks, locomotives and cargo ships involved in mining the ore and delivering it to refineries,
enrichment facilities, power plants and, ultimately, to a radioactive waste storage site. Fossil
fuels also are consumed (and CO2 released) in the
fabrication of the thick concrete housings and assembly of
the huge metal parts that go into making a nuclear power
plant. It takes many years for a fully operational nuclear
plant to generate sufficient energy to offset the energy
consumed in the plants construction.10

Designing new reactors make warming worse

Smith 11 (Gar Smith et al , June 2011, GAR SMITHEditor

Emeritus of Earth Island Journal, a former editor of
Common Ground magazine, a Project Censored Award-
winning journalist, and co-founder of Environmentalists
Against War. ERNEST CALLENBACHAuthor of Ecotopia,
Ecotopia Emerging, Ecology: A Pocket Guide and was
coauthor of EcoManagement. For many years, he edited
film books and natural history guides for the University of
California Press. AILEEN MIOKO-SMITHFounder and
Director of Green Action in Kyoto and is a leading anti-
nuclear campaigner in Japan. JERRY MANDERFounder,
Distinguished Fellow, International Forum on
Globalization. NUCLEAR ROULETTE THE CASE AGAINST A
NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE.) MO

Unlike a coal-fired plant, where production can be ramped up or slowed to meet power demands,
a nuclear reactor spins out a constant level of electricity day
in and day out. Because nuclear plants need to be operated
full-time, they often throw away the electric energy
generated during off-peak hours. Day in and day out,
nuclear power plants routinely release clouds of 1,000F
steam directly into the atmosphere.According to one estimate, the waste heat
from all the worlds electric power plants (including coal, oil
and nuclear) amounts to more than 27,000 trillion BTUs per
year.68 The added heat from a Nuclear Renaissance would
only further fuel global warming. The situation was summed up by energy
expert Amory Lovins who calculated that, from an efficiency standpoint, investing in
nuclear power would make global warming worse since
pouring money into reactors instead of renewables
produces two to ten times less climate-solution per dollar.

It would take 18 years of energy production to make up

the CO2 imprint caused by plant construction and mining.
Even then the gains will be minimal

Christine Frank 2006 Why Nuclear Power Is Not the Way

to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions, d/l:
http://www.socialistaction.org/frank5.htm //jl

An alarming number of so-called environmentalists in the United

States are taking the position that more nuclear power generation is
the way to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that are contributing to global
warming. In an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle a couple of months back, G. Pascal
Zachary proposed such nuclear madness. He tried to assure readers that todays
new Generation IV reactors, which the utility giants and the federal government hope to
foist upon us, are much safer to operate than the older models and will do
an efficient job of providing us with clean, inexpensive energy. None
of those claims are true, and the American people cannot allow themselves to be hoodwinked
by sellouts like Zachary. All of the reasons to oppose nuclear powerrisk of
catastrophic accident, routine radioactive emissions, accumulating
irradiated wastes, all of which threaten the health of life on Earth
apply equally to the new pebble-bed technology Zachary is favoring and the aging
reactors currently in operation. Through its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, the Bush
administration plans to proliferate over 130 more nuclear power plants over the next 40 years worldwide.
This includes the construction of small-scale reactors in Third World nations that will contribute further to
their gross maldevelopment. The U.S. nuclear power industry will receive more than $10 billion in subsidies
and tax breaksall at the taxpayers expense. Thats quite some price tag for electricity that supposed to
be "too cheap to meter." The beneficiaries of these hand-outs will be a consortium of utility companies,
consisting of Westinghouse, General Electric, Entergy, and Exelon, the main owners, operators, and
builders of Americas nuclear power stations. Bechtel, which builds nuclear-fuel reprocessing reactors, will
also benefit from this welfare for the rich. It is claimed by advocates such as Zachary that the advanced
nuclear reactors, designed with new pebble-bed technology, will be much cheaper and safer to operate
and will emit no sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxides, or greenhouse gases. The industry PR slogan is "nuclear
energy means cleaner air." Friends of the Earth has estimated that a typical
nuclear reactor must operate at full capacity for 10 years to repay
its energy debt incurred by uranium mining and milling, fuel
enrichment and fabrication, steel and zirconium manufacture, and
plant constructionnot including decommissioning. Another eight to
10 years can be added for fuel loading and reloading. It would
therefore take approximately 18 years for one net calorie of energy
to be produced for societal consumption. That can hardly be considered cost-
effective. In addition, vast amounts of carbon dioxide are created in
every step of the nuclear fuel cycleboth upstream and
downstream. Even the production of cement and concrete, needed in
the basic construction of the plants and waste-storage facilities,
releases CO2. In addition, all nuclear power plants use electricity for
basic operation from outside sources that burn fossil fuels. Greenpeace
International states that if nuclear power supplied 75 percent of the worlds
electricity, it would result in only a 25 percent reduction in harmful
carbon emissions. Every dollar spent on simple energy-efficiency measures is seven times more
effective in cutting carbon than the billions allocated for nuclear power.

Even doubling the amount of nuclear energy produced

wouldnt solve global warming

World Watch Institute 2006 Nuclear Industry: Headed for

Meltdown?, d/l: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4124 //jl
Washington, DC"Nobody wants any more Chornobyls. The question is, can that outcome be ensured
without phasing out nuclear power altogether?" asks Karen Charman, in "Brave Nuclear World?", the
second in a two-part series on the nuclear power industry. While a key argument for nuclear power these
days is the claim that nuclear reactors are safe and reliable, the regulatory environment in the United
States, coupled with the aging fleets of reactors, has some experts afraid that another serious accident is
while proponents are heralding nuclear energy as a
inevitable. And
possible solution to climate change, doubling the world's current
nuclear energy output would reduce global carbon emissions by just
one-seventh the amount required to avoid the worst impacts of
global warming. "Given nuclear power's drawbacks, and the growth
and promise of clean, lower cost, less dangerous alternatives, the
case for nuclear power wobbles badly. Stripped of the pretext that
nuclear power is the answer to climate change, the case essentially
collapses," writes Charman. In "Nuclear Revival? Don't Bet on It!" Worldwatch Institute President
Christopher Flavin notes that the industry's biggest foes are not environmentalists, but market forces. The
dramatic collapse of the industry in the early 1980s was caused largely by massive cost overruns driven by
expensive safety upgrades after the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania revealed vulnerabilities in
plant designs, which made them more expensive than they were supposed to bedriving some U.S. power
companies to bankruptcy. While nuclear executives argue that improved technologies will allow them to
lower costs this time around, the assertion remains unproven, says Flavin. Data from the few plants
completed in the last few years suggest that they produce electricity at roughly twice the cost of new coal
and gas plants. At least 70 nuclear plants would have to be built in the
next decade just to replace those that are projected to be closed , and
Flavin predicts that nuclear power is more likely to decline than increase in the coming years. Luckily,
renewable sources of power not only provide more electricity today
than nuclear power does, but they are also active, growing
industries, attracting over US$25 billion in new investment last year.

Nuclear power cant be built fast enough to solve warming

Makhijani, 4 - President of the Institute for Energy and

Environmental Research(Arjun, Atomic Myths,
Radioactive Realities: Why Nuclear Power Is a Poor Way to
Meet Energy Needs,24 J. Land Resources & Envtl. L. 61,
2004)

<If the world continues to use oil for transportation (and oil accounts
for about forty percent of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use today,
most of it in the transport sector), 15 a very large number of nuclear
power plants will have to be built in the next four decades to
mitigate carbon dioxide emissions. Most existing coal-fired power plants
would have to be replaced with nuclear ones, and present-day nuclear power
plants (over 400 in all) will have to be retired and replaced with new ones. In
order to make a significant dent in CO2 emissions, at least one-third,
and perhaps one-half or more of the global growth in electricity
demand must be supplied by nuclear power. In any scenario
involving two percent or greater global electricity growth, the use of
nuclear power will mean the construction of thousands of nuclear
power plants in the next four decades. Consider for instance, an
electricity growth rate of two percent, which is far less than that occurring in
China and India, but more or less typical of recent U.S. trends. To make a
substantial contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we
might hypothesize that (i) all present day nuclear power plants will
be replaced by new ones, (ii) half the electricity growth will be
provided by nuclear power, and (iii) half of the world's coal-fired
plants will be replaced by nuclear power plants. This would mean
that about two thousand large (1,000 megawatts each) nuclear power
plants would have to be built over the next four decades. That is a
rate of about one per week. If small plants, like the proposed Pebble Bed
Modular Reactor were built instead, the required rate of construction would
be about three reactors every two days .>

The expansion of nuclear power would have to be more

rapid and substantial than possible to dent warming

Mariotte, 2007- Executive Director of Nuclear Information

and Resource Service (Michael, Nuclear Power in
Responseto Climate Change, November 9,
http://www.cfr.org/publication/14718/nuclear_power_in_res
ponse_to_climate_change.html, REQ)

Environmental advocates considering reconsidering nuclear power

in light of climate change are too late. The accelerating pace of the
climate crisis and the dawning realization that we no longer have
the luxury of a few decades to address the crisis already have made
nuclear power an irrelevant technology in terms of climate. Even if
the nuclear industry had solved the safety, radioactive waste,
proliferation, cost, and other issues that ended its first generation
and it hasnt solved any of those problemsit wouldnt matter. What
nuclear power can offer for climate is simply too little, too late. The major studies that have looked at the
issue MIT, the National Commission on Energy Policy, etc.generally agree that for nuclear to make a
meaningful contribution to carbon emissions reduction would require reactor construction on a massive
scale: 1,200 to 2,000 new reactors worldwide, 200 to 400 in the United States alone. And that would have
to be done over the next 40 to 50 years. Pity poor Japan Steel Works, the worlds major facility for forging
reactor pressure vessels (there is one other, small-capacity facility in Russia): working overtime it can
produce twleve pressure vessels per year. Do the math: Thats less than half of what is needed. Even if
someone put in the billions of dollars and years necessary to build a new forging facility, its still not
enough, not fast enough. There are 104 operable reactors in the United States today. In November 2017,
no matter how much taxpayer money is thrown at the nuclear industry, there will be 104or fewer.
Even with streamlined licensing procedures and certified reactor
designs, it will take ten, twelve years or more to license, build and
bring a single new reactor online. And since most of the reactor
designs being considered are first or second of a kind, count on
them taking even longer. Our energy future ultimately will be
carbon-free and nuclear-free, based primarily on solar and wind
power, energy efficiency, and distributed generation. What is perhaps less
obvious is that the future is now. In the years wed be waiting for that first new reactor to come online, we
can install ten times or more solar and wind capacity, and save twenty times or more that much power
through increased efficiency while building the mass production that reduces costs, especially for
By the time that first reactor could come online, solar could
photovoltaics.
already be cost-competitive, while wind and efficiency already are
cheaper than nuclear. We no longer have ten years to begin reducing
carbon emissions. Waiting around for a few new reactors wont help
our climate, but it would waste the funds needed to implement our
real energy future.

Nuclear power releases CO2 during the harvesting of

uranium used to fuel the power plants

Caldicott, 6 Founder and President of the Nuclear Policy

Research Institute(Helen, Nuclear Power is not the
answer, pg. 4-6)

They were wrong. Although a nuclear power plant itself re leases no

carbon dioxide, the production of nuclear electricity de pends upon a
vast, complex, and hidden industrial infrastructure that is never
featured by the nuclear industry in its propaganda, but that actually
releases a large amount of carbon dioxide as well as other global
warming gases. One is led to believe that the nuclear reactor stands alone,
an autonomous creator of energy. In fact, the vast infrastructure
necessary to create nuclear energy, called the nu clear fuel cycle, is
a prodigious user of fossil fuel and coal. The production of carbon
dioxide (C0 2 ) is one measurement that indicates the amount of
energy used in the production of the nuclear fuel cycle. Most of the
energy used to create nuclear energy-to mine uranium ore for fuel,
to crush and mill the ore, to enrich the uranium, to create the
concrete and steel for the reactor, and to store the thermally and
radioactively hot nuclear waste comes from the consumption of
fossil fuels, that is, coal or oil. When these materials are burned to
produce energy, they form CO 2 (reflecting coal and oil's origins in ancient
trees and other organic carboniferous material laid down under the earth's
crust millions of years ago). For each ton of carbon burned, 3.7 tons of CO 2
gas are added to the atmosphere, and this is the source of today's global
warming.

Nuclear power emits CO2 from uranium enrichment and

reprocessing

Sovacool, 07 - Senior Research Fellow for the Virginia

Center for Coal and Energy Research and professor of
Governmentand International Affairs at Virginia Tech
(Benjamin, What's Really Wrong With Nuclear Power?,
11/30,http://scitizen.com/stories/Future-
Energies/2007/11/What-s-Really-Wrong-With-Nuclear-
Power/)

Environmental costs abound as well. The reprocessing and enrichment of

uranium and plutonium, needed for fuel, often necessitate fossil-
fueled generators that emit significant amounts of carbon dioxide.
At an earlier stage in the nuclear fuel cycle, the mining and milling
of uranium and the operation of nuclear reactors also present grave
dangers to the environment. Abandoned mines, for example, can pose
radioactive risks for as long as 250,000 years after closure. Lets not forget
that nuclear plants produce prodigious amounts of waste that remain
dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of yearslonger than our
civilization has practiced Catholicism, or, more important for some, cultivated
agriculture.
 AT: Anything BUT Nuclear Solves Warming
Nuclear can solve climate change through the global
expansion of enrichment capability- plan reverses that

Squassoni 9 (Sharon, Director and Senior Fellow of the Proliferation

Prevention Program at CSIS, , Nuclear Power: How Much More?,
http://www.npolicy.org/article.php?aid=176&rid=2, 3/25/2009)

The amount of nuclear capacity required to make a signification

contribution to global climate change mitigation is so large that it
would inevitably be widely distributed across the globe. Such a distribution
would have particular implications for nuclear proliferation. However, projected distributions
of nuclear energy out to 2050 are extremely speculative . The industry itself
does not engage in such projections, and countries that set nuclear energy
production goals have a history of widely missing long-range
targets, such as China and India. The discussion below considers a hypothetical
distribution of nuclear energy for 2050, based on the 2003 MIT Study. [12] Scenario III, shown in Figure 7,
uses the High 2050 scenario in Appendix 2 (Global Electricity Demand and the Nuclear Power Growth
Although this is not a
Scenario) of the 2003 MIT study, The Future of Nuclear Power.
distribution designed to achieve optimal CO2 reductions, it is
expansion at a level significant enough (1500 GWe) to have an effect
on CO2 emissions. This would mean a fourfold increase from current
reactor capacity. The MIT study used an underlying assumption that the developed countries
would continue with a modest annual increase in per capita electricity use and the developing countries
would move to the 4000 kWh per person per year benchmark if at all feasible (the 4000 kWh benchmark
being the dividing line between developed and advanced countries). Electricity demand was then pegged
to estimated population growth. Finally, it was assumed that nuclear energy would retain or increase its
current share of electricity generation. The least-off developing countries were assumed in the MIT study
not to have the wherewithal for nuclear energy. It should be noted that MITs 2050 projection was an
attempt to understand what the distribution of nuclear power deployment would be if robust growth were
realized, perhaps driven by a broad commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and a concurrent
resolution of the various challenges confronting nuclear powers acceptance in various countries. A few
countries that the MIT High 2050 case included but are not included here are countries that currently have
A fourfold
laws restricting nuclear energy, such as Austria. Implications for Uranium Enrichment
expansion of nuclear energy would entail significant new production
requirements for uranium enrichment as shown in Figure 8 and
possibly, reprocessing. The MIT study anticipated that 54 states
would have reactor capacities that could possibly justify indigenous
uranium enrichment. If a capability of 10 GWe is considered the threshold at which indigenous
enrichment becomes cost-effective, more than 15 additional states could find it advantageous to engage in
uranium enrichment. Figure 9 depicts what the geographic distribution of enrichment capacity might look
some states
like, based on the development of 10 GWe or more of reactor capacity. Of course,
such as Australia or Kazakhstan might opt to enrich uranium
regardless of domestic nuclear energy capacity, choosing to add
value to their own uranium exports. In addition, states may choose
to take the path of the UAE, which has formally renounced domestic
enrichment and reprocessing in its domestic law, despite aspiring to
reach 10 GWe of capacity. Ultimately, these decisions lie very much
in the political realm, and can be reversed.
 AT: FW/Policy First
Focusing on policy-making first absolves individual
contribution and cedes the political---ensures their
impacts are inevitable and is an independent reason to
vote negative

Trennel 6
Paul, Ph.D of the University of Wales, Department of International Politics, The (Im)possibility of
Environmental Security

Thirdly, it can be claimed that the security mindset channels the obligation to address
environmental issues in an unwelcome direction . Due to terms laid out by the social
contract security is essentially something done by statesthere is no
obligation or moral duty on citizens to provide security In this sense security is
essentially emptyit is not a sign of positive political initiative (Dalby, 1992a: 97-
8). Therefore, casting an issue in security terms puts the onus of action
onto governments , creating a docile citizenry who await instructions
from their leaders as to the next step rather than taking it on their own
backs to do something about pressing concerns. This is unwelcome because
governments have limited incentives to act on environmental issues ,
as their collectively poor track record to date reveals. Paul Brown notes that at present in all the
large democracies the short-term politics of winning the next election and the
need to increase the annual profits of industry rule over the long term
interests of the human race (1996: 10; see also Booth 1991: 348). There is no clearer
evidence for this than the grounds on which George W. Bush explained his
decision to opt out of the Kyoto Protocol: I told the world I thought that Kyoto was a
lousy deal for AmericaIt meant that we had to cut emissions below 1990 levels, which would have meant
I would have presided over massive layoffs and economic destruction (BBC: 2006). The short-term
focus of government elites and the long-term nature of the environmental
threat means that any policy which puts the burden of responsibility on the
shoulders of governments should be viewed with scepticism as this may
have the effect of breeding inaction on environmental issues . Moreover,
governmental legislation may not be the most appropriate route to solving the problem at hand. If
environmental vulnerabilities are to be effectively addressed [t]he routine
behaviour of practically everyone must be altered (Deudney, 1990: 465). In the case of the
environmental sector it is not large scale and intentional assaults but the cumulative effect of small and
seemingly innocent acts such as driving a car or taking a flight that do the damage. Exactly how a
legislative response could serve to alter non-criminal apolitical acts by individuals (Prins, 1993: 176- 177)
which lie beyond established categories of the political is unclear. Andrew Dobson has covered this ground
in claiming that the solution to environmental hazards lies not in piecemeal
legislation but in the fostering of a culture of ecological citizenship . His
call is made on the grounds that legislating on the environment, forcing people to adapt, does
not reach the necessary depth to produce long-lasting change, but merely plugs the problem
temporarily . He cites Italian car-free city days as evidence of this, noting
that whilst selected cities may be free of automobiles on a single
predetermined day, numbers return to previous levels immediately thereafter
(2003: 3). This indicates that the deeper message underlying the policy is not being successfully
conveyed.
Enduring environmental solutions are likely to emerge only
when citizens choose to change their ways because they understand that there
 Such a realisation is unlikely to be prompted by the
exists a pressing need to do so.
top-down, state oriented focus supplied by a security framework .

Intellectualization = projection of responsibility---that

theyve come to a debate tournament and demanded
political action is laughable and demonstrative of their
delusions

Dodds 12 Joseph, MPhil, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK, MA, Psychoanalytic
Studies, Sheffield University, UK BSc, Psychology and Neuroscience, Manchester University, UK, Chartered
Psychologist (CPsychol) of the British Psychological Society (BPS), and a member of several other
professional organizations such as the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, Psychoanalysis and
Ecology at the Edge of Chaos p 48

The split can also take the form of an intellectualization , separating abstract awareness of
the crisis from real emotional engagement (by writing a book on psychoanalysis and climate
change or making a presentation to a conference on the ecological crisis, reached by flying
on a low-cost airline ). General principles are at times more easy to face emotionally than
our personal contributions , the threats to other species easier to acknowledge than the threat to our
own. Thus the abstractness of the issue that can be such a barrier to action can be partly
artificially induced to protect us from feeling . The affect refused in intellectualization can also be
dealt with through displacement onto a different, less threatening target. Winter & Koger (2004: 36)
suggest that environmental concern can be displaced in ineffective but more comfortable
activities such as buying a T-shirt with a whale picture or 'reconnecting' with nature by going
on carbon-emitting flights to exotic lands. On the other hand, eco-anxiety can be displaced
onto other groups and scapegoats, exasperating existing hatred of immigrants or conflicts such as the
War on Terror. Scapegoating mechanisms are always around but they tend to increase during times of anxiety and uncertainty . A good example is the witch
persecutions of the Early Modern Era, which became a focal point, a lightning rod for all kinds of anxieties
(religious, existential, sexual, relational, social and psychological) connected to the transitional period from
the medieval-religious to the modern-scientific world. (For psychoanalytic explorations of this history see
Lyndal Roper's [1994] Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe
and Evelyn Heinemann' s [2000] Witches: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Killing of Women)
Displacement can also result in 'blaming the ecological messenger', in a way comparable to how the
unpalatable insights of psychoanalysis still provoke enough emotion for a whole 'Freud-burying' (Tallis
2009) industry (but like the undead, one burial never seems enough). As Marshall (2005) writes: Climate
change is deeply threatening to anyone whose world view sees increasing personal consumption as a fair
reward for a lifetime's dedication to the growth economy. We all feel small and powerless in the face of a
huge and daunting problem and although we are not actively punished for speaking out against it, we are
hardly well rewarded ... Try bringing it up when a friend shows you their holiday tan and you will see what I
mean. One relevant example here is the Czech President Vaclav Klaus who not only denies outright the
existence of anthropogenic climate change, but even compares environmentalism with Nazism, Fascism
and Stalinism (Dujisin 2007). Others evoke the phrase 'ecofascist' to describe anyone with a vaguely green
agenda. All these responses need to be explored by psychoanalytically informed social theorists and
environmental researchers. In terms of displacement, it is interesting also to consider Marshall's (2005)
comments on certain New Age trends, which, while leading many to care deeply about ecology
through a 'mother earth' spirituality, may provide space for defensive displacements . He
relates the story of a manager of a chain of luxury hotels in Mauritius who said 'we take
these environmental problems very seriously ... we are the first company in Mauritius to
open a Feng Shui hotel' where people 'can reconnect with the natural environment' including
'special Feng Shui meals' where 'everything is rounded to help the movement of the chi forces' (ibid.).
Marshall sees this as emblematic of a certain response to ecological threat, shared by 'the
tourists who identify with the New Age marketing and will pay a premium for the eco-
theming of their air conditioned room' (ibid.). Furthermore, on visiting a large well-known bookshop
he found that while they sold over 30 books on feng shui, they stocked not a single volume on home
In the face of a problem which 80% of people say is a major issue, vastly
energy efficiency.
more people wish to control and manage the movement of chi energy around their house than
the real energy going out through their windows ... It is hard not to think of Feng Shui as the
ideological equivalent of dioxins which occupy and block key receptors in the body which
should be engaging with nutrients ... We chose to replace the daunting and terrifying

environmental problems ... with manageable and entertaining pseudo-environmentalism .

(ibid.)

This is especially true given our positions as debaters and

academics. Our alternative is less utopian and more
pragmatic---as critical theorists our role is to ask
questions to open heuristic spaces for reflection---
obviously we dont change politics, but its better than
pretending to reform a fantasmic system from a cloistered
college campus---this is also a DA to the perm

Pepper 10
Prof Geography Oxford, Utopianism and Environmentalism, Environmental Politics, 14:1, 3-22, SAGE

Conclusion Academic and activist opinion nonetheless frequently argues that Utopian endeavour is
necessary for radical environmentalism and for related movements such as feminism, anarchism and

socialism. Utopianism is important within these movements to inspire hope and provide
'transgressive' spaces , conceptual and real, in which to experiment within alternative
paradigms . To be truly transgressive, rather than lapsing into reactionary fantasy ,
ecotopias need to emphasise heuristic spaces and processes rather than laying down
blueprints , and must be rooted in existing social and economic relations rather than being merely a form
of abstraction unrelated to the processes and situations operating in today's 'real' world. This paper
suggests that by these criteria, the transgressiveness of ecotopianism is ambiguous and limited. Deep
ecological and bioregional literature, for instance, can seem regressively removed from
today's world. Anti-modernism is evident, for instance, in the form of future primitivism and the
predilection for small-scale 're-embedded' societies echoing "traditional cultures'. Blueprinting is also
suggested by the strong metanarratives driven by (ecological) science. There is a
remarkable consensus amongst ideologically diverse ecotopian perspectives about what
should be in ecotopia, leaving relatively little as provisional and reflexive . Additionally, idealism
in the negative sense is often rife in ecotopianism. However, idealism pervades reformist as well

as radical environmentalism , and the principles behind ecological modernisation - the much-
favoured mainstream policy discourse about the environment are founded on premises that
can be described as 'Utopian* in the pejorative sense used by Marxists. That is, they do not
adequately and accurately take into account the socioeconomic dynamics of the capitalist
system they are meant to reform . Thus they fail to recognise that social-democratic and
'third way' attempts to realise an environmentally sound, humane, inclusive and egalitarian
capitalism are ultimately headed for failure . Notwithstanding these limitations of ecotopianism,
given that the environmental problems featured in dystopian fiction for over a century seem increasingly
to be materialising, it may be that we will soon be clutching at ecotopias as beacons affirming Bloch's
'principle of hope* (1986). And what of those who, despite these deepening environmental problems, still
maintain that 'ecotopia' is Utopian fantasy in the worst sense, while considering their reformist visions to
be pragmatic and attainable? These "hard-nosedrealists*, as Terry Eagleton (2000, p.33) ironically calls
them, "who behave as though chocolate chip cookies and the IMF will be with us in another
3000 years time", should realise that although the future may or may not be pleasant: to
deny that it will be quite different in the manner of post-histoire philosophising, is to offend
against the very realism on which such theorists usually pride themselves. To claim that
human affairs might feasibly be much improved is an eminently realistic proposition

It calls into question the epistemological basis for their

harms and solvency---means the alt is a prior question to
determine whether the 1ac claims are true--- its the most
basic question in environmental policy-making

Doremus 2k
Holly Doremus is Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-faculty director of the
California Center for Environmental Law and Policy "The Rhetoric and Reality of Nature Protection:Toward a
New Discourse" 1-1-2000scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1311&context=wlulr

Rhetoric matters . That is almost too basic to be worth saying , but it bears repeating
because sometimes the rhetoric we use to describe problems becomes so ingrained as to be
almost invisible . Even if we are unaware of it, though, rhetoric has the very real effect of
severely constraining our perception of a problem and its potential solutions . Terminology is
one aspect of rhetoric. The words we use to describe the world around us condition our response to that
Whether we use the word "swamps" or "wetlands," for example, may determine
world.
whether we drain or protect those areas.1 Not surprisingly, the battle to control terminology is
an important one in the environmental context .2 But there is far more to the rhetoric of law. The
way words are put together to form stories and discourses shapes the law and society .
Stories , which put a human face on concerns that might otherwise go unnoticed, exert a
powerful emotional tug .3 "Discourses," loose collections of concepts and ideas, provide a shared
language for envisioning problems and solutions .4
 AT: Perm
Cant sever their reps---allows aff conditionality and
causes argumentative irresponsibility that jacks negative
ground---their language uses are a strategic choice that
they should have to defend

Trennel 6
Paul, Ph.D of the University of Wales, Department of International Politics, The (Im)possibility of
Environmental Security

With the understanding of security as a performative rather than descriptive act in place the debate over
under the speech
environmental security takes on a new character. As Ole Waever has detailed,
act conception of security, the use of the security label does not merely
reflect whether a problem is a security problem, it is also a political choice ,
that is a decision for conceptualization a special way. When an issue is
securitized the act itself tends to lead to certain ways of
addressing it (Waever, 1995: 65). Therefore, the focus shifts from the question
of whether the environment is in reality a threat to human well
being the question which underpinned the early work on the topic by those such as Mathews and
Ullman and onto the issue of whether the conditions invoked by
applying the security tag are desirable for addressing the issue at hand.
As Huysmans has said One has to decideif one wants to approach a problem in
security terms or notthe is-question automatically turns into a should-question (1998: 234,
249). The response to the should-question of environmental security is dependent on whether or not the
way in which security organizes social relations can be seen as beneficial to the attempt to develop
effective environmental policy.

The alt cannot incorporate environmental threat

construction---rethinking has to come before policy
deliberation to ensure the new politics of the alt are
effective

Dalby 99
Simon, Asst Prof Intl Affairs @ Carleton, Contested Grounds, p158-9

Butthere is much more than an academic research agenda involved in these discussions. The
debate about environmental security is about how politics will be rethought and policy
reoriented after the Cold War. Conflating this and the academic agenda often simply causes confusion.8
The use of the term by the U.N. Development Program and the Commission on Global Governance
suggests clearly a political exercise about whose issues are part of the international policy agenda. It is
policymakers and institutions with specific political interests will
also to be expected that
attempt to co-opt advocates of positions and arguments that they find useful . The military
can sometimes be green when it suits its institutional purpose, and intelligence agencies may
also seek roles in monitoring environmental trends.9 In this process it is not surprising that broad
generalizations proliferate along with assumptions of common global interests among all peoples. But
global or universal political claims often have a nasty habit of turning out to be parochial concerns dressed
much of the
up in universalist garb to justify much narrower political interests. This chapter argues that
policy literature linking environmental issues and security (broadly defined) is in danger of
overlooking important political issues unless analysts are alert to the persistent dangers of
the traditional ethnocentric and geopolitical assumptions in Anglo-American security
thinking.10 Security thinking is only partly an academic discourse, it is, as recent analysts
have made clear much more importantly part of the process of international politics and the
formation of American foreign policy in particular. This suggests that if old ideas of
security are added to new concerns about the environment the policy results may not be
anything like what the original advocates of environmental security had in mind . There are
a number of very compelling arguments already in print that suggest some considerable
difficulties with the positing of environmental security as a "progressive" political
discourse .12 While the argument in this chapter*acknowledges the efficacy of the case against
environmental security as a policy focus, the point of departure takes seriously the political desire to
fundamentally rethink the whole concept of security as a strategy to reorient political
thinking and extend definitions of security, of who and what should be rendered secure, and also who
would be the political agents providing these new forms of security. While these progressive ideas may
they are interesting both because they shed light
be a minority concern on the political landscape,
on conventional thinking and because they suggest possibilities for rethinking conventional
state-dominated political concepts and practices. Examining the environmental security
literature in the light of these arguments suggests some fundamental critiques of the global
order that has been in part "secured" by a: geopolitical understanding of American
national security through the Cold War period. Further, and of primary concern to this chapter, this is
especially clear when the environmental security discourse is confronted by the issues of global justice in
terms of a "Southern critique" of the double standards and inequities in some high profile Northern
These lines of argument suggest that unless the term security is
environmentalist policies.
understood in substantially different ways in the new circumstances of the 1990s, it is quite
possible that environmental security may turn out to be just another addition to the
traditional Cold War American policy concerns with national and international security
that usually operated to maintain the global political and economic status quo .

The impact is global wars and violence in the name of

environmental and resource protection---you should be
skeptical of their epistemology

Kumari 12
Masters in International Relations; educated at University of Nottingham and The University of Birmingham
(Parmila, Securitising The Environment: A Barrier To Combating Environment Degradation Or A Solution In
Itself?, www.e-ir.info/2012/01/29/securitising-the-environment-a-barrier-to-combating-environment-
degradation-or-a-solution-in-itself/) [table omitted]

The Dilemma should by now be apparent; securitising environmental issues runs the risk
that the strategic/realist approach will coopt and colonise the environmental agenda rather
than respond positively to environmental proble ms. (Barnett 2001:137) The realist take on
security in the post-WWII period still holds a firm grasp today, so that the state is still the referent
object of security and it is still its sovereignty which is to be secured against the threat of states. The
in the context of the environment, this makes no sense because the traditional
problem is that,
focus of national security (interstate violence) has nothing to do with the focus of
environmental degradation (human impact on the environment). Furthermore, talking of
national security is too restrictive because a states ecological footprint may cross its
sovereign domain. The wealthiest 20% of the worlds population consume 84% of all paper, use 87% of
the worlds vehicles and emit 53% of all C0. Yet those least responsible suffer the effects the most. This is
because wastes are exported to and resources come from the Southern poorer countries, so
that their lands experience resource depletion and extraction (Barnett 2001:13). A focus on national
security selects the military, because environmental degradation is viewed as having the potential to
destabilise regional balances of power (Hough 2004:13-16). One only wonders how the military alone could
prevent the effects of depletion and extraction. The environmental-conflict literature is a good example
The narrative
where traditional national security concerns have been linked with the environment.
within this discourse is that environment degradation will lead to resource scarcities, which will
make the developing countries more militarily confrontational towards the industrialised states
(Barnett 2001:38). Conflict over scarce resources undermines the security of the state (Detraz
and Betsill 2009:305), so it is the state which is to be protected . Emphasis on such an account

is undesirable for many reasons. Firstly, it is untrue that the only consequence of
environmental degradation is conflict. Bogardi and Brauch have noted how environmental security
involves freedom from want (economic and social security dimensions), freedom from hazard impacts (natural or human-induced
hazards as effects of environmental degradation) and freedom from fear (violence and conflict) (Brauch 2008: 17-8). This

demonstrates how conflict is but one consequence of degradation. Environmental-conflict literature

ignores the root socioeconomic causes and hazard impact dimensions of environmental
security; a focus on which would lead to conclusions of undertaking non-military efforts like disaster
preparedness, adaptation, mitigation, early warning systems etc (Brauch 2008:17-8), and economic
solutions like pricing goods to reflect the costs of their provision (Mathews (1989:172). Secondly, the
assertion that environmental degradation is a primary reason of conflict is purely
speculative (Barnett 2003:10). Barnett suggests that the evidence provided in support is a
collection of historical events chosen to support the conflict-scarcity storyline and reify the
realist assumption that eventually humans will resort to violence (Barnett 2001:66). This is
as opposed to acknowledging that humans are equally capable of adapting . Thirdly,
research shows that it is abundance of resources which drives competition, not scarcity
(Barnet 2003:11). This makes sense because any territorial conquest to obtain resources will be expensive.
A poor country suffering from resource scarcity would not be able to afford an offensive war (Deudney
environmental-conflict literature
1990: 309-11). The second and third points mean that
coun teracts any attempts at solving the problem of environmental degradation . The
discourse attributes high intentionality to people-because of scarcity they decide to become
violent. This ignores the fact that human actions are not intended to harm the environment.
The high intentionality given to people prevents them from being seen as victims who need help. Instead
This view can exacerbate ethnic tensions as the state
they are pictured as threats to state security.
uses minority groups as scapegoats for environmental degradation . It also means that only
those involved in conflict are relevant to environmental security, not those who are vulnerable
(Detraz and Betsill 2009:307-15). In this way the South is scripted as primeval Other (Barnett
2001:65), where order can only be maintained by the intervention of the North, rather than by the
provision of aid. The Norths agency in creating the environmental problems is completely
erased . Instead environmental degradation is seen from the perspective of the individual state,
questioning how it could affect the state, i.e. increased migration (Allenby 2000:18) and this leads to the
adoption of narrow policies. Saad has said that securitising the environment in this way allows
the North to justify intervening and forcing developing nations to follow policies which
encapsulate the Norths norms (Saad 1991:325-7). In this way the powerful become stronger, and the weak
weaker. This view may affect the Souths relations with the North. For example, Detraz and Betsill have
commented on tensions between the North and South in the 2007 United Nations Security Council debate
on climate change. Only 29% of the Southern states compared to 70% of Northern speakers supported the
idea of the Security Council being a place to develop a global response to climate change. The reasons for
this difference was that shifting decision-making to the Security Council would make Southern states
unable to promote efficiently their interests in obtaining resources for climate adaptation and mitigation
Northern countries were avoiding
plans. Furthermore, Egypt and India argued that in suggesting this
their responsibilities for controlling greenhouse gases, by trying to shift attention to the
need to address potential climate-related conflict in the South (Detraz and Betsill 2009:312).
In this way environmental security becomes a barrier because the traditional (realist)
concept of security is used to immobilise any action towards dealing with the root causes of
environmental degradation.
 Turns Case/ AT: No Impact
Securitization undermines cooperation---turns case

Trombetta 8
Maria Julia Trombetta is a postdoctoral re- searcher at the department of Economics of. Infrastructures,
Delft University of Technology, Environmental security and climate change: analysing the discourse, Outh
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Volume 21, Number 4, December 2008

Opponents were quick to warn that the term 'security' evokes a set of confrontational
practices associated with the state and the military which should be kept apart from
the environmental debate (Deudney 1990). Concerns included the possibilities of creating
new competencies for the military militarizing the environment rather than
greening security (Kakonen 1994)or the rise of nationalistic attitudes in order to protect
the national environment (Deudney 1999, 466-468). Deudney argued that not only are practices and
institutions associated with national security inadequate to deal with environmental problems,
but security can also introduce a zero-sum rationality to the environmental debate that can create
winners and losers, and undermine the cooperative efforts required by environmental problems. Similar
objections came from a southern perspective: environmental
security was perceived as a discourse
about the security of northern countries, their access to resources and the protection
of their patterns of consumption (Shiva 1994; Dalby 1999; Barnett 2001). Although the debate waxed and
waned, the concept slowly gained popularity. In April 2007 the security implications of climate change were discussed by
the United Nations (UN) Security Council but the state representatives remained divided over the opportunity of
considering climate change and, more generally, environmental degradation as a security issue (United Nations Security
Council 2007). The divide between those who oppose the use of the term environmental security by arguing that the logic
of security is fixed and inflexible and those who support it by suggesting that the logic of security should be changed
distracts attention away from the question of whether practices associated with providing security have been transformed
by environmental security discourses. In the literature there is a debate about whether and how security
language transforms the method of dealing with an issue the debate focuses 'on the
implications of using security language for the definition and governance of migration and
the environment' (Huysmans 2006, 16)but there is little on the reverse process or on the implications of using
environmental language for the definition and governance of security. This article is an attempt to develop the latter type
of analysis by exploring the meaning and function of environmental and climate security. The purpose is to consider how
the use of a word in different contexts challenges and transforms the practices and
meanings associated with it. It aims to explore 'what the practices of definition and usage do to a concept, and
what the concept in turn does to the world into which it is inscribed' (Bartelson 2000,182). To undertake this
analysis it is necessary to explore how different discourses about environmental and
climate security have developed and 'conditioned the possibility of thought and
action' (181). The article is presented in three parts. The first explores why the environment has been excluded from
security considerations. By adopting a perspective that is attentive to the social construction

of security issues and its implications, the article assesses the potential of a discursive
approach in transforming existing security practices . The analysis draws on the theory of
securitization elaborated by the Copenhagen School (inter alia Buzan and Waever 1998) and integrates it with elements
borrowed from Beck's work (inter alia 1992, 1999, 2006) on risk society to provide a framework that accounts for
transformation. It argues that the securitization of environmental issues can reorient security
logics and practices. The second and third parts apply this framework to explore the development of
environmental security and climate security discourses respectively.
 AT: Securitizing Inevitable
It is possible to overcome defensive anxiety
mechanisms---dont be blackmailed by their inevitability
args---you can just vote neg

Smith 12
Daniel Smith is the author of Muses, Madmen, and Prophets and a contributor to numerous publications,
including The American Scholar, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate "Its Still the Age of
Anxiety. Or Is It?" opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/its-still-the-age-of-anxiety-or-is-it/
Its hard to believe that anyone but scholars of modern literature or paid critics have read W.H. Audens dramatic poem The Age of
Anxiety all the way through, even though it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948, the year after it was published. It is a difficult work allusive,
allegorical, at times surreal. But more to the point, its boring. The characters meet, drink, talk and walk around; then they drink, talk and walk
around some more. They do this for 138 pages; then they go home. Audens title, though: that people know. From the moment it appeared,
has been used to characterize the consciousness of our era, the
the phrase

awareness of everything perilous about the modern world: the degradation of the environment,
nuclear energy , religious fundamentalism, threats to privacy and the family, drugs, pornography, violence,
terrorism. Since 1990, it has appeared in the title or subtitle of at least two dozen books on subjects ranging from science to politics
to parenting to sex (Mindblowing Sex in the Real World: Hot Tips for Doing It in the Age of Anxiety). As a sticker on the bumper of the
the age of anxiety has been ubiquitous for more than six
Western world,

decades now. But is it accurate? As someone who has struggled with chronic anxiety for many years, I have my doubts. For one
thing, when youve endured anxietys insults for long enough the gnawed fingernails and sweat-drenched underarms, the hyperventilating
and crippling panic attacks calling the 20th century The Age of Anxiety starts to sound like calling the 17th century The Age of the
Throbbing Migraine: so metaphorical as to be meaningless. From a sufferers perspective, anxiety is always and absolutely personal. It is an
experience: a coloration in the way one thinks, feels and acts. It is a petty monster able to work such humdrum tricks as paralyzing you over
your salad, convincing you that a choice between blue cheese and vinaigrette is as dire as that between life and death. When you are on
intimate terms with something so monumentally subjective, it is hard to think in terms of epochs. And yet it is undeniable that ours is an age
in which an enormous and growing number of people suffer from anxiety. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety
disorders now affect 18 percent of the adult population of the United States, or about 40 million people. By comparison, mood disorders
depression and bipolar illness, primarily affect 9.5 percent. That makes anxiety the most common psychiatric complaint by a wide margin,
and one for which we are increasingly well-medicated. Last spring, the drug research firm IMS Health released its annual report on
pharmaceutical use in the United States. The anti-anxiety drug alprazolam better known by its brand name, Xanax was the top
psychiatric drug on the list, clocking in at 46.3 million prescriptions in 2010. Just because our anxiety is heavily diagnosed and medicated,
however, doesnt mean that we are more anxious than our forebears. It might simply mean that we are better treated that we are, as
individuals and a culture, more cognizant of the minds tendency to spin out of control. Earlier eras might have been even more

Fourteenth-century Europe, for example, experienced

jittery than ours.
devastating famines, waves of pillaging mercenaries, peasant
revolts, religious turmoil and a plague that wiped out as much as
half the population in four years. The evidence suggests that all this resulted in mass
convulsions of anxiety, a period of psychic torment in which, as one historian has put it, the more one

knew, the less sense the world made . Nor did the monolithic presence of the
Church necessarily help; it might even have made things worse . A firm
belief in God and heaven was near-universal, but so was a firm belief in their opposites: the Devil and hell.
And you could never be certain in which direction you were headed. Its hard to imagine that we
have it even close to as bad as that . Yet there is an aspect of anxiety that we
clearly have more of than ever before: self-awareness . The inhabitants of earlier
eras might have been wracked by nerves, but none fixated like we do on the condition. Indeed, none even
Anxiety didnt emerge as a cohesive psychiatric
considered anxiety a condition.
concept until the early 20th century, when Freud highlighted it as
the nodal point at which the most various and important questions
converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light upon our
whole mental existence. After that, the number of thinkers and artists who sought to solve this riddle increased exponentially. By
1977, the psychoanalyst Rollo May was noting an explosion in papers, books and studies on the subject. Anxiety, he wrote, has certainly
come out of the dimness of the professional office into the bright light of the marketplace. None of this is to say that ours is a

serene age. Obviously it isnt. It is to say, however, that we shouldnt be possessive about our
uncertainties , particularly as one of the dominant features of anxiety is
its recursiveness. Anxiety begins with a single worry , and the more you concentrate on
that worry, the more powerful it gets, and the more you worry. One of the best things you
can do is learn to let go : to disempower the worry altogether . If you start to believe
that anxiety is a foregone conclusion if you start to believe the hype about the times we
live in then you risk surrendering the battle before its begun.
 AT: Alt Doesnt Solve
Reframing solves all of their motivation offense---we can
reconstitute our relationship to the environment through
ethical and local justifications

Deudney 99
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT JOHNS HOPKINS, 1999 ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY A
CRITIQUE, CONTESTED GROUNDS, ED. DEUDNEY & MATTHEW, P. EBOOK

Fortunately, environmental awareness need not depend upon co-opted

national security thinking. Integrally woven into ecological
concerns are a powerful set of interests and valuesmost notably
human health and property values, religions and ethics, and
natural beauty and concern for future generations. Efforts to raise
awareness of environmental problems can thus connect directly
with these strong, basic, and diverse human interests and values as
sources of motivation and mobilization. Far from needing to be
bolstered by national security mindsets, a "green" sensibility can
make strong claim to being the master metaphor for an emerging
postindustrial civilization. Instead of attempting to gain leverage by
appropriating national security thinking, environmentalists can
gain much more political leverage by continuing to develop and
disseminate this immensely rich and powerful worldview. Earth Nationalism
Transposing existing national security thinking and approaches to
environmental politics is likely to be both ineffective, and to the
extent effective, counterproductive. But the story should not end
with this negative conclusion. Fully grasping the ramifications of
the emerging environmental problems requires a radical
rethinking and reconstitution of many of the major institutions of industrial modernity, including the nation. The nation
and the national, as scholars on the topic emphasize, are complex phenomena because so many different components of identity
have become conflated with or incorporated into national identities. Most important in Western constructions of national identity
have been ethnicity, religion, language, and war memories. However, one dimension of the nationalidentification with place
has been underappreciated, and this dimension opens important avenues for reconstructing identity in ecologically appropriate
ways. Identification with a particular physical place, what geographers of place awareness refer to as "geopiety" and "topophilia,"
has been an important component of national identity.35 As Edmund Burke, the great philosopher of nationalism, observed, the
sentimental attachment to place is among the most elemental widespread and powerful of forces, both in humans and in animals.
In the modern era the nation-state has sought to shape and exploit this sentimental attachment. With the growth of ecological
problems, this sense of place and threat to place takes on a new character. In positing the "bioregion" as the appropriate unit for
environmentalists are recovering and redefining
political identity,
topophilia and geopiety in ways that subvert the state-constructed
and state-supporting nation. Whether the bioregion is understood
as a particular locality defined by ecological parameters, or the entire planet as
the only naturally autonomous bioregion, environmentalists are asserting what can appropriately be called "earth nationalism." 36
This construction of the nation has radical implications for existing state and international political communities. This emergent
earth nationalism is radical both in the sense of returning to fundamental roots, and in posing a fundamental challenge to the state-
It also entails a powerful
sponsored and defined concept of nation now hegemonic in world politics.
and fresh way to conceptualize environmental protection as the
practice of national security.
 1NC Warming Good Frontline
No Impact and good for the environment- Laundry List

Singer 8
(President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project and Distinguished Research
Professor @ George Mason, Prof. Emeritus Environmental Science @ UVA and First Director of
the National Weather Satellite Service. Fred, Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate,
Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on
Climate Change)//TR

We also discuss the many shortcomings of climate models in trying to simulate what is happening in the
real atmosphere. If the human contribution to global warming due to increased levels of greenhouse gases
is insignificant, why do greenhouse gas models calculate large temperature increases, i.e., show high
models ignore the
values of climate sensitivity? The most likely explanation is that
negative feedbacks that occur in the real atmosphere. New observations
reported from satellites suggest it is the distribution of water vapor that could
produce such strong negative feedbacks. If current warming is not due to increasing
greenhouse gases, what are the natural causes that might be responsible for both warming and cooling
episodes as so amply demonstrated in the historic, pre-industrial climate record? Empirical evidence
that the main cause of warming and cooling on a
suggests very strongly
decadal scale derives from solar activity via its modulation of cosmic
rays that in turn affect atmospheric cloudiness. According to published research,
cosmic-ray variations are also responsible for major climate changes observed in the paleo-record going
back 500 million years. ! The third question concerns the effects of modest warming. A major scare
associated with a putative future warming is a rapid rise in sea level, but even the IPCC has been scaling
there will be little if any acceleration, and
back its estimates. We show here that
therefore no additional increase in the rate of ongoing sea level rise.
This holds true even if there is a decades-long warming, whether
natural or manmade. Other effects of a putative increase in
temperature and carbon dioxide are likely to be benign, promoting
not only the growth of crops and forests but also benefiting human
health. Ocean acidification is not judged to be a problem, as indicated by available
data. After all, CO2 levels have been up to 20 times the present value
during the Phanerozoic Period, the past 500 million years. During this time
Earths climate has been remarkably stable, with no run-away
greenhouse effects indicating strong negative feedbacks. If, for
whatever reason, a modest warming were to occur even one that matches
temperatures seen during the Medieval Warm Period of around 1100 AD or the much larger ones recorded
during the Holocene Climate Optimum of some 6,000 years ago the impact would not be
damaging but would probably be, on the whole, beneficial. [Lamb 1982, and Figure 26] ! Policy
Implications ! Our findings, if sustained, point to natural causes and a moderate warming trend with
beneficial effects for humanity and wildlife. This has obvious policy implications: Schemes proposed for
controlling CO2 emissions, including the Kyoto Protocol, proposals in the U.S. for federal and state actions,
and proposals for a successor international treaty to Kyoto, are unnecessary, would be ineffective if
implemented, and would waste resources that can better be applied to genuine societal problems [Singer,
Even if a substantial part of global
Revelle and Starr 1991; Lomborg 2007].
warming were due to greenhouse gases and it is not any control
efforts currently contemplated would give only feeble results. For
example, the Kyoto Protocol even if punctiliously observed by all
participating nations would decrease calculated future
temperatures by only 0.02 degrees C by 2050 [re-calculated from Parry et al.
1998], an undetectable amount
Current CO2 levels prevent an ice age

Science Daily, 2007

(Science Daily Next Ice Age Delayed By Rising Carbon
Dioxide Levels. August 30 2007.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070829193
436.htm)
Future ice ages may be delayed by up to half a million years by our burning of fossil fuels. That is the
implication of recent work by Dr Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and
Earth Science at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.Arguably, this work demonstrates the
most far-reaching disruption of long-term planetary processes yet suggested for human activity.Dr
Tyrrell's team used a mathematical model to study what would happen to marine chemistry in a world
with ever-increasing supplies of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.The world's oceans are absorbing
CO2 from the atmosphere but in doing so they are becoming more acidic. This in turn is dissolving the
calcium carbonate in the shells produced by surface-dwelling marine organisms, adding even more
carbon to the oceans. The outcome is elevated carbon dioxide for far longer than previously assumed.
Computer modelling in 2004 by a then oceanography undergraduate student at the University, Stephanie
Castle, first interested Dr Tyrrell and colleague Professor John Shepherd in the problem. They
subsequently developed a theoretical analysis to validate the plausibility of the phenomenon.The work,
which is part-funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, confirms earlier ideas of David
Archer of the University of Chicago, who first estimated the impact rising CO2 levels would have on
the timing of the next ice age.Dr Tyrrell said: 'Our research shows why atmospheric CO2 will not return
to pre-industrial levels after we stop burning fossil fuels. It shows that it if we use up all known fossil
fuels it doesn't matter at what rate we burn them. The result would be the same if we burned them at
present rates or at more moderate rates; we would still get the same eventual ice-age-prevention
result.'Ice ages occur around every 100,000 years as the pattern of Earth's orbit alters over time.
Changes in the way the sun strikes the Earth allows for the growth of ice caps, plunging the Earth into
an ice age. But it is not only variations in received sunlight that determine the descent into an ice age;
levels of atmospheric CO2 are also important.Humanity has to date burnt about 300 Gt C of fossil fuels.
This work suggests that even if only 1000 Gt C (gigatonnes of carbon) are eventually burnt (out of total
reserves of about 4000 Gt C) then it is likely that the next ice age will be skipped. Burning all
recoverable fossil fuels could lead to avoidance of the next five ice ages.

This causes extinction by 2020

Chapman 8
geophysicist and astronautical engineer, 2008
(Phil Chapman. April 23 2008 Sorry to ruin the fun, but
an ice age cometh.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,235
83376-7583,00.html)
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into
another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850. There is no doubt that the next little ice age
would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There
are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially
in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will
decrease it. Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to
compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases. There is also another possibility, remote but
much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe
glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet. The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North
America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted
occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years. The interglacial
we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years
ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in
global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years. The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may
not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in
typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in
2027. By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice,
and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining. Australia may
escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation
starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.

Global warming will melt the arctic

Schneider 04
SCHNEIDER 2004 (Doug, NewsVOA.com, October 22,
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2004-10/2004-10-22-voa61.cfm?
CFID=12777931&CFTOKEN=29167729)

More than 250 scientists from around the Arctic spent four years compiling the report for the
Arctic Council, an organization of government officials, scientists and indigenous people from Canada, Denmark, Finland,
Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Russia and the United States. The report is expected to conclude that the Arctic is
undergoing dramatic environmental change as a result of a climate that has warmed an average of five
degrees in recent decades. Among the changes are disappearing sea ice, melting permafrost and glaciers ,
and the colonization of the tundra by trees and shrubs. The report also draws on five separate computer models to
predict the Arctic's future climate. Weller says that while each model offers somewhat different
scenarios, they all point to an Arctic with much less ice and snow in coming decades.

Melting Arctic will allow Russia access to new oil fields

CSM 07
Fred Weir, writer for the Christian Science monitor, July
31, 2007, As icecaps melt, Russia races for Arctic's
resources, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0731/p01s01-
woeu.html
As milder temperatures make exploration of the Arctic sea floor possible for the first time, Russia's
biggest-ever research expedition to the region is steaming toward the immense scientific prestige of
being the first to explore the seabed of the world's crown. In the next few days, two manned minisubs
will be launched through a hole blasted in the polar ice to scour the ocean floor nearly three miles
below. They will gather rock samples and plant a titanium Russian flag to symbolize Moscow's claim
over 460,000 square miles of hitherto international territory an area bigger than France and Germany
combined in a region estimated to contain a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves.
The issue of who owns the North Pole, now administered by the International Seabed Authority, has
long been regarded as academic since the entire region is locked in year-round impenetrable ice. But
with global warming thinning the icecaps, the question has vaulted to the front burner. "The No. 1
reason for the urgency about this is global warming, which makes it likely that a very large part of the
Arctic will become open to economic exploitation in coming decades," says Alexei Maleshenko, an
expert with the Carnegie Center in Moscow. "The race for the North Pole is becoming very exciting."
 The US Geological Survey estimates that 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves lie
beneath the Arctic Ocean. Experts at the Russian Institute of Oceanology calculate that the saddle-
shaped territory that Russia is planning to claim may contain up to 10 billion tons of petroleum, plus
other mineral resources and vast, untapped fishing stocks. Russia stakes its claim The 1982 Law of the
Sea Convention establishes a 12-mile offshore territorial limit for each country, plus a 200-mile
"economic zone" in which it has exclusive rights. But the law leaves open the possibility that the
economic zone can be extended if it can be proved that the seafloor is actually an extension of a
country's geological territory. In 2001, Russia submitted documents to the United Nations (UN)
claiming that the Lomonosov Ridge, which underlies the Arctic Ocean, is actually an extension of the
Siberian continental shelf and should therefore be treated as Russian territory. The case was rejected.
But a group of Russian scientists returned from a six-week Arctic mission in June insisting that they had
uncovered solid evidence to support the Russian claim. That paved the way for the current expedition,
which includes the giant nuclear-powered icebreaker Rossiya, the huge research ship Akademik
Fyodorov, two Mir deep-sea submersibles previously used to explore the wreck of the Titanic and
about 130 scientists. The subs were tested Sunday, near Franz-Joseph Land in the frozen Barents Sea,
and found to be working well. "It was the first-ever dive of manned vehicles under the Arctic ice,"
Anatoly Sagelevich, one of the pilots, told the official ITAR-Tass agency. "We now know that we can
perform this task." The upcoming dive beneath the North Pole will be far more difficult, and involve
collecting evidence about the age, sediment thickness, and types of rock, as well as other data all of
which will be presented to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (a
body of scientists chosen by parties to the Law of the Sea Convention) to support Russia's claim to the
territory.

Warming good crop gains, CO2 fertilizer, negligible

losses

Gillis 11
(Environmental specialist staff writer for the New York
Times) 2011 (Justin, Global Warming Reduces Expected
Yields of Harvests in Some Countries, Study Says, May 5,
2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/science/earth/06war
ming.html)
Some countries saw small gains from the temperature increases, however. And in all countries, the extra
carbon dioxide that humans are pumping into the air acted as a fertilizer that encouraged plant growth,
offsetting some of the losses from rising temperatures caused by that same greenhouse gas.
Consequently, the studys authors found that when the gains in some countries were weighed against the
losses in others, the overall global effect of climate change has been small so far: losses of a few
percentage points for wheat and corn from what they would have been without climate change. The
overall impact on production of rice and soybeans was negligible, with gains in some regions entirely
offsetting losses in others.

Turnwarming is key to oceans

Idso 10
President of the CO2 Magazine, PhD in Botany (Craig,
"Study: Global Warming Will Benefit Marine Life,"
Heartland Newspaper, October)
 Seventeen Australian and Canadian scientists have published a study in the peer-reviewed journal
Global Change Biology concluding global warming will benefit marine life. The study finds "climate
change is altering the rate and distribution of primary production in the world's oceans," which in turn
"plays a fundamental role in structuring marine food webs which are "critical to maintaining
biodiversity and supporting fishery catches." Hence, the studys authors write they are keen to examine
what the future might hold in this regard, noting, "effects of climate-driven production change on
marine ecosystems and fisheries can be explored using food web models that incorporate ecological
interactions such as predation and competition. The scientists first used the output of an ocean general
circulation model driven by a "plausible" greenhouse gas emissions scenario (IPCC 2007 scenario A2)
to calculate changes in climate over a 50-year time horizon. The results were then fed into a suite of
models for calculating primary production of lower trophic levels (phytoplankton, macroalgae,
seagrass, and benthic microalgae), after which the results of the latter set of calculations were used as
input to "twelve existing Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) dynamic marine food web models to describe
different Australian marine ecosystems." The protocol predicted positive "changes in fishery catch,
fishery value, biomass of animals of conservation interest, and indicators of community composition.
The 17 scientists state under the IPCC's "plausible climate change scenario, primary production will
increase around Australia" with "overall positive linear responses of functional groups to primary
production change," and "generally this benefits fisheries catch and value and leads to increased
biomass of threatened marine animals such as turtles and sharks." The calculated responses "are robust
to the ecosystem type and the complexity of the model used," In the concluding sentence of their paper,
the authors state the primary production increases their work suggests will result from future IPCC-
envisioned greenhouse gas emissions and their calculated impacts on climate "will provide
opportunities to recover overfished fisheries, increase profitability of fisheries and conserve threatened
biodiversity." Those highly positive consequences are a great contrast to climate alarmists claims that
global warming would be an unmitigated climate catastrophe.

Food crises are coming now - only CO2 can sustain

agricultural growth

Parry & Hawkesford 11

Retired Sargeant AND Fellow at Rothamstead Research
for Environmental Research (M.A.J. and M.J., "Meeting the
Food Needs of a Growing World Population," NIPCC
Report, July)
Parry and Hawkesford (2010) introduce their study of the global problem by noting that "food
production needs to increase 50% by 2030 and double by 2050 to meet projected demands," and they
note that at the same time the demand for food is increasing, production is progressively being limited
by "non-food uses of crops and cropland," such as the production of biofuels, stating that in their
homeland of the UK, "by 2015 more than a quarter of wheat grain may be destined for bioenergy
production," which surely must strike one as both sad and strange, when they also note that "currently,
at least one billion people are chronically malnourished and the situation is deteriorating," with more
people "hungrier now than at the start of the millennium."So what to do about it: that is the question the
two researchers broach in their review of the sad situation. They begin by describing the all-important
process of photosynthesis, by which the earth's plants "convert light energy into chemical energy, which
is used in the assimilation of atmospheric CO2 and the formation of sugars that fuel growth and yield,"
which phenomena make this natural and life-sustaining process, in their words, "a major target for
improving crop productivity both via conventional breeding and biotechnology." Next to a plant's need
for carbon dioxide comes its need for water, the availability of which, in the words of Parry and
Hawkesford, "is the major constraint on world crop productivity." And they state that "since more than
80% of the [world's] available water is used for agricultural production, there is little opportunity to use
additional water for crop production, especially because as populations increase, the demand to use
water for other activities also increases." Hence, they rightly conclude that "a real and immediate
challenge for agriculture is to increase crop production with less available water."Enlarging upon this
 challenge, they give an example of a success story: the Australian wheat variety 'Drysdale', which
gained its fame "because it uses water more efficiently." This valued characteristic is achieved "by
slightly restricting stomatal aperture and thereby the loss of water from the leaves." They note, however,
that this ability "reduces photosynthetic performance slightly under ideal conditions," but they say it
enables plants to "have access to water later in the growing season thereby increasing total
photosynthesis over the life of the crop." Of course, Drysdale is but one variety of one crop; and the
ideal goal would be to get nearly all varieties of all crops to use water more efficiently. And that goal
can actually be reached by doing nothing, by merely halting the efforts of radical environmentalists to
deny earth's carbon-based life forms -- that's all of us and the rest of the earth's plants and animals -- the
extra carbon we and they need to live our lives to the fullest. This is because allowing the air's CO2
content to rise in response to the burning of fossil fuels naturally causes the vast majority of earth's
plants to progressively reduce the apertures of their stomata and thereby lower the rate at which water
escapes through them to the air. And the result is even better than that produced by the breeding of
Drysdale, because the extra CO2 in the air more than overcomes the photosynthetic reduction that
results from the partial closure of plant stomatal apertures, allowing even more yield to be produced per
unit of water transpired in the process. Yet man can make the situation better still, by breeding and
selecting crop varieties that perform better under higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations than the
varieties we currently rely upon, or he can employ various technological means of altering them to do
so. Truly, we can succeed, even where "the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of
substantially reducing the world's hungry by 2015 will not be met," as Parry and Hawkesford accurately
inform us. And this truly seems to us the moral thing to do, when "at least one billion people are
chronically malnourished and the situation is deteriorating," with more people "hungrier now than at the
start of the millennium."

CO2 key to preventing water wars and famine

Idso et al 10
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2010 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) The World's Looming Food and Water Shortage
http://co2science.org/articles/V13/N49/EDIT.php
This water deficiency, according to Hanjra and Qureshi, "will lead to a food gap unless concerted
actions are taken today." Some of the things they propose, in this regard, are to conserve water and
energy resources, develop and adopt climate-resilient crop varieties, modernize irrigation, shore up
domestic food supplies, reengage in agriculture for further development, and reform the global food and
trade market. And to achieve these goals, they say that "unprecedented global cooperation is required,"
which by the looks of today's world is an even more remote possibility than that implied by the
proverbial wishful thinking. So, on top of everything else they suggest (a goodly portion of which will
not be achieved), what can we do to defuse the ticking time-bomb that is the looming food and water
crisis? We suggest doing nothing. But not just any "nothing." The nothing we suggest is to not mess
with the normal, unforced evolution of civilization's means of acquiring energy. We suggest this,
because on top of everything else we may try to do to conserve both land and freshwater resources, we
will still fall short of what is needed to be achieved unless the air's CO2 content rises significantly and
thereby boosts the water use efficiency of earth's crop plants, as well as that of the plants that provide
food and habitat for what could be called "wild nature," enabling both sets of plants to produce more
biomass per unit of water used in the process. And to ensure that this happens, we will need all of the
CO2 that will be produced by the burning of fossil fuels, until other forms of energy truly become more
cost-efficient than coal, gas and oil. In fact, these other energy sources will have to become much more
cost-efficient before fossil fuels are phased out; because the positive externality of the CO2-induced
increase in plant water use efficiency provided by the steady rise in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration
due to the burning of fossil fuels will be providing a most important service in helping us feed and
sustain our own species without totally decimating what yet remains of wild nature.
Increased CO2 emissions key to curing a laundry list of
diseases

Idso and Idso 12

Craig and Keith Idso and Idso (Craig, PhD in geography
@Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U Nebraska) 2012
Here's to Your Health! ... Courtesy of Carbon Dioxide
http://co2science.org/articles/V15/N18/EDIT.php
At the turn of the last millennium, when our father was still an actively-working researcher, he and five
colleagues grew common spider lily (Hymenocallis littoralis) plants out-of-doors at the U.S. Water
Conservation Laboratory in Phoenix, Arizona. This they did for two consecutive two-year cycles, within
clear-plastic-wall open-top chambers that had their atmospheric CO2 concentrations continuously
maintained at either the normal concentration, which at their urban site was about 400 ppm, or at an
enriched level of 700 ppm. Then, at the ends of each of the two-year periods, they harvested the bulbs
produced by the plants and measured their biomass, along with the concentrations of several substances
they contained that had previously been proven to be effective in fighting various human maladies. In
doing so, they found that the 75% increase in the air's CO2 concentration resulted in a 48% increase in
aboveground plant biomass and a 56% increase in belowground bulb biomass. In addition, the extra
CO2 also increased the concentrations of five bulb constituents that possessed anti-cancer and anti-viral
properties. These substances are listed in table below, along with the percentage increases they each
exhibited, which when considered in their totality yield a mean increase of 12%. And combined with
the 56% increase in bulb biomass, the net result was a mean active-ingredient increase of 75% due to
the 75% increase in the air's CO2 concentration. What is especially exciting about these findings is that
the substances the six scientists studied have been demonstrated to be effective in fighting a number of
debilitating human diseases, including leukemia, ovary sarcoma, melanoma, brain cancer, colon cancer,
lung cancer, renal cancer, Japanese encephalitis, yellow fever, dengue fever, Punta Tora fever and Rift
Valley fever, as reported (with pertinent supporting citations) in their paper. Furthermore, there is reason
to believe that many other such substances in other medicinal plants may also be benefited by
atmospheric CO2 enrichment. See, for example, Health Effects (CO2 - Health-Promoting Substances:
Medicinal Plants in our Subject Index. This larger body of work also points to the tantalizing possibility
that there may be a number of still other health-promoting substances in the tissues of the foods we
regularly eat that may additionally have their concentrations enhanced by the ongoing rise in the air's
CO2 concentration. And indeed there are, as may readily be seen by perusing the items archived under
Health Effects (CO2 - Health-Promoting Substances: Common Food Plants in our Subject Index. And
these findings lead to our speculation that the ever-lengthening life-span of people all around the world
may well be due, at least in part, to the historical - and still ongoing - rise in the air's CO2 content. So
here's to our health ... and the health of our children's children ... courtesy (in part) of the atmosphere's
steadily rising carbon dioxide concentration; for if the world's climate alarmists can attribute nearly
everything bad that happens nowadays, to the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content, surely we can point
out a possible benefit or two. And the potential benefit we describe here is a huge one.

CO2 increases photosynthesis and plant growth

Kirschbaum 11
(Miko U.F. Kirschbaum, Ph.D. (Environmental Biology) and
B.Sc. (Agricultural Science), Plant Physiology, Does
Enhanced Photosynthesis Enhance Growth? Lessons
Learned from CO2 Enrichment Studies
http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/155/1/117.short)
Plants typically convert only 2% to 4% of the available energy in radiation into new plant growth. This
low efficiency has provided an impetus for trying to genetically manipulate plants in order to achieve
greater efficiencies. But to what extent can increased photosynthesis be expected to increase plant
growth? This question is addressed by treating plant responses to elevated CO2 as an analog to
increasing photosynthesis through plant breeding or genetic manipulations. For plants grown under
optimal growth conditions and elevated CO2, photosynthetic rates can be more than 50% higher than
for plants grown under normal CO2 concentrations. This reduces to 40% higher for plants grown under
the average of optimal and suboptimal conditions, and over the course of a full day, average
photosynthetic enhancements under elevated CO2 are estimated to be about 30%. The 30%
enhancement in photosynthesis is reported to increase relative growth rate by only about 10%. This
discrepancy is probably due to enhanced carbohydrate availability exceeding many plants ability to
fully utilize it due to nutrient or inherent internal growth limitations. Consequently, growth responses to
elevated CO2 increase with a plants sink capacity and nutrient status. However, even a 10%
enhancement in relative growth rate can translate into absolute growth enhancements of up to 50%
during the exponential growth phase of plants. When space constraints and self-shading force an end to
exponential growth, ongoing growth enhancements are likely to be closer to the enhancement of relative
growth rate. The growth response to elevated CO2 suggests that increases in photosynthesis almost
invariably increase growth, but that the growth response is numerically much smaller than the initial
photosynthetic enhancement. This lends partial support to the usefulness of breeding plants with greater
photosynthetic capacity, but dramatic growth stimulation should not be expected. The usefulness of
increasing photosynthetic capacity can be maximized through changes in management practices and
manipulation of other genetic traits to optimize the conditions under which increased photosynthesis
can lead to maximal growth increases.
 AT: "Even If"
Warm climates are empirically more peaceful and more
prosperous

Idso et al 11
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2011 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) Two-and-a-Half Millennia of European Climate
Variability and Societal Responses
http://co2science.org/articles/V14/N17/EDIT.php
Buntgen et al. (2011) recently developed a set of tree ring-based reconstructions of central European
summer precipitation and temperature variability over the past 2500 years, which suggests, in their
opinion, that "recent warming is unprecedented, but modern hydroclimatic variations may have at times
been exceeded in magnitude and duration." Although we question their claim about recent warming
being unprecedented within this context (see both our Medieval Warm Period Project and the materials
we have archived under Roman Warm Period (Europe) in our Subject Index), we will not argue this
subject further here. Instead, we will concentrate on the primary conclusion that Buntgen et al. draw
from their work, which is that their data "may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and
fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change." In the abstract of their paper, the twelve
researchers state that "wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval
prosperity," which is indeed correct; and in the body of their paper they write that "average precipitation
and temperature showed fewer fluctuations during the period of peak medieval and economic growth,
~1000 to 1200 C.E. (Kaplan et al., 2009; McCormick, 2001), which is also correct, but which is
something that suggests to us that warmer is better than colder, especially when it comes to assessing
what could be called the wellness-state of humanity. Support for this point of view is provided by
Buntgen et al.'s description of what happened as temperatures declined and the Medial Warm Period
gave way to the Little Ice Age, with its onset "likely contributing," in their words, "to widespread
famine across central Europe," when they say that "unfavorable climate may have even played a role in
debilitating the underlying health conditions that contributed to the devastating economic crisis that
arose from the second plague pandemic, the Black Death, which reduced the central European
population after 1347 C.E. by 40 to 60% (Buntgen et al., 2010; Kaplan et al., 2009; Kausrud et al.,
2010)." In addition, the team of Austrian, German, Swiss and U.S. scientists notes that this period "is
also associated with a temperature decline in the North Atlantic and the abrupt desertion of former
Greenland settlements (Patterson et al., 2010)," and that "temperature minima in the early 17th and 19th
centuries accompanied sustained settlement abandonment during the Thirty Years' War and the modern
migrations from Europe to America." And a quick trip to the heading of War and Social Unrest in our
Subject Index will provide many more real-world examples of cold times typically leading to bad times
in terms of the wellness-state of humanity in many other parts of the planet. Clearly, maintaining the
planet's current level of warmth is a good thing for earth's inhabitants, as is maintaining -- and actually
increasing -- the atmosphere's CO2 concentration, because of CO2's impressive aerial fertilization effect
and its anti-transpiration effect, which working together significantly boost the water use efficiencies of
nearly all plants, including those that supply us and the rest of the planet's animal life with the food we
need to sustain ourselves. And since there is no compelling reason to attribute the planet's current level
of warmth to its current level of atmospheric CO2 -- seeing there was much less CO2 in the air during
the comparable (or even greater) warmth of the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods -- there is no
reason to believe that attempting to reduce the air's CO2 content (which we can't do anyway) or even
slow its rate-of-rise (which we cannot do to any significant degree) would alter the planet's temperature
to any significant degree. In addition, the planet's temperature has remained essentially level for the past
decade or more; and some scientists believe we are facing a future cooling. Consequently, we believe
that the work of Buntgen et al. "may provide a basis for [not] counteracting the recent political and
 fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change," as those mitigating efforts are known to likely
have but a miniscule thermal impact even if successful, and they would come at an ungodly economic
cost at a time when the world's economy is in an ungodly world of hurt.

Carbon Fertilization is false

Jackson 2009
Research molecular biologist @ USDA (Eric, 2009, The
international food system and the climate crisis, The
Panama News, Lexis)

A major weakness in the forecasts of the IPCC and others when it comes to agriculture is that
their predictions accept a theory of carbon fertilisation, which argues that higher levels CO2
in the atmosphere will enhance photosynthesis in many key crops, and boost their yields. Recent
studies show that this is a mirage. Not only does any initial acceleration in
growth slow down significantly after a few days or weeks, but the
increase in CO2 reduces nitrogen and protein in the leaves by more than
12 per cent. This means that, with climate change, there will be less
protein for humans in major cereals such as wheat and rice. There will also be less
nitrogen in the leaves for bugs, which means that bugs will eat more leaf, leading to
important reductions in yield.
 Ag Good - Impact Calc
Resource wars and food conflicts outweigh warming
reversibility and magnitude

Idsos 1
(Craig Idso, President of the CO2 Magazine, PhD Botany
AND Keith Idso, VP of the CO2 Magazine, PhD in Botany,
CO2 Science Magazine, Vol 4(24), June 2001, Two Crises
of Unbelievable Magnitude: Can We Prevent One Without
Exacerbating the Other?)

Two potentially devastating environmental crises loom ominously on

the horizon. One is catastrophic global warming, which many people
claim will occur by the end of the next century. The other is the need to
divert essentially all usable non-saline water on the face of the earth to
the agricultural enterprises that will be required to meet the food and
fiber needs of humanity's growing numbers in but half a century
(Wallace, 2000; Tilman et al., 2001). This necessary expansion of
agriculture will also require the land that currently supports a full third
of all tropical and temperate forests, savannas and grasslands,
according to Tilman, et al., who also correctly state that the destruction
of that important natural habitat will lead to the extinction of untold
numbers of plant and animal species. How do the magnitudes of the
two crises compare? Tilman et al. suggest that the coming
agriculturally-driven crisis is likely to rival that of predicted climate
change, placing the two disasters on pretty much an equal footing.
Wallace, however, is unequivocal in his contention that the agricultural
crisis dwarfs the climate crisis. "There can be," he says, "no greater
global challenge today on which physical and social scientists can work
together than the goal of producing the food required for future
generations." It is our judgment that the conclusion of Wallace is the
more robust of the two, based on the simple fact that the
agriculturally-driven crisis is almost certain to occur, whereas there is
still doubt about the climate crisis. We also believe that Tilman et al.
would probably not dispute this contention; for it is their own
conclusion that "even the best available technologies, fully deployed,
cannot prevent many of the forecasted problems," meaning the future
scarcity of food, fiber, land and water described above. This conclusion
as to the unavoidability of the agricultural crisis is further buttressed
by the fact that Tilman et al.'s analysis even assumed a reasonable
rate of advancement in technological expertise, as we also assumed in
an earlier analysis of the identical problem that arrived at essentially
the same conclusion (Idso and Idso, 2000).
 Food Extension
Mass crop and water scarcities are comingincreasing
atmospheric CO2 is key to divert these crises

Idsos 7
(Sherwood Idso, Research Physicist with the US
Department of Agricultures Agricultural Research Service
AND Craig Idso, President of the CO2 Magazine, PhD in
Botany, 2007,
http://co2science.org/education/reports/hansen/HansenTe
stimonyCritique.pdf p. 17-19)

Finally, with respect to the third effort increasing crop yield per unit of
water used Tilman et al. note that water is regionally scarce, and
that many countries in a band from China through India and Pakistan,
and the Middle East to North Africa either currently or will soon fail to
have adequate water to maintain per capita food production from
irrigated land. Increasing crop water use efficiency, therefore, is also a
must. Although the impending man vs. nature crisis and several
important elements of its potential solution are thus well defined,
Tilman and his first set of collaborators concluded that even the best
available technologies, fully deployed, cannot prevent many of the
forecasted problems. This was also the finding of Idso and Idso
(2000), who concluded that although expected advances in
agricultural technology and expertise will significantly increase the
food production potential of many countries and regions, these
advances will not increase production fast enough to meet the
demands of the even faster-growing human population of the planet.
How can we prevent this unthinkable catastrophe from occurring,
especially when it has been concluded by highly-credentialed
researchers that earth possesses insufficient land and freshwater
resources to forestall it, while simultaneously retaining any semblance
of the natural world and its myriad animate creations? Although the
task may appear next to impossible to accomplish, it can be done; for
we have a powerful ally in the ongoing rise in the atmospheres CO2
concentration that can provide what we can't. Since atmospheric CO2
is the basic food of nearly all plants, the more of it there is in the air,
the better they function and the more productive they become. For a
300-ppm increase in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration above the
planets current base level of slightly less than 400 ppm, for example,
the productivity of earth's herbaceous plants rises by something on the
order of 30% (Kimball, 1983; Idso and Idso, 1994), while the
productivity of its woody plants rises by something on the order of 50%
(Saxe et al., 1998; Idso and Kimball, 2001). Thus, as the air's CO2
content continues to rise, so too will the productive capacity or land-
use efficiency of the planet continue to rise, as the aerial fertilization
 effect of the upward-trending atmospheric CO2 concentration boosts
the growth rates and biomass production of nearly all plants in nearly
all places. In addition, elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations
typically increase plant nutrient-use efficiency in general and
nitrogen-use efficiency in particular as well as plant water-use
efficiency, as may be verified by perusing the many reviews of
scientific journal articles we have produced on these topics and
archived in the Subject Index of our website (www.co2science.org).
Consequently, with respect to fostering all three of the plant
physiological phenomena that Tilman et al. (2002) contend are needed
to prevent the catastrophic consequences they foresee for the planet
just a few short decades from now, a continuation of the current
upward trend in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration would appear to
be essential. In the case we are considering here, for example, the
degree of crop yield enhancement likely to be provided by the increase
in atmospheric CO2 concentration expected to occur between 2000
and 2050 has been calculated by Idso and Idso (2000) to be sufficient
but only by the slightest of margins to compensate for the huge
differential that is expected to otherwise prevail between the supply
and demand for food earmarked for human consumption just 43 years
from now. Consequently, letting the evolution of technology take its
natural course, with respect to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, would
appear to be the only way we will ever be able to produce sufficient
agricultural commodities to support ourselves in the year 2050 without
the taking of unconscionable amounts of land and freshwater resources
from nature and decimating the biosphere in the process.

Warming key to food productionstatistics prove

Avery & Burnett 5

(Dennis T. Avery, director of the Center for Global Food
Issues at Hudson AND H. Sterling Burnett, PhD, Senior
Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, Brief
Analyses, No. 517, 5-19-2005, Warming: Famine or
Feast?)

The available evidence undermines Brown's claims. Indeed, a warmer

planet has beneficial effects on food production. It results in longer
growing seasons - more sunshine and rainfall - while summertime high
temperatures change little. And a warmer planet means milder winters
and fewer crop-killing frosts. Global warming also increases carbon
dioxide (CO2), which acts like fertilizer for plants. As the planet warms,
oceans naturally release huge tonnages of additional CO2. (Cold water
can hold much more of a gas than warmer water.) Since 1950, in a
period of global warming, these factors have helped the world's grain
production soar from 700 million to more than 2 billion tons last year.
CO2 emissions are key to a second green revolution
solves food crises globally

CEW 6
(Climate and Environment Weekly, peer-reviewed journal
by multiple experts writing for the Center for Science and
Public Policy, a non-partisan policy group, Issue 34, 1-12-
2006, AgricultureOur Greatest Challenge ff.org)

Also writing about the need to increase global food production near the
close of the 20th century were the Rockefeller Foundation's Conway
and Toenniessen (1999), who stated that "the Green Revolution was
one of the great technological success stories of the second half of the
twentieth century," but that its benefits were dropping and that a
number of arguments "point to the need for a second Green
Revolution." It is enlightening to consider the arguments made by
Conway and Toenniessen. First, they note that the world already
produces more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, but
that it is not evenly distributed, due to "notoriously ineffective" world
markets that leave 800 million people chronically undernourished.
Hence, it would seem that requirement number one for the second
Green Revolution should be that the agricultural benefits to be reaped
should be equitably distributed among all nations. Second, the
Rockefeller representatives say that food aid programs designed to
help countries most in need "are also no solution," as they reach "only
a small portion of those suffering chronic hunger." In addition, they say
that such programs, if prolonged, "have a negative impact on local
food production." Hence, it would seem that requirement number two
for the second Green Revolution should be that local food production
should be enhanced worldwide. Third, Conway and Toenniessen state
that 650 million of the world's poorest people live in rural areas and
that many of them live in "regions where agricultural potential is low
and natural resources are poor." Hence, it would seem that
requirement number three for the second Green Revolution should be
that regions of low agricultural potential lacking in natural resources
should be singled out for maximum benefits. All three of these
requirements represent noble causes; but if mankind already produces
more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet and we don't
do it, i.e., we don't feed everyone, it is clear that mankind must not be
noble enough to rise to the challenge currently confronting us. So why
does anyone think we will do any better in the future? Based on
humanity's prior track record, it would seem to us that the second
Green Revolution envisioned by the Rockefeller Foundation will also fall
short of its noble goal, depending, as it were, on a less-than-noble
humanity to see it through.
 Plant Growth Extnesion
CO2 increases plant harvest

Idso et al. 11
Craig D. Idso is the founder, former president and current
chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Robert M. Carter is a
palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist and
adjunct professorial research fellow in earth sciences at
James Cook University. Fred Singer is a physicist and
emeritus professor of environmental science at the
University of Virginia. Susan Crockford has a Ph.D. and in
the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Victoria. Joseph DAleo is the Executive Director of ICECAP
Co-Chief Meteorologist at WeatherBell Analytics and
Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Indur
Goklany has a Ph. D., an Independent Scholar and the
founder and co-editor of Electronic Journal of Sustainable
Development. Sherwood Idso is the president of the
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change. Madhav Khandekarhas a Ph.D and is an Editorial
Board Member of natural Hazards and an Expert Reviewer
IPCC AR4 Climate Change assessment. Anthony Lupo has
a Ph. D and is in the Department of Soil, Environmental,
and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Missouri-
Columbia. Willie Soon has a Ph. D and is an Independent
Scientist. Mitch Taylor has a Ph.D. and is in the
Department of Geography at Lakehead University. 2011.
Climate Change Reconsidered 2011 Interim Report
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterim
report.pdf)
We begin our review of atmospheric CO2 enrichment effects on Earths vegetation with a consideration
of C3 plantsthose in which the enzyme RuBisCO is involved in the uptake of CO2 and the
subsequent photosynthetic process, which results in its incorporation into a 3-carbon compound
starting with the study of Norikane et al. (2010). They focused on the genus Cymbidium, which
comprises about 50 species distributed throughout tropical and subtropical Asia and Oceania. The four
researchers worked with shoots of Music Hour Maria, a type of orchid, possessing two to three
leaves, which they obtained from a mass of protocorm-like bodies they derived from shoot-tip culture.
They grew them in vitro on a modified Vacin and Went medium in air augmented with either 0, 3,000,
or 10,000 ppm CO2 under two photosynthetic photon flux densities (either 45 or 75 mol m -1 s -1 )
provided by cold cathode fluorescent lamps for a period of 90 days. They then transferred the plants to
ex vitro culture for 30 more days. Relative to plants grown in vitro in ambient air, the percent increases
in shoot and root dry weight due to enriching the air in which the plants grew by 3,000 ppm CO2
 were, respectively, 216 percent and 1,956 percent under the low-light regime and 249 percent and
1,591 percent under the high-light regime, while corresponding increases for the plants grown in air
enriched with an extra 10,000 ppm CO2 were 244 percent and 2,578 percent under the low-light
regime and 310 percent and 1,879 percent under the high-light regime. Similarly, in the ex vitro
experiment, the percent increases in shoot and root dry weight due to enriching the air in which the
plants grew by 3,000 ppm CO2 were 223 percent and 436 percent under the low-light regime and 279
percent and 469 percent under the high-light regime, while corresponding increases for the plants
grown in air enriched with an extra 10,000 ppm CO2 were 271 percent and 537 percent under the low-
light regime and 332 percent and 631 percent under the high-light regime. Consequently, the Japanese
scientists concluded, super-elevated CO2 enrichment of in vitro-cultured Cymbidium could
positively affect the efficiency and quality of commercial production of clonal orchid plantlets.
Turning from ornamental plants to food crops, Vanaja et al. (2010) note grain legumes provide
much needed nutritional security in the form of proteins to the predominant vegetarian populations of
India and also the world. They further state that legumesof which pigeon peas are an important
examplehave the potential to maximize the benefit of elevated CO2 by matching stimulated
photosynthesis with increased N2 fixation, citing Rogers et al. (2009). Therefore, they grew pigeon
peas (Cajanus cajan L. Millsp.) from seed to maturity outdoors at Hyderabad, India within open-top
chambers maintained at atmospheric CO2 concentrations of either 370 or 700 ppm. They then harvested
the plants and measured pertinent productivity parameters. This work revealed, according to the team
of nine Indian scientists, that in the higher of the two CO2 concentrations, total biomass recorded an
improvement of 91.3%, grain yield 150.1% and fodder yield 67.1%. They also found the major
contributing components for improved grain yield under elevated CO2 were number of pods, number
of seeds and test weight, with these items exhibiting increases of 97.9 percent, 119.5 percent, and 7.2
percent, respectively. In addition, they found there was a significant positive increase of harvest
index at elevated CO2 with an increment of 30.7% over ambient values, which they say was due to
the crops improved pod set and seed yield under enhanced CO2 concentration. These multiple
positive findings, according to the scientists from Indias Central Research Institute for Dryland
Agriculture, illustrate the importance of pigeon peas for sustained food with nutritional security
under a climate change scenario. This work revealed, according to the team of nine Indian scientists,
that in the higher of the two CO2 concentrations, total biomass recorded an improvement of 91.3%,
grain yield 150.1% and fodder yield 67.1%. They also found the major contributing components
for improved grain yield under elevated CO2 were number of pods, number of seeds and test weight,
with these items exhibiting increases of 97.9 percent, 119.5 percent, and 7.2 percent, respectively. In
addition, they found there was a significant positive increase of harvest index at elevated CO2 with
an increment of 30.7% over ambient values, which they say was due to the crops improved pod set
and seed yield under enhanced CO2 concentration.

CO2 increases rice growth

Idso et al. 11
Craig D. Idso is the founder, former president and current
chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Robert M. Carter is a
palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist and
adjunct professorial research fellow in earth sciences at
James Cook University. Fred Singer is a physicist and
emeritus professor of environmental science at the
University of Virginia. Susan Crockford has a Ph.D. and in
the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Victoria. Joseph DAleo is the Executive Director of ICECAP
Co-Chief Meteorologist at WeatherBell Analytics and
Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Indur
Goklany has a Ph. D., an Independent Scholar and the
founder and co-editor of Electronic Journal of Sustainable
Development. Sherwood Idso is the president of the
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change. Madhav Khandekarhas a Ph.D and is an Editorial
Board Member of natural Hazards and an Expert Reviewer
IPCC AR4 Climate Change assessment. Anthony Lupo has
a Ph. D and is in the Department of Soil, Environmental,
and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Missouri-
Columbia. Willie Soon has a Ph. D and is an Independent
Scientist. Mitch Taylor has a Ph.D. and is in the
Department of Geography at Lakehead University. 2011.
Climate Change Reconsidered 2011 Interim Report
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterim
report.pdf)
These multiple positive findings, according to the scientists from Indias Central Research Institute for
Dryland Agriculture, illustrate the importance of pigeon peas for sustained food with nutritional
security under a climate change scenario. In much the same vein, Yang et al. (2009) declared, rice
is unequivocally one of the most important food crops that feed the largest proportion of the worlds
population, that the demand for rice production will continue to increase in the coming decades,
especially in the major rice-consuming countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and that
accurate predictions of rice yield and of the ability of rice crops to adapt to high CO2 environments
are therefore crucial for understanding the impact of climate change on the future food supply. In fact,
they forcefully stateand rightly that there is a pressing need to identify genotypes which could
optimize harvestable yield as atmospheric CO2 increases.Climate Change Reconsidered 2011
Interim Report 200 They set out to do that in a standard paddy culture free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE)
experiment conducted at Yangzhou, Jiangsu, China over the period 20042006. The team of eight
researchers grew a two-line inter-subspecific hybrid rice variety (Liangyoupeijiu) at ambient and
elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 376 and 568 ppm, respectively, at two levels of field
nitrogen (N) application: low N (12.5 g N m -2 ) and high N (25 g N m -2 ), measuring numerous
aspects of crop growth, development, and final yield production in the process. The Chinese scientists
found the 51 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration employed in their study increased the
final grain yield of the low N rice crop by 28 percent and that of the high N rice crop by 32 percent. As
a result, and compared with the two prior rice FACE experiments (Kim et al., 2003; Yang et al.,
2006), they state, hybrid rice appears to profit much more from CO2 enrichment than inbred rice
cultivars (c. +13 percent). Yang et al. describe Liangyoupeijiu as one of the most popular super
hybrid rice varieties in China (Peng et al., 2004), and it appears it will become increasingly super as
the airs CO2 content continues to rise, helping China to lead the way in future food production.

Fossil fuels help environment

Idso et. al 11
(Craig, Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, CO2 Magazine, Robert Carter, paleontologist,
stratiagrapher, geologist, research fellow at James Cook
Univ., Fred Singer, Environmental Science @ UVA, Susan
Crockford, PhD Anthropology @ Victoria, Joseph D'Aleo,
Executive Director of ICECAP, Co-Chief Meteorologist,
Indur Goklany, founded the Electronic Journal of
Sustainable Development, Sherwood Idso, president of
the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, Madhav Khandekarhas, PhD, Editorial Board
Member of natural hazards, AR4 Climate Assessment,
Anthony Lupo, PhD, Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric
Sciences at Mizzou - Columbia, Willie Soon, PhD, Mitch
Taylor, Geography @ Lakehead Univ., "Climate Change
Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report," NIPCC Rport
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterim
report.pdf)
What, then, can we do to defuse the ticking timebomb of this looming food and water crisis? One
option is to do nothing: dont mess with the normal, unforced evolution of civilizations means of
acquiring energy. This is because on top of everything else we may try to do to conserve both land and
freshwater resources, we will still fall short of what is needed to be achieved unless the airs CO2
content rises significantly and thereby boosts the water use efficiency of Earths crop plants and that
of the plants that provide food and habitat for what could be called Climate Change Reconsidered
2011 Interim Report 268 wild nature, enabling both sets of plants to produce more biomass per unit
of water used. To ensure this happens, we will need all of the CO2 that will be produced by the burning
of fossil fuels, until other forms of energy truly become more cost-efficient than coal, gas, and oil. In
fact, these other energy sources will have to become much more cost-efficient before fossil fuels are
phased out, because the positive externality of the CO2-induced increase in plant water use efficiency
provided by the steady rise in the atmospheres CO2 concentration due to the burning of fossil fuels
will be providing a most important service in helping us feed and sustain our own species without
totally decimating what yet remains of wild nature

Increased tree growth from CO2 releases carbon from the

soil

Science Daily 11
(8/15/11, Increased Tropical Forest Growth Could Release
Carbon from the Soil Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110814141
445.htm)

A new study shows that as climate change enhances tree growth in tropical forests, the resulting
increase in litterfall could stimulate soil micro-organisms leading to a release of stored soil carbon . The
research was led by scientists from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and
the University of Cambridge, UK. The results are published online in the
journal Nature Climate Change. The researchers used results from a six-year
experiment in a rainforest at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in
Panama, Central America, to study how increases in litterfall -- dead plant material such
as leaves, bark and twigs which fall to the ground -- might affect carbon storage in the soil. Their
results show that extra litterfall triggers an effect called 'priming' where fresh carbon from plant
litter provides much-needed energy to micro-organisms, which then stimulates the decomposition of carbon
stored in the soil. Lead author Dr Emma Sayer from the UK's Centre for Ecology &
Hydrology said, "Most estimates of the carbon sequestration capacity of
tropical forests are based on measurements of tree growth. Our study
demonstrates that interactions between plants and soil can have a massive
impact on carbon cycling. Models of climate change must take these
feedbacks into account to predict future atmospheric carbon dioxide levels."
The study concludes that a large proportion of the carbon sequestered by greater tree growth in
tropical forests could be lost from the soil. The researchers estimate that a 30% increase in
litterfall could release about 0.6 tonnes of carbon per hectare from lowland tropical forest soils each year .
This amount of carbon is greater than estimates of the climate-induced
increase in forest biomass carbon in Amazonia over recent decades. Given the
vast land surface area covered by tropical forests and the large amount of carbon stored in the soil, this
could affect the global carbon balance. Tropical forests play an essential role in
regulating the global carbon balance. Human activities have caused carbon
dioxide levels to rise but it was thought that trees would respond to this by
increasing their growth and taking up larger amounts of carbon. However,
enhanced tree growth leads to more dead plant matter, especially leaf litter, returning to the forest floor
and it is unclear what effect this has on the carbon cycle. Dr Sayer added,
"Soils are thought to be a long-term store for carbon but we have shown that
these stores could be diminished if elevated carbon dioxide levels and
nitrogen deposition boost plant growth." Co-author Dr Edmund Tanner, from
the University of Cambridge, said, "This priming effect essentially means that
older, relatively stable soil carbon is being replaced by fresh carbon from
dead plant matter, which is easily decomposed. We still don't know what
consequences this will have for carbon cycling in the long term."
 AT: Warming Kills Gulf Stream
Global warming makes the ocean saltier stabilizing the
Gulf Stream

Brahic 07
(New Scientists environmental reporter , Saltier North
Atlantic should give currents a boost.
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12528)
The surface waters of the North Atlantic are getting saltier, suggests a new study of records spanning
over 50 years. And this might actually be good news for the effects of climate change on global ocean
currents in the short-term, say the study's researchers. This is because saltier waters in the upper levels
of the North Atlantic ocean may mean that the global ocean conveyor belt the vital piece of planetary
plumbing which some scientists fear may slow down because of global warming will remain
stable. The global ocean conveyor belt is the crucial circulation of ocean waters around the Earth. It
helps drive the Gulf Stream and keeps Europe warm. The density of waters which drives the flow of
ocean currents is dependent on temperature and salinity, so any change in saltiness may have an
impact. Tim Boyer of the US National Oceanographic Data Center and colleagues compiled salinity
data gathered by fisheries, navy and research ships travelling across the North Atlantic between 1955
and 2006. They found that during this time, the layer of water that makes up the top 400 metres has
gradually become saltier. The seawater is probably becoming saltier due to global warming, Boyer says.
"We know that upper ocean is warming in the North Atlantic, so it stands to reason that there should be
more evaporation, making waters more salty," he says. Polar 'pulse' The global ocean conveyor belt is
in part driven by salty and relatively dense subpolar waters sinking and flowing south to the
equator. So when a huge "pulse" of less dense freshwater was found to have been dumped into the sub-
polar waters of the North Atlantic in the mid-1960s, researchers speculated the sub-polar waters might
just stay floating where they were and cause circulation to stagnate. The freshwater pulse probably
came from a combination of increased rainfall and melting ice, as well as big chunks of ice suddenly
pushing through the Fram Straight into the Atlantic. When in their recent study Boyer and his
colleagues zoomed in on the subarctic Atlantic, they found that the waters there became much less salty
in the 1960s, as expected. But since the 1990s, they have been getting saltier again, and are now about
as salty as they were in the 1970s. Backing up this finding, when the team looked at the salinity of
deeper waters, those flowing more than 1300 metres beneath the surface, they found that these have
been getting less salty since the late 1980s. They see this as a sign that the pulse of freshwater has been
slowly making its way south. It takes roughly 10 to 15 years for subpolar water to move away from the
Arctic and down to the equator.

Even if theyre right only minor climate changes will occur,

Global warming wont lead to an ice age or a collapse of
the AMO

Weaver and Hillaire 2004

(Andrew Weaver and Claud Hillaire, Gordon head of the
School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of
Victoria and a Canadian geoscientist of great distinction
and a world leader in Quaternary research. He is known
for his groundbreaking research on the environment,
climate change, and oceanography. He is a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada and professor at l'Universit du
Qubec Montral, 4/16/2004, Global Warming and the
next Ice Age, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?
vid=1&hid=14&sid=5e63d5e2-5a5a-4141-a53a-
7826e5e7c1bb%40sessionmgr2)
Models that eventually lead to a collapse of the AMO under global warming conditions typically fall
into two categories: (i) flux-adjusted coupled general circulation models, and (ii) intermediate-
complexity models with zonally averaged ocean components. Both suites of models are known to be
more sensitive to freshwater perturbations. In the first class of models, a small perturbation away from
the present climate leads to large systematic errors in the salinity fields (as large flux adjustments are
applied) that then build up to cause dramatic AMO transitions. In the second class of models, the
convection and sinking of water masses are coupled (there is no horizontal structure). In contrast, newer
non flux-adjusted models find a more stable AMO under future conditions of climate change ( 11,
13, 14). Even the recent observations of freshening in the North Atlantic ( 15) (a reduction of salinity
due to the addition of freshwater) appear to be consistent with the projections of perhaps the most
sophisticated non flux-adjusted model ( 11). Ironically, this model suggests that such freshening is
associated with an increased AMO ( 16). This same model proposes that it is only Labrador Sea Water
formation that is susceptible to collapse in response to global warming. In light of the paleoclimate
record and our understanding of the contemporary climate system, it is safe to say that global warming
will not lead to the onset of a new ice age. These same records suggest that it is highly unlikely that
global warming will lead to a widespread collapse of the AMO despite the appealing possibility
raised in two recent studies ( 18, 19) although it is possible that deep convection in the Labrador Sea
will cease. Such an event would have much more minor consequences on the climate downstream over
Europe.
 Ice Age - CO2 Key
CO2 emissions are the only thing preventing the next ice
age

Tzedakis et al 12
P. C. Tzedakis, et al J. E. T. Channell,D. A. Hodell,H. F.
Kleiven & L. C. January 2012 Skinner Determining the
natural length of the current interglacial
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng
eo1358.html
Climate modelling studies show that a reduction in boreal summer insolation is the primary trigger for
glacial inception, with CO2 playing a secondary role3, 5. Lowering CO2 shifts the inception threshold to
higher insolation values1, but modelling experiments indicate that preindustrial concentrations of 280ppmv
would not be sufficiently low to lead to new ice growth given the subdued insolation minimum2, 3, 4.
However, the extent to which preindustrial CO2 levels were natural has been challenged10, 11 by the
suggestion that anthropogenic interference since the mid-Holocene led to increased greenhouse gas (GHG)
concentrations, which countered the natural cooling trend and prevented a glacial inception. The overdue
glaciation hypothesis has been tested by climate simulations using lower preindustrial GHG concentrations,
with contrasting results, ranging from no ice growth5 to a linear increase in ice volume4 to large increases
in perennial ice cover6. Empirical evidence from intervals characterized by similar boundary conditions to
the current interglacial may also be used to infer the timing of the next natural glacial inception, assuming
that, for a given insolation and CO2 forcing, ice-volume responses between two periods are also similar.
Here, we limit the search for potential Holocene analogues to the past 800kyr, for which ice-core records
of atmospheric GHG concentrations are available12, 13. We then explore approaches to constraining the
timing of glacial inception and assess the relevance of this information to the current interglacial.
 Ice Age - Impact Calc
Ice age makes every impact scenario inevitable

Stipp 4
(Staff writer for CNN) 04
(David Stipp. Staff writer. The Pentagon's Weather
Nightmare The climate could change radically, and fast.
That would be the mother of all national security issues.
February 9. 2004
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/02/09/360120
/index.htm)

For planning purposes, it makes sense to focus on a midrange case of abrupt change. A century of cold,
dry, windy weather across the Northern Hemisphere that suddenly came on 8,200 years ago fits the bill-
its severity fell between that of the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age. The event is thought to have
been triggered by a conveyor collapse after a time of rising temperatures not unlike today's global
warming. Suppose it recurred, beginning in 2010. Here are some of the things that might happen by
2020: At first the changes are easily mistaken for normal weather variation, allowing skeptics to dismiss
them as a "blip" of little importance and leaving policymakers and the public paralyzed with
uncertainty. But by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening. The average
temperature has fallen by up to five degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of North America and Asia and
up to six degrees in parts of Europe. (By comparison, the average temperature over the North Atlantic
during the last ice age was ten to 15 degrees lower than it is today.) Massive droughts have begun in key
agricultural regions. The average annual rainfall has dropped by nearly 30% in northern Europe, and its
climate has become more like Siberia's. Violent storms are increasingly common as the conveyor
becomes wobbly on its way to collapse. A particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through
levees in the Netherlands, making coastal cities such as the Hague unlivable. In California the delta
island levees in the Sacramento River area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting
water from north to south. Megadroughts afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states, along with
winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now, causing widespread dust storms and soil
loss. The U.S. is better positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse growing
climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources. That has a downside, though: It magnifies the
haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America. Turning inward, the U.S.
effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold
back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands, waves of boat
people pose especially grim problems. Tension between the U.S. and Mexico rises as the U.S. reneges
on a 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into Mexico. America is forced to
meet its rising energy demand with options that are costly both economically and politically, including
nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern contracts. Yet it survives without catastrophic losses.
Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with immigrants from Scandinavia seeking
warmer climes to the south. Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in
Africa and elsewhere. But Western Europe's wealth helps buffer it from catastrophe. Australia's size and
resources help it cope, as does its location. The conveyor shutdown mainly affects the Northern
Hemisphere. Japan has fewer resources but is able to draw on its social cohesion to cope. Its
government is able to induce population-wide behavior changes to conserve resources. China's huge
population and food demand make it particularly vulnerable. It is hit by increasingly unpredictable
monsoon rains, which cause devastating floods in drought-denuded areas. Other parts of Asia and East
Africa are similarly stressed. Much of Bangladesh becomes nearly uninhabitable because of a rising sea
level, which contaminates inland water supplies. Countries whose diversity already produces conflict,
such as India and Indonesia, are hard-pressed to maintain internal order while coping with the unfolding
changes. As the decade progresses, pressures to act become irresistible. History shows that whenever
humans have faced a choice between starving or raiding, they raid. Imagine Eastern European countries,
struggling to feed their populations, invading Russia, which is weakened by a population that is already
in decline, for access to its minerals and energy supplies. Or picture Japan eyeing nearby Russian oil
and gas reserves to power desalination plants and energy-intensive farming. Envision nuclear-armed
Pakistan, India, and China skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable
land. Or Spain and Portugal fighting over fishing rights, fisheries are disrupted around the world as
water temperatures change, causing fish to migrate to new habitats. Growing tensions engender novel
alliances. Canada joins fortress America in a North American bloc. (Alternatively, Canada may seek to
keep its abundant hydropower for itself, straining its ties with the energy-hungry U.S.) North and South
Korea align to create a technically savvy, nuclear-armed entity. Europe forms a truly unified bloc to
curb its immigration problems and protect against aggressors. Russia, threatened by impoverished
neighbors in dire straits, may join the European bloc.) Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable. Oil
supplies are stretched thin as climate cooling drives up demand. Many countries seek to shore up their
energy supplies with nuclear energy, accelerating nuclear proliferation. Japan, South Korea, and
Germany develop nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt, and North Korea. Israel, China,
India, and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.
 Ice Age - Checks Warming
Melting Icebergs dump iron into the ocean - solves
catastrophic effects of warming
Williams 9
Andrew Williams, writer for clean technical a website
dedicated to environmental news, JANUARY 4, 2009, Clean
technical, Green Algae Bloom Process Could Stop Global
Warming, http://cleantechnica.com/2009/01/04/green-algae-bloom-
process-could-stop-global-warming/

The researchers, aboard the Royal Navys HMS Endurance, have found that melting icebergs off the
coast of Antarctica are releasing millions of tiny particles of iron into the southern Ocean, helping to
create huge blooms of algae that absorb carbon emissions. The algae then sinks to the icy depths,
effectively removing CO2 from the atmosphere for hundreds of years. According to lead researcher,
Prof. Rob Raiswell of Leeds University, The Earth itself seems to want to save us. Scientists have
known for some time that artificially created algal blooms could be used to absorb greenhouse gases,
but the technique has been banned for fear of causing unforeseen side effects in fragile ecosystems.
However, based on the UK teams evidence that the process has been occurring naturally for millions of
years, and on a wide scale, the UN has given the green light for a ground-breaking experiment later this
month. The team will seek to create a massive algae bloom by releasing several tons of iron sulphate
into the sea off the coast of the British island of South Georgia. The patch will apparently be large
enough to be visible from space. If successful, the technique could be rolled out across vast swathes of
the Great Southern Ocean. Scientists calculate that if the whole 20 million square miles was treated, it
could remove up to three and a half Gigatons of C02, equivalent to one eighth of all global annual
emissions from fossil fuels. It would be a huge irony if melting icebergs, until now a powerful symbol
of the damage caused by global warming, reveal a process that may enable scientists to take steps that
might drastically reduce, and potentially even halt, the threat of environmental catasrophe

Increased oceanic iron levels solve CO2 emissions

Nature 12
Quirin Schiermeier, 18 July 2012, Dumping iron at sea
does sink carbon, http://www.nature.com/news/dumping-
iron-at-sea-does-sink-carbon-1.11028
In the search for methods to limit global warming, it seems that stimulating the growth of algae in the
oceans might be an efficient way of removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere after all.
Despite other studies suggesting that this approach was ineffective, a recent analysis of an ocean-
fertilization experiment eight years ago in the Southern Ocean indicates that encouraging algal blooms
to grow can soak up carbon that is then deposited in the deep ocean as the algae die. In February 2004,
researchers involved in the European Iron Fertilization Experiment (EIFEX) fertilized 167 square
kilometres of the Southern Ocean with several tonnes of iron sulphate. For 37 days, the team on board
the German research vessel Polarstern monitored the bloom and demise of single-cell algae
(phytoplankton) in the iron-limited but otherwise nutrient-rich ocean region Each atom of added iron
pulled at least 13,000 atoms of carbon out of the atmosphere by encouraging algal growth which,
through photosynthesis, captures carbon. In a paper in Nature today, the team reports that much of the
captured carbon was transported to the deep ocean, where it will remain sequestered for centuries1 a
'carbon sink'. At least half of the bloom was exported to depths greater than 1,000 metres, says Victor
Smetacek, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in
Bremerhaven, Germany, who led the study. The team used a turbidity meter a device that measures
the degree to which water becomes less transparent owing to the presence of suspended particles to
establish the amount of biomass, such as dead algae, that rained down the water column towards the sea
floor. Samples collected outside the experimental area showed substantially less carbon being deposited
in the deep ocean. Iron findings The EIFEX results back up a hypothesis by the late oceanographer John
Martin, who first reported in 1988 that iron deficiency limits phytoplankton growth in parts of the
subarctic Pacific Ocean2. Martin later proposed that vast quantities of iron-rich dust from dry and
sparsely vegetated continental regions may have led to enhanced ocean productivity in the past, thus
contributing to the drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide during glacial climates3 an idea given
more weight by the EIFEX findings. Some advocates of geoengineering think that this cooling
mechanism might help to mitigate present-day climate change. However, the idea of deliberately
stimulating plankton growth on a large scale is highly controversial. After noting that there were gaps in
the scientific knowledge about this approach, the parties to the London Convention the international
treaty governing ocean dumping agreed in 2007 that commercial ocean fertilization is not justified
(see 'Convention discourages ocean fertilization'). The finding that ocean fertilization does work,
although promising, is not enough to soothe concerns over potentially harmful side effects on ocean
chemistry and marine ecosystems, says Smetacek. Some scientists fear that massive ocean fertilization
might produce toxic algal blooms or deplete oxygen levels in the middle of the water column. Given the
controversy over another similar experiment (see 'Ocean fertilization experiment draws fire'), which
critics said should not have been approved in the first place, the Alfred Wegener Institute will not
conduct any further artificial ocean-fertilization studies, according to Smetacek. We just dont know
what might happen to species composition and so forth if you were to continuously add iron to the sea,
says Smetacek. These issues can only be addressed by more experiments including longer-term studies
of natural blooms that occur around some Antarctic islands. But some experts argue that artificial
ocean-fertilization studies should not be abandoned altogether. We are nowhere near the point of
recommending ocean fertilization as a geoengineering tool, says Ken Buesseler, a geochemist at the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. But just because we don't know all the
answers, we shouldn't say no to further research.
 Russia Oil - Shell
Continued global warming is key to melting the Arctic and
opening new resources

Armour et al 11
(Department of Physics, University of Washington) 11
K. C. Armour,1 I. Eisenman,2,3 E. Blanchard
Wrigglesworth,3 K. E. McCusker,3 and C. M. Bitz3, climate
scientists, The reversibility of sea ice loss in a stateof
theart climate model,
http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/gl1116/2011GL048739/201
1GL048739.pdf
Rapid Arctic sea ice retreat has fueled speculation about the possibility of threshold (or tipping point)
behavior and irreversible loss of the sea ice cover. We test sea ice reversibility within a stateoftheart
atmosphere ocean global climate model by increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide until the Arctic
Ocean becomes icefree throughout the year and subsequently decreasing it until the initial ice cover
returns. Evidence for irreversibility in the form of hysteresis outside the envelope of natural variability
is explored for the loss of summer and winter ice in both hemispheres. We find no evidence of
irreversibility or multiple icecover states over the full range of simulated sea ice conditions between
the modern climate and that with an annually icefree Arctic Ocean. Summer sea ice area recovers as
hemispheric temperature cools along a trajectory that is indistinguishable from the trajectory of summer
sea ice loss, while the recovery of winter ice area appears to be slowed due to the long response times of
the ocean near the modern winter ice edge. The results are discussed in the context of previous studies
that assess the plausibility of sea ice tipping points by other methods. The findings serve as evidence
against the existence of threshold behavior in the summer or winter ice cover in either hemisphere.

Russian oil production has peaked, new arctic fields are

key to preventing Russian economic collapse

Weir 8
(Correspondent for CSM) 08
Fred Weir, May 28, 2008, Has Russian oil output peaked?,
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-
Central/2008/0528/p01s04-wosc.html
The Kremlin often touts Russia's image as an "energy superpower," but now the country's oil production
is declining. Some say Russia may have already reached peak oil output. Underscoring the urgency of
the issue, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's new cabinet made its first order of business on Monday the
approval of a package of measures to relieve the oil-production crisis. "It's a good first step," says
Natalia Milchakova, an oil and gas analyst for Otkritiye, a Moscow-based brokerage firm. But she adds
that "rapidly slowing" oil production, which was growing by more than 10 percent five years ago, isn't
"something that can be quickly fixed with political declarations." As the world's second-largest oil
exporter, Russia joins a growing number of top oil suppliers wrestling with how to address declining or
peaking production. Like Venezuela and Mexico, Russia is heavily dependent on oil, which accounts for
more than two-thirds of government revenue and 30 percent of the country's gross domestic product.
Now, Moscow is trying to remedy a situation caused in part by outdated technology, heavy taxation of
 oil profits, and lack of investment in oil infrastructure. The Presidium of the Cabinet, as it is officially
known, in its inaugural meeting Monday approved tax holidays of up to 15 years for Russian companies
that open new oil fields and proposed raising the threshold at which taxation begins from the current $9
per barrel to $15. Oil companies welcomed the measures, but experts say that after almost two decades
of post-Soviet neglect, which have seen little new exploration, it may be too little, too late. After rising
steadily for several years to a post-Soviet high of 9.9 million barrels per day (bpd) in October, Russian
oil production fell by 0.3 percent in the first four months of this year, while exports fell 3.3 percent - the
first Putin-era drop. Russia's proven oil reserves are a state secret, but the Oil & Gas Journal, a US-
based industry publication, estimates it has about 60 billion barrels - the world's eighth largest - which
would last for 17 years at current production rates. Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko recently admitted
the decline, but suggested it might be overcome by fresh discoveries in underexplored eastern Siberia or
in new Arctic territories recently claimed by Russia. "The output level we have today is a plateau, or
stagnation," he said. But Leonid Fedun, vice president of Russia's largest private oil company LUKoil,
went one step further in an interview with the Financial Times last month. "Russian oil production has
peaked and may never return to current levels," he said. That poses problems for Russia, which has
talked of expanding beyond its main oil market - Europe - to China, Japan, and the US. In 2006, then-
President Putin approved construction of an $11 billion pipeline across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean to
carry eastward exports. Putin and his successor, Dmitri Medvedev, have insisted Russia can meet
demand by increasing output but oil analysts around the globe are pessimistic that oil supplies can meet
rising consumption in the coming decade.

Extinction

Filger 9
(Sheldon Filger, columnist, writer for
Globaleconomiccrisis.com, 2009, "Russia's Economy Faces
a Disastrous Free Fall Contraction," Huffington Post)
In Russia historically, economic health and political stability are intertwined to a degree that is
rarely encountered in other major industrialized economies. It was the economic stagnation of the
former Soviet Union that led to its political downfall. Similarly, Medvedev and Putin, both intimately
acquainted with their nations history, are unquestionably alarmed at the prospect that Russias economic crisis will
endanger the nations political stability, achieved at great cost after years of chaos following the demise of the Soviet Union.
Already, strikes and protests are occurring among rank and file workers facing unemployment or non-payment of their
salaries. Recent polling demonstrates that the once supreme popularity ratings of Putin and Medvedev are eroding rapidly. Beyond the
political elites are the financial oligarchs, who have been forced to deleverage, even unloading their yachts and executive jets in a
desperate attempt to raise cash. Should the Russian economy deteriorate to the point where economic
collapse is not out of the question, the impact will go far beyond the obvious accelerant such an
outcome would be for the Global Economic Crisis. There is a geopolitical dimension that is even more
relevant then the economic context. Despite its economic vulnerabilities and perceived decline from superpower status, Russia
remains one of only two nations on earth with a nuclear arsenal of sufficient scope and capability
to destroy the world as we know it. For that reason, it is not only President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin who will
be lying awake at nights over the prospect that a national economic crisis can transform itself into a virulent
and destabilizing social and political upheaval. It just may be possible that U.S. President Barack Obamas national
security team has already briefed him about the consequences of a major economic meltdown in Russia for the peace of the world.
After all, the most recent national intelligence estimates put out by the U.S. intelligence community have already concluded that the
Global Economic Crisis represents the greatest national security threat to the United States, due to its facilitating political instability in
the world.
 Russia Oil - Warming k2 Arctic
Global warming will melt the arctic

Schneider 04
SCHNEIDER 2004 (Doug, NewsVOA.com, October 22,
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2004-10/2004-10-22-voa61.cfm?
CFID=12777931&CFTOKEN=29167729)

More than 250 scientists from around the Arctic spent four years compiling the report for the
Arctic Council, an organization of government officials, scientists and indigenous people from Canada, Denmark, Finland,
Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Russia and the United States. The report is expected to conclude that the Arctic is
undergoing dramatic environmental change as a result of a climate that has warmed an average of five
degrees in recent decades. Among the changes are disappearing sea ice, melting permafrost and glaciers ,
and the colonization of the tundra by trees and shrubs. The report also draws on five separate computer models to
predict the Arctic's future climate. Weller says that while each model offers somewhat different
scenarios, they all point to an Arctic with much less ice and snow in coming decades.
 Russia Oil - Arctic k2 Oil
Melting Arctic will allow Russia access to new oil fields

CSM 07
Fred Weir, writer for the Christian Science monitor, July
31, 2007, As icecaps melt, Russia races for Arctic's
resources, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0731/p01s01-
woeu.html
As milder temperatures make exploration of the Arctic sea floor possible for the first time, Russia's
biggest-ever research expedition to the region is steaming toward the immense scientific prestige of
being the first to explore the seabed of the world's crown. In the next few days, two manned minisubs
will be launched through a hole blasted in the polar ice to scour the ocean floor nearly three miles
below. They will gather rock samples and plant a titanium Russian flag to symbolize Moscow's claim
over 460,000 square miles of hitherto international territory an area bigger than France and Germany
combined in a region estimated to contain a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves.
The issue of who owns the North Pole, now administered by the International Seabed Authority, has
long been regarded as academic since the entire region is locked in year-round impenetrable ice. But
with global warming thinning the icecaps, the question has vaulted to the front burner. "The No. 1
reason for the urgency about this is global warming, which makes it likely that a very large part of the
Arctic will become open to economic exploitation in coming decades," says Alexei Maleshenko, an
expert with the Carnegie Center in Moscow. "The race for the North Pole is becoming very exciting."
The US Geological Survey estimates that 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves lie
beneath the Arctic Ocean. Experts at the Russian Institute of Oceanology calculate that the saddle-
shaped territory that Russia is planning to claim may contain up to 10 billion tons of petroleum, plus
other mineral resources and vast, untapped fishing stocks. Russia stakes its claim The 1982 Law of the
Sea Convention establishes a 12-mile offshore territorial limit for each country, plus a 200-mile
"economic zone" in which it has exclusive rights. But the law leaves open the possibility that the
economic zone can be extended if it can be proved that the seafloor is actually an extension of a
country's geological territory. In 2001, Russia submitted documents to the United Nations (UN)
claiming that the Lomonosov Ridge, which underlies the Arctic Ocean, is actually an extension of the
Siberian continental shelf and should therefore be treated as Russian territory. The case was rejected.
But a group of Russian scientists returned from a six-week Arctic mission in June insisting that they had
uncovered solid evidence to support the Russian claim. That paved the way for the current expedition,
which includes the giant nuclear-powered icebreaker Rossiya, the huge research ship Akademik
Fyodorov, two Mir deep-sea submersibles previously used to explore the wreck of the Titanic and
about 130 scientists. The subs were tested Sunday, near Franz-Joseph Land in the frozen Barents Sea,
and found to be working well. "It was the first-ever dive of manned vehicles under the Arctic ice,"
Anatoly Sagelevich, one of the pilots, told the official ITAR-Tass agency. "We now know that we can
perform this task." The upcoming dive beneath the North Pole will be far more difficult, and involve
collecting evidence about the age, sediment thickness, and types of rock, as well as other data all of
which will be presented to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (a
body of scientists chosen by parties to the Law of the Sea Convention) to support Russia's claim to the
territory.

Specifically melting now is aiding Russia

The Economist 12
The Economist, Jun 16th 2012 The melting north,
(http://www.economist.com/node/21556798)
Yet the melting Arctic will have geostrategic consequences beyond helping a bunch of resource-fattened
countries to get fatter. An obvious one is the potentially disruptive effect of new trade routes. Sailing
along the coast of Siberia by the north-east passage, or Northern Sea Route (NSR), as Russians and
mariners call it, cuts the distance between western Europe and east Asia by roughly a third. The passage
is now open for four or five months a year and is getting more traffic. In 2010 only four ships used the
NSR; last year 34 did, in both directions, including tankers, refrigerated vessels carrying fish and even a
cruise liner. Asias big exporters, China, Japan and South Korea, are already investing in ice-capable
vessels, or planning to do so. For Russia, which has big plans to develop the sea lane with trans-
shipment hubs and other infrastructure, this is a double boon. It will help it get Arctic resources to
market faster and also, as the NSR becomes increasingly viable, diversify its hydrocarbon-addicted
economy.
 Russia Oil - AT: SQ Solves
Russian oil deposits cant keep up with demand. Need to
spread to the Arctic

Konoczuk 12
(head of the department of eastern European studies and
a major researcher in eastern European politics) 12
Wojciech Konoczuk, April 2012 , RUSSIAS BEST ALLY THE
SITUATION OF THE RUSSIAN OIL SECTOR AND FORECASTS
FOR ITS FUTURE,
http://www.osw.waw.pl/sites/default/files/PRACE_39_en.pdf

As production levels in the traditional oil fields are regularly falling, the development of new regions is
a problem. Eastern Siberia with the northern part of Krasnoyarsk Krai and the Far East (and the Arctic
shelf in the longer term) stand the greatest chance of becoming major production sources. Production
has already started in some of these regions, although its level is still low. An increase in output is also
expected on the Caspian and the Black Sea continental shelves, which will however have less impact on
the Russian oil sector. What these regions have in common is that they all have been explored
geologically to only a small extent so far, which makes it difficult to assess the volume of the oil
deposits there. Furthermore, investments in geological and exploration research are at low levels, the
discovered fields are at the initial stage of development and most of them are classified as medium in
terms of confirmed deposits. What makes Eastern Siberia, the Far East and the Arctic shelf different
from the present chief production centres are the much harsher climate conditions; this significantly
raises the costs of investment and requires the application of new, often still undeveloped technologies
(as in the case of the Arctic shelf). Another crucial aspect regarding the new fields is the feasibility of
production, while in 80% of them production is unprofitable, given the present fiscal situation.
Bunch of Turns
 Enrichment TURN
Nuclear can solve climate change through the global
expansion of enrichment capability- plan reverses that

Squassoni 9 (Sharon, Director and Senior Fellow of the Proliferation

Prevention Program at CSIS, , Nuclear Power: How Much More?,
http://www.npolicy.org/article.php?aid=176&rid=2, 3/25/2009)

The amount of nuclear capacity required to make a signification

contribution to global climate change mitigation is so large that it
would inevitably be widely distributed across the globe. Such a
distribution would have particular implications for nuclear proliferation.
However, projected distributions of nuclear energy out to 2050 are
extremely speculative. The industry itself does not engage in such
projections, and countries that set nuclear energy production goals
have a history of widely missing long-range targets, such as China
and India. The discussion below considers a hypothetical distribution of
nuclear energy for 2050, based on the 2003 MIT Study. [12]
Scenario III, shown in Figure 7, uses the High 2050 scenario in Appendix 2
(Global Electricity Demand and the Nuclear Power Growth Scenario) of the
2003 MIT study, The Future of Nuclear Power. Although this is not a
distribution designed to achieve optimal CO2 reductions, it is
expansion at a level significant enough (1500 GWe) to have an effect
on CO2 emissions. This would mean a fourfold increase from current
reactor capacity. The MIT study used an underlying assumption that the
developed countries would continue with a modest annual increase in per
capita electricity use and the developing countries would move to the 4000
kWh per person per year benchmark if at all feasible (the 4000 kWh
benchmark being the dividing line between developed and advanced
countries). Electricity demand was then pegged to estimated population
growth. Finally, it was assumed that nuclear energy would retain or increase
its current share of electricity generation. The least-off developing countries
were assumed in the MIT study not to have the wherewithal for nuclear
energy. It should be noted that MITs 2050 projection was an attempt to
understand what the distribution of nuclear power deployment would be if
robust growth were realized, perhaps driven by a broad commitment to
reducing greenhouse gas emissions and a concurrent resolution of the
various challenges confronting nuclear powers acceptance in various
countries. A few countries that the MIT High 2050 case included but are not
included here are countries that currently have laws restricting nuclear
energy, such as Austria. Implications for Uranium Enrichment A fourfold
expansion of nuclear energy would entail significant new production
requirements for uranium enrichment as shown in Figure 8 and
possibly, reprocessing. The MIT study anticipated that 54 states
would have reactor capacities that could possibly justify indigenous
uranium enrichment. If a capability of 10 GWe is considered the threshold
at which indigenous enrichment becomes cost-effective, more than 15
additional states could find it advantageous to engage in uranium
enrichment.
Figure 9 depicts what the geographic distribution of enrichment capacity
might look like, based on the development of 10 GWe or more of reactor
capacity. Of course, some states such as Australia or Kazakhstan
might opt to enrich uranium regardless of domestic nuclear energy
capacity, choosing to add value to their own uranium exports. In
addition, states may choose to take the path of the UAE, which has
formally renounced domestic enrichment and reprocessing in its
domestic law, despite aspiring to reach 10 GWe of capacity.
Ultimately, these decisions lie very much in the political realm, and
can be reversed.

Extinction

Deibel 7
International Relations @ Naval War College (Terry,
"Foreign Affairs Strategy: Logic of American Statecraft,"
Conclusion: American Foreign Affairs Strategy Today)
Finally, there
is one major existential threat to American security (as well as prosperity) of a nonviolent nature, which,
though far in the future, demands urgent action. It
is the threat of global warming to the stability of the climate
upon which all earthly life depends. Scientists worldwide have been observing the gathering of
this threat for three decades now, and what was once a mere possibility has passed through
probability to near certainty. Indeed not one of more than 900 articles on climate change
published in refereed scientific journals from 1993 to 2003 doubted that anthropogenic warming
is occurring. In legitimate scientific circles, writes Elizabeth Kolbert, it is virtually impossible to find evidence
of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming. Evidence from a vast international
scientific monitoring effort accumulates almost weekly, as this sample of newspaper reports
shows: an international panel predicts brutal droughts, floods and violent storms across the
planet over the next century; climate change could literally alter ocean currents, wipe away huge portions of Alpine Snowcaps
and aid the spread of cholera and malaria; glaciers in the Antarctic and in Greenland are melting much faster than expected, and
worldwide, plants are blooming several days earlier than a decade ago; rising sea temperatures have been accompanied by a
significant global increase in the most destructive hurricanes; NASA scientists have concluded from direct temperature
measurements that 2005 was the hottest year on record, with 1998 a close second; Earths warming climate is estimated
to contribute to more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year as disease spreads; widespread bleaching
from Texas to Trinidadkilled broad swaths of corals due to a 2-degree rise in sea temperatures. The world is slowly
disintegrating, concluded Inuit hunter Noah Metuq, who lives 30 miles from the Arctic Circle. They call it climate changebut we
just call it breaking up. From the founding of the first cities some 6,000 years ago until the beginning of the industrial revolution,
carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere remained relatively constant at about 280 parts per million (ppm). At present they are
accelerating toward 400 ppm, and by 2050 they will reach 500 ppm, about double pre-industrial levels. Unfortunately, atmospheric
CO2 lasts about a century, so there is no way immediately to reduce levels, only to slow their increase, we are thus in for
significant global warming; the only debate is how much and how serous the effects will be. As the
newspaper stories quoted above show, we are already experiencing the effects of 1-2 degree warming in more violent storms, spread
of disease, mass die offs of plants and animals, species extinction, and threatened inundation of low-lying
countries like the Pacific nation of Kiribati and the Netherlands at a warming of 5 degrees or less the Greenland and West Antarctic ice
sheets could disintegrate, leading to a sea level of rise of 20 feet that would cover North Carolinas outer
banks, swamp the southern third of Florida, and inundate Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village.
Another catastrophic effect would be the collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation that keeps
the winter weather in Europe far warmer than its latitude would otherwise allow. Economist William Cline once estimated the damage
to the United States alone from moderate levels of warming at 1-6 percent of GDP annually; severe warming could cost 13-26 percent
of GDP. But the most frightening scenario is runaway greenhouse warming, based on positive
feedback from the buildup of water vapor in the atmosphere that is both caused by and causes
hotter surface temperatures. Past ice age transitions, associated with only 5-10 degree changes in average global
temperatures, took place in just decades, even though no one was then pouring ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
Faced with this specter, the best one can conclude is that humankinds continuing enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect is
akin to playing Russian roulette with the earths climate and humanitys life support system. At worst, says physics professor Marty
Hoffert of New York University, were just going to burn everything up; were going to het the atmosphere to the
temperature it was in the Cretaceous when there were crocodiles at the poles, and then everything will collapse. During the
Cold War, astronomer Carl Sagan popularized a theory of nuclear winter to describe how a thermonuclear war between the Untied
States and the Soviet Union would not only destroy both countries but possible end life on this planet. Global warming is the
post-Cold War eras equivalent of nuclear winter at least as serious and considerably better
supported scientifically. Over the long run it puts dangers form terrorism and traditional military
challenges to shame. It is a threat not only to the security and prosperity to the United States, but
potentially to the continued existence of life on this planet.
 Prolif Turn
Climate turns prolif- turns the economy
Elhefnawy 8 (Nader, Professor of English at the University of
Miami,Autumn 2008, The Next Wave of Nuclear Proliferation, Parameters:
The US Army War College Quarterly)

The rationale driving the shift to nuclear energy in the first place
(energy and climate stress) will increasingly translate into greater
motivation on the part of some actors to pursue a nuclear capability.
Broad economic disruption is nearly certain as the result of the
tightening of oil supplies and the climate changes this scenario
anticipates. Politically, this may translate into changes in the distribution of
international power depending on individual states ability to cope (as with
wealthier nations, or ones with energy-efficient economies), or even profit
from these conditions (for instance, oil exporters); while the most vulnerable
states may collapse, creating even greater problems for the international
community (havens for crime, terrorism, or refugee flows). 27 Intensified
conflict over territory and waters rich in energy and other resources
will become increasingly likely.
Alliances, trading relationships, and other arrangements will be in
flux, and when combined with the associated anxiety and
vulnerability may exacerbate a desire on the part of certain states to
minimize their vulnerability. A goal which nuclear weapons have long
been viewed as a cheap way of achieving. The nuclearization of a
single state can induce a chain reaction across a region. The
nuclearization of China spurred India and in turn Pakistan to follow suit, and
the Argentinean and Brazilian nuclear programs fed off one another. Today
the possibility that a nuclear North Korea may lead South Korea or Japan to
acquire nuclear weapons is often discussed. 28 In the Middle East there are
signs that Saudi Arabia is reviewing its nuclear options, and a nuclear-armed
Iran may encourage the Saudis and others in the region to continue down this
path. 29 With nuclear technology more widely available these actions can be
taken much more rapidly and at less cost. Those pursuing this course of
action will find it a simple matter to amass large stockpiles of
nuclear weapons. It is also worth noting that even were the development of
actual nuclear weapons to remain a rarity, virtual arsenals could be more
common, leaving the nuclear weapons status of a longer list of countries
uncertain, in many cases deliberately so, with a detrimental impact on the
security environment.30
 AT: Climate Change
No Impact and good for the environment- Laundry List

Singer 8
(President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project and Distinguished Research
Professor @ George Mason, Prof. Emeritus Environmental Science @ UVA and First Director of
the National Weather Satellite Service. Fred, Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate,
Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on
Climate Change)//TR

We also discuss the many shortcomings of climate models in trying to simulate what is happening in the
real atmosphere. If the human contribution to global warming due to increased levels of greenhouse gases
is insignificant, why do greenhouse gas models calculate large temperature increases, i.e., show high
models ignore the
values of climate sensitivity? The most likely explanation is that
negative feedbacks that occur in the real atmosphere. New observations
reported from satellites suggest it is the distribution of water vapor that could
produce such strong negative feedbacks. If current warming is not due to increasing
greenhouse gases, what are the natural causes that might be responsible for both warming and cooling
episodes as so amply demonstrated in the historic, pre-industrial climate record? Empirical evidence
that the main cause of warming and cooling on a
suggests very strongly
decadal scale derives from solar activity via its modulation of cosmic
rays that in turn affect atmospheric cloudiness. According to published research,
cosmic-ray variations are also responsible for major climate changes observed in the paleo-record going
back 500 million years. ! The third question concerns the effects of modest warming. A major scare
associated with a putative future warming is a rapid rise in sea level, but even the IPCC has been scaling
there will be little if any acceleration, and
back its estimates. We show here that
therefore no additional increase in the rate of ongoing sea level rise.
This holds true even if there is a decades-long warming, whether
natural or manmade. Other effects of a putative increase in
temperature and carbon dioxide are likely to be benign, promoting
not only the growth of crops and forests but also benefiting human
health. Ocean acidification is not judged to be a problem, as indicated by available
data. After all, CO2 levels have been up to 20 times the present value
during the Phanerozoic Period, the past 500 million years. During this time
Earths climate has been remarkably stable, with no run-away
greenhouse effects indicating strong negative feedbacks. If, for
whatever reason, a modest warming were to occur even one that matches
temperatures seen during the Medieval Warm Period of around 1100 AD or the much larger ones recorded
during the Holocene Climate Optimum of some 6,000 years ago the impact would not be
damaging but would probably be, on the whole, beneficial. [Lamb 1982, and Figure 26] ! Policy
Implications ! Our findings, if sustained, point to natural causes and a moderate warming trend with
beneficial effects for humanity and wildlife. This has obvious policy implications: Schemes proposed for
controlling CO2 emissions, including the Kyoto Protocol, proposals in the U.S. for federal and state actions,
and proposals for a successor international treaty to Kyoto, are unnecessary, would be ineffective if
implemented, and would waste resources that can better be applied to genuine societal problems [Singer,
Even if a substantial part of global
Revelle and Starr 1991; Lomborg 2007].
warming were due to greenhouse gases and it is not any control
efforts currently contemplated would give only feeble results. For
example, the Kyoto Protocol even if punctiliously observed by all
participating nations would decrease calculated future
temperatures by only 0.02 degrees C by 2050 [re-calculated from Parry et al.
1998], an undetectable amount
 AT: SMRs solve Warming
Solving warming requires almost 100 reactors a year---
and requires several new states get enrichment
capabilities

Sharon Squassoni 8, senior associate in the Nonproliferation Program at

the Carnegie Endowment, former director of Policy Coordination in the
Nonproliferation Bureau of the State Department, March 12, 2008, Nuclear
Energy and Global Warming, Testimony before the Committee on House
Select Energy Independence and Global Warming, lexis

A rough approximation of where reactor capacity would expand in a

climate change scenario is based on the high scenario of the 2003 MIT
Study, "The Future of Nuclear Power." For 1500 GW capacity, MIT estimated
that 54 countries (an additional 23) would have commercial nuclear
power programs. This essentially means a five- fold increase in the
numbers of reactors worldwide and an annual build rate of 35 per year. In
the event that smaller-sized reactors are deployed in developing countries -
which makes eminent sense - the numbers could be much higher. If nuclear
energy were assumed to be able to contribute a reduction of
between 2 and 6 billion tons of carbon per year as outlined in the Stern
Report, the resulting reactor capacity would range between 1800 GWe and
4500 GWe - increases ranging from six times to ten times current capacity.
This would require building between 42 and 107 reactors per year
through 2050. Impact on Uranium Enrichment Such increases in reactor
capacity would certainly have repercussions for the front and back
ends of the fuel cycle. Almost 90 percent of current operating reactors use
low-enriched uranium (LEU). Presently, 11 countries have commercial
uranium enrichment capacity and produce between 40 and 50 million SWU. A
capacity of 1070 GWe - the one "wedge" scenario - could mean tripling
enrichment capacity, requiring anywhere from 11 to 22 additional enrichment
plants. A capacity of 1500 GWe would require quadrupling enrichment
capacity (see slide 4). Further, if Stern Report nuclear expansion levels are
achieved, enrichment capacity would have to increase ten-fold. In
assessing where new uranium enrichment capacity might develop,
the MIT Study assumed that 18 states would have 10 GWe reactor
capacity - the point at which domestic uranium enrichment becomes
competitive with LEU sold on the international market - and thus
might enrich uranium. (See slide 4 for a more modest approach, with 9 additional countries
enriching uranium).

Cant solve warming- need growth, and time, money, and

a host of issues make solving warming and growth
mutually exclusive

Martenson 9 (Dr. Chris, Dec 24, [An independent economist and

author of a popular website, ChrisMartenson.com. Chris earned a
PhD in neurotoxicology from Duke University, and an MBA from
Cornell University. A fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, Chris's
work has appeared on PBS and been cited by the Washington
Post. He is a contributor to SeekingAlpha.com and
FinancialSense.com, and former VP of Pfizer and SAIC,]
Copenhagen & Economic Growth - You Can't Have Both,
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51229 //DF)
massive discrepancy exists between the
I want to point out that a
official pronouncements emerging from Copenhagen on
carbon emissions and recent government actions to spur
economic growth. Before and during Copenhagen (and after, too, we can be sure),
politicians and central bankers across the globe have worked tirelessly to return the global economy to
a path of growth. We need more jobs, we are told; we need economic growth, we need more people
consuming more things. Growth is the ever-constant word on
politicians' lips. Official actions amounting to tens of trillions of dollars speak to the fact that
this is, in fact, our number-one global priority. But the consensus coming out of
Copenhagen is that carbon emissions have to be reduced by
a vast amount over the next few decades. These two ideas
are mutually exclusive. You can't have both. Economic
growth requires energy, and most of our energy comes from
hydrocarbons - coal, oil, and natural gas. Burning those fuel sources
releases carbon. Therefore, increasing economic activity will
release more carbon. It is a very simple concept. Nobody has yet
articulated how it is that we will reconcile both economic
growth and reduced use of hydrocarbon energy. And so the
proposed actions coming out of Copenhagen are not
grounded in reality, and they are set dead against trillions of
dollars of spending. There is only one thing that we know about which has curbed, and
even reversed, the flow of carbon into the atmosphere, and that is the recent economic contraction.
This is hard proof of the connection between the economy and energy. It should serve as proof that
any desire to grow the economy is also an explicit call to
increase the amount of carbon being expelled into the
atmosphere. The idea of salvation via the electric plug-in car or other renewable energy is a
fantasy. The reality is that any new technology takes decades to
reach full market penetration, and we haven't even really
begun to introduce any yet. Time, scale, and cost must be
weighed when considering any new technology's potential to
have a significant impact on our energy-use patterns. For example,
a recent study concluded that another 20 years would be required for electric vehicles to have a
significant impact on US gasoline consumption. Meaningful Numbers of Plug-In Hybrids Are Decades
Away The mass-introduction of the plug-in hybrid electric car is still a few decades away, according to
the
new analysis by the National Research Council. The study, released on Monday, also found that
next generation of plug-in hybrids could require hundreds of
billions of dollars in government subsidies to take off. Even
then, plug-in hybrids would not have a significant impact on
the nations oil consumption or carbon emissions before
2030. Savings in oil imports would also be modest, according to the report, which was financed with
 Twenty to thirty years is the normal
the help of the Energy Department.
length of time for any new technology to scale up and fully
penetrate a large market. But this study, as good as it was in calculating the time,
scale, and cost parameters of technology innovation and penetration, still left out the issue of resource
scarcity.Is there enough lithium in the world to build all these
cars? Neodymium? This is a fourth issue that deserves
careful consideration, given the scale of the overall issue. But
even if we did manage to build hundreds of millions of plug-in vehicles, where would the
electricity come from? Many people mistakenly think that
we are well on our way to substantially providing our
electricity needs using renewable sources such as wind and
solar. We are not. Renewable timetable is a long shot Al Gore's
well-intentioned challenge that we produce "100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and
truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years" represents a widely held delusion that we can't afford
to harbor. The delusion is shared by the Minnesota Legislature, which is requiring the state's largest
One of the
utility, Xcel Energy, to get at least 24 percent of its energy from wind by 2020.
most frequently ignored energy issues is the time required
to bring forth a major new fuel to the world's energy supply.
Until the mid-19th century, burning wood powered the world. Then coal gradually surpassed wood into
the first part of the 20th century. Oil was discovered in the 1860s, but it was a century before it
surpassed coal as our largest energy fuel. Trillions of dollars are now invested in the world's
infrastructure to mine, process and deliver coal, oil and natural gas. As distinguished professor Vaclav
Smil of the University of Manitoba recently put it, "It
is delusional to think that
the United States can install in a decade wind and solar
generating capacity equivalent to that of thermal power
plants that took nearly 60 years to construct." Texas has three times the
name plate wind capacity of any other state 8,000-plus megawatts. The Electric Reliability Council of
Texas manages the Texas electric grids.ERCOT reports that its unpredictable
wind farms actually supply just a little more than 700 MW
during summer power demand, and provide just 1 percent of
Texas' power needs of about 72,000 MW. ERCOT's 2015
forecast still has wind at just more than 1 percent despite
plans for many more turbines. For the United States, the
Energy Information Administration is forecasting wind and
solar together will supply less than 3 percent of our electric
energy in 2020. Again it turns out that supplanting even a
fraction of our current electricity production with renewables
will also take us decades. And even that presumes that we have a functioning
economy in which to mine, construct, transport and erect these fancy new technologies. Time,
scale, and cost all factor in as challenges to significant
penetration of new energy technologies as well. So where will all
the new energy for economic growth come from? The answer, unsurprisingly,
is from the already-installed carbon-chomping coal, oil, and
natural gas infrastructure. That is the implicit assumption that lies behind the calls
for renewed economic growth. It's The Money, Stupid As noted here routinely in my writings and in the
we have an exponential monetary system. One
Crash Course,
mandatory feature of our current exponential monetary
system is the need for perpetual growth. Not just any kind of growth;
exponential growth. That's the price for paying interest on
money loaned into existence. Without that growth, our
monetary system shudders to a halt and shifts into reverse,
operating especially poorly and threatening to melt down
the entire economic edifice. This is so well understood, explicitly or implicitly,
throughout all the layers of society and in our various institutions, that you will only ever hear
politicians and bankers talking about the "need" for growth. In fact, they are correct; our system does
need growth. All debt-based money systems require growth. That is the resulting feature of loaning
one's money into existence. That's the long and the short of the entire story. The growth may seem
Any
modest, perhaps a few percent per year ('That's all, honest!'), but therein lies the rub.
continuous percentage growth is still exponential growth.
Exponential growth means not just a little bit more each
year, but a constantly growing amount each year. It is a
story of more. Every year needs slightly more than the prior year - that's the requirement.
The Gap Nobody has yet reconciled the vast intellectual and
practical gap that exists between our addiction to
exponential growth and the carbon reduction rhetoric
coming out of Copenhagen. I've yet to see any credible plan that illustrates how we
can grow our economy without using more energy. Is it somehow possible to grow
an economy without using more energy? Let's explore that concept for a
bit. What does it mean to "grow an economy?" Essentially, it means more jobs for more people
An economy, as we measure it,
producing and consuming more things. That's it.
consists of delivering the needs and wants of people in ever-
larger quantities. It's those last three words - ever-larger
quantities - that defines the whole problem. For example, suppose our
economy consisted only of building houses. If the same number of houses were produced each year,
we'd say that the economy was not growing. It wouldn't matter whether the number was four hundred
thousand or four million; if the same number of new homes were produced each year, year after year,
this would be considered a very bad thing, because it would mean our economy was not growing. The
same is true for cars, hair brushes, big-screen TVs, grape juice, and everything else you can think of
Each year, more needs to be sold than
that makes up our current economy.
the year before, or the magic economic-stimulus wands will
come out to ward off the Evil Spirits of No Growth. If our economy
were to grow at the same rate as the population, it would grow by around 1% per year. This is still
exponential growth, but it is far short of the 3%-4% that policymakers consider both desirable and
necessary. Why the gap? Why do we work so hard to ensure that 1% more people consume 3% more
stuff each year? Out of Service It's not that 3% is the right number for the land or the people who live
upon it. The target of 3% is driven by our monetary system,
which needs a certain rate of exponential growth each year
in order to cover the interest expense due each year on the
already outstanding loans. The needs of our monetary
system are driving our economic decisions, not the needs of the people,
let alone the needs of the planet. We are in service to our money system,
not the other way around. Today we have a burning need for an economic model that can operate
tolerably well without growth. But ours can't, and so we actually find ourselves in the uncomfortable
position of pitting human needs against the money system and observing that the money system is
winning the battle. The Federal Reserve exists solely to assure that the monetary system has what it
needs to function. That is their focus, their role, and their primary concern. I assume that they assume
that by taking care of the monetary system, everything else will take care of itself. I think their
our primary institutions and
assumption is archaic and wrong. Regardless,
governing systems are in service to a monetary system that
is dysfunctional. It was my having this outlook, this lens, more than any other, that allowed
me to foresee what so many economists missed. Only by examining the system
from a new, and very wide, angle can the enormous flaws in
the system be seen. Economy & Energy Now let's get back to our main problem of
economic growth and energy use (a.k.a. carbon production). There is simply no way to build houses,
produce televisions, grow and transport grape juice, and market hair brushes without consuming
We need liquid fuel to
energy in the process. That's just a cold, hard reality.
extract, transform, and transport products to market. More
people living in more houses means we need more electricity.
Sure, we can be more efficient in our use of energy, but unless our efficiency gains
are exceeding the rate of economic growth, more energy will
be used, not less. In the long run, if we were being 3% more efficient in our use of fuel and
growing our economy at 3%, this would mean burning the same amount of fuel each year.
Unfortunately, fuel-efficiency gains are well known to run
slower than economic growth. For example, the average fuel
efficiency of the US car fleet (as measured by the CAFE standards) has
increased by 18% over the past 25 years, while the economy
has grown by 331%. Naturally, our fuel consumption has grown, not fallen, over that
time, despite the efficiency gains. So the bottom line is this: There is no
possible way to both have economic growth (as we've known it in the
past) and cut carbon emissions. At least not without doing things very differently.
Tipping Point Turns
 AT: Runaway Warming
Short time-frame tipping point rhetoric is a fallacy-
impacts take decades If not centuries to happen, and we
need to focus on the long term

Mendelsohn 9 (Robert O., June 2009, [The Edwin Weyerhaeuser

Davis Professor, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental
Studies, Yale University,] Climate Change and Economic
Growth, online:
http://www.growthcommission.org/storage/cgdev/documents/gcw
p060web.pdf //DF)

debate about climate change comes from a number of

The heart of the
warnings from scientists and others that give the impression that
human-induced climate change is an immediate threat to society (IPCC
2007a,b; Stern 2006). Millions of people might be vulnerable to health effects (IPCC 2007b), crop
production might fall in the low latitudes (IPCC 2007b), water supplies might dwindle (IPCC 2007b),
precipitation might fall in arid regions (IPCC 2007b), extreme events will grow exponentially (Stern 2006),
and between 2030 percent of species will risk extinction (IPCC 2007b). Even worse, there may be
catastrophic events such as the melting of Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets causing severe sea level rise,
which would inundate hundreds of millions of people (Dasgupta et al. 2009). Proponents argue
there is no time to waste. Unless greenhouse gases are cut dramatically today, economic
growth and wellbeing may be at risk (Stern 2006). These statements are largely
alarmist and misleading. Although climate change is a serious problem that deserves
attention, societys immediate behavior has an extremely low
probability of leading to catastrophic consequences. The science and
economics of climate change is quite clear that emissions over the
next few decades will lead to only mild consequences. The severe
impacts predicted by alarmists require a century (or two in the case of Stern
2006) of no mitigation. Many of the predicted impacts assume there
will be no or little adaptation. The net economic impacts from
climate change over the next 50 years will be small regardless. Most
of the more severe impacts will take more than a century or even a
millennium to unfold and many of these potential impacts will
never occur because people will adapt. It is not at all apparent that immediate and
dramatic policies need to be developed to thwart longrange climate risks. What is needed are
longrun balanced responses.

Tipping point rhetoric breeds inaction in the face of

alarmism, and are of questionable scientific basis

Revkin 9 (Andrew C., March 29, 2009, [Senior fellow at Pace

University's Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies,
has taught at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and the
Bard College Center for Environmental Policy,] Among Climate
Scientists, a Dispute Over Tipping Points, The New York Times,
online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29revkin.html
?_r=1&pagewanted=print //DF)

But the idea that the planet is nearing tipping points thresholds at which
change suddenly becomes unstoppable has driven a wedge between scientists
who otherwise share deep concerns about the implications of a
human-warmed climate. Environmentalists and some climate experts
are increasingly warning of impending tipping points in their efforts
to stir public concern. The term confers a sense of immediacy and menace to potential threats
from a warming climate dangers that otherwise might seem too distant for people to worry about. But
other scientists say there is little hard evidence to back up specific
predictions of catastrophe. They worry that the use of the term
tipping point can be misleading and could backfire, fueling
criticism of alarmism and threatening public support for reducing
greenhouse gas emissions. I think a lot of this threshold and tipping
point talk is dangerous, said Kenneth Caldeira, an earth scientist at Stanford University and
the Carnegie Institution and an advocate of swift action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. If we say
we passed thresholds and tipping points today, this will be an
excuse for inaction tomorrow, he said. While studies of climate patterns in the distant
past clearly show the potential for drastic shifts, these scientists say, there is enormous
uncertainty in making specific predictions about the future . In some
cases, there are big questions about whether climate-driven disasters
like the loss of the Amazon or a rise in sea levels of several yards in a century are even
plausible. And even in cases where most scientists agree that rising
temperatures could lead to unstoppable change, no one knows
where the thresholds lie that would set off such shifts .

Tipping point rhetoric is a new phenomena that lays its

claim not to science but the media- and this rhetoric
inspires try-or-die environmental fatalism

Russill 8 (Chris, July 2008, [Assistant Professor in the

Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota,]
Tipping Point Forewarnings in Climate Change Communication:
Some Implications of an Emerging Trend, Environmental
Communication, Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 133-153 //DF)

use of tipping points does not simply

Finally, there is the fact that Hansens
reflect the primary science. I replicated the methodology used by Naomi
Oreskes (2004) to survey the climate change research literature and found no uses of
tipping point between 1993 and 2003. I then extended the search through the end
of 2006 and broadened the parameters. This resulted in two research articles. The dearth of
tipping point references in the scientific literature prompts
questions regarding its accuracy as a description of climate change .
In addressing this question for Nature, Gabrielle Walker (2006) reviewed the scientific literature and
there are several danger zones that
interviewed IPCC climate scientists to conclude
may deserve to be called tipping points (p. 802). In particular, the
elements of threshold crossing, irreversibility, and positive feedback
appear to characterize key climatic mechanisms quite well. It is odd,
however, that Walkers non-committal conclusion suggests the
popularity of the concept, while failing to observe its very rare use
in the primary research literature (p. 802). In fact, both Walker and an
accompanying Nature editorial are unclear on this point . As the Editors
Summary (2006) puts it, The idea that passing a hidden threshold could
drastically worsen man-made climate change has been current in the
scientific literature for many years. Now it has a new name, a
tipping point, and suddenly the news magazines and other media
have picked up on it. ( 1) This is an important point. If tipping point
warnings do not simply reflect advancing scientific understanding,
then why is it now preferred? There are other functionally equivalent and more clearly
elaborated conceptions of change available, both in the scientific literature and in popular environmental
writing. For example, Al Gores (1992) Earth in the Balance attempts to revise received views of causality
in a way very similar to Gladwells perspective, enrolling ideas of non-linearity from chaos theory (p. 34,
pp. 361!363). Walker does not say it is an inaccurate description of climate systems and the editors of
The perspective is almost
Nature suggest its use is akin to old wine in new bottles.
nominalist in its conclusion regarding the appropriateness of tipping
points. Climate systems might be described in a variety of manners,
either using tipping points or other concepts. Its importance derives not from better
describing climate systems but in making available an image of
crisis useful for registering public concern and opening avenues for
response. It is on this point that advocates and critics of tipping
point forewarnings disagree. The editors of Nature, for example, believe there are
three dangers attendant on focusing humanitys response to the
climate crisis too much on tipping points (p. 785). They believe such
warnings underplay the uncertainties inherent to climate science,
that they distort human responses by focusing on avoidance rather
than adaptation, and that can induce fatalism, since tipping points,
may encourage a belief that a complete solution is the only
worthwhile one, as any other course may allow the climate system to
tumble past the crucial threshold (p. 785).

Tipping point claims are contrary to how the environment

works and force alarmism that produces inaccurate
solutions

Russill 8 (Chris, July 2008, [Assistant Professor in the

Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota,]
Tipping Point Forewarnings in Climate Change Communication:
Some Implications of an Emerging Trend, Environmental
Communication, Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 133-153 //DF)
Second, in trying to make clear the threat to the planet, Hansen describes tipping point change in the
following manner: A
tipping point occurs in a system with positive
feedbacks. When forcing toward a change, and change itself become
large enough, positive feedbacks can cause a sudden acceleration of
change with very little, if any, additional forcing (p. 3). This explanation
accords well with Gladwells attempt to capture changes that are sensitive to small perturbations and
which selfsustain the pattern of change without further forcing.In this situation, one passes
the threshold where past climate responses are a reliable guide to
future predictions. This is also the explication Gabrielle Walker (2006) found acceptable in her
review of tipping point uses in climate change science for Nature. It is an accelerated
change against a background of slower or more gradualist change
that distinguishes a tipping point. This creates imprecision since the rate of change is
only accelerated when pictured upon a more gradually shifting set of relations. Hypothetically,
the tipping point might be a snap of the fingers or a century long
moment, if considered on geological timescales. In practice, however, the intent of
tipping point warnings is to transform our perception of climatic and
geological system change by using more familiar event-based
frames of reference. Imprecision does not result simply from the
complexity of the processes involved, but from the effort to fit these
almost imperceptible changes to temporal scales based more firmly
in typical human experiences. Put another way, Hansen is re-characterizing
climatic processes in terms of events so as to recalibrate the
dangers represented by shifts in these processes to our sense of
significant change. This entails a necessary transformation of
scientific research and opens Hansen to charges of alarmism.

Tipping points are false- the globe has survived and

thrived in much worse

Taylor 11 (James M., October 2, 2011, [Senior Fellow, The

Heartland Institute; Managing Editor, Environment and Climate
News,] Case Against Climate-Change Alarmism, online:
http://heartland.org/editorial/2011/10/12/case-against-climate-
change-alarmism //DF)

While it is
The first principle we need to keep in mind regarding climate change alarmism is context.
true that global temperatures have risen somewhat during the past
100-plus years since the Little Ice Age ended, there was little room
for temperatures to go at the time but up. The Little Ice Age, lasting from
approximately 1300-1900 A.D., brought the planets coldest extended
temperatures during the last 10,000 years. Saying that
temperatures have risen by 1 degree or so since the end of the Little
Ice Age tells us essentially nothing in the long-term temperature
context because the arbitrary baseline of the Little Ice Age was an
exceptionally cold climate anomaly. Keeping this long-term
temperature context in mind, global warming alarmists frequently
assert that a given month, year, or decade was the hottest in
recorded history, but that statement only holds true because
alarmists conveniently define recorded history as the past 130
years or so since the depths of the Little Ice Age. Alarmists justify this
convenient definition of recorded history based on the establishment of a relatively global system of
proxy climate
weather and temperature stations approximately 130 years ago. Fair enough, but
data from a variety of sources, including ice cores drilled in the Greenland and Antarctic
ice sheets, demonstrate that global temperatures were warmer than
today for most of the past 10,000 years. Human civilization first
developed, and thereafter thrived, during climate conditions warmer than
today. Todays temperatures, in a more appropriate long-term context, are
unusually cold, not hot. The second principle we need to remember is that the earths
long-term temperature history gives us proof that warmer
temperatures have in the real world always been better for human
civilization than colder temperatures. The Little Ice Age was typified
by crop failures, famines, plagues, extreme weather events and
human population contractions. By contrast, our recently warming
temperatures have been a welcome reprieve from the harsh and
unusually cold conditions of the Little Ice Age. During the past century, as global
temperatures have risen forests have expanded, deserts have retreated, soil moisture has improved, crops
have flourished and extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes have become less
frequent. While our ability to document the frequency of famines, plagues, droughts, hurricanes, etc., is
more limited in the millennia before the Little Ice Age, we do know that during these warmer millennia
human civilization thrived and the planets climate was not thrown into a chaotic downward spiral. Indeed,
the earths climate remains quite benign despite these thousands of
years of recent warmer temperatures. This really gets to the heart of the Sandia
paper. If we have real-world evidence that temperatures were warmer
than today during most of the past 10,000 years (and also during several
interglacial warm periods during the past few million years), and if we also have real-world
evidence that human civilization thrived during these warmer
temperatures and the warmer temperatures did not trigger so-called
tipping points sending the planet into a climate catastrophe, then
we have very little reason to believe that our presently and
moderately warming temperatures are now poised to send the
planet into a climate catastrophe. For many scientists, this distinction
between theory and real-world conditions is what typifies the
differences between so-called alarmists and skeptics . As Colorado State
University emeritus professor and hurricane expert William Gray frequently explains, alarmists base their
climate alarmism on speculative computer models programmed and run within the confines of cubicles
and drywall. Skeptics, on the other hand, base their skepticism on real-world data and observations. The
global warming may produce an
Sandia paper may present an interesting theory that
imminent climate catastrophe within a chaotic global atmosphere,
but the theory is strongly contradicted by thousands of years of
real-world data and real-world climate observations. The Scientific
Method dictates that real-world observations trump speculative
theory, not the other way around.
Negative Feedbacks
 AT: Positive Feedbacks
No positive feedbacks-this takes out 100% of the impact
to warming

Vahrenholt 12
(Fritz, Honorary Professor of chemistry at the University of Hamburg, former Umweltsenator in
the German Ministry for Environment, Scientific Reviewer for the 2010 IPCC, June 18, 2012,
"Global warming: second thoughts of an environmentalist," The Telegraph,
online:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9338939/Global-warming-second-thoughts-of-an-
environmentalist.html)//TR

Furthermore, what is little known is that CO2 also requires a strong amplifier if it were
to aggressively shape future climate as envisaged by the IPCC. CO2 alone,
without so-called feedbacks, would only generate a moderate warming of
1.1C per CO2 doubling. The IPCC assume in their models that there are strong
amplification processes, including water vapour and cloud effects
which, however, are also still poorly understood, like solar amplification. These are
the shaky foundations for the IPCC's alarming prognoses of a
temperature rise of up to 4.5C for a doubling of CO2. In the last 10
years the solar magnetic field dropped to one of its lowest levels in the
last 150 years, indicating lower intensity in the decades ahead. This may have contributed to the
halt in global warming and is likely to continue for a while , until it may
resume gradually around 2030/2040. Based on the past natural climate pattern, we should
expect that by 2100 temperatures will not have risen more than 1C ,
significantly less than proposed by the IPCC. Climate catastrophe would have been called off and the fear
of a dangerously overheated planet would go down in history as a classic science error. Rather than being
largely settled, there are more and more open climate questions which need to be addressed in an
impartial and open-minded way.

Negative Feedback solves- Their models are all based on a

misreading

Spencer 10
(Roy, climatologist and a Principal Research Scientist for the University of Alabama in
Huntsville, Former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, awarded the American
Meteorological Society's Special Award for his work in Satellite-Based Temperature Monitoring,
THE GREAT GLOBALWARMING BLUNDER How Mother Nature Fooled the Worlds Top Climate
Scientists, p. 153-155)//TR

satellite measurements of the Earth reveal the

The first conclusion is that recent
climate system to be relatively insensitive to warming influences, such
as humanitys greenhouse gas emissions. This insensitivity is the
result of more clouds forming in response to warming, thereby
reflecting more sunlight back to outer space and reducing that
warming. This process, known as negative feedback, is analogous to opening your car
window or putting a sun shade over the windshield as the sun begins to heat the cars interior. An
insensitive climate system does not particularly care how much we drive suvs or how much coal we burn
for electricity.
This evidence directly contradicts the net positive
feedback exhibited in the computerized climate models tracked by
the IPCC. It is well known that positive feedback in these models is what causes them to produce so
 Without the high
much warming in response to humanitys greenhouse gas emissions.
climate sensitivity of the models, anthropogenic global warming
becomes little more than a minor academic curiosity . The strong negative
feedback in the real climate system has not been noticed by previous researchers examining satellite data
because they have not been careful about inferring causation. As is the case in all realms of scientific
research, making the measurements is much easier than figuring out what those measurements mean in
Climate researchers have neglected to account for
terms of cause and effect.
clouds causing temperature change (forcing) when they tried to
determine how temperature caused clouds to change (feedback). They
mixed up cause and effect when analyzing year-to-year variability in clouds and temperature. You might
say they were fooled by Mother Nature. Clouds causing temperature to change created the illusion of a
sensitive climate system. In order to help you understand this problem, I have used the example that I was
given when I asked the experts how they knew that feedbacks in the climate system were positive. It was
explained to me that when there is an unusually warm year, researchers have found that there is typically
less cloud cover. The researchers assumed that the warming caused the decrease in cloud cover. This
would be positive feedback because fewer clouds would let in more sunlight and thereby amplify the
warming. But I always wondered: How did they know that it was the warming causing fewer clouds, rather
than fewer clouds causing the warming? As we have seen, they didnt know. And when the larger,
contaminating effect of clouds causing temperature change is taken into account, the true signal of
negative feedback emerges from the data. I have demonstrated this with a simple climate model by
that the two directions of causation forcing and feedback (or
showing
cause and effect) have distinctly different signatures both in the
satellite data and in a simple model of the climate system. These
distinct signatures even show up in the climate models tracked by
the IPCC. Probably as a result of the confusion between cause and
effect, climate models have been built to be too sensitive, with
clouds erroneously amplifying rather than reducing warming in
response to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
The models then predict far too much warming when the small
warming influence of more manmade greenhouse gases is increased
over time in the models. This ultimately results in predictions of serious to catastrophic levels
of warming for the future, which you then hear about through the news media. While different models
The mix-up between
predict various levels of warming, all of them exhibit positive feedbacks.
cause and effect also explains why feedbacks previously diagnosed
from satellite observations of the Earth by other researchers have
been so variable. There have been differing levels of contamination of the feedback signal by
forcing, depending on what year the satellites were observing the Earth. The second major conclusion of
this book is closely connected to the first. If the carbon dioxide we produce is not nearly enough to cause
significant warming in a climate system dominated by negative feedback, then what caused the warming
New satellite measurements
we have experienced over the last fifty years or more?
indicate that most of the global average temperature variability we
have experienced in the last 100 years could have been caused by a
natural fluctuation in cloud cover resulting from the Pacific Decadal
Oscillation (PDO). Nine years of our best NASA satellite data, combined with a simple climate model,
reveal that the PDO causes cloud changes that might be sufficient to explain most of the major variations
in global average temperature since 1 900, including 75 percent of the warming trend.
The Rate Debate
 Slowing
Earth is actually getting colder - disproves anthropogenic
warming

Klimenko 11
(RAS Klimenko, Moscow Power Engineering Institute,
2011, "Why is Global Warming Slowing Down?," Doklady
Earth Sciences, Vol. 440(2))
The first decade of the present century has ended with a remarkable climatic event: for the first time
over the past 65 years, the fiveyear average global temper ature over 20062010 turned out to be lower
than the value for the previous fiveyear interval (20012005). In addition, the absolute maximum
temperature, which was attained as long ago as in 1998, has not been surpassed for thirteen years. Both
these facts seem ingly support the arguments of the opponents of global warming theory, at least those
who regard the anthro pogenic origin of warming questionable or even far fetched. Indeed, the
anthropogenic emission of car bon dioxide, which is the major greenhouse atmo spheric component, has
risen by 60% from 5.2 giga tons to 8.5 gigatons of carbon, and its concentration has increased from 339
to 390 ppmv (parts per million by volume). How then do we explain the apparent slowdown in the rate
of global warming? Evidently, the observed global rise in temperature (Fig. 1) is a response of the
climatic system to the combined action of both anthropogenic and natural impacts. Some of the latter
are precisely the factors responsible for the current climatic paradox. Further, we will attempt to identify
these factors and, based on their analysis, forecast the global climatic trends for the next decades. Figure
2 presents the wavelet spectra yielded by continuously analyzing the time series of global tem perature
over 18502011 [1]. Here, we analyze only one of three existing global temperature datasets which are
continuously updated, namely the HadCRUT3 temperature series provided by the Uni versity of East
Anglia (accessible at http://www.cru. uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/), because this is, as of now, the
only dataset covering more than a 150year interval, which is crucial for our study. We note that it only
recently became possible to analyze such long time series and, thus, identification of multidecade
rhythms became a solvable task. The temperature data were preliminarily rid of the longterm
anthropogenic trend associated with the accumulation of greenhouse gases and aerosols in the
atmosphere; this trend was calculated from the energybalance climate model developed at the Moscow
Power Engineering Institute (MPEI) [2]. The resulting temperature series, free of anthropogenic trends,
will contain important infor mation on the influence of natural factors. Figure 2 shows that, throughout
the entire interval of instrumental observations since the mid nineteenth century, the data contain rather
stable 70year and 20year cyclic components. A less significant 9year cycle was present in most
observations (during 1870 1900 and 19402000), and a 6year cycle persisted over a considerable part
of the entire time span. Closely consistent results were also obtained when analyzing the temperature
series by the maximum entropy method (MEM) (Fig. 3). As the order of the auroregression (AR)
method is known to significantly affect the result, in our case this parameter was chosen to be onethird
the length of the studied data series: according to the long experience in application of MEM in climate
research, this value is suitable for providing useful information. All the harmonic com ponents identified
above are statistically significant with a confidence level of 90%. Supposedly, the source of the
dominant 70year cycle is the North Atlantic, where this harmonic is reliably identified not only in the
ocean [35] but also on the continental margins: in Greenland [6], England [7], Finland [8], at the
Novaya Zemlya Archipelago, and on the Yamal Peninsula [9]. More over, this periodical component is
not only recognized in the instrumental data but it is also revealed in the time series of paleotemperature
and pressure which date back to over hundreds and even thousands of years ago. We believe that this
rhythm is associated with the quasiperiodical changes in the atmospheric and oceanic circulation known
as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and with the related pulsations in the advection of warm waters
to the basins of the Nor wegian and Barents seas. Indeed, the time series of the NAO index contain an
approximately 60to 70year component [10] and show a strong positive correlation with the time series
of temperature in the Northern hemisphere [11].
 Warming Inevitable
Warming inevitable even with a complete emissions
reduction

Solomon et. al 10
(Susan Solomon, Chemical Sciences Division, Earth
System Research Laboratory, National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, Ph.D. in Climotology
University of California, Berkeley, Nobel Peace Prize
Winner, Chairman of the IPCC, Gian-Kasper Plattner,
Deputy Head, Director of Science, IPCC Affiliated, Climate
and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University
of Bern, Switzerland, John S. Daniel, research scientist at
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA), Ph.D. Physics @ Michigan, Todd J. Sanford,
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental
Science @ Colorado, Daniel M. Murphy, Chemical Sciences
Division, Earth System Research Laboratory, National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Boulder Gian-
Kasper Plattner, Deputy Head, Director of Science,
Technical Support Unit Working Group I,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Affiliated
Scientist, Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics
Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland Reto Knutti,
Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science,
Eidgenssiche Technische Hochschule Zurich and Pierre
Friedlingstein, Chair, Mathematical Modelling of Climate
Systems, member of the Science Steering Committee of
the Analysis Integration and Modeling of the Earth System
(AIMES) programme of IGBP and of the Global Carbon
Project (GCP) of the Earth System Science Partnership
(ESSP), Proceedings of the National Academy of the
Sciences of the United States of America, "Persistence of
climate changes due to a range of greenhouse gases", Vol
107(43))
Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases increased over the course of the
20th century due to human activities. The human-caused increases in these gases are the primary
forcing that accounts for much of the global warming of the past fifty years, with carbon dioxide being
the most important single radiative forcing agent (1). Recent studies have shown that the human-caused
warming linked to carbon dioxide is nearly irreversible for more than 1,000 y, even if emissions of the
gas were to cease entirely (25). The importance of the ocean in taking up heat and slowing the
response of the climate system to radiative forcing changes has been noted in many studies (e.g., refs. 6
and 7). The key role of the oceans thermal lag has also been highlighted by recent approaches to
proposed metrics for comparing the warming of different greenhouse gases (8, 9). Among the
observations attesting to the importance of these effects are those showing that climate changes caused
by transient volcanic aerosol loading persist for more than 5 y (7, 10), and a portion can be expected to
last more than a century in the ocean (1113); clearly these signals persist far longer than the radiative
forcing decay timescale of about 1218 mo for the volcanic aerosol (14, 15). Thus the observed climate
response to volcanic events suggests that some persistence of climate change should be expected even
for quite short-lived radiative forcing perturbations. It follows that the climate changes induced by
short-lived anthropogenic greenhouse gases such as methane or hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) may not
decrease in concert with decreases in concentration if the anthropogenic emissions of those gases were
to be eliminated. In this paper, our primary goal is to show how different processes and timescales
contribute to determining how long the climate changes due to various greenhouse gases could be
expected to remain if anthropogenic emissions were to cease. Advances in modeling have led to
improved AtmosphereOcean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs) as well as to Earth Models of
Intermediate Complexity (EMICs). Although a detailed representation of the climate system changes on
regional scales can only be provided by AOGCMs, the simpler EMICs have been shown to be useful,
particularly to examine phenomena on a global average basis. In this work, we use the Bern 2.5CC
EMIC (see Materials and Methods and SI Text), which has been extensively intercompared to other
EMICs and to complex AOGCMs (3, 4). It should be noted that, although the Bern 2.5CC EMIC
includes a representation of the surface and deep ocean, it does not include processes such as ice sheet
losses or changes in the Earths albedo linked to evolution of vegetation. However, it is noteworthy that
this EMIC, although parameterized and simplified, includes 14 levels in the ocean; further, its global
ocean heat uptake and climate sensitivity are near the mean of available complex models, and its
computed timescales for uptake of tracers into the ocean have been shown to compare well to
observations (16). A recent study (17) explored the response of one AOGCM to a sudden stop of all
forcing, and the Bern 2.5CC EMIC shows broad similarities in computed warming to that study (see
Fig. S1), although there are also differences in detail. The climate sensitivity (which characterizes the
long-term absolute warming response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations) is 3
C for the model used here. Our results should be considered illustrative and exploratory rather than
fully quantitative given the limitations of the EMIC and the uncertainties in climate sensitivity. Results
One Illustrative Scenario to 2050. In the absence of mitigation policy, concentrations of the three major
greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide can be expected to increase in this
century. If emissions were to cease, anthropogenic CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere by a
series of processes operating at different timescales (18). Over timescales of decades, both the land and
upper ocean are important sinks. Over centuries to millennia, deep oceanic processes become dominant
and are controlled by relatively well-understood physics and chemistry that provide broad consistency
across models (see, for example, Fig. S2 showing how the removal of a pulse of carbon compares
across a range of models). About 20% of the emitted anthropogenic carbon remains in the atmosphere
for many thousands of years (with a range across models including the Bern 2.5CC model being about
19 4% at year 1000 after a pulse emission; see ref. 19), until much slower weathering processes affect
the carbonate balance in the ocean (e.g., ref. 18). Models with stronger carbon/climate feedbacks than
the one considered here could display larger and more persistent warmings due to both CO2 and non-
CO2 greenhouse gases, through reduced land and ocean uptake of carbon in a warmer world. Here our
focus is not on the strength of carbon/climate feedbacks that can lead to differences in the carbon
concentration decay, but rather on the factors that control the climate response to a given decay. The
removal processes of other anthropogenic gases including methane and nitrous oxide are much more
simply described by exponential decay constants of about 10 and 114 y, respectively (1), due mainly to
known chemical reactions in the atmosphere. In this illustrative study, we do not include the feedback of
changes in methane upon its own lifetime (20). We also do not account for potential interactions
between CO2 and other gases, such as the production of carbon dioxide from methane oxidation (21),
or changes to the carbon cycle through, e.g., methane/ozone chemistry (22). Fig. 1 shows the computed
future global warming contributions for carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide for a midrange
scenario (23) of projected future anthropogenic emissions of these gases to 2050. Radiative forcings for
all three of these gases, and their spectral overlaps, are represented in this work using the expressions
assessed in ref. 24. In 2050, the anthropogenic emissions are stopped entirely for illustration purposes.
The figure shows nearly irreversible warming for at least 1,000 y due to the imposed carbon dioxide
 increases, as in previous work. All published studies to date, which use multiple EMICs and one
AOGCM, show largely irreversible warming due to future carbon dioxide increases (to within about 0.5
C) on a timescale of at least 1,000 y (35, 25, 26). Fig. 1 shows that the calculated future warmings
due to anthropogenic CH4 and N2O also persist notably longer than the lifetimes of these gases. The
figure illustrates that emissions of key non-CO2 greenhouse gases such as CH4 or N2O could lead to
warming that both temporarily exceeds a given stabilization target (e.g., 2 C as proposed by the G8
group of nations and in the Copenhagen goals) and remains present longer than the gas lifetimes even if
emissions were to cease. A number of recent studies have underscored the important point that
reductions of non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions are an approach that can indeed reverse some past
climate changes (e.g., ref. 27). Understanding how quickly such reversal could happen and why is an
important policy and science question. Fig. 1 implies that the use of policy measures to reduce
emissions of short-lived gases will be less effective as a rapid climate mitigation strategy than would be
thought if based only upon the gas lifetime. Fig. 2 illustrates the factors influencing the warming
contributions of each gas for the test case in Fig. 1 in more detail, by showing normalized values
(relative to one at their peaks) of the warming along with the radiative forcings and concentrations of
CO2 , N2O, and CH4 . For example, about two-thirds of the calculated warming due to N2O is still
present 114 y (one atmospheric lifetime) after emissions are halted, despite the fact that its excess
concentration and associated radiative forcing at that time has dropped to about one-third of the peak
value.

Its too late to stop climate change, and models fail to accurately
predict what will occur
Idso 11 Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2011 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U Nebraska) Recent
Reflections on Sea-Level Rise Reflect Poorly on the IPCC
http://co2science.org/articles/V14/N50/EDIT.php
It has long been the practice of the world's climate alarmists to promote fear about the future in terms of
anthropogenic-CO2-induced increases in various types of climatic extremes. As noted by Lee (2011),
for example, "in 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested that, for a
'business-as-usual' greenhouse gas forcing scenario, global sea level could rise by 8-29 cm by 2030 and
31-110 cm by 2100," as reported by Houghton et al. (1990), which report also stated that "even with
substantial decreases in the emissions of greenhouse gases, future rises in sea level were unavoidable
owing to 'lags in the climate system'." And he also noted that "the Second World Climate Conference
(Jager and Ferguson, 1991) reached similar conclusions, which in the case of the British Isles was that
there could be a [sea level] rise of between 50 and 70 cm over the next 100 years." Noting that "the
IPCC projections set the framework for the coastal policy response to sea-level rise in England and
Wales," which was developed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF, 1991), Lee
says it was widely predicted that the expected relative sea-level rise (RSLR) would result in an increase
in wave energy at the base of coastal cliffs that would lead to accelerated cliff recession that "inevitably
would lead to increased risk to properties behind actively retreating cliff-lines," adding that Bray and
Hooke (1997) suggested that "significant increases in recession rate could be expected to occur," as
their analysis pointed towards "a 22-133% increase in cliff recession rates on the south coast of England
by 2050." As a result of these projections, Lee decided to analyze the most recent 50-year recession
records of the United Kingdom's Holderness Cliffs, stating that "twenty years on from the IPCC First
Assessment Report seems an appropriate moment to reflect on what has actually happened." So what
did he find? As Lee describes it, "relative sea level has risen over the second half of the 20th century,"
and "so have Holderness cliff recession rates, from around 1.2 m/year in the early 1950s to around 1.5
m/year by 2000." However, as he continues, "there has been no significant acceleration in the rate of
global sea-level rise since 1990 and no rapid increase in the recession rate." Thus, he states that
"predictions of 20-year recession distances made in the early 1990s that took account of the RSLR
advice from MAFF (1991) are likely to have overestimated the risk to cliff-top property and the benefits
of coast protection." In a candid expression of his feelings after conducting his analysis, Lee writes that
"as someone who was heavily involved in providing technical support to policymakers through the
research and development of methods for predicting cliff recession that took account of RSLR (see Lee
et al., 2001; Hall et al., 2000; Lee and Clark, 2002; Lee, 2005), I feel somewhat awkward about the
absence of accelerated cliff recession over the last two decades," acknowledging that "perhaps we were
all too keen to accept the unquestioned authority of the IPCC and their projections." Thus, he ends by
stating "I am left with the feeling that a healthy skepticism of the climate change industry might not be
such a bad thing," suggesting that people see, in this regard, the report of the Nongovernmental Panel
on Climate Change that was edited by Idso and Singer (2009).
 Past Tipping Point
The plan is too little, too late they cant stop warming
now

Ghommem, Hajj, and Puri 12

(Mehdi Ghommem, Muhammad R. Hajj, Ishwar K. Puri,
Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics,
Virginia Tech, 4/26/12, Influence of natural and
anthropogenic carbon dioxide sequestration on global
warming Ecological Modelling, SciVerse Science Direct)
We have used the results of previous GCM simulations to develop a model that accounts for the
couplings between the global temperature, atmospheric CO2 concentration, and the ocean and land CO2
uptakes. The good agreement between the results of the simplified model and historical records for both
atmospheric CO2 and global temperature demonstrates that our reduced order analysis is able to
correctly reproduce the major CO2 feedbacks between natural sinks and the atmosphere. We have also
used the model to investigate the impact of anthropogenic CO2 sequestration on the increase in the
global temperature. Our results suggest that an inordinately large, and perhaps unrealizable, fraction of
CO2 emissions would have to be sequestered in order to prevent global warming. Undoubtedly, without
referring to the environmental consequences, sequestration could be used as one among several carbon
mitigation strategies to accomplish large effective values.

Warming is real but the plan cant solve it

Ghommem, Hajj, and Puri 12

(Mehdi Ghommem, Muhammad R. Hajj, Ishwar K. Puri,
Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics,
Virginia Tech, 4/26/12, Influence of natural and
anthropogenic carbon dioxide sequestration on global
warming Ecological Modelling, SciVerse Science Direct)
The increase in the global surface temperature is influenced by several factors including anthropogenic
and natural emissions of CO2, and the ability of natural sequestration reservoirs in the Earth's oceans
and land to absorb and store it. The CO2 absorption in these reservoirs is sensitive to changes in the
global temperature and the atmospheric CO2 concentration, thus creating a feedback loop in the Earth's
ecosystem, which complicates predictions of the overall impact of rising atmospheric CO2 levels on
global warming. Here, we model this interaction through a positive feedback loop and utilize general
circulation models (GCM) to quantify the coupling between the carbon-cycle and the global
temperature. We validate the model by comparing its predictions with those from high fidelity
simulations and historical records. Thereafter, we investigate the impact of anthropogenic CO2
sequestration on lowering the rate of increase in the global temperature and find that a reduction in
global warming is more sensitive to larger sequestration fractions. Thus, an inordinately large fraction
of CO2 emissions would have to be sequestered to significantly impact global warming.
 Runaway Warming Soon
Runaway warming leads to extinction timeframe is 2020

Stein 7/18/12
(David Stein, Science Editor for The Canadian, news
agency, Scientists say Humanity ignores Antarctic
melting and Greenhouse gas time-bombs with the price of
Mass-Extinction,
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2007
/02/26/01381.html)

Global Warming continues to be approached by governments as a "luxury" item, rather

than a matter of basic human survival. Humanity is being taken to its destruction by a greed-driven
elite. These elites, which include 'Big Oil' and other related interests, are intoxicated by "the high" of
pursuing ego-driven power, in a comparable manner to drug addicts who pursue an elusive "high",
irrespective of the threat of pursuing that "high" poses to their own basic survival, and the security of
others. Global Warming and the pre-emptive war against Iraq are part of the same self-
destructive prism of a political-military-industrial complex, which is on a path of mass
planetary destruction, backed by techniques of mass-deception. "The scientific debate
about human induced global warming is over but policy makers - let alone the happily
shopping general public - still seem to not understand the scope of the impending tragedy.
Global warming isn't just warmer temperatures, heat waves, melting ice and threatened polar
bears. Scientific understanding increasingly points to runaway global warming leading to
human extinction", reported Bill Henderson in CrossCurrents. If strict global environmental
security measures are not immediately put in place to keep further emissions of
greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere we are looking at the death of billions, the end of
civilization as we know it and in all probability the end of humankind's several million year old
existence, along with the extinction of most flora and fauna beloved to man in the world we share. The
Stephen Harper minority government backed by Alberta "Big Oil", the U.S. Republican President Bush
administration, and a confederacy of other elites associated with a neo-conservative oriented political-
military-industrial complex, has only sought to "buy time" against his critics, (and mount a
disingenuous public relations campaign under a new Minister of the Environment). It is apparent that
The Stephen Harper government has no commitment to providing any leadership on Canadian or global
achievement of the minimum standards set on greenhouse gas emissions reductions under the Kyoto
Protocol. The immediate threat of runaway global warming and climate change melt-down There are
'carbon bombs': carbon in soils, carbon in warming temperate and boreal forests and in a drought struck
Amazon, methane in Arctic peat bogs and in methane hydrates melting in warming ocean waters. " For
several decades it has been hypothesized that rising temperatures from increased
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to burning fossil fuels could be releasing some of
and eventually all of these stored carbon stocks to add substantially more potent
greenhouse gases to the atmosphere," Bill Henderson further elaborates. Given time lags of 30-50
years, we might have already put enough extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to have crossed a
threshold to these bombs exploding, their released greenhouse gases leading to ever accelerating global
warming with future global temperatures maybe tens of degrees higher than our norms of human
habitation and therefore extinction or very near extinction of humanity. "(T)he science is clear. We
need not a 20% cut by 2020; not a 60% cut by 2050, but a 90% cut by 2030 (1). Only
then do we stand a good chance of keeping carbon concentrations in the atmosphere
below 430 parts per million, which means that only then do we stand a good chance of
preventing some of the threatened positive feedbacks . If we let it get beyond that point there is
nothing we can do. The biosphere takes over as the primary source of carbon. It is out of our hands,"
George Monbiot says.
 Tipping Points Soon
Tipping points are approaching now - make warming
irreversible - inaction multiplies certainty

Risby 11
(James Risby, Researcher, Marine and Atmospheric
Research at CSIRO, PhD in Climatology from MIT, 6/15/11,
"Speaking science to climate policy," The Conversation,
http://theconversation.edu.au/speaking-science-to-
climate-policy-1548)
Were only a few decades away from a major tipping point, plus or minus only about a decade. The rate
at which the ice sheets would melt is fairly uncertain, but not the result that says we are very close to a
tipping point committing to such melt and breakdown. If we were to keep remaining emissions inside
the 250450Gt carbon allocation, we would need to take account of the inertia in energy systems and
infrastructure, which set some limits on the maximum rate that emissions can be reduced. To stay within
the budget, we cant hope to emit 10Gt a year (the present emissions rate) for the next thirty years and
then reduce emissions suddenly to zero. Rather, net emissions would need to be phased down to zero to
stay within the budget. The longer stringent emissions reductions are delayed, the more drastic they
must be to stay within the 250450Gt budget. With more than a small delay, the reductions needed are
faster than can be achieved in turning over the stock of emitting infrastructure. Thus, if we were to stay
within this budget, dramatic emission reductions would have to begin now. Delayed action on stringent
emissions reductions almost certainly implies overshooting the thresholds and locking in vast long term
impacts.

Tipping points coming now - positive feedbacks make

warming irreversible and fast

Worth 9
(Jess Worth, editorial and feature writer for New
Internationalist, April 2009, "Can Climate Change be
Averted?: The first tipping point to climate disaster is
already here," CCPA Monitor 15(10))
The time for words of warning is long gone. One need only tune in briefly to the panicked tones of the
world's leading climate scientists to grasp that we are already in a crisis. The Arctic ice-sheets are
melting far faster than the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected only last year.
Their conclusion that the world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 - no mean
feat in itself - was based on the assumption that Arctic summer ice may be gone by the end of the
century. It is now predicted to be gone in the next five years. Arctic sea-ice acts as a refrigerator for the
globe. Without it, global warming will happen even faster. It also contributes to the "albedo effect"
whereby white surfaces reflect more solar radiation than dark ones. As ice and snow disappear, darker
ocean and land absorb more heat from the sun and add to warming. This in turn affects the Arctic
permafrost, which currently locks away twice as much carbon as is now in the entire global atmosphere.
That permafrost is starting to thaw, about 80 years ahead of schedule. We have reached the first climate
"tipping point." As temperatures rise, changes are triggered in the planet's systems which create
"positive feedbacks," further contributing to global warming, and potentially unleashing rapid,
uncontrollable, and irreversible climate change. It's still not too late to prevent a catastrophe. But only
just. Global warming has already resulted in a temperature increase of nearly 1C, and we are
committed to further warming caused by greenhouse gases already emitted around 0.2C per decade.
But scientists say that, if warming is kept below 2C, we have a good chance of avoiding the worst
effects of climate change.
 Tipping Points Impact
Empirically tipping points are real

Cook 9
(Kerry Cook, Geosciences @ UT Austin, 2009, "Abrupt
climate change: atmospheric tipping points," IOP Conf.
Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci., Vol. 6(6))
The atmosphere has a low heat capacity, and so it can change abruptly when forcing functions change
rapidly. For example, rapid changes in ocean temperature or land surface conditions will cause a
similarly rapid change in the atmosphere. But abrupt changes in climate can also come about through
the atmospheres response to smooth changes in forcing when certain tipping points, or thresholds, are
reached. Several types of atmospheric tipping mechanisms are discussed, with examples taken from
seasonal variations of todays climate and abrupt climate change on century and millennial time scales.
Some tipping point mechanisms occur purely because of the nonlinearity of the atmospheres internal
dynamics. One example is the rapid change in rainfall distributions that occur virtually every spring
over northern Africa, known as the monsoon jump. Other examples relate to the vertical stability
properties of the atmosphere, which are especially relevant for understanding drought and floods.
Tipping points also arise due to phase changes of water within the atmosphere. For example, cooling to
a threshold temperature will cause water to condense and form a cloud. As a result, sudden changes in
atmospheric and surface heating rates will occur, and feedbacks from the condensational heating
released into the atmosphere can drive a strong dynamical response with consequences for regional
climate. Sudden aerosol loading, when threshold surface winds speeds are reached for suspending
particles, also presents potential for abrupt change that may be felt on global space scales. We do not
fully understand how effective these tipping points can be for changing climate, and we probably have
not identified all of the potentially important tipping points. We need to investigate the mechanisms of
these abrupt changes so they can be properly represented in climate models. Because of the existence of
these tipping points, and their ability to cause rapid climate change, we need to prepare for surprise as
climate changes.
 AT: No Tipping Pts = No Impact
Warming makes disasters inevitable even absent tipping
points - the impacts are linear

Risby 11
(James Risby, Researcher, Marine and Atmospheric
Research at CSIRO, PhD in Climatology from MIT, 6/15/11,
"Speaking science to climate policy," The Conversation,
http://theconversation.edu.au/speaking-science-to-
climate-policy-1548)
Climatology can tell us, however, what is likely to happen if we dont act, or if we dont act with sufficient
speed to keep total emissions within specific carbon allocations. There is no single threshold above which
climate change is dangerous and below which it is safe. There is a spectrum of impacts. But some of the
largest impacts are effectively irreversible and the thresholds for them are very near. In particular, the
melting and breakdown of polar ice sheets seems to be in the vicinity of a couple of degrees warming. This
expectation is based on current high rates of mass loss from the ice sheets compared to relative stability
through the Holocene (the past 10,000 years) and on past ice sheet response in periods such as the Pliocene
(a few million years ago) when the Earth was a couple of degrees warmer than preindustrial times (and sea
level up to 25m higher). We have already had about 0.8C warming globally, with another third of a degree
locked in by the inertia of the climate system. That leaves, somewhat optimistically, perhaps a degree or so
of wiggle room. Translating that into carbon emissions, if we wish to keep the total warming below about
2C (with 50% chance), then we have a total global carbon emission allocation of between about 800 and
1000Gt carbon. We have already emitted about 550Gt, leaving perhaps another 250450Gt. Current global
emissions are about 10Gt per year, growing at roughly 3% per year. That leaves a few decades at present
rates before having committed to 2C warming and crossing the expected thresholds for ice sheet
disintegration. And that is for a 50% chance of not crossing the 2C threshold. For more comfortable odds
of staying within the threshold, the total carbon allocation drops and so the time to threshold is even
shorter. Surely this estimate is vastly uncertain? Everything has some uncertainty, but the uncertainty in this
case lies mostly in the timing, not in the essential result. Ice sheets are sensitive to warming somewhere in
this vicinity of temperature change and the climate system will yield 2C warming somewhere in the
vicinity of 8001000Gt of carbon emissions.
Adaptation
 Yes Adaptation - Intervening Actors
Intervening actors solve - the SQ has plans to deal with
warming

Kenny 12
(Charles Kenny, senior fellow at the Center for Global
Development, a Schwartz fellow at the New America
Foundation, 4/9/12, "Not Too Hot to Handle," Foreign
Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/09/not_too_
hot_to_handle)

But for all international diplomats appear desperate to affirm the self-worth of pessimists and
doomsayers worldwide, it is important to put climate change in a broader contex t. It is a vital
global issue -- one that threatens to slow the worldwide march toward improved quality of life. Climate change is
already responsible for more extreme weather and an accelerating rate of species extinction -- and may ultimately kill off
as many as 40 percent of all living species. But it is also a problem that we know how to tackle, and one to
which we have some time to respond before it is likely to completely derail progress. And that's
good news, because the fact that it's manageable is the best reason to try to tackle it rather than
abandon all hope like a steerage class passenger in the bowels of the Titanic. Start with the economy. The Stern
Review, led by the distinguished British economist Nicholas Stern, is the most comprehensive look to date at the economics
of climate change. It suggests that, in terms of income, greenhouse gasses are a threat to global growth, but hardly an
immediate or catastrophic one. Take the impact of climate change on the developing world. The most
depressing forecast in terms of developing country growth in Stern's paper is the "A2 scenario" -- one of a series of
economic and greenhouse gas emissions forecasts created for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). It's a model that predicts slow global growth and income convergence (poor countries catching up
to rich countries). But even under this model, Afghanistan's
GDP per capita climbs sixfold over the next 90
years, India
and China ninefold, and Ethiopia's income increases by a factor of 10. Knock off a third for the
most pessimistic simulation of the economic impact of climate change suggested by the Stern
report, and people in those countries are still markedly better off - - four times as rich for Afghanistan, a
little more than six times as rich for Ethiopia. It's worth emphasizing that the Stern report suggests that the costs of
dramatically reducing greenhouse-gas emissions is closer to 1 (or maybe 2) percent of world GDP -- in the region of $600
billion to $1.2 trillion today. The economic case for responding to climate change by pricing carbon
and investing in alternate energy sources is a slam dunk. But for all the likelihood that the
world will be a poorer, denuded place than it would be if we responded rapidly to reduce
greenhouse gases, the global economy is probably not going to collapse over the next century
even if we are idiotic enough to delay our response to climate change by a few years. For all
the flooding, the drought, and the skyrocketing bills for air conditioning, the economy would
keep on expanding, according to the data that Stern uses.
 Yes Adaptation - Growth
Growth solves

Kenny 12
(Charles Kenny, senior fellow at the Center for Global
Development, a Schwartz fellow at the New America
Foundation, 4/9/12, "Not Too Hot to Handle," Foreign
Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/09/not_too_
hot_to_handle)
Again, while climate change will make extreme weather events and natural disasters like flooding and hurricanes more
common, the negative effect on global quality of life will be reduced if economies continue to grow.
That's because, as Matthew Kahn from Tufts University has shown, the safest place to suffer a natural disaster
is in a rich country. The more money that people and governments have, the more they can both
afford and enforce building codes, land use regulations, and public infrastructure like flood
defenses that lower death tolls.
 Yes Adaptation - Empirics
Humans are already adapting to climate change

Biello 12
(Environmental specialist staff writer for the Scientific
American)
(David, How to Adapt to Climate Change, 60-Second
Earth, Energy & Sustainability, May 6, 2012,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?
id=how-to-adapt-to-climate-change-12-05-06)
For want of a mangrove, the village was lost. In fact, the loss of coastal mangroves made even a costly
dyke along the Vietnamese seashore inadequate to cope with a recent typhoon. Plus, the absence of
mangroves hit livelihoodsless seafood to catch. But one village had painstakingly replanted
mangroves, scraping barnacles off the seedlings to ensure they took root. In return, those mangroves
protected the village from the typhoon that devastated the rest of the coast. This is not a fable, it's a tale
of how people are already adapting to climate change, as revealed at the International Institute for
Environment and Development's sixth conference on community-based adaptation to climate change
held in Vietnam in April. Farmers are trying to adapt, too. Whether by growing ginger in the shade of
banana fronds in Southeast Asia or planting millet beneath new trees in the Sahel region of Africa.
Those who can't adapt have to move, like Alaskans whose coastal towns have been undermined by
severe winds or waves. Or whose water sources have been infiltrated by brine.

Humans will adapt to a climate-changed world empirics

McDermott 12
(Science and Climate Change staff writer for the Discovery
Network sub-site Treehugger) 2012
Mat, Exxon's CEO is Right, We Will Adapt to Climate
Change, June 29, 2012,
http://www.treehugger.com/climate-change/exxons-ceo-
right-we-will-adapt-climate-change.html)
(Image Caption: Unprecedented wildfires are burning in the American west. What does big oil have to say
about climate change? We have spent our entire existence adapting. Well adapt. ExxonMobil CEO Red
Tillerson, 6/27/12) I'm a day late to this image above and the social media outrage around it, but I've been
thinking, and unfortunately ExxonMobil's CEO is right. That's the unfashionable thing to say in green
circles, but he is right. Humanity has spent its time on this planet adapting. Both adapting the world we
inhabit to meet our needs, on various timescales and over various areas of the globe, as well as adapting to
the local conditions under which we live. And, we will adapt to climate change. But nevertheless, the
statement is obfuscation of the highest order; it is literally true but contextually entirely false. And it is there
where it's deep insidiousness resides. How many humans the planet can support in a world that is 2C,
3C, 4-6C warmer on averagewith all the ecosystem, biodiversity, agricultural changes that bringsis a
very much open question. The odds are solidly in favor of far less than it now does, just because of climate
change, ignoring resource overconsumption and population growth. Which is all to say, that while
humanity will adapt to a climate changed world is true, there is no doubt that climate change will create, in
comparison to today, let alone a pre-industrial, lower population world, a world that is less bountiful, prone
to more extremes of temperature and weather in many places, less fecundand since we're talking about
human adaptation, more difficult to live in and less conducive to human civilization.
 Yes Adaptation - Insects Prove
Organisms are capable of adapting to climate change
insects prove

Brakefield and Jong 11

(PM and PW de Institute of Biology, Leiden University) 27
July 2011 A steep cline in ladybird melanism has decayed
over 25 years: a genetic response to climate change?
http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v107/n6/full/hdy20114
9a.html#bib4
A variety of processes can enable organisms, including insects, to respond successfully to climate
change (Stenseth et al., 2002; Bradshaw and Holzapfel, 2006; Parmesan, 2006). These include habitat
tracking, phenotypic plasticity and genetic adaptation or some combination thereof. Evidence for the
first of these mechanisms is becoming comparatively commonplace. Thus, many species of butterfly on
the northern and southern edges of their range are clearly responding with northern extensions in their
range limits (Parmesan and Yohe, 2003; see also Thomas et al., 2004; Hickling et al., 2006), and species
of moth and other insects are moving up altitudinal gradients (Chen et al., 2009). The extent to which
changes in phenotypic plasticity are (or will be) involved in the numerous reports of changes in
phenology (Brakefield, 1987; Roy and Sparks, 2000; Amano et al., 2010) is not clear but in some case
studies, including the timing of egg hatching in the winter moth and of egg laying in the great tit, there
is already evidence that strong selection can occur on the characteristics of the underlying norms of
reaction (Visser and Holleman, 2001; van Asch and Visser, 2007). There are as yet few reports of
genetic changes within populations linked to climate change, including in insects. The pitcher plant
mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii, showed a genetic response to climate change, which involved changes in
sensitivity to photoperiod (Bradshaw et al., 2006). The change could be detected over a period as short
as 5 years. On a wider geographic scale, changes in clines for the alcohol dehydrogenase polymorphism
or in the frequencies of certain chromosome inversion polymorphisms have been detected in natural
populations of species of Drosophila and linked to climate change (Umina et al., 2005; Balany et al.,
2006).
 No Adaptation - Info
Humans will be unable to adapt to climate change
Haby (Meteorologist with The Weather Prediction) 2010
(Jeff, Global Warming, 2010,
http://www.theweatherprediction.com/global_warming/) //CL
One of the most talked about topics in meteorology and climatology is global warming. Global
warming is the theory that states when greenhouse gases are added to the earth's atmosphere the result
will be for increased average global temperature. The main greenhouse gas that is of concern is Carbon
Dioxide. The replacing of trees and vegetation with pavement also contributes to warmer surface
temperatures. This page will clarify many of the issues about global warming. It has been debated
whether global warming is a theory or a fact. The overwhelming majority of scientists studying the
issue agree that global warming is a fact, although there is considerable debate on the magnitude.
Although global warming is widely believed, it is a problem that is easy to put off. It is easier to notice
sudden changes such as a volcanic eruptions and tsunamis than it is to notice slow processes such as
climate change. At one extreme of the global warming debate is those that believe the change in
precipitation, temperature and sea level will be severe. They predict the average global temperature to
rise several degrees Celsius over the next several decades. Sea level will rise and take over large
portions of the land in coastal areas. Agriculture will be significantly impacted with some currently
rainy regions becoming much drier and some dry regions becoming much wetter. Humans will be
unable to adapt very successfully to the change: disease, famine and destruction of the world economy
will far surpass the problems of today.
 No Adaptation - AT: Growth
Many countries cant adapt to climate change causes social crisis
Marien (Founder and editor of Future Survey, Director, Global Foresight
Books, Ph.D. in social science and national planning studies from Maxwell
School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, Fellow of the
World Academy of Art and Science) 2012
(Michael, Dow and Downing, The Atlas of Climate Change, February 2012,
http://www.globalforesightbooks.org/Book-of-the-Month/dow-and-downing-
the-atlas-of-climate-change.html) //CL
CLIMATE & SOCIAL CRISES. Dramatic alterations called tipping elements could occur in the
Earths biophysical system. Examples include an ice-free Arctic in summer that accelerates warming,
accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet, collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, melting ice
shifts the Gulf Stream south in the Atlantic Ocean, dieback of the Amazon rainforest, boreal forests
exposed to fire and pests, and an abrupt climate shift resulting in Sahara and West African monsoons.
Countries unable to adapt to the impact of climate change could see social and political upheaval. By
2050, the global burden of migration related to climate change might be 100 million.
Evidence Comparison
 Alarmism Good - More Qualified
Cooption is inevitable on both sides because of the litany
of incentives - objective measures prove our scientists
more qualified
Andregg et. al 10
(William Andregg, Biology @ Stanford, James Prall,
Electrical/Computer Engineering @ Univ of Toronto, Jacob
Harold, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Stephen
Schneider, Woods Institute for the Environment, April
2010, "Expert credibility in climate change," Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.full.pdf+html )

The UE group comprises only 2% of the top 50 climate researchers as ranked by expertise
(number of climate publications), 3% of researchers of the top 100, and 2.5% of the top 200,
excluding researchers present in both groups (Materials and Methods). This result closely agrees
with expert surveys, indicating that 97% of self-identied actively publishing climate scientists
agree with the tenets of ACC (2). Furthermore, this nding complements direct polling of the
climate researcher community, which yields qualitative and self-reported researcher expertise (2).
Our ndings capture the added dimension of the distribution of researcher expertise, quantify
agreement among the highest expertise climate researchers, and provide an independent
assessment of level of scientic consensus concerning ACC. In addition to the striking difference
in number of expert researchers between CE and UE groups, the distribution of expertise of the
UE group is far below that of the CE group (Fig. 1). Mean expertise of the UE group was around
half (60 publications) that of the CE group (119 publications; MannWhitney U test: W = 57,020;
P < 10 14 ), as was median expertise (UE = 34 publications; CE = 84 publications).
Furthermore, researchers with fewer than 20 climate publications comprise 80% the UE group,
as opposed to less than 10% of the CE group. This indicates that the bulk of UE researchers on
the most prominent multisignatory statements about climate change have not published
extensively in the peer-reviewed climate literature. We examined a subsample of the 50 most-
published (highestexpertise) researchers from each group. Such subsampling facilitates
comparison of relative expertise between groups (normalizing differences between absolute
numbers). This method reveals large differences in relative expertise between CE and UE groups
(Fig. 2). Though the top-published researchers in the CE group have an average of 408 climate
publications (median = 344), the top UE researchers average only 89 publications (median = 68;
Mann Whitney U test: W = 2,455; P < 10 15 ). Thus, this suggests that not all experts are equal,
and top CE researchers have much stronger expertise in climate science than those in the top UE
group. Finally, our prominence criterion provides an independent and approximate estimate of the
relative scientic signicance of CE and UE publications. Citation analysis complements
publication analysis because it can, in general terms, capture the quality and impact of a
researchers contributiona critical component to overall scientic credibilityas opposed to
measuring a researchers involvement in a eld, or expertise (Materials and Methods). The
citation analysis conducted here further complements the publication analysis because it does not
examine solely climaterelevant publications and thus captures highly prominent researchers who
may not be directly involved with the climate eld. We examined the top four most-cited papers
for each CE and UE researcher with 20 or more climate publications and found immense
disparity in scientic prominence between CE and UE communities (MannWhitney U test: W =
50,710; P < 10 6 ; Fig. 3). CE researchers top papers were cited an average of 172 times,
compared with 105 times for UE researchers. Because a single, highly cited paper does not
establish a highly credible reputation but might instead reect the controversial nature of that
paper (often called the single-paper effect), we also considered the average the citation count of
the second through fourth most-highly cited papers of each researcher. Results were robust when
only these papers were considered (CE mean: 133; UE mean: 84; MannWhitney U test: W =
50,492; P < 10 6 ). Results were robust when all 1,372 researchers, including those with fewer
than 20 climate publications, were considered (CE mean: 126; UE mean: 59; MannWhitney U
test: W = 3.5 10 5 ; P < 10 15 ). Number of citations is an imperfect but useful benchmark for
a groups scientic prominence (Materials and Methods), and we show here that even considering
all (e.g., climate and nonclimate) publications, the UE researcher group has substantially lower
prominence than the CE group. We provide a large-scale quantitative assessment of the relative
level of agreement, expertise, and prominence in the climate researcher community. We show that
the expertise and prominence, two integral components of overall expert credibility, of climate
researchers convinced by the evidence of ACC vastly overshadows that of the climate change
skeptics and contrarians. This divide is even starker when considering the top researchers in each
group. Despite media tendencies to present both sides in ACC debates (9), which can contribute
to continued public misunderstanding regarding ACC (7, 11, 12, 14), not all climate researchers
are equal in scientic credibility and expertise in the climate system. This extensive analysis of
the mainstream versus skeptical/contrarian researchers suggests a strong role for considering
expert credibility in the relative weight of and attention to these groups of researchers in future
discussions in media, policy, and public forums regarding anthropogenic global warming.
 Denialism Good - More Qualified

Warming skeptics are more scientifically knowledgeable

than alarmists
Taylor 12
(Managing editor of Environment & Climate News, senior
fellow at The Heartland Institute, bachelors degree from
Dartmouth College, law degree from Syracuse University
College of Law) 2012 (John M., Climate Change Weekly:
Global Warming Skeptics More Knowledgeable than
Alarmists, June 1, 2012,
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-
article/2012/06/01/climate-change-weekly-global-
warming-skeptics-more-knowledgeable-alarmi)
Global warming alarmists often accuse skeptics of being anti-science, but a newly published peer-
reviewed study finds skeptics are more scientifically knowledgeable than the alarmist name-callers. The
study, published Sunday in Nature Climate Change, documented that global warming skeptics scored better
on a test of 22 scientific and statistical questions than people who are worried about global warming. A
team of researchers, led by a professor at Yale University, tested more than 1,500 U.S. adults on their
scientific literacy and technical reasoning capacity, and then asked them to assign a numerical value to how
concerned they are about climate change. According to the study, Members of the public with the highest
degrees of scientific literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate
change. As respondents science literacy scores increased, their concern with climate change decreased,
observed the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.
 Denialism Good - Political Incentives
Claims of warming are politics, not science the IPCC
reports are riddled with errors and should not be used to
justify policy

Armstrong, Green, and Soon 11

(J. Scott Armstrong is a professor of marketing at the
University of Pennsylvania, Kesten C. Green is a Senior
Research Fellow with the Business and Economic
Forecasting Unit at Monash University, Willie Soon is an
astrophysicist and geoscientist at the Solar and Stellar
Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, 2011, Research on Forecasting for the
Manmade Global Warming Alarm Energy & Environment,
Vol. 22 Issue 8, Ebsco)
The validity of the manmade global warming alarm requires the support of scientific forecasts of (1) a
substantive long-term rise in global mean temperatures in the absence of regulations, (2) serious net
harmful effects due to global warming, and (3) cost-effective regulations that would produce net beneficial
effects versus alternatives policies, including doing nothing. Without scientific forecasts for all three
aspects of the alarm, there is no scientific basis to enact regulations. In effect, the warming alarm is like a
three-legged stool: each leg needs to be strong. Despite repeated appeals to global warming alarmists, we
have been unable to find scientific forecasts for any of the three legs. We drew upon scientific (evidence-
based) forecasting principles to audit the forecasting procedures used to forecast global mean temperatures
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) leg 1 of the stool. This audit found that the
IPCC procedures violated 81% of the 89 relevant forecasting principles. We also audited forecasting
procedures, used in two papers, that were written to support regulation regarding the protection of polar
bears from global warming leg 3 of the stool. On average the forecasting procedures violated 85% of
the 90 relevant principles. The warming alarmists have not demonstrated the predictive validity of their
procedures. Instead, their argument for predictive validity is based on their claim that nearly all scientists
agree with the forecasts. This count of votes by scientists is not only an incorrect tally of scientific
opinion, it is also, and most importantly, contrary to the scientific method. We conducted a validation test
of the IPCC forecasts that were based on the assumption that there would be no regulations. The errors for
the IPCC model long-term forecasts (for 91 to 100 years in the future) were 12.6 times larger than those
from an evidence-based no change model. Based on our own analyses and the documented unscientific
behavior of global warming alarmists, we concluded that the global warming alarm is the product of an
anti-scientific political movement. Having come to this conclusion, we turned to the structured analogies
method to forecast the likely outcomes of the warming alarmist movement. In our ongoing study we have,
to date, identified 26 similar historical alarmist movements. None of the forecasts behind the analogous
alarms proved correct. Twenty-five alarms involved calls for government intervention and the government
imposed regulations in 23. None of the 23 interventions was effective and harm was caused by 20 of them.
Our findings on the scientific evidence related to global warming forecasts lead to the following
recommendations: 1. End government funding for climate change research. 2. End government funding for
research predicated on global warming (e.g., alternative energy; CO2 reduction; habitat loss). 3. End
government programs and repeal regulations predicated on global warming. 4. End government support for
organizations that lobby or campaign predicated on global warming.
 Denalism Good - Economic Incentives
Alarmists have economic incentives to exaggerate
Jasper 12
(William Jasper, staff writer, 7/13/12, " 'Climate Science' in
Shambles: Real Scientists Battle UN Agenda," The New
American,
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/1
1998-%E2%80%9Cclimate-science%E2%80%9D-in-
shambles-real-scientists-battle-un-agenda)

Until recently, the AGW alarmists definitely had the upper hand. For one thing, they have been
organized. For another, they have been outspending the climate realists by a huge order of magnitude. In
2007, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, showed that
proponents of man-made global warming enjoyed a monumental funding advantage over the
skeptics. The alarmists had received a whopping $50 billion mostly from the federal government
compared to a paltry $19 million and some change for the realists. A 2009 study entitled Climate Money, by Joanne
Nova for the Science & Public Policy Institute, found that the U.S. government had sunk $79 billion into climate-change-
related activities (science research, alternative energy technology, foreign aid, etc.) between 1989 and 2009. That total does
not include additional massive funding from state governments, foundations, and corporations. Similar levels of funding
have been poured into climate policy by European Union institutions and the national governments of European nations
and Japan. This super-extravagant lavishing of state funding on a new scientific field has created
an instant global climate industry that is government-fed and completely political. However,
these sums, impressive as they are, represent only the very tip of the mountain of climate cash that
has the political classes panting and salivating. They smell not only tens of billions of dollars for research
and technology, but also hundreds of billions for climate debt foreign aid, and trillions to be made in
CO2 cap-and-trade schemes. The politicization and corruption of climate science is, perhaps, most clearly
evident from the continuing cavalcade of shocking scandals: Climategate, Climategate 2.0, Himalayan
Glaciergate, Alaskan Glaciergate, Amazongate, Sea Levelgate, Fakegate, Satellitegate, Antarctic Sea
Icegate, Hockey Stickgate, Hurricanegate, Surface Weather Stationgate, Russiagate, etc. The
Germany-based engineer P. Gosselin has catalogued 129 climate scandals at his website, NoTrickZone.com. Fortunately,
each of these transgressions against the integrity of science has caused new circles of scientists to become aware of, and
outraged by, the chicanery being employed by the political operatives masquerading as scientists. And the genuine
scientists are stepping into the gap in increasing numbers to fight for truth and to expose the climate-change flim-flam
artists who are perverting science.

The perception of consensus about global warming is

merely the result of scientists fear to speak out because
it may cost them their job and alarmism spread by those
who benefit from the spending to try and curb the
supposed change

Allegre et al 11
(Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the
Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong,
cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the
International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of
the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism,
Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American
Physical Society; Edward David, member, National
Academy of Engineering and National Academy of
Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton;
Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of
Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of
climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology;
Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT;
James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical
University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of
the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace
engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne;
Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S.
senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew
University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director,
Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi,
president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva;
10/18/11; No Need to Panic About Global Warming Wall
Street Journal;
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020430140
4577171531838421366.html)

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively
say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to
speak up for fear of not being promotedor worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr.
Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed
article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is
not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international
warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed
from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his
university job. This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it beforefor example, in the frightening period
when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which
Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to
death. Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical
Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to
remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the
old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money." Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to
many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government
bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-
funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for
big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet . Lysenko and his team lived very well,
and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them. Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have
looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no
compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if
one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies
are not justified economically. A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale
economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a
policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This
would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of
material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses
would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may
come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet .

The IPCC had no justification for its methods of

investigation and violated 81% of forecasting principles

Armstrong, Green, and Soon 11

(J. Scott Armstrong is a professor of marketing at the
University of Pennsylvania, Kesten C. Green is a Senior
Research Fellow with the Business and Economic
Forecasting Unit at Monash University, Willie Soon is an
astrophysicist and geoscientist at the Solar and Stellar
Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, 2011, Research on Forecasting for the
Manmade Global Warming Alarm Energy & Environment,
Vol. 22 Issue 8, Ebsco)
Kesten Green surveyed climate experts (many of whom were IPCC authors and editors) to find the most
credible source for forecasts on climate change. Most respondents referred to the IPCC report and some
specifically to Chapter 8, the key IPCC chapter on forecasting (Randall et al. 2007). Kesten Green and I
examined the references to determine whether the authors of Chapter 8 were familiar with the evidence-
based literature on forecasting. We found that none of their 788 references related to that body of
literature. We could find no references that validated their choice of forecasting procedures. In other
words, the IPCC report contained no evidence that the forecasting procedures they used were based on
evidence of their predictive ability. We then conducted an audit of the forecasting procedures using
Forecasting Audit Software, which is freely available on forprin.com. Kesten Green and I independently
coded the IPCC procedures against the 140 forecasting principles, and then we discussed differences in
order to reach agreement. We also invited comments and suggestions from the authors of the IPCC
report that we were able to contact in hope of filling in missing information. None of them replied with
suggestions and one threatened to lodge a complaint if he received any further correspondence. We
described the coding procedures we used for our audit in Green and Armstrong (2007a). We concluded
from our audit that invalid procedures were used for forecasting global mean temperatures. Our
findings, described in Green and Armstrong (2007a), are summarized in Exhibit 1. Based on the
available information, 81% of the 89 relevant principles were violated. There were an additional 38
relevant principles, but the IPCC chapter provided insufficient information for coding and the IPCC
authors did not supply the information that we requested.
 AT: Consensus - Useless
So-called "denialists" are on the right side of the debate -
their evidence is full of groupthink and scare tactics that
marginalize legitimate scientists
Jasper 12
(William Jasper, staff writer, 7/13/12, " 'Climate Science' in
Shambles: Real Scientists Battle UN Agenda," The New
American,
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/1
1998-%E2%80%9Cclimate-science%E2%80%9D-in-
shambles-real-scientists-battle-un-agenda)
All agree that climate change is an existential threat to humankind, stated UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, before the
UNs 2009 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. All agree? Existential threat? In this statement, the chief UN
bureaucrat took the false consensus claim a quantum leap beyond even Al Gores lurid assertions. The
Gore choir has been declaring for years that there is an overwhelming consensus among scientists that catastrophic AGW is
real and imminent. According to Ban Ki-moon, weve gone beyond consensus to unanimity, and not just among
scientists but all, presumably meaning every person on Earth agrees that global warming is a dire
threat to humanitys very existence. That, of course, is nonsense. However, while Bans unanimity plea is easily
recognizable as patently ridiculous, the consensus claim has bamboozled a great many people, including scientists who should
know better. Aside from the fact that science is not determined by consensus, but by observation,
experimentation, and measurement, the truth is that the AGW consensus involves a relatively small
coterie of climate scientists who have been placed in key gatekeeper positions, enabling them to
co-opt the claim of scientific consensus on AGW, while squashing dissenting voices and branding
all dissenters as cranks, outliers, or, even, deniers. The use of the denier label is an especially odious tactic,
intentionally aimed at smearing fellow scientists who dissent from AGW theory as equivalent to Holocaust deniers. The
Climategate e-mails showed top climate activists at major universities and other institutions
conspiring to punish scientists with opposing viewpoints and to prevent them from being
published in the scientific literature. It also showed that they were going to great lengths to doctor
their evidence to make it prove their preordained outcomes . Whats more, they have refused to
make their data publicly available to scientific peers for independent review as genuine scientific procedure
demands and when pressed on the issue, have claimed that the evidence has been lost. Some of the top
names in climate alarmism Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Kevin Trenberth, Rajendra Pachauri, Stephan Ramsdorf, James
Hansen, Peter Gleick demonstrated repeatedly that they are engaged in abusing science for a global political agenda. The
AGW consensus scam is one of the most astounding frauds in all of history, not only because it is patently false, but
also because it is being used to propel the most sweeping and authoritarian scheme for global economic,
social, and political regimentation the world has ever seen. This is not merely a theoretical scientific debate; the
alleged science is being used to drive policy and legislation at a global level. The policies they have already succeeded in
imposing have caused devastating impacts , especially on the worlds poorest populations. The additional
policies they propose would cause even more horrendous results. The AGW alarmists insist that science has spoken, and it is
telling us, they say, that we must subject ourselves to UN-mandated global governance which is to be determined, of course,
by scientists who toe the UN-approved, IPCC-certified party line.

Consensus is an inaccurate tool to determine the veracity

of any truth claims - exaggerated numbers prove
Jasper 12
(William Jasper, staff writer, 7/13/12, " 'Climate Science' in
Shambles: Real Scientists Battle UN Agenda," The New
American,
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/11998-
%E2%80%9Cclimate-science%E2%80%9D-in-shambles-real-scientists-battle-
un-agenda)

Again, the aforementioned experts represent but a small sampling of the distinguished company of
international scientific heavyweights who dispute the so-called AGW consensus. This is important to note,
as the climate alarmists have gone to great lengths in using the logical fallacy of argument by authority to
convince us that only right-wing whackos and illiterate wingnuts reject Al Gores the science is settled trope. The IPCC
alarmists and their media allies never weary of telling us that the IPCCs reports represent the
views of 4,000 climate scientists who endorse the IPCCs sense of crisis and alarm. However, as researcher John
McLean reported in his 2009 study entitled The IPCC Cant Count Its Expert Scientists: Author and Reviewer Numbers
Are Wrong, the UNs preeminent science body double-counts scientists and further pads their
numbers by counting many non-scientific personnel who participate in the research assessments.
Finally, the IPCCs non-scientist policy wonks who write the political conclusions of the IPCC reports hijack
whatever real science has been done by its qualified experts, falsely attributing a nonexistent consensus or
unanimity to the scientific teams and ignoring the reservations or dissenting opinions of the non-conformists. McLeans
analysis, published by the Science & Public Policy Institute (SPPI), found that the 4,000 scientists consensus claim for the
IPCCs 4th Assessment (2010) was spectacularly exaggerated. He notes: Fifty-three authors and five reviewers are all that
might generously be said to have explicitly supported the claim of a significant human influence on climate. Forget any notion
that 4,000 scientists supported the claim or even the 3750+ people as mentioned by the IPCC. Also forget any notion that all
2890 individuals who were authors, reviewers or both supported the claim. The only explicit evidence is for support
from just less than 60 individuals. Please note, the number of scientists in the IPCC report that the
organization may honestly be able to say have endorsed the IPCCs AGW catastrophism, is more
on the order of 50-60 individuals, not 4,000. That is a very significant discrepancy, to say the least! It has taken a
long time for the thousands of AGW skeptics (or climate realists, as many prefer to be called) to come to the fore. Why is
that? Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a former AGW believer himself, says most
scientists are so busy in their own specialties that, like most laymen, they dont consider that the consensus
may be completely contrived. But that has changed, he says. Each one of us was working in his or her own niche, says
Shaviv. While working there, each one of us realized that things just don't add up to support the AGW picture. So many
had to change their views.

Consensus flows against warming

Jasper 12
(William Jasper, staff writer, 7/13/12, " 'Climate Science' in
Shambles: Real Scientists Battle UN Agenda," The New
American,
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/1
1998-%E2%80%9Cclimate-science%E2%80%9D-in-
shambles-real-scientists-battle-un-agenda)
A large number of noted climatologists, paleoclimatologists, meteorologists, atmospheric physicists, geophysicists,
oceanographers, geologists, and scientists in virtually every field has been challenging the claims of the UNs
IPCC and vigorously denouncing the politicization of IPCC science to promote costly and draconian global
policies. Some of the IPCCs most severe critics are scientists who have served as lead authors and expert reviewers of IPCC
reports and have witnessed from the inside the blatant bias and politics masquerading as science. Former and current IPCC
experts who have spoken out against the IPCCs abuse of science include such prominent scientists
as: Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT climate physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of meteorology, Dept. of Earth,
Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Dr. John Christy, a climatologist of the University of Alabama in Huntsville and
NASA; Dr. Lee C. Gerhard, past director and state geologist with the Kansas Geological Society and a senior scientist
emeritus of the University of Kansas; Dr. Patrick J. Michaels, former Virginia State climatologist, a UN IPCC reviewer,
and University of Virginia professor of environmental sciences; Dr. Vincent Gray, New Zealand chemist and climate
researcher; Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, geologist/geochemist, head of the Geological Museum in Norway; Dr. John T.
Everett, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) senior manager and project manager for the
UN Atlas of the Oceans. The above-mentioned IPCC experts represent only a tiny subset of the
scientists involved in the climate debate who take serious issue with the alarmist claims . More than
31,000 scientists in the United States have signed a petition urging the U.S. government to reject the kinds
of AGW policies proposed by the UN and environmental extremists. The Petition Project, organized by Dr.
Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National
Academy of Sciences, refutes claims that there is any kind of consensus regarding man-made global
warming as a crisis or existential threat . The petition reads, in part: The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would
harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There
is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other
greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earths
atmosphere and disruption of the Earths climate. More than 1,000 internationally renowned scientists
have gone further; they have not merely signed a petition, but have made public statements challenging key
claims of the AGW alarmists. Published in 2010, in a report by Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com, this important
collection of statements is an update of a similar report of 700 scientists statements published by Senator James Inhofe of the
U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee. The 1,000+ lineup of scientists reads like a Whos Who of
the global scientific community. It includes: Dr. William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Bracket professor of physics,
Princeton University; Dr. Leonard Weinstein, 35 years at the NASA Langley Research Center and presently a senior
research fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace; Nobel Prize-winning Stanford University physicist Dr. Robert B.
Laughlin, formerly a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Dr. Anatoly Levitin, the head of
the geomagnetic variations laboratory at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the
Russian Academy of Sciences; Swedish climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring of the Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics Unit at
Stockholm University; Burt Rutan, renowned engineer, inventor, and aviation/space pioneer; Dr. Willie Soon, Harvard-
Smithsonian Center astrophysicist; Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, emeritus professor of physics, and Founding Director,
International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks; Dr. Bjarne Andresen, physicist, and
professor, The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Dr. Ian D. Clark, Professor, isotope
hydrogeology and paleoclimatology, University of Ottawa, Canada.
 AT: Consensus - It's Shifting
There is NO consensus that global warming is real, a
substantial and growing group of scientists are convinced
by facts that global warming is not occurring

Allegre et al 11
(Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott
Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow,
head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen,
fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National
Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of
technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the
Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath,
professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New
York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne;
Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics,
Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio
Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva; 10/18/11; No Need to Panic About Global
Warming Wall Street Journal;
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html)

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming."
Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something
dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of
distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are
needed. In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever , a supporter of President Obama in the last
election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I
did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The
evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant
disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must
reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over
time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?" In spite of a multidecade
international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization,
large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the
number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of
stubborn scientific facts. Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for
well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of
climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we
can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds
greatly amplify the small effect of CO2. The lack of warming for more than a decadeindeed, the smaller-
than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) began issuing projectionssuggests that computer models have greatly
exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting
alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate
to be ascribed to CO2. The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas,
exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle.
Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2
concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and
animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better
plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past
century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
 IPCC Indict
The IPCC reports are riddled with inaccuracies and false
information

Singer 12
(S. Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus of Environmental
Sciences at the University of Virginia and Research Fellow
at The Independent Institute, June 2012, IPCC Exercise in
Curve-Fitting To Prove
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) Energy and
Environment, Volume 23, Number 4, Meta Press)
In its four major reports, IPCC has always tried to manufacture evidence for anthropogenic global
warming (AGW). For example, IPCC-1 [1990] mentions the correlation between a rise in [global
average surface] temperature and a rise in carbon dioxide - - without discussing the 35-year
period [1940-1975] where global temperatures diminished while CO2 kept on rising . IPCC-2
[1996], in Chapter 8 (B.D. Santer, lead author), attempted to show that modeled and observed
fingerprints agreed i.e., patterns of warming trends with latitude and altitude . It was soon
discovered that the chapter contained a key graph that had been doctored by Santer and another
key graph that contained selected data points a sub-interval of rising temperatures, while the overall record showed
no warming. Finally also, it was discovered that between scientists approval and printing there were
significant text changes that affected the meaning of the chapter . All of these are discussed in detail in my
paper in Energy and Environment 2011 http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/kv75274882804k98/fulltext.pdf. Note also that
these changes supported the political SPM (Summary for Policymakers) with its claim of balance of evidence for AGW. Thus this
IPCC report is directly responsible for the Kyoto Protocol and the waste of hundreds of billions of dollars. That IPCC and chief Kyoto
promoter Al Gore shared a Nobel Prize is a travesty. The third IPCC report, IPCC-3 [2001], featured the notorious
Hockeystick graph. It tried to advance the claim that the 20th century showed unusual warming, compared
to the past 1000 years. It was later demonstrated that the data were inadequate and the
methodology faulty - -all of which invalidated the IPCC conclusion. The fourth IPCC report, IPCC-
4 [2007], no longer featured the Hockeystick or fingerprints, but made the claim that a combination of natural and
human forcings could explain the reported global temperature record of the 20th century [see IPCC
Figure 9.5 and the accompanying discussion in the text] I maintain that this is a curve fitting exercise, accomplished
by choosing appropriate climate sensitivities for each of the many forcings .
 IPCC Fails
IPCC wrong about clouds

Taylor 12
(Managing editor of Environment & Climate News, senior
fellow at The Heartland Institute, bachelors degree from
Dartmouth College, law degree from Syracuse University
College of Law) 2012 (John M., Climate Change Weekly:
Global Warming Skeptics More Knowledgeable than
Alarmists, June 1, 2012,
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-
article/2012/06/01/climate-change-weekly-global-
warming-skeptics-more-knowledgeable-alarmi)
NEW STUDY CONTRADICTS IPCC ON CLOUDS A newly published peer-reviewed study contradicts one of
the key assumptions of alarmist computer models. Those models are programmed to assume that a cooling of the
stratosphere is occurring as a result of clouds over the Earths poles trapping a significant amount of
heat beneath the stratosphere. To the contrary, the new study finds clouds over the poles act to cool the
stratosphere by adiabatic cooling rather than by trapping outgoing radiation.

IPCC wrong about aerosols

Taylor (Managing editor of Environment & Climate News, senior fellow at
The Heartland Institute, bachelors degree from Dartmouth College, law
degree from Syracuse University College of Law) 2011 (John M., New
Aerosol Study Refutes Global Warming Theory, October 20, 2011,
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/new-aerosol-study-refutes-global-
warming-theory) //CL

The amount of warming due to aerosols was so significant, the researchers reported, that aerosols alone
could explain--in and of themselves and completely independent of greenhouse gases--the observed
glacier retreat in the Eastern Himalayan Mountains. Milloy noted the new discovery further calls into
question unreliable global warming models that have failed to explain why manmade carbon dioxide
emissions steadily increased from about 1940 to 1975 even as global temperatures cooled. Said Milloy,
"Global warming alarmists, such as the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, attempt to
counter this observation by claiming that aerosol particles in the atmosphere--like soot and sulfates
from fossil fuel combustion, and dust from volcanic eruptions--can mask the warming effect of
greenhouse gases and cool the planet by reflecting solar radiation back into space. Earth has not
warmed as predicted, they argue, because aerosol pollution is cooling the planet in a way that
temporarily mitigates greenhouse gas warming. "The new aerosol study doesn't show that climate
alarmists may be just a little off course--it shows that they may be 180 degrees off," Milloy added. "The
aerosol study opens up the possibility for an entirely new hypothesis for global warming, with aerosols
as the culprit. Yet up to now, the 'consensus' crowd has portrayed aerosols in the opposite light, as
cooling agents."
 Idsos Indict
The Idsos dont have peer review and fill their work with
meaningless jargon

UCS 5
(Misinformation about climate change,
http://www.ucsusa.org/ssi/archive/climate-
misinformation.html)
In an attempt to bank on the credibility science generally enjoys and to fight off accusations of
making unscientific, biased claims, skeptics also pursue the idea "if you can't beat them, join them"if only in appearance.
EXAMPLE: The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change This pseudo-scientific research center
located in Tempe, AZ is currently headed up by Craig D. and Keith E. Idso, who are also involved with the Greening
Earth Society. In a position paper on global warming [13], the two authors (the only listed staff of the Center) state, "There is
little doubt the air's CO2 concentration has risen significantly since the inception of the Industrial
Revolution; and there are few who do not attribute the CO2 increase to the increase in humanity's
use of fossil fuels. There is also little doubt that the earth has warmed slightly over the same period; but there is no compelling
reason to believe that the rise in temperature was caused by the rise in CO2. Furthermore it is highly unlikely that future increases in
the air's CO2 content will produce any global warming; for there are numerous problems with the popular hypothesis that links the
two phenomena." The authors then go on to flesh out these "problems" with scientific jargon,
criticizing unscientific interpretations, and debunking claims never made by serious climate
scientists. The "scientific" positions held by Center staff are not subjected to peer-review, and the
Center's Scientific Advisors are mostly retired scientists without past or current research in
climate-related sciences. It is not clear whether the CO2 Center is actually a separate entity from
the Greening Earth Society.

Theyre paid by oil and gas companies

UCS 7
(Responding to Global Warming SkepticsProminent
Skeptics Organizations,
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/skeptic-
organizations.html)

Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide & Global Change The Center claims to "disseminate factual report s and
sound commentary on new developments in the world-wide scientific quest to determine the climactic and biological consequences of
the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content." The Center is led by two brothers, Craig and Keith Idso. Their father,
Sherwood Idso, is affiliated with the Greening Earth Society; the Center also shares a board member (Sylvan Wittwer) with GES.
Both Idso brothers have been on the Western Fuels payroll at one time or another. Spin: Increased
levels of CO2 will help plants, and that's good. Funding: The
Center is extremely secretive of its funding sources,
stating that it is their policy not to divulge it funders. There
is evidence for a strong connection to the Greening
Earth Society (ergo Western Fuels Association). Affiliated Individuals: Craig Idso, Keith Idso, Sylvan Wittwer \
 Idsos Prodict
The Idsos use peer review and have done extensive
research

D'Aleo 10
(Joseph DAleo, Director of Icecap.us, former Prof
Meteorology and Climatology, first director of
Meteorology at the Weather Channel, Fellow at the
American Meteorology Society, 2-14-2010, Climategate:
What Did Phil Jones Actually Admit? Was He Correct?)

The Idsos at CO2 Science have done a very thorough job documenting,
using the peer review literature, the existence of a global MWP. They have
found data published by 804 individual scientists from 476 separate
research institutions in 43 different countries supporting the global
Medieval Warm Period.

The Idsos are qualified and not paid off

Idso 7
(Sherwood B. Idso, President of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide
and Global Change, Position Papers on Funding, 2007, What Motivates
the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change?)

one should not believe what we at CO2 Science or anyone else says
Clearly,
without carefully examining the
about carbon dioxide and global change
reasoning behind, and the evidence for, our and their declarations,
which makes questions about funding rather moot. It is self-evident, for
example, that one need not know from whence a person's or organization's
funding comes in order to evaluate the reasonableness of what they
say, if - and this is a very important qualification - one carefully studies
the writings of people on both sides of the issue. Nevertheless, questions
about funding persist, and they are clearly of great interest to many people, as evidenced
by the spate of publicity aroused by the 4 Sep 2006 letter of Bob Ward (Senior Manager for Policy
Communication of the UK's Royal Society) to Nick Thomas (Esso UK Limited's Director of
Corporate Affairs), as well his criticism of us in his BBC Today Programe interview of 21 Sep 2006
with Sarah Montague, where he pointedly described our Center as being one of the organizations
That we tell a far
funded by ExxonMobil that "misrepresent the science of climate change."
different story from the one espoused by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change is true; and that may be why ExxonMobil made some donations to
us a few times in the past; they probably liked what we typically had to
say about the issue. But what we had to say then, and what we have to
say now, came not, and comes not, from them or any other
organization or person. Rather, it was and is derived from our individual
scrutinizing of the pertinent scientific literature and our analyses of
what we find there, which we have been doing and subsequently
writing about on our website on a weekly basis without a single break
since 15 Jul 2000, and twice-monthly before that since 15 Sep 1998 ...
and no one could pay my sons and me enough money to do that. So
what do we generally find in this never-ending endeavor? We find enough
good material to produce weekly reviews of five different peer-reviewed scientific journal articles
we often
that do not follow the multiple doom-and-gloom storylines of the IPCC. In addition,
review articles that do follow the IPCC's lead; and in these cases we
take issue with them for what we feel are valid defensible reasons. Why
do we do this? We do it because we feel that many people on the other
side of the debate - but by no means all or even the majority of them -
are the ones that "misrepresent the science of climate change." Just as
beauty resides in the eye of the beholder, however, so too does the misrepresentation of climate
change science live there; and with people on both sides of the debate often saying the same
negative things about those on the other side, it behooves the rational person seeking to know
the truth to carefully evaluate the things each side says about more substantial matters. Are they
based on real-world data? Do the analyses employed seem appropriate? Do the researchers rely
more on data and logic to make their points, or do they rely more on appeals to authority and
Funding also enters the picture; but one must
claims of consensus?
determine if it is given to influence how scientists interpret their
findings or to encourage them to maintain their intellectual integrity
and report only what they believe to be the truth. In this regard, as I mentioned
earlier, there are many scientists on both sides of the climate change
debate who receive funds from people that admire their work and who
continue to maintain their intellectual and moral integrity. Likewise,
there are probably some on both sides of the controversy who do
otherwise. So how does one differentiate between them? Clearly, each researcher's
case is unique. In my case, I feel that a significant indication of what
motivates me to do what I do can be gleaned from my publication
record, which demonstrates that I studied and wrote about many of the
topics we currently address on our website a full quarter-century ago in
a host of different peer-reviewed scientific journals - as well as in a
couple of books (Idso, 1982, 1989) that I self-published and for which I
personally paid the publication costs - all of which happened well
before I, or probably anyone else, had ever even contemplated doing
what we now do and actually receiving funds to sustain the effort. What
is more, many of these things occurred well before there was any significant controversy over the
climate change issue, which largely began with the publication of one of my early contributions to
that my views about the
the topic (Idso, 1980). Hence, it should be readily evident
potential impacts of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 concentration
from that time until now have never been influenced in even the
slightest degree by anything other than what has appeared in the
scientific literature. And my sons are in their father's image.
 AT: IPCC Indict
Even if they win this - substantial evidence independent
from the IPCC proves our impact

Huber and Knutti 11

(Markus Huber is a doctoral student at and Reto Knutti is
a Professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate
Science of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
12/4/11, Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred
from changes in Earths energy balance Nature
Geoscience)
The Earths energy balance is key to understanding climate and climate variations that are caused by natural and anthropogenic
changes in the atmospheric composition. Despite abundant observational evidence for changes in the energy balance over the past
decades1, 2, 3, the formal detection of climate warming and its attribution to human influence has so
far
relied mostly on the difference between spatio-temporal warming patterns of natural and
anthropogenic origin4, 5, 6. Here we present an alternative attribution method that relies on the
principle of conservation of energy, without assumptions about spatial warming patterns . Based on a
massive ensemble of simulations with an intermediate-complexity climate model we demonstrate that known changes in the global
energy balance and in radiative forcing tightly constrain the magnitude of anthropogenic warming. We find that since the mid-
twentieth century, greenhouse gases contributed 0.85C of warming (595% uncertainty: 0.61.1C),
about half of which was offset by the cooling effects of aerosols, with a total observed change in
global temperature of about 0.56C. The observed trends are extremely unlikely (<5%) to be
caused by internal variability, even if current models were found to strongly underestimate it . Our
method is complementary to optimal fingerprinting attribution and produces fully consistent results, thus suggesting an even higher
confidence that human-induced causes dominate the observed warming .

These account for natural forcings

Huber and Knutti 11

(Markus Huber is a doctoral student at and Reto Knutti is
a Professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate
Science of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
12/4/11, Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred
from changes in Earths energy balance Nature
Geoscience)
Here we have shown that for global temperature the fundamental principle of conservation of energy, combined with knowledge about
the evolution of radiative forcing, provides a complementary approach to attribution. Our results are strongly constrained by global
observations and are robust when considering uncertainties in radiative forcing, the observed warming and in climate feedbacks.
Each of the thousands of model simulations is a consistent realization of the ocean atmosphere
energy balance. The resulting distribution of climate sensitivity (1.76.5C, 595%, mean 3.6C) is also
consistent with independent evidence derived from palaeoclimate archives 11. Using a more informative
prior assumption does not significantly alter the conclusions (see Supplementary Information). Our results show that it is
extremely likely that at least 74% (12%, 1) of the observed warming since 1950 was caused by
radiative forcings, and less than 26% (12%) by unforced internal variability. Of the forced signal
during that particular period, 102% (90116%) is due to anthropogenic and 1% (10 to 13%) due to
natural forcing. The discrepancy between the total and the sum of the two contributions (14% on
average) arises because the total ocean heat uptake is different from the sum of the responses to the
individual forcings. Even for a reconstruction with high variability in total irradiance, solar forcing contributed only about 0.07
C (0.030.13C) to the warming since 1950 (see Fig. 3c). The combination of those results with attribution
studies based on optimal fingerprinting, with independent constraints on the magnitude of climate
feedbacks, with process understanding, as well as palaeoclimate evidence leads to an even higher
confidence about human influence dominating the observed temperature increase since pre-
industrial times.
Warming Real
 Yes Real - Consensus
International consensus concurs warming is real

Harris 11
(Richard Harris, 6/21/11, "Climate Change: Public
Skeptical, Scientists Sure," NPR,
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/21/137309964/climate-
change-public-skeptical-scientists-sure)
Most Americans are unaware that the National Academy of Sciences, known for its cautious and even-handed reviews of the state of
science, is firmly on board with climate change. It has been for years. Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy,
paraphrased its most recent report on the subject. "The consensus statement is that climate changes are being
observed, are certainly real, they seem to be increasing, and that humans are mostly likely the
cause of all or most of these changes," he said. That's not just the view of the U.S. National
Academies. There's also a consensus statement from the presidents of science academies from
around the world, including the academies of China, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Russia,
France, Brazil, the list goes on. Cicerone also points to strong statements about climate change from the leading professional
organizations in the United States, including from the American Chemical Society, the American Physical
Society and others. Of course, it's still possible to find a few scientists who reject the consensus. Cicerone
says it is appealing to think they are right when they say there's no need to worry about complicated cap-and-trade policies or
otherwise fuss about climate change.

Warming real - consensus

Brooks 12
(Jon Brooks, staff writer, KQED news, citing Craig Miller, environmental scientist, 5/3/12, "Is
Climate Change Real? For the Thousandth Time, Yes," KQED News,
http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2012/05/03/is-climate-change-real-for-the-thousandth-time-yes/)

BROOKS: So what are the organizations that say climate change is real? MILLER: Virtually ever
major, credible scientific organization in the world. Its not just the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. Organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical
Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And that's echoed in most
countries around the world. All of the most credible, most prestigious scientific organizations
accept the fundamental findings of the IPCC. The last comprehensive report from the IPCC, based on research,
came out in 2007. And at that time, they said in this report, which is known as AR-4, that there is "very high
confidence" that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming. Scientists are
very careful, unusually careful, about how they put things. But then they say "very likely," or "very high confidence," theyre
talking 90%. BROOKS: So its not 100%? MILLER: In the realm of science; theres virtually never 100% certainty
about anything. You know, as someone once pointed out, gravity is a theory. BROOKS: Gravity is testable, though...
Virtually every major credible scientific organization in the world says climate change is real .
MILLER: You're right. You cant drop a couple of balls off of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prove climate change. Thats why
we have to rely on mathematical models to try to figure out where this is all going. And that's difficult. But its not impossible,
as some people like to paint it. You know, the people doing the models are not inept. Over the past nearly four years, Climate
Watch has interviewed a lot of scientists, attended conferences, read academic papers. To me, as what you might call an
informed observer, the vast preponderance of scientific evidence supports this notion that the Earth is warming and that
human activity is a significant cause. BROOKS: Are there legitimate debunkers of this proposition? MILLER: Certainly
there are legitimate scientists on the other side of the question. If you take, for example, a guy by the name of
John Christy from the University of Alabama, who is very strongly identified with climate change skeptics. That doesnt mean
that his work is invalidated. He came out recently with a study that basically refuted the idea that theres been an observable
shrinkage in the snow pack of the Sierra Nevada. And we talked to other scientists who do believe in anthropogenic or human-
induced global warming and do believe that the Sierra snow pack is going to be shrinking, who thought that this study was
sound. But thats one study in a sea of studies. And you have look at the preponderance of the evidence and
not at any one particular study, not any particular year, not even any particular ten years, because even a 10-year
trend does not necessarily constitute climate change. BROOKS: What are some of the metrics scientists have looked at to
come to the conclusion that human-caused climate change is real? MILLER: They study temperature records. There
have been tidal gauges in place for a long time, looking at sea-level rise, and also augmented now by satellite data that measure
with greater accuracy the rate of the rise. Theyve looked at things like ice cores from Greenland and elsewhere which
gives us sort of a reverse chronological story of what the climate has done. And you can actually pull one of those ice cores and
see the amount of C02 that was in the atmosphere at the time. And what they've found is what looks to be a pretty
convincing relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the behavior of the
Earths climate. BROOKS: But there are some who refute that evidence? MILLER: Absolutely. Well get people frequently
commenting on our blog who will say the sea level is not rising and that theres been no warming for the past ten years. As I
already pointed out, ten years of anything does not constitute a definitive pattern; its just too short a
time span. Its this idea of cherry-picking data, which both sides accuse the other of doing. You have to look
at the Earths climate over time as a really big, complicated jigsaw puzzle. And clearly there are pieces
missing. And there are pieces sitting off to the side that arent missing, but we dont quite know how they fit
into the puzzle yet. But still, you see enough of the picture to know whats going on. The science has
yielded at least -- as Stanford's Chris Field of the IPCC puts it -- a blurry picture of the future. And the blurry picture is
enough to know the general direction were heading, even without knowing all of the specifics. BROOKS: Are there former
critics who now acknowledge the reality of climate change? MILLER: Richard Muller would be a good example of that.
Hes the physicist over at UC Berkeley who was identified with the skeptic camp for a long time. He wasnt
buying a lot of
climate change theory. He launched a temperature-data audit because he wasnt convinced that the
temperature data being used by the IPCC and NOAA and others was accurate, that there were fundamental issues they were
getting bad data, garbage in, garbage out.
 Yes Real - Antarctica
Warming is real - Antarctic vulnerability

Monash 12
(Monash University News, 7/13/12, "The challenges facing
the vulnerable Antarctic,"
http://www.monash.edu.au/news/show/the-challenges-
facing-the-vulnerable-antarctic)
Led by Monash University's Professor Steven Chown, a
multidisciplinary team of experts from around the globe
has set out the current and future conservation challenges facing the Antarctic in a Policy Forum article
published today in Science. The team analysed the effectiveness of the existing Antarctic Treaty System for protecting the region, one
of the world's largest commons, from the threats of climate change and, as technology improves, increasing prospects of use of the
Antarctic's natural resources. Using a horizon scanning approach, the team determined that the major short-term
threats included climate change impacts on marine systems, marine resource use, ocean
acidification, invasive alien species, pollution, habitat alteration and regulatory challenges within
the Treaty system. Professor Chown, incoming Head of Biological Sciences at Monash said the impacts of climate
change were particularly worrying. "Interactions between resource use and climate change are
especially significant threats," Professor Chown said. "Climate change is increasing the risk of the
introduction of non-indigenous species. Several alien species, which have track records of being
highly invasive, are already present in the Peninsula region and the risks are growing ." The team also
looked at the likely situation in half a century. In the longer-term, climate change impacts on terrestrial systems, and
the impacts of ocean acidification on marine organisms are growing threats. Professor Chown said that the
Treaty system remains effective, but swifter decision-making and more collaboration were vital if the
Antarctic was to be conserved. "The quick pace of change in much of the region is under-
appreciated. Theres warming in the Western Antarctic, changing species distributions, and a
quickening in the rate of ice-loss, among other clear signs," Professor Chown said.
 Yes Real - Heat Waves
Warming real - heat waves

Kolbert 12
(Elizabeth Kolbert, Fulbright scholar, environmental writer
for the New Yorker, 7/23/12, "The Big Heat," The New
Yorker,
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/07/23/1207
23taco_talk_kolbert)

Up until fairly recently, it

was possiblewhich, of course, is not the same as advisableto see climate change
as a phenomenon that was happening somewhere else. In the Arctic, Americans were told (again and again
and again), the effects were particularly dramatic. The sea ice was melting. This was bad for native Alaskans, and even
worse for polar bears, who rely on the ice for survival. But in the Lower Forty-eight there always seemed to be more
pressing concerns, like Barack Obamas birth certificate. Similarly, the Antarctic Peninsula was reported to be
warming fast, with unfortunate consequences for penguins and sea levels. But penguins live far away and sea-level rise
is prospective, so again the issue seemed to lack the fierce urgency of now. The summer of 2012 offers
Americans the best chance yet to get their minds around the problem. In late June, just as a sizzling
heat wave was settling across much of the countryin Evansville, Indiana, temperatures rose into the
triple digits for ten days, reaching as high as a hundred and seven degreeswildfires raged in Colorado. Hot
and extremely dry conditions promoted the flames spread. Its no exaggeration to say Colorado is
burning, KDVR, the Fox station in Denver, reported. By the time the most destructive blaze was fully contained, almost
three weeks later, it had scorched nearly twenty-nine square miles. Meanwhile , a super derechoa long line of
thunderstormsswept from Illinois to the Atlantic Coast, killing at least thirteen people and leaving
millions without power. Referring to the fires, the drought, and the storms, Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of geosciences
and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told the Associated Press, This is certainly what I and many
other climate scientists
have been warning about. He also noted, This is what global warming looks like
at the regional or personal level. Or, at least, what it looks like right now. One of the most salientbut also,
unfortunately, most counterintuitiveaspects of global warming is that it operates on what amounts to a time delay.
Behind this summers heat are greenhouse gases emitted decades ago . Before many effects of todays
emissions are felt, it will be time for the Summer Olympics of 2048. (Scientists refer to this as the commitment to
warming.) Whats at stake is where things go from there. It is quite possible that by the end of the century we
could, without even really trying, engineer
the return of the sort of climate that hasnt been seen on
earth since the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.
 Yes Real - Geological Data
Warming true - geological data

McGuire 12
(Bill McGuire, professor of geophysical and climate
hazards at University College of London, 7/10/12, "Climate
change is not science fiction, Jeremy Clarkson," The
Guardian,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jul/10/c
limate-change-science-fiction-jeremy-clarkson)

The bottom line is that rapid climate change drives a hazardous response from the Earth's crust fact!
The idea is not new and in scientific circles is not even controversial. We have a huge amount of
data gleaned from the 20,000 years that has elapsed since the end of the last ice age, which saw one of the
most dramatic transformations in our planet's history; from frigid wasteland to the broadly clement world we are
familiar with today. The changes in stress and strain in the crust that resulted from melting of the 3km-thick
continental ice sheets and a 130m rise in global sea levels, saw Lapland wracked by massive quakes associated
today with places like the Pacific "ring of fire", while volcanic outbursts on Iceland increased 30 times. There is
plenty of evidence too, for seismic shakings and volcanic rumblings, during this period, right across the planet. With the
climate once again changing at least as rapidly as during post-glacial times, we are already seeing a seismic
response to the loss of ice mass in Alaska, and a rise in the frequency of giant landslides as a reaction to heat
waves across mountainous regions. How widespread and obvious the future response of the Earth beneath our feet will be to
continued planetary warming, remains uncertain. Clearly, however, the potential exists for unmitigated climate
change to bring about a significant and hazardous riposte.
 Yes Real - Sea Level Rise
Sea level rise is real

Lemonick 12
(Michael Lemonick, senior staff writer at Climate Central,
former senior staff writer for Time, 7/12/12, "Climate
Change: It Could Be Worse Than We Think," Climate
Central, http://www.climatecentral.org/news/sea-level-
rise-it-could-be-worse-than-we-think/)

A new analysis released Thursday in the journal Science implies that the seas could rise dramatically higher over the
next few centuries than scientists previously thought somewhere between 18-to-29 feet above current levels, rather
than the 13-to-20 feet they were talking about just a few years ago. The increase in sea level would largely come
from the partial melting of giant ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica, which have remained largely
intact since the end of the last ice age, nearly 20,000 years ago. But rising global temperatures, thanks to
human greenhouse-gas emissions, have already begun to melt that ancient ice, sending sea level up
8 inches since 1880 alone, with as much as 6 feet or so of additional increase projected by 2100. Thats
not enough to inundate major population centers by itself, but coupled with storm surges, it could threaten
millions of Americans long before the century ends. Around the world, sea level rise will put trillions in
property at risk within the next few decades. West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Twenty-nine feet of sea-level
rise, by contrast, or even 18, would put hundreds coastal cities around the globe entirely under water,
displacing many hundreds of millions of people and destroying untold trillions in property. It would, in
short, be a disaster of unimaginable proportions .
 Yes Real - Tree Rings
Warming is real - tree rings

Speidel & Li 11
(Gisela Spidel, Outreach Specialist, International Pacific
Research Center AND Jinbao Li, QIT, 5/9/2011,
"Researchers discover tree rings tell a 1,100-year history
of El Nino," University of Hawaii at Manoa)
An international team of climate scientists from the University of Hawaii at Mnoa recently found that
annually resolved tree-ring records from North America, particularly from the U.S. Southwest, give a
continuous representation of the intensity of El Nio events over the past 1,100 years and can be used to
improve El Nio predictions. The study, spearheaded by postdoctoral fellow Jinbao Li and co-authored
by meteorology professor Shang-Ping Xie of the International Pacific Research Center, was published
in the May 6 issue of Nature Climate Change. Tree rings in the U.S. Southwest, the team found, agree
well with the 150-year instrumental sea surface temperature records in the tropical Pacific. During El
Nio, the unusually warm surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific lead to changes in the atmospheric
circulation, causing unusually wetter winters in the U.S. Southwest, and thus wider tree rings; unusually
cold eastern Pacific temperatures during La Nia lead to drought and narrower rings. The tree-ring
records, furthermore, match well existing reconstructions of the El Nio-Southern Oscillation and
correlate highly, for instance, with d18O isotope concentrations of both living corals and corals that
lived hundreds of years ago around Palmyra in the central Pacific. Our work revealed that the towering
trees on the mountain slopes of the U.S. Southwest and the colorful corals in the tropical Pacific both
listen to the music of El Nio, which shows its signature in their yearly growth rings, explained Li.
The coral records, however, are brief, whereas the tree-ring records from North America supply us
with a continuous El Nio record reaching back 1,100 years. The tree rings reveal that the intensity of
El Nio has been highly variable, with decades of strong El Nio events and decades of little activity.
The weakest El Nio activity happened during the Medieval Climate Anomaly in the 11th
century, whereas the strongest activity has been since the 18th century.
 Yes Anthro - Best Card
Laundry list of indicators prove warming anthropogenic

Shulman 10
(Seth Shulman, citing Benjamin Santer, Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for
Meteorology, Last updated: 7/15/10, "Global Warming
Science and Impacts: Climate Fingerprinter," Union of
Concerned Scientists,
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impac
ts/science/climate-scientist-benjamin-santer.html)
The key insight of the research is straightforward: the factors that might account for global warming
what climate scientists call "forcings"operate in different ways. For instance, Santer explains, if the
earth's warming were caused by an increase in the sun's energy output, "you would expect to see
warming from the top of the atmospheric column straight down to the surface." But if massive volcanic
eruptions, say, were a significant factor, their influence would show up with a distinctly different
profile. When such eruptions occur, the dust they produce can reach upper portions of Earth's
atmosphere, and remain there for several years. Because volcanic dust absorbs incoming sunlight,
preventing it from penetrating to the earth's surface, the data would show cooling in the troposphere (the
atmospheric layer closest to the surface) and heating in the stratosphere (the layer above the
troposphere). But, Santer points out, those two profiles are "not at all what the data show." His
research, now replicated by many others, instead documents a telltale warming of the troposphere and
cooling of the stratospherethe precise fingerprint that scientists since the 1960s had predicted would
occur from the intensified "greenhouse effect" as increasing amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide
from fossil-fuel emissions built up in the atmosphere. Because of his groundbreaking work, Santer was
selected as the lead author on a chapter of the 1995 report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC). That year, for the first time, the report said that "the balance of evidence
suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." That measured statement has, of course,
been dramatically strengthened in the latest IPCC report, which concludes that there is a greater than 90
percent likelihood that human activities have been the main cause of warming since the middle of the
twentieth century. Santer's cutting-edge research led to widespread acclaim from his colleagues and
earned him many accolades, including a MacArthur "genius grant," but his high-profile role in the 1995
IPCC report made him a target of those trying to stir up controversy and confuse the public about global
warming. For instance, after the 1995 report was issued, an industryfunded group led an effort to
discredit Santer personally by spuriously claiming that he had altered the IPCC's findings. He had not.
"Nothing in my university training prepared me for what I faced in the aftermath of that report," Santer
says of the vicious personal attacks by fossil-fuel interests. "You are prepared as a scientist to defend
your research. But I was not prepared to defend my personal integrity. I never imagined I'd have to do
that." Fifteen years later, the evidence that human activity is causing global warming is stronger than
ever and accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists. Our understanding of climate
fingerprinting has also become far more sophisticated and now shows human causation in the measured
changes in ocean temperatures, Arctic sea ice, precipitation, atmospheric moisture, and many other
aspects of climate change. Some of Santer's more recent work, for instance, addresses changes in the
height of the tropopausethe boundary between the troposphere, the more turbulent lower layer, and
the more stable stratosphere above. (Between 5 and 10 miles above the earth's surface, a marker of the
tropopause can be seen in the flat, anvil-like top of a thundercloud.) Measurements over the course of
several recent decades have shown that the tropopause has risen markedly. By studying tropopause
changes in computer climate models, and comparing model output with observations, Santer was able
to show that both the warming of the lower atmosphere and cooling of the stratosphere led to a rise in
the height of the tropopauseand that the observed rise in the tropopause matched the fingerprint of an
increase in heat-trapping gases. "Nobody had looked at it before," Santer says, "but the data showed
clearly that natural causes alone simply could not provide a convincing explanation for the observed
change." All the climate fingerprinting research to date, Santer explains, has arrived at the same
conclusion, namely that "natural causes cannot provide a convincing explanation for the particular
patterns of climate change we see." That, he says, is why scientists "have come to have such confidence
in our understanding of what is happeningnot because of the claims of any one individual, but
because of the breadth of scientific work and reproducibility of the results."
 Yes Anthro - Generic
Warming is anthropogenic - even if there are alt causes,
human emissions are the biggest factor

Fitzpatrick 6
(Melanie Fitzpatrick, Earth and Space Sciences and
Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington,
5/11/06, "Human Fingerprints," Union of Concerned
Scientists,
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impac
ts/science/global-warming-human.html)

Background: Driving the Climate ("Forcing") Climate is influenced by many

factors, both natural and human. [7] Things that increase temperature, such
as increases in heat-trapping emissions from cars and power plants or an
increase in the amount of radiation the sun emits, are examples of "positive"
forcings or drivers. Volcanic events and some types of human-made pollution, both of
which inject sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the atmosphere, lower temperature and are examples of
"negative" forcings or drivers. Natural climate drivers include the sun's
energy output, aerosols from volcanic activity, and changes in snow and ice
cover. Human climate drivers include heat-trapping emissions from cars and
power plants, aerosols from pollution, and soot particles. Much as the Air Force develops computer
programs to simulate aircraft flight under different conditions, climate scientists develop computer
programs to simulate global climate changes under different conditions. These programs use our
knowledge of physical, chemical, and biological processes that occur within Earth's atmosphere and
oceans and on its land surfaces. Mathematical models allow scientists to simulate the behavior of complex
systems such as climate and explore how these systems respond to natural and human factors. Fingerprint
1: The Ocean Layers WarmThe world's oceans have absorbed about 20 times as
much heat as the atmosphere over the past half-century, leading to higher
temperatures not only in surface waters but also in water 1,500 feet below
the surface. [8,9] The measured increases in water temperature lie well outside the bounds of natural
climate variation. Fingerprint 2: The Atmosphere Shifts Recent research shows that human activities have
lifted the boundary of Earth's lower atmosphere. Known as the troposphere (from the Greek tropos, which
means "turning"), this lowest layer of the atmosphere contains Earth's weather. The stable layer above is
called the stratosphere. The boundary that separates the two layers, the tropopause, is as high as nine
miles above the equator and as low as five miles above the poles. In an astounding development, a 2003
study showed that this tropopause has shifted upward over the last two decades by more than 900 feet.
[10] The rising tropopause marks another human fingerprint on Earth's climate. In their search for clues ,
scientists compared two natural drivers of climate (solar changes and volcanic aerosols)
and three human drivers of climate (heat-trapping emissions, aerosol pollution, and ozone
depletion), altering these one at a time in their sophisticated models. Changes in
the sun during the twentieth century have warmed both the troposphere and
stratosphere. But human activities have increased heat-trapping emissions
and decreased stratospheric ozone. This has led to the troposphere warming
more because the increase in heat-trapping emissions is trapping more of
Earth's outgoing heat. The stratosphere has cooled more because there is
less ozone to absorb incoming sunlight to heat up the stratosphere. Both these
effects combine to shift the boundary upward. Over the period 1979-1999, a study shows that human-
induced changes in heat-trapping emissions and ozone account for more than
80 percent of the rise in tropopause height . [10] This is yet another example of how
science detectives are quantifying the impact of human activities on climate .
Fingerprint 3: The Surface Heats Up Measurements show that global average temperature has
risen by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years, with most of that happening in the last three
decades. [1,2] By comparing Earth's temperature over that last century with
models comparing climate drivers, a study showed that, from 1950 to the
present, most of the warming was caused by heat-trapping emissions from
human activities [3]. In fact, heat-trapping emissions are driving the climate
about three times more strongly now than they were in 1950 . The spatial pattern of
where this warming is occurring around the globe indicates human-induced causes. Even ac countin g

for the occasional short-lived cooling from volcanic events and moderate levels of cooling from
aerosol pollution as well as minor fluctuations in the sun's output in the last 30 years, heat-trapping
emissions far outweigh any other current climate dr iver. Once again, our
scientific fingerprinting identifies human activities as the main driver of our warming climate. Human
Causes, Human Solutions
 Yes Anthro - We Assume their Ev
Anthropogenic causes overwhelm alt causes - their data is
descriptive of models we already assume, not predictive
of a future of runaway climate change

Baum et. al 12
(Seth Baum, Research on Environmental Decisions @
Columbia, Chris Karmosky, Geography @ Penn State,
Jacob Haqq-Misra, Meteorology and Astrobiology Research
Center, June 2012, "Climate Change: Evidence of Human
Causes and Arguments for Emissions Reduction," Science
and Engineering Ethics 18(2))

Anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gas emissions serve to increase surface

temperature. However, this fact alone is insufcient to attribute the warming observed over the last several decades to
anthropogenic emissions. Other processes could be relevant. It is also important to consider the sources of greenhouse gas
emissions (mainly the burning of fossil fuels) and the sinks for greenhouse gasses (mainly photosynthesis), as well as how these
processes unfold over time. However, even after factoring in these processes, the observed warming
cannot be reproduced without including anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions as a factor.
Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions also appear to be driving further temperature
increases and other climatic changes in the future . The exact nature of the changes is uncertain. One reason for
this uncertainty is that the amount of total greenhouse gas that humanity will emit in the future is unknown. Another reason for
this uncertainty is that the understanding of the climate system, though strong, remains imperfect.
Spiers Skepticisms In his editorial, Spier questions four aspects of climate science: (1) an observed temperature decline between
1943 and 1975; (2) ice-core data which Spier interprets as evidence that changes in temperature cause changes in carbon dioxide
(CO2) in the atmosphere, instead of changes in CO2 in the atmosphere causing changes in temperature; (3) the role of cloud
formation in global temperature; and (4) the role of cosmic rays in global temperature (Spier 2008). Observed Temperature
Decline Between 1943 and 1975 While it is true that global temperature records show a temperature
decline from 1943 to 1975, 1 even while greenhouse gas concentrations were increasing, this
temperature decline does not disprove the claim that broader temperature increases are driven
primarily by greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, it highlights another contributor to global temperatures:
sulfur emissions, which form sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere that reect additional incoming solar
radiation back to space (an increase in albedo) and thus cool Earths surface. Sulfur emissions began with a rapid rise in
industrialization following World War II and peaked around 1980 (Stern 2005). During this time greenhouse gas emissions
grew more slowly than sulfur emissions, which led to net cooling while the sulfate aerosols
dominated (Ramaswamy et al. 2001). When sulfate aerosols are included in climate models, this same
temperature decline appears, along with the familiar longer-term warming trend (Harvey and
Kaufmann 2002; Stott et al. 2006).
 Yes Anthro - Ice Cores
Ice cores prove warming is self-reinforcing

Baum et. al 12
(Seth Baum, Research on Environmental Decisions @
Columbia, Chris Karmosky, Geography @ Penn State,
Jacob Haqq-Misra, Meteorology and Astrobiology Research
Center, June 2012, "Climate Change: Evidence of Human
Causes and Arguments for Emissions Reduction," Science
and Engineering Ethics 18(2))
Interpreting Ice Core Data Because there are few human-produced records of climate longer than 150
years, to learn about past climates, one must seek information from climate proxies. Some of the most
informative climate proxies are ice cores on Greenland and Antarctica. The cores, up to two miles deep,
provide information for periods of hundreds of thousands of years (Alley 2002). Spier claims that ice
core data presented by Petit et al. (1999) indicate that historic temperature increases preceded
atmospheric CO2 increases, suggesting that temperature increases cause CO2 increases, instead of the
other way around as would be expected under the view that CO2 increases are driving current global
warming. We are unable to conclusively reproduce this assessment from our own analysis of the work
of Petit et al. (1999). Ice core data show that CO2 and temperature have uctuated in synch with each
other as a result of Milankovitch cycles (variations in Earths orbital patterns), demonstrating a
correlation between the two but no causation. The causal role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas is derived
from the well-understood physical properties of the CO2 molecule. There is also positive feedback in
that increased warming of the oceans can cause a decrease in the saturation concentration of CO2 in the
ocean waters. As a result, CO2 is released into the atmosphere from warming oceans and can cause
further atmospheric warming. CO2 concentrations thus can either lag or precede temperature increases.
Even if it is demonstrated that in one situation atmospheric CO2 levels were driven by a temperature
change, this does not exclude the possibility that CO2 concentrations may drive temperature changes in
other situations.
 AT: Alt Cause - Sunspots
Human emissions, not the sun, are the primary cause of
global warming NASA satellites prove

Parry 12
(Wynne Parry, LiveScience Senior Writer, 2/1/12, NASA
Report: Greenhouse Gases, Not Sun, Driving Warming
www.livescience.com/18255-solar-cycle-climate-change-
warming.html)

A recent, prolonged lull in the sun's activity did not prevent the Earth from absorbing more solar
energy than it let escape back into space, a NASA analysis of the Earth's recent energy budget
indicates. An imbalance like this drives global warming since more energy is coming in than
leaving and, because it occurred during a period when the sun was emitting comparatively low
levels of energy, the imbalance has implications for the cause of global warming. The results confirm greenhouse
gases produced by human activities are the most important driver of global climate change,
according to the researchers. They found that the Earth absorbed 0.58 watts of excess energy per
square meter than escaped back into space during the study period from 2005 to 2010, a time
when solar activity was low. By comparison, the planet receives 0.25 watts less energy per square meter during a solar
minimum, than during a period of maximum activity in the sun's 11-year cycle. (Currently, the sun is in the midst of Solar Cycle 24,
with activity expected to ramp up toward solar maximum in 2013.) "The fact we still see a positive imbalance
despite the prolonged solar minimum isn't a surprise given what we've learned about the climate
system," lead researcher James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies,
said in a statement. "But it's worth noting, because this provides unequivocal evidence that the
sun is not the dominant driver of global warming ."
 AT: Alt Cause - Clouds
Cloud formations irrelevant - they are net coolants

Baum et. al 12
(Seth Baum, Research on Environmental Decisions @
Columbia, Chris Karmosky, Geography @ Penn State,
Jacob Haqq-Misra, Meteorology and Astrobiology Research
Center, June 2012, "Climate Change: Evidence of Human
Causes and Arguments for Emissions Reduction," Science
and Engineering Ethics 18(2))
The Role of Cloud Formation Clouds do play an important role in surface air temperatures: water vapor
is Earths most prevalent greenhouse gas, so increased cloud cover will cause surface warming.
However, clouds also reect incoming solar radiation back into space, thereby cooling Earths surface.
In general, thick clouds, such as the cumulonimbus Evidence of Human Causes and Arguments 397
123clouds found in thunderstorms, tend to have a net cooling effect on Earths surface, whereas thin
clouds, such as high cirrus clouds, have a net warming effect (Grenci and Nese 2006). Higher global
temperatures will cause higher rates of evaporation, bringing more of both thick and thin clouds. Clouds
thus constitute an important source of uncertainty in future temperature change.
 AT: Alt Cause - Cosmic Rays
Baum et. al 12
(Seth Baum, Research on Environmental Decisions @
Columbia, Chris Karmosky, Geography @ Penn State,
Jacob Haqq-Misra, Meteorology and Astrobiology Research
Center, June 2012, "Climate Change: Evidence of Human
Causes and Arguments for Emissions Reduction," Science
and Engineering Ethics 18(2))
The Role of Cosmic Rays The amount of incoming radiation from both the sun and other cosmic ray
sources is not constant over time. As Spier (2008) indicates, some researchers have claimed that these
cosmic ray uctuations are at least as dominant a driver of global temperature changes as greenhouse
gas emissions, including via changes in cloud cover (Carslaw et al. 2002; Marsh and Svensmark 2000a,
b). However, there is no apparent correspondence between the cosmic ray time series and global low-
level cloud cover past 1994 (Kristjansson et al. 2002, 2004; Sun and Bradley 2002). Likewise, the
overall contribution of solar variability to global radiative forcing is small relative to anthropogenic
contributions (Solomon et al. 2007).
 AT: Alt Cause - Volcanoes
Volcanic eruptions actually help slow down warming

Eilperin 11
(Juliet Eilperin joined The Washington Post as the House
of Representatives reporter, where she covered the
impeachment of Bill Clinton, lobbying, legislation, and
four national congressional campaigns, since April of 2004
she has covered the environment for the national desk,
reporting on science, policy and politics in areas including
climate change, oceans, and air quality, 7/21/11, Volcanic
ash, soot helped slow recent warming, study shows
www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-
science/volcanic-ash-soot-helped-slow-recent-warming-
study-shows/2011/07/20/gIQAg7k8RI_story.html)

Tiny solid and liquid particles in the atmosphere, including volcanic ash and soot from fossil
fuel burning, have kept the Earth from warming as fast as it otherwise would have in the past
dozen years, according to a new study published online Thursday in the journal Science. The findings show
that both natural and human factors have slowed the rate of global warming 20 percent since
1998. Small particles, otherwise known as aerosols, help cool the Earths climate by blocking out sunlight. The study is
significant because although average global temperatures last decade were higher than in the 1990s and 1980s, it appears the rate
of warming has slowed compared with previous decades. Now, scientists say, persistent aerosols in the stratosphere the region
of the atmosphere that contains the ozone layer might account for why warming has not been as rapid. John S. Daniel,
who co-authored the paper and is a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administrations Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., said the analysis shows
the impact minor volcanic eruptions and soot from coal burning is certainly not negligible .
By looking at both ground-based and satellite data, you could see without a doubt volcanoes
were having an impact even though there has not been a colossal eruption since Mount Pinatubo
erupted in 1991, Daniel said. The six researchers, from France and the United States, did not determine how much of the
cooling effect stemmed from natural causes and how much was from human activities such as sulfur dioxide emissions from
power plants and vehicles. Alan Robock, a professor at Rutgers Universitys Department of
Environmental Sciences who specializes in analyzing volcanic activitys climatic impact, said
the paper buttresses the argument that the climate change taking place is consistent with
computer modeling.
 AT: Warming isn't Global (Essex)
Baum et. al 12
(Seth Baum, Research on Environmental Decisions @
Columbia, Chris Karmosky, Geography @ Penn State,
Jacob Haqq-Misra, Meteorology and Astrobiology Research
Center, June 2012, "Climate Change: Evidence of Human
Causes and Arguments for Emissions Reduction," Science
and Engineering Ethics 18(2))
Climate Sensitivity Climate sensitivity is dened as the average global temperature increase that would
come from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. 2 Average global temperature is not a perfect
proxy for aggregate climate change: temperature changes are not uniform across Earth, and other
climatic changes such as changes in precipitation, severe weather events, and climate variability are also
important. However, average global temperature is nonetheless often a reasonable approximation of
aggregate climate change, which makes climate sensitivity a variable of great interest. Climate
sensitivity has been studied since the early days of climate change research (Arrhenius 1896). However,
the exact magnitude of climate sensitivity remains unknown, due to uncertainty about positive and
negative feedbacks in the climate system in which a response to warming could lead to additional
warming or cooling. As noted above, perhaps the main uncertain feedback is in clouds. The basic
physics of greenhouse gases indicates that, without these feedbacks, climate sensitivity would be an
increase of approximately 1.2C. As a result of the cumulative effects of all of the planets feedback
systems, climate sensitivity is frequently estimated to be approximately 3C but magnitudes as high as
6C or even 10C have not been ruled out (Knutti and Hegerl 2008). A high climate sensitivity could
result in catastrophic outcomes.
Baum et. al 12
(Seth Baum, Research on Environmental Decisions @
Columbia, Chris Karmosky, Geography @ Penn State,
Jacob Haqq-Misra, Meteorology and Astrobiology Research
Center, June 2012, "Climate Change: Evidence of Human
Causes and Arguments for Emissions Reduction," Science
and Engineering Ethics 18(2))
Regional Climate As mentioned above, global mean temperature is not necessarily a robust indicator of
aggregate climate change. Atmosphereocean climate models under global warming scenarios predict
non-uniform change in temperature distribution across the planet. For example, greater warming often
occurs over land masses than oceans because less available water reduces the magnitude of evaporative
cooling. Warming also tends to increase the spatial variability of precipitation, leading to a drying of the
subtropics and an increase in tropical and mid-latitude rainfall (Solomon et al. 2007). This spatial
variability in precipitation, coupled with the poleward expansion of the subtropical high pressure belt
under global warming (Lu et al. 2007; Seidel et al. 2008), points toward an intense reduction in
precipitation at subtropical dry zones. Thus, climate change involves important regional changes in
addition to increases in global mean temperature. The current understanding of how climates will
change in specic regions remains uncertain. Uncertainty in regional climate projection owes partially
to the limitations of climate models. The resolution of global atmosphereocean models ranges from 400
to 125 km, which makes ner scale variability difcult to resolve. However, these models can provide
boundary conditions for nested regional climate models, which are capable of resolving detail down to
50 kmand some as small as 15 km (Solomon et al. 2007). Advances in computing will lead to
increased resolution for both types of models. Nevertheless, improved prediction of regional responses
to global warming will also require a better understanding of the underlying physics, including changes
in cloud cover, radiative forcing, soil parameterization, and biomass feedback. In short, many of the
challenges involved in regional climate forecasts are common to the pursuit of global climate
projections.
 AT: You Don't Solve All Wmg
Even if the plan doesn't solve warming we slow its rate -
that's k2 adaptation

Baum et. al 12
(Seth Baum, Research on Environmental Decisions @
Columbia, Chris Karmosky, Geography @ Penn State,
Jacob Haqq-Misra, Meteorology and Astrobiology Research
Center, June 2012, "Climate Change: Evidence of Human
Causes and Arguments for Emissions Reduction," Science
and Engineering Ethics 18(2))

In general, what is of importance is not only how much the sea level rises, but also how fast
this rise occurs, because a rapid rise gives humans and ecosystems less time to adapt to the
change. There is presently much concern that an abrupt ice sheet collapse could cause a rapid
sea level rise. The WAIS is particularly prone to abrupt collapse because it rests on ground that lies below sea level. If the
surrounding oceans warm enough, then WAIS could rapidly disintegrate. Meanwhile, the Antarctic
Peninsula, home to the northernmost fringes of WAIS, is undergoing perhaps the largest
increase in temperature of any location on the planet (King et al. 2002; Turner et al. 2005), and there are
already some warning signs that a WAIS collapse could be in progress. 3 Thus, abrupt WAIS collapse is a major
cause for concern. However, it is not known if or when such a collapse is likely to occur.
 AT: Bobertz/Blaming Kritik Alts
Green attitudes don't solve - adopting a federal approach
is key to offset the worst of the existential impacts
warming has

Karlsson 11
(Rasmus Karlsson is a post-doctoral fellow at the Hong
Kong Institute of Education, PSA Annual Conference
London, 19-21 April 2011,
http://www.psa.ac.uk/journals/pdf/5/2011/1223_662.pdf)

Recently, a number of bright-green or Promethean environmentalists have challenged this

pessimistic analysis (Galiana & Green, 2009; Lewis, 1992; Mandle, 2008; Shellenberger, Nordhaus, Navin, Norris, &
Van Noppen, 2008). Unlike cornucopian liberals of the past such as Julian Simon, these bright-
green authors acknowledge the existential risk that climate change poses. However,
instead of seeing the prevailing impasse as inevitable due to the physics of climate change
(for instance the dispersion of causes and effects as discussed above), they argue that the impasse is rather
caused by the way the problem has been politically structured and interpreted. Most
importantly, they have challenged the premise that achieving climate stability will
require immense sacrifices or lead to permanent welfare losses. Bright-green authors
believe that the primary reason that the current approach does not work is that it
perceives climate change mitigation as a burden and a cost that unwilling countries have
to accept in the name of the greater good. In its stead, bright-green authors argue that we need a proactive
investment-oriented approach to global sustainability, one that takes into account not only the risks of the future but also the
possibilities for radical innovation that the coming decades could offer. Bright-greens believe that the convergence of disruptive
technological change and social innovation offers a far more politically promising path to global sustainability than either the
fear-mongering of deep-greens or the complacent green consumerism of light-greens. In terms of practical politics this means
shifting the focus from targets and timetables to the far more interesting question of how emissions are to be reduced. Making
this shift means accepting the impossibility of putting the cart (large cuts in emissions) before the horse (the technological
means for making those cuts) (Galiana & Green, 2010, p. 331). It also means accepting that while global rebound effects make the
possible reductions from energy efficiency improvements uncertain (Alcott, 2005; Roy, 2000; Wei, 2010), the other possible
route, i.e. brute-force mitigation through welfare losses, is unlikely to ever win sufficient public support, not even if the world
were to experience abrupt climate change (Gardiner, 2009). That does not mean that bright-greens think that we should not do
what we can in order to reduce wasteful consumption, it only means that they recognize the political futility in believing that such
demand-side changes will suffice to secure long-term global sustainability.
 Aerosols = Warming - Asia
Aerosols exacerbate warming - Asia

Taylor 11
(Managing editor of Environment & Climate News, senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, bachelors
degree from Dartmouth College, law degree from Syracuse University College of Law) 2011 (John M., New
Aerosol Study Refutes Global Warming Theory, October 20, 2011, http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-
article/new-aerosol-study-refutes-global-warming-theory)

However, a team of researchers from NASA and the University of California at San Diego reported in the
August 2 issue of the British science journal Nature that they sent instruments into "brown clouds" of aerosols
over Asia to measure their effect on temperature. To their surprise, the researchers discovered the common
assumption that aerosols lower temperatures was wrong. Instead, aerosols were found to
substantially amplify the Earth's greenhouse effect. "We found that atmospheric brown clouds
enhanced lower atmospheric solar heating by about 50 percent ," explained the researchers. "[The
pollution] contributes as much as the recent increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases to regional
lower atmospheric warming trends," the researchers added. The amount of warming due to aerosols was so
significant, the researchers reported, that aerosols alone could explain--in and of themselves and completely
independent of greenhouse gases--the observed glacier retreat in the Eastern Himalayan Mountains.
 Aerosols = Warming - Masking
Aerosols cause warming masked effect

Taylor 11
(Managing editor of Environment & Climate News, senior
fellow at The Heartland Institute, bachelors degree from
Dartmouth College, law degree from Syracuse University
College of Law) 2011 (John M., New Aerosol Study
Refutes Global Warming Theory, October 20, 2011,
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/new-aerosol-
study-refutes-global-warming-theory)
The amount of warming due to aerosols was so significant, the researchers reported, that aerosols alone
could explain--in and of themselves and completely independent of greenhouse gases--the
observed glacier retreat in the Eastern Himalayan Mountains. Milloy noted the new discovery further calls into
question unreliable global warming models that have failed to explain why manmade carbon dioxide emissions steadily increased
from about 1940 to 1975 even as global temperatures cooled. Said Milloy, "Global warming alarmists, such as the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, attempt to counter this observation by claiming that aerosol
particles in the atmosphere--like soot and sulfates from fossil fuel combustion, and dust from volcanic eruptions--can
mask the warming effect of greenhouse gases and cool the planet by reflecting solar radiation
back into space. Earth has not warmed as predicted, they argue, because aerosol pollution is cooling the planet in a way that
temporarily mitigates greenhouse gas warming. "The new aerosol study doesn't show that climate alarmists
may be just a little off course--it shows that they may be 180 degrees off," Milloy added. "The aerosol
study opens up the possibility for an entirely new hypothesis for global warming, with aerosols as
the culprit. Yet up to now, the 'consensus' crowd has portrayed aerosols in the opposite light, as
cooling agents."
Warming Not Real
 Not Real - Consensus

Warming not real - 30,000 scientists signed a petition

saying warming is flat-out nonexistent - their data is
skewed

Bell 12
(Larry Bell, Prof at Univ of Houston, Sasakawa
International Center for Space Architecture, 7/17/2012,
"That Scientific Global Warming Consensus...Not!,"
Forbes,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-
scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/2/)
Since 1998, more than 31,000 American scientists from diverse climate-related disciplines , including
more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have signed a public petition announcing their belief that there is no
convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other
greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the
Earths atmosphere and disruption of the Earths climate. Included are atmospheric physicists,
botanists, geologists, oceanographers, and meteorologists. So where did that famous consensus
claim that 98% of all scientists believe in global warming come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009
American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question
online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82%
answered yes to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with. Then of those, only a
small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate
science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That 98% all scientists referred to a laughably
puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered yes. That anything-but-scientific survey asked two
questions. The first: When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen,
or remained relatively constant? Few would be expected to dispute thisthe planet began thawing out of the Little Ice Age in the
middle 19th century, predating the Industrial Revolution. (That was the coldest period since the last real Ice Age ended roughly 10,000
years ago.) The second question asked: Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in
changing mean global temperatures? So what constitutes significant? Does changing include
both cooling and warming and for both better and worse? And which contributionsdoes
this include land use changes, such as agriculture and deforestation?
 Natural - Water Vapors
Alt cause - water vapors

Goldblatt & Watson 12

(Colin Goldblatt, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at U
of Victoria AND Andrew Watson, School of Environmental
Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1/8/2012,
"The Runaway Greenhouse: implications for future climate
change, geoengineering and planetary atmospheres," The
Royal Society TEX Paper,
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.1593v1.pdf)
One major uncertainty is relative humidity. We have assumed a saturated troposphere as the end
member which makes a runaway greenhouse most likely, with the aim that uncertainty here would be how much
less likely the runaway greenhouse would be. If Earths tropics were saturated, they would be in a local runaway greenhouse, whereas
in reality columns of unsaturated air allow radiation to escape (Pierrehumbert, 1995). How relative humidity will change
with warming is very poorly understood, but will have a rst order e ffect on temperature change.
Explicit inclusion of a hydrological cycle in models has given rise to multiple equilibria (Renno, 1997), which adds an additional
threat. Likewise, we have not discussed clouds (the physics is hard enough without them). Presently,
the greenhouse effect of clouds is about half the albedo effect (e.g. Zhang et al., 2004). A typical
argument, following Kasting (1988), is that in an optically thick atmosphere, the cloud
greenhouse effect would diminish as noncloud optical depth would be so high and the albedo
effect would dominate further, making the runaway greenhouse less likely. This is not a watertight
argument: for example, with much more water vapour aloft high clouds might become thicker and more widespread, causing net
warming. We do not know what will happen. There are uncertainties in the radiative transfer too. The last full,
spectrally resolved, treatments of the problem (Abe & Matsui, 1988; Kasting, 1988) are over two decades old. Much
of the uncertainty relates to the so-called continuum absorption of water vapour (in window regions, both 8 to 12 m and 4 m, there
is more absorption than one would expect considering nearby water vapour lines). This is probably caused by far-wing line absorption
by water lines, which depends on selfcollisions of water molecules. Hence this depends on vapour pressure squared,
and is highly relevent to our problem. Understanding and empirical constraints on this continuum
have improved, but remain unsatisfactory.
 Natural - Laundry List
Climate change is completely natural and the world is
cooling historical cycle, satellite data, ocean oscillation,
and sunspots prove

Ferrara 12
(Peter Ferrara, Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy
for the Heartland Institute, General Counsel for the
American Civil Rights Union, and Senior Fellow at the
National Center for Policy Analysis, he served in the White
House Office of Policy Development under President
Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the
United States under President George H.W. Bush, he is a
graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School,
5/31/12, Sorry Global Warming Alarmists, The Earth Is
Cooling
www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2012/05/31/sorry-
global-warming-alarmists-the-earth-is-cooling/2/)
Check out the 20th century temperature record, and you will find that its up and down pattern
does not follow the industrial revolutions upward march of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), which
is the supposed central culprit for man caused global warming (and has been much, much higher
in the past). It follows instead the up and down pattern of naturally caused climate cycles. For
example, temperatures dropped steadily from the late 1940s to the late 1970s . The popular press was even
talking about a coming ice age. Ice ages have cyclically occurred roughly every 10,000 years, with a new
one actually due around now. In the late 1970s, the natural cycles turned warm and temperatures
rose until the late 1990s, a trend that political and economic interests have tried to milk
mercilessly to their advantage. The incorruptible satellite measured global atmospheric
temperatures show less warming during this period than the heavily manipulated land surface
temperatures. Central to these natural cycles is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Every 25 to
30 years the oceans undergo a natural cycle where the colder water below churns to replace the
warmer water at the surface, and that affects global temperatures by the fractions of a degree we
have seen. The PDO was cold from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, and it was warm from the
late 1970s to the late 1990s, similar to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). In 2000, the UNs
IPCC predicted that global temperatures would rise by 1 degree Celsius by 2010. Was that based on climate science, or political
science to scare the public into accepting costly anti-industrial regulations and taxes? Don Easterbrook, Professor
Emeritus of Geology at Western Washington University, knew the answer. He publicly predicted in
2000 that global temperatures would decline by 2010. He made that prediction because he knew
the PDO had turned cold in 1999, something the political scientists at the UNs IPCC did not know or did not think
significant. Well, the results are in, and the winner is.Don Easterbrook. Easterbrook also spoke at the Heartland conference, with a
presentation entitled Are Forecasts of a 20-Year Cooling Trend Credible? Watch that online and you will see how scientists are
supposed to talk: cool, rational, logical analysis of the data, and full explanation of it. All I ever see from the global warming
alarmists, by contrast, is political public relations, personal attacks, ad hominem arguments, and name calling, combined with
admissions that they cant defend their views in public debate. Easterbrook shows that by 2010 the 2000
prediction of the IPCC was wrong by well over a degree, and the gap was widening. Thats a big miss
for a forecast just 10 years away, when the same folks expect us to take seriously their predictions for 100 years in the future. Howard
Hayden, Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Connecticut showed in his presentation at the conference that based on the
historical record a doubling of CO2 could be expected to produce a 2 degree C temperature increase. Such a doubling would take
most of this century, and the temperature impact of increased concentrations of CO2 declines logarithmically. You can see Haydens
presentation online as well. Because PDO cycles last 25 to 30 years, Easterbrook expects the cooling
trend to continue for another 2 decades or so. Easterbrook, in fact, documents 40 such alternating
periods of warming and cooling over the past 500 years, with similar data going back 15,000
years. He further expects the flipping of the ADO to add to the current downward trend. But that is not all. We are also
currently experiencing a surprisingly long period with very low sunspot activity. That is
associated in the earths history with even lower, colder temperatures . The pattern was seen during a period
known as the Dalton Minimum from 1790 to 1830, which saw temperature readings decline by 2 degrees in a 20 year period, and the
noted Year Without A Summer in 1816 (which may have had other contributing short term causes). Even worse was the period known
as the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715, which saw only about 50 sunspots during one 30 year period within the cycle,
compared to a typical 40,000 to 50,000 sunspots during such periods in modern times. The Maunder Minimum coincided with the
coldest part of the Little Ice Age, which the earth suffered from about 1350 to 1850. The Maunder Minimum saw sharply reduced
agricultural output, and widespread human suffering, disease and premature death. Such impacts of the sun on the earths climate
were discussed at the conference by astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon, Nir J. Shaviv, of the Racah Institute of Physics in the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Sebastian Luning, co-author with leading German environmentalist Fritz Vahrenholt of The Cold
Sun. Easterbrook suggests that the outstanding question is only how cold this present cold cycle
will get. Will it be modest like the cooling from the late 1940s to late 1970s? Or will the paucity of sunspots drive us all the way
down to the Dalton Minimum, or even the Maunder Minimum? He says it is impossible to know now. But based on experience, he
will probably know before the UN and its politicized IPCC.

Warming is not anthropogenic or a big deal history,

satellites, and IPCCs falsified data prove

Arrak 11
(Arno Arrak, author of the book What Warming? and
was a nuclear chemist on NASA's Apollo program, 12/1/11,
Arctic Warming Is Not Greenhouse Warming Energy &
Environment, Vol. 22, No. 8, Ebsco)
Present Arctic warming started at the turn of the twentieth century. Its probable cause is a change in the
North Atlantic current system that directed warm water from the Gulf Stream into the Arctic Ocean. Prior
to that there had been only slow cooling for two thousand years according to Kaufman et al. A foraminiferal
core taken near Svalbard by Spielhagen et al. also shows the same long term cooling. Rapid warming of
Greenland glaciers, polar bears in trouble, permafrost melting, the Northwest Passage becoming navigable
etc. have been used as proofs that greenhouse warming is real. Since it is now clear that Arctic warming is
not greenhouse warming these observations cannot be used as proof of greenhouse warming. It is therefore
incumbent upon us to look at what other proofs remain of the existence of greenhouse warming. Most
axiomatic is the claim that we are now living through a greenhouse warming period that started with a
global temperature rise in the late seventies. After all, Hansen said so in his testimony to the Senate. But
satellites which have been measuring global temperature for the last 31 years cannot even see this so-called
late twentieth century warming. What global warming they do see is a short spurt that began with the super
El Nino of 1998, raised temperature by a third of a degree in four years, and then stopped. Its origin was
oceanic. And this satellite record is in accord with the observations of Ferenc Miskolczi on IR absorption
by the atmosphere. A third of a degree may not sound like much but it is half of what is allotted to the entire
twentieth century. It, and not the greenhouse effect, was responsible for the very warm first decade of our
century. But there are ground-based temperature curves that do show warming in the eighties and nineties.
These are simply cooked, as in falsified. It was done by systematically raising up the cool La Nina
temperatures and leaving the warm El Nino peaks in place. This fake warming was then used to justify the
establishment of the IPCC in 1988. According to satellites there has been no warming in the twentyfirst
century either but thanks to the IPCC we still get major governmental efforts to mitigate a non-existent
warming. The global warming extremists today are not just in charge of government policy but have also
infiltrated and taken over control of our scientific organizations. Those who should be our scientific
leaders, such as the Royal Society and the National Academies of Science, have all knuckled under to
extremist propaganda and now support the global warming movement. As a scientist I repudiate such a
mass dereliction of their mission to advance science. Last time the scientific elite espoused such wrong
ideas was in the eighteenth century when phlogiston was king. They renamed it caloric to make it more
palatable but it still would not fly and both imaginary concepts ended up in the dust bin of history. That is
where the global warming doctrine belongs.
 Natural - Solar Variation
Warming is overwhelmingly due to natural causes
natural fluctuations, solar activity, and IPCC flaws prove
Marsh 12
(Gerald E. Marsh is a retired physicist from the Argonne
National Laboratory and a former consultant to the
Department of Defense on strategic nuclear technology
and policy in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton
Administrations, 2/1/12, Climate Change: Sources of
Warming In the Late 20th Century Energy and
Environment, Ebsco)
* PDO is Pacific Decadal Oscillation and NAO is North Atlantic Oscillation
The Visbeck, et at. argument that anthropogenic climate change might influence modes of natural variability, perhaps making it
more likely that one phase of the NAO is preferred over the other cannot be decided by correlation over the limited period
available. Most of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide was put into the atmosphere after ~1940. The period from ~1940 to
1976-1977 was dominated by a large negative NAOsee Fig. 1followed by a large positive
NAO. Since similar positive NAOs have occurred in the past, it cannot be said that the latest is
due to human activity simply because it correlates with rising carbon dioxide concentrations. It
is interesting that the large negative NAO that began in the earlier portion of the 20th century and extended to about 1975 roughly
corresponds to a negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) shown in Fig. 2. And the recent large positive NAO also
corresponds to the positive shift of the PDO of 1976-1977. However, the correlation does not appear to be robust when compared
to PDOs extending back to 1600, as seen in Figure 3. In terms of the temperature shift in the arctic, however, the impact of the
positive phase of the PDOoften called The Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1976-1977has been dramatic. Composite
temperatures from Fairbank, Anchorage, Nome and Barrow (see Fig. 4) show a rise of ~1.4 oC followed by a decrease of ~0.24
oC/decade. [11] It is worth reiterating the observation of Visbeck, et al. that because global average temperatures are dominated
by temperature variability over the northern land masses, a significant fraction of the recent warming trend in global surface
temperatures can be explained as a response to observed changes in atmospheric circulation. In addition to a positive NAO phase
beginning in ~1980, and the positive PDO beginning in 1976-1977, there are also the effects of aerosols and the extraordinary
solar activity in the last half of the 20th century to be considered. 3.1. Aerosols The Arctic is purported to be the region of the
earth most sensitive to radiative forcing by rising carbon dioxide concentrations. The temperature rise there is often cited, usually
without consideration being given to the PDO shift in 1976-1977, as proof of the climate impact of rising anthropogenic
concentrations of greenhouse gases. But other factors, even if one excludes the PDO shift, may be responsible for most if not all
of the temperature rise. Shindell and Faluvegi [12] have looked at the impact of aerosols on Arctic climate and concluded
that decreasing concentrations of sulphate aerosols and increasing concentrations of black carbon have substantially contributed
to rapid Arctic warming during the past three decades. They estimate that some 45% of the warming during this
period was due to this change in both types of aerosol concentrations . What this means is that rising
concentrations of carbon dioxide are not responsible for almost half of arctic warming. Temperature rise comparisons for different
regions of the globe are shown in Figure 5. From Fig. 5, the temperature rise in the Arctic over the past three decades (~1978-
2002) is ~1.1 oC. If 45% of this increase is due to changes in the concentrations of aerosols and black carbon, that leaves
~0.5 oC for other causes. This is obviously not compatible with the ~1.4 oC Arctic temperature
rise due to the shift in the PDO in 1976-1977 shown in Fig. 4. The discrepancy may possibly be due to the use of
different databases or other factors having to do with the model-based study of Shindell and Faluvegi. In any case, if the limited
data in Fig. 4 is indicative of the rest of the Arctic, almost all of the Arctic warming since 1976-1977 is
apparently due to causes unrelated to the rising concentrations of carbon dioxide . It would be a
sophistry to claim that since the aerosols and black carbon came from burning fossil fuels there is a relationship between the
carbon dioxide and the production of aerosols and black carbonof course there is, but it is not a causal connection. 3.2. Solar
Activity As can be seen from Fig. 6 below, [13] the high level of solar activity during the last sixty years
transcends anything seen during the last 1150 years ! Notice in Fig. 6 that the variation in 14C has an inverted
scale. High solar activity, however, does not mean there are large changes in solar irradiance. The most likely
mechanism for coupling solar activity to climate is the modulation of the cosmic ray flux by
solar activity and the observed, correlated, variations in the earths albedo . This coupled with the fact
that cosmic-ray intensity, as reconstructed from 10Be concentrations in ice cores show a ~5-6% decrease over
the twentieth century, corresponding to a 1% decrease in cloud cover. A simple phenomenological
approach allows one to obtain an estimate of solar variations on climate since 1900. [14] This yields a range of 36-
50% for the percentage of temperature rise since 1900 due to the increase in solar activity. For
additional discussion see reference 14. How this estimate fits with Hurrells claim that nearly all of the cooling in the northwest
Atlantic and the warming across Europe and downstream over Eurasia since the mid-1970s results from changes in the NAO
depends on whether there is a relationship between solar activity and the NAO, and this is unknown. One thing that should be
clear at this point, however, is that the recent rise in global temperature is probably not due to rising
carbon dioxide concentrations as is generally assumed . Given the uncertainties outlined above,
even this basic assumption behind the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
is probably incorrect. And while rising carbon dioxide concentrations are likely to be responsible for a small portion of the
warming since the mid-1970s, the IPCC has been using far too high an estimate for climate sensitivity to a doubling of carbon
dioxide in its projections. It is also important to understand the uncertainties associated with such
projections. Future climate projections by the IPCC are based on coupled ocean-atmosphere climate models. These models
are validated by using past data to predict present surface temperatures. There is, however, as
put by Valdes, large intermodel variability in the prediction of present-day surface temperature for
atmospheric GCMs [Global Climate Modelsoften using a simplified ocean treatment rather than being coupled to
an ocean circulation model]. At high latitudes the differences can exceed 10oC . Simulations with coupled
ocean-atmosphere models will almost certainly have an even wider spread of results. . . . Thus it could be said that the
models and data agree to within the error bars . However, this interpretation of modeling results is
controversial since a similar argument applied to future climate predictions would suggest that the predicted change in future
climates in mid- and high latitudes does not exceed the modeling errors! [15] That is, the modeling errors could well
exceed the temperature changes predicted by the models . In that case, how can one argue that
model projections are a sound basis for formulating public policy? SUMMARY The conclusion of
this essay can be stated in a single sentence: Much, if not all, of the warming during the late
20th century was most likely due to natural rather than anthropogenic causes .
 Natural - Sunspots
Sun spots are the primary cause of climate change those
who believe in human induced warming are simply
ignoring the facts

Bell 11
(Larry Bell is an endowed professor at the University of
Houston where he founded and direct the Sasakawa
International Center for Space Architecture and head the
graduate program in space architecture, his background
deals extensively with research, planning and design of
habitats, structures and other support systems for
applications in space and extreme environments on Earth,
he is the author of the book "Climate of Corruption:
Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax"
9/20/11, Sorry, But With Global Warming It's The Sun,
Stupid www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/09/20/sorry-
but-with-global-warming-its-the-sun-stupid/)

Man-made global warming crisis crusaders are now facing a new threat . Their anti-fossil
carbon-based premise for alarmism is being challenged by new scientific evidence of
important solar influences upon climate that cant readily be blamed on us. Not that there
wasnt lots of good evidence of this before. Actually, there has been, and it has been routinely
denigrated and ignored. Only this time, the high-profile international source will be impossible for the entrenched
scientific establishment to casually dismiss. No, not after experiments at the worlds leading physics
laboratory, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland recently revealed an
inverse correlation between periodic changes in sunspot activity levels, and quantities of
cosmic rays entering Earths atmosphere that trigger surface-cooling cloud formations .
Sunspots are areas of localized magnetic activity on the suns surface that are coupled with
high energy streams of charged particles called solar winds . The overall number of sunspots
typically varies in frequency over 11 year cycles. During the most active periods the solar
winds shield more outer space cosmic rays from penetrating the Earths magnetic field and
entering the atmosphere to nucleate low-level clouds. But when sun spot activity is low, a
condition that can sometimes persist over decades and longer, the increased cosmic ray
bombardment produces more cloud cover, hence cooling influences . The sunspot-climate part of the
connection isnt a new idea. Astronomer Royal, William Herschel, noticed a correlation between sunspots and the price of wheat
in England two centuries ago. Some scientists have also observed that sunspots all but disappeared for 70 years during the frigid
Little Ice Age around the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet the notion didnt begin to receive any real attention, albeit mostly
negative, until 1995. That was when Danish physicist, Henrik Svensmark, decided to explore the matter after coming across a
1991 paper by fellow Danes Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen that charted solar variations and global surface temperatures
since 1860. Svensmark then teamed up with Friis-Christensen to review solar activity, cloud cover and cosmic ray levels recorded
using satellite data available since 1979. The connections seemed clear. Responses to their findings by prominent members of the
climate science community were unwelcoming. When presented at a 1996 conference in Birmingham, England, Svensmark
recalls that everything went completely crazyIt turned out that it was very, very sensitive to say these things already at that
time. Upon returning to Copenhagen he was greeted by a statement quoting Bert Bolin who was then chairman of the U.N.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely nave and
irresponsible. Failing to raise any significant research support, Svensmark managed to conduct a boot-strap-
funded experiment in 2007 at the Danish National Space Center that yielded convincing
validation. Using a particle accelerator, he demonstrated that cosmic rays colliding with
molecules in the atmosphere can, in fact, cause gaseous water vapor to condense into cloud-
forming droplets. Again, he received little scientific applause for this accomplishment . But
fortunately, at least one person took the Danes early observations seriously. Following their presentation at the Birmingham
conference, CERN scientist Jasper Kirkby*, a British experimental physicist, told the scientific press in 1998 that the
theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between half and the whole of the increase in the Earths temperature that
we have seen in the last century. Furthermore, he too, set out to obtain more proof. But his plan to do so wasnt an easy sell. It
took Kirkby nearly 10 years to convince the CERN bureaucracy to create a stainless steel cloud
chamber to precisely replicate the Earths atmosphere and conduct independent experiments . It
worked! As reported in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature, Jasper Kirkby and his 62 co-authors from 17
institutes in Europe and the U.S. announced that the sun indeed has a significant influence on
our planets temperature. Their Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets (CLOUD) experiment
proved that its magnetic field does, in fact, act as a gateway for cosmic rays that play a large
role in cloud formation. The report stated Ion-induced nucleation [cosmic ray action] will
manifest itself as a steady production of new particles [molecular clusters] that is difficult to
isolate in atmospheric observations because of other sources of variability but is nevertheless
taking place and could be quite large globally over the troposphere [the lower atmosphere].
In other words, the big influence exists, yet hasnt been factored into climate models .
 Natural - Satellites
NASA has already collected satellite data that proves
their feedback theory is wrong and warming is not a
problem - heat can escape the atmosphere

Taylor 11
(James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at
The Heartland Institute and managing editor of
Environment & Climate News, 5/27/11, New NASA Data
Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism
http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-
global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html)

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing
far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a
new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less
future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted , and supports
prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed. Study co-author
Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and
U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's
Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple
assumptions fed into alarmist computer models. "The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost
to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release.
"There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the
oceans." In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite
data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted. The new findings
are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate. Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate
are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not
much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly
trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human
carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very
effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric
humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted. The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with
long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by
alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave
radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the
NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide
emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have
predicted.
 Natural - Volcanoes
Alt causes - volcanoes and solar variations - their models
don't account for them
Cooper 11
(Barry Cooper, political science professor at the
University of Calgary, 2011, "Scientists grow cool to
global warming theory," Calgary Herald)
Today, academic conferences have become venues for real scientific debate. Recently, the University of
Ottawa hosted an international meeting of "climate realists," as Bob Carty, a geology professor from Australia, called his colleagues.
Only one speaker came close to endorsing the catastrophic claims of the IPCC. The rest of the panic-mongers stayed home .
For them, the science is truly settled. They have nothing more to learn. And yet, science moves on. For example, earlier this year, a
Swedish geophysicist, Nils-Axel Moerner, published a paper in the journal Energy and Environment flatly
contradicting the IPCC predictions of an ice-free Arctic, a prospect that has significant policy
implications for Canada. His argument was straightforward. Variation in solar activity -radiance
and sun spots -affect the Earth's temperature and rotation, which in turn affect the Gulf Stream
and the movement of ice and cold Arctic water, allowing it to penetrate as far south as Portug al.
Soon, kids will skate again on the Thames and England will become a hockey powerhouse. Another geophysicist,
Ivanka Charvatova, has shown how gravitational forces in the solar system affect the wobble of the
sun, called solar inertial motion, which affects weather patterns on Earth. The IPCC has never considered
solar inertial motion or any other solarterrestrial link. Not geomagnetic changes, cosmic rays,
solar gravitational change. Nothing. They haven't even looked at volcanic eruptions. Volcanoes matter.
Somebody calculated that in four days, the Grimsvotn eruption in Iceland a month ago wiped out five years of effort
to control CO2 emissions. No one has required Iceland to purchase carbon offsets. Yet. Somebody else calculated the year-
long eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines 20 years ago spewed more carbon dioxide than the entire
human race for the whole of human history. Up the road in Edmonton, Fangliang Hu co-authored a paper published in the important
science journal Nature that explained the models attempting to show disappearing Arctic fauna, from polar bugs to polar bears, were
deeply flawed. Reaction by a selfdescribed "conservation biologist" (as distinct from an ordinary scientific
biologist) was that the authors had taken a cheap shot at his research. Stephen Hubbel, the other co-author, said it was evidence that
science is self-correcting. And speaking of models, last month, John Mitchell, a research fellow at the Meteorological Office in
London, was asked about the absence of warming since 1995. He replied: "People underestimate the power of models.
Observational evidence is not very useful. Our approach is not entirely empirical."
 Natural - Prefer our Ev
The effects of human emissions are negligible the threat
of imminent warming is all hype so scientists and
politicians dont have to admit they were wrong

Evans 11
(David Evans, Award winning researcher and editor for
Environment & Climate News, 4/8/11, Climate Models Go
Cold; Carbon Warming Too Minor To Be Worth Worrying
About LexisNexis)

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin
half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was
once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying.
This issue is tearing society apart, making fools out of our politicians. Let's set a few things
straight. The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is
based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy
train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the
possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit
they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain
the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant. Let's be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is
a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the
planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether
carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much. Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on
how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet's temperature, if just
the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the
basic physics have been well known for a century. The disagreement comes about what happens next. The planet
reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from
the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more
clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the
height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas. This is
the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits
of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three -so two-thirds of
their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide. That's the core of
the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the
atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism. Weather balloons had been
measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as
the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as
the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late
1970s, '80s and '90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one.
This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly
overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide. This evidence first became clear around the mid-
1990s. At this point, official "climate science" stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter
how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science
ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide
theory -that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their
government masters. There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to
extra carbon dioxide by dampening the warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbance.
Otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it. But the alarmists say the exact
opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. It is no surprise that
their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the U.S. Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved
much higher than reality. They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per
decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade -yet they have the gall to tell us "it's worse than expected." These people are not scientists.
They overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they conceal the truth. One
way they conceal is in the way they measure temperature. The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air
conditioning outlets, over hot tarmac at airports where they get blasts of hot air from jet engines, at waste-water plants where they get
warmth from decomposing sewage, or in hot cities choked with cars and buildings. Global warming is measured in 10ths of a degree,
so any extra heating nudge is important. In the United States, nearly 90% of official thermometers surveyed by volunteers violate
official siting requirements that they not be too close to an artificial heating source. Global temperature is also measured by satellites,
which measure nearly the whole planet 24/7 without bias. The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the
global temperature has levelled off. Why does official science track only the surface thermometer results and not mention the satellite
results? The Earth has been in a warming trend since the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1680.
Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850 and have nearly all come after
the Second World War, so human carbon dioxide cannot possibly have caused the trend. Within the
trend, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes alternating global warming and cooling for 25 to 30 years at a go in each direction. We
have just finished a warming phase, so expect mild global cooling for the next two decades. We are now at an extraordinary juncture.
Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist
air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose
taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world
government -how exciting for the political class! Even if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow,
completely shut up shop and went back to the Stone Age, according to the official government
climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate
10-fold -in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler!
Finally, to those who still believe the planet is in danger from our carbon dioxide emissions:
Sorry, but you've been had. Yes, carbon dioxide is a cause of global warming, but it's so minor it's
not worth doing much about.
 Models Flawed
Climate models empirically unreliable

Idso et al 12
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2012 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) Global Warming Fosters High-Latitude
Cooling???
http://co2science.org/articles/V15/N27/EDIT.php

In a study recently published in Environmental Research Letters, Cohen et al. (2012) note that
over the last four decades Arctic temperatures have warmed at nearly double the global rate, citing
Solomon et al. (2007) and Screen and Simmonds (2010); and they state that "coupled climate models attribute much of this warming
to rapid increases in greenhouse gases and project the strongest warming across the extratropical Northern Hemisphere during boreal
winter due to 'winter (or Arctic) amplification'," citing Holland and Bitz (2003), Hansen and Nazarenko (2004), Alexeev et al. (2005)
and Langen and Alexeev (2007). However, they say that "recent trends in observed Northern Hemisphere
winter surface temperatures diverge from these projections," noting that "while the planet has
steadily warmed, Northern Hemisphere winters have recently grown more extreme across the
major industrialized centers," and reporting that "record cold snaps and heavy snowfall events across the United States,
Europe and East Asia garnered much public attention during the winters of 2009/10 and 2010/11 (Blunden et al., 2011; Cohen et al.,
2010)," with the latter set of researchers suggesting that "the occurrence of more severe Northern Hemisphere winter weather is a two-
decade-long trend starting around 1988." So what's going on here? Cohen et al. say that "whether the recent colder
winters are a consequence of internal variability or a response to changes in boundary forcings
resulting from climate change remains an open question." But like most scientists who love to resolve dilemmas,
they go on to propose their answer to the puzzle, suggesting that "summer and autumn warming trends are concurrent with increases
in high-latitude moisture and an increase in Eurasian snow cover, which dynamically induces large-scale wintertime cooling." But,
again, who knows? The only thing that is certain, as Cohen et al. describe it, is that "traditional
radiative greenhouse gas theory and coupled climate models forced by increasing greenhouse
gases alone cannot account for this seasonal asymmetry." And so we have yet another reason why so many
scientists are so skeptical about the ability of even the most sophisticated of today's climate models to adequately portray reality.
 Models Flawed - Glaciers
Current glacial models are totally unreliable

Idso et al 11
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2011 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) Weaknesses in Our Knowledge of Land-Ice/Sea-
Level Interactions
http://co2science.org/articles/V14/N43/EDIT.php
In a review paper published in Oceanography, Pfeffer (2011) provides a 30-year perspective on what scientists have learned about
the relationship between land ice and sea level, while at the same time openly acknowledging the weaknesses associated with
current views of the subject. The professor -- who holds positions in both the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and the
Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering of the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA) -- begins by
acknowledging that for all the success of air- and space-borne observations of glaciers and ice
sheets, "certain long-standing objectives have consistently eluded researchers ," such as obtaining
trustworthy observations of basal sliding and calving, as well as an improved understanding of subglacial processes, while further
writing that "at present, the foundations of our theoretical knowledge of subglacial sliding and
iceberg calving are not very different than what was available at the time of the First IPCC
Assessment (Houghton et al., 1990)." "As was the case nearly three decades ago," as Pfeffer continues, "basal sliding and
calving remain obscure but exert critical controls on glacier and ice sheet dynamics," and he notes that as a result , "the lack
of detailed observations of basal topography, temperature, and other boundary conditions in
critical regions further complicates modeling efforts." In fact, he writes that the situation is so
bleak that researchers "have still not closed the gaps in our knowledge to a degree that 'sliding
laws' can be reliably and broadly implemented in numerical models," even adding that "no
clear solution to this problem is in sight." Pfeffer additionally reports that there has been "no
comprehensive, global upscaled compilation of glacier and ice cap loss rates after 2005,"
stating that "without any proper accounting of the aggregate glacier and ice cap loss rate, the
net loss from land ice cannot be reliably calculated." And without such observations, he adds that "no reliable
assessment of contemporary rates of sea level rise can be made," commenting that "without this knowledge, projections of sea
level rise are blind to future contributions from glaciers and ice caps." In concluding his "weakness"
commentary, Pfeffer states that our ability to project what glacier and ice discharge will
actually be in years and decades to come "is grossly compromised, both by lack of basic
inventory knowledge (where are the glaciers and how big are they?) and up-to-date
observations of their rate of change." Thus, there is still much important work to be done in the area of land-ice/sea-
level interactions before we can have much confidence in what the world's climate alarmists are currently predicting about future
sea level rise.
 Models Flawed - Rainfall
Climate models fail - cannot accurately predict something
as basic as rainfall

Idso et al 11
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2011 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) State-of-the-Art Climate Models and Extreme
Meteorological Events and Consequences
http://co2science.org/articles/V14/N30/EDIT.php
In a recent paper published in Climate Research, Trenberth (2011) compares the projections of state-of-the-art climate models with
what is known about the real world with respect to extreme meteorological events related to atmospheric moisture, such as
precipitation and various types of storm systems, as well as subsequent extreme consequences such as droughts, floods and wind
damage. So what does he find? In the concluding sentence of his paper's abstract, the U.S. researcher -- a Distinguished Senior
Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research -- states that model-simulated precipitation
"occurs prematurely and too often, and with insufficient intensity, resulting in recycling that is too large and a lifetime of moisture in
the atmosphere that is too short, which affects runoff and soil moisture," while in the text of the paper he writes that "all models
contain large errors in precipitation simulations, both in terms of mean fields and their annual
cycle (such as the spurious migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone into the other hemisphere), as well as their
characteristics: the intensity, frequency, and duration of precipitation, plus the amount (e.g. IPCC,
2007; Bosilovich et al., 2008; Liepert and Previdi, 2009)." And he states that "it appears that many, perhaps all, global
climate and numerical weather prediction models and even many high-resolution regional models
have a premature onset of convection and overly frequent precipitation with insufficient
intensity," citing the work of Yang and Slingo (2001) and Dai and Trenberth (2004). Continuing, Trenberth states that
"confidence in model results for changes in extremes is tempered by the large scatter among the
extremes in modeling today's climate, especially in the tropics and subtropics (Kharin et al., 2007), which
relates to poor depiction of transient tropical disturbances, including easterly waves, Madden-Julian Oscillations, tropical storms, and
hurricanes (Lin et al., 2006)." These phenomena, in his words, "are very resolution dependent, but also depend on parameterizations of
sub-grid-scale convection, the shortcomings of which are revealed in diurnal cycle simulations," wherein "models produce
precipitation that is too frequent and with insufficient intensity (Yang and Slingo, 2001; Trenberth et al., 2003; Dai and Trenberth,
2004; Dai, 2006)." In light of these several observations, Trenberth concludes that "major challenges remain to improve
model simulations of the hydrological cycle." And until such is accomplished and it is proven that
the models can at least correctly simulate something as basic as precipitation, it would seem
unwise in the extreme to make major global-economy-impacting political decisions on so flimsy
a basis as what today's climate models are currently predicting, not only with respect to the
meteorological phenomena that are discussed by Trenberth, but with respect to the many other
extreme weather and climatic events that the world's climate alarmists use to terrorize the public
on a never-ending basis via their over-the-top rhetoric about impending catastrophic
consequences if anthropogenic CO2 emissions are not drastically reduced.
 AT: Weather Impacts
All climate impacts are untrue

Solomon 11
(Lawrence Solomon, executive director of Energy Probe
and Urban Renaissance Institute, 9/17/2011, "Warmed
right over; The global-warming theory is nearing its end
as evidence against it mounts," The National Post)
Some Canadians blame humans for global warming because they've been told that Antarctica is melting in unprecedented ways, the
"proof" being spectacular film footage of huge chunks of ice breaking off into the Antarctic Ocean. They don't yet know that
Antarctic ice has always broken off, that satellites show Antarctica to be gaining ice overall, and
that Antarctica has been getting colder, not warmer, over the last half centur y. Other Canadians think the
Arctic ice is in danger of disappearing, unaware that several times over the last century the Arctic Ocean was actually navigable -
today's Arctic is no different from before. What about all the hurricanes predicted to ravage our
shores because of global warming? They never happened, and for good reason: As the IPCC's own hurricane expert said
in resigning from that organization, there is no evidence that global warming will cause an increase in
hurricanes. The submerged islands in the Pacific? That, too, never happened. Yes, the oceans have
been rising, as they have been for centuries, but not because of recent carbon dioxide emissions.
In fact, the recent evidence shows the oceans' rate of rise has been slowing.
 CO2 Doesn't Increase warming
CO2 doesnt cause warming - variability

Solomon 11
(Lawrence Solomon, executive director of Energy Probe
and Urban Renaissance Institute, 9/17/2011, "Warmed
right over; The global-warming theory is nearing its end
as evidence against it mounts," The National Post)

The correlation between carbon dioxide and global warming? In the last century, there has been none.
While carbon-dioxide emissions have steadily increased, the temperature has gone up and down
like a yo-yo. The down period in the 1970s was so severe that many scientists at the time thought
we were heading for a period of global cooling, as many do again, now that the planet has again
stopped warming.

CO2 cannot affect radiation

Goldblatt & Watson 12

(Colin Goldblatt, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at U
of Victoria AND Andrew Watson, School of Environmental
Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1/8/2012,
"The Runaway Greenhouse: implications for future climate
change, geoengineering and planetary atmospheres," The
Royal Society TEX Paper,
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.1593v1.pdf)

the carbon dioxide inventory of the atmosphere a ffects the change in

Figure 5 illustrates how increasing
outgoing longwave radiation with temperature, using a grey atmosphere model. Presently, Earths absorbed
solar ux is smaller than all of the radiation limits described above and the surface temperature
adjusts so that outgoing longwave radiation matches the absorbed solar ux. More carbon dioxide
means that the surface must be warmer to provide the same outgoing uxthis is the familiar
greenhouse effect. The runaway greenhouse only occurs when the outgoing longwave ux
reaches a radiation limit. The fundamental point is that adding carbon dioxide does not increase the outgoing
longwave ux, socannot cause a runaway greenhouse. Whilst this result comes from simple
models, a qualitatively similar result can be obtained from spectrally resolved radiative transfer
codes (see gure 9 of Kasting, 1988): even 100 bar of CO2 does not give a radiation limit (Kasting & Ackerman, 1986; Kasting,
1988).

Their studies have zero causal warrant

Bell 12
(Larry Bell, Prof at Univ of Houston, Sasakawa
International Center for Space Architecture, 7/17/2012,
"That Scientific Global Warming Consensus...Not!,"
Forbes,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-
scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/2/)
Consider the National Academy of Sciences for example. In 2007, Congress
appropriated $5,856,000 for NAS to
complete a climate change study. The organization subsequently sold its conclusions in three separate report sections at
$44 per download. The first volume, upon which the other two sections were based titled Advancing the Science of Climate Change,
presents a case that human activities are warming the planet, and that this poses significant risks. The second urges that a cap-and-
trade taxing system be implemented to reduce so-called greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The third explores strategies for adapting to
the reality of climate change, meaning purported extreme weather events like heavy precipitation and heat waves . What
scientific understanding breakthrough did that big taxpayer-financed budget buy ? Namely that the
Earths temperature has risen over the past 100 years, and that human activities have resulted in a
steady atmospheric CO2 increase. This is hardly new information , and few scientists are likely to challenge
either of these assertions, which essentially prove no link between the two observations. All professional
scientists recognize that correlation does not establish causation.
 Past Temperatures Outweigh
Their impacts are all empirically denied ---- past
temperatures were substantially warmer than the present

Idsos 7
(Sherwood, Research Physicist @ US Water Conservation
laboratory, and Craig, President of Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global change and PhD in Geography,
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change: Separating Scientific
Fact from Personal Opinion, 6-6,
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/hansen/Hans
enTestimonyCritique.pdf)

In an attempt to depict earth's current temperature as being extremely high and, therefore, extremely
dangerous, Hansen focuses almost exclusively on a single point of the earth's surface in the Western Equatorial Pacific, for
which he and others (Hansen et al., 2006) compared modern sea surface temperatures (SSTs) with paleo-SSTs that were derived
by Medina-Elizade and Lea (2005) from the Mg/Ca ratios of shells of the surface-dwelling planktonic foraminifer
Globigerinoides rubber that they obtained from an ocean sediment core. In doing so, they concluded that this critical ocean
region, and probably theplanet as a whole [our italics], is approximately as warm now as at the Holocene
maximum and within ~1C of the maximum temperature of the past million years [our italics]. Is there any
compelling reason to believe these claims of Hansen et al. about the entire planet? In a word, no, because
there are a multitude of other single-point measurements that suggest something vastly
different. Even in their own paper, Hansen et al. present data from the Indian Ocean that indicate, as best we can determine
from their graph, that SSTs there were about 0.75C warmer than they are currently some 125,000 years ago during the prior
interglacial. Likewise, based on data obtained from the Vostok ice core in Antarctica, another of their graphs suggests that
temperatures at that location some 125,000 years ago were about 1.8C warmer than they are now; while data from two sites in
the Eastern Equatorial Pacific indicate it was approximately 2.3 to 4.0C warmer compared to the present at about that time. In
fact, Petit et al.s (1999) study of the Vostok ice core demonstrates that large periods of all four of the interglacials that preceded
the Holocene were more than 2C warmer than the peak warmth of the current interglacial. But we dont have to go
nearly so far back in time to demonstrate the non-uniqueness of current temperatures. Of the
five SST records that Hansen et al. display, three of them indicate the mid-Holocene was also
warmer than it is today. Indeed, it has been known for many years that the central portion of the current interglacial was
much warmer than its latter stages have been. To cite just a few examples of pertinent work conducted in the 1970s and 80s
based on temperature reconstructions derived from studies of latitudinal displacements of terrestrial vegetation (Bernabo and
Webb, 1977; Wijmstra, 1978; Davis et al., 1980; Ritchie et al., 1983; Overpeck, 1985) and vertical displacements of alpine plants
(Kearney and Luckman, 1983) and mountain glaciers (Hope et al., 1976; Porter and Orombelli, 1985) we note it was concluded
by Webb et al. (1987) and the many COHMAP Members (1988) that mean annual temperatures in the Midwestern United States
were about 2C greater than those of the past few decades (Bartlein et al., 1984; Webb, 1985), that summer temperatures in
Europe were 2C warmer (Huntley and Prentice, 1988) as they also were in New Guinea (Hope et al., 1976) and that
temperatures in the Alps were as much as 4C warmer (Porter and Orombelli, 1985; Huntley and Prentice, 1988). Likewise,
temperatures in the Russian Far East are reported to have been from 2C (Velitchko and Klimanov, 1990) to as much as 4-6C
(Korotky et al., 1988) higher than they were in the 1970s and 80s; while the mean annual temperature of the Kuroshio Current
between 22 and 35N was 6C warmer (Taira, 1975). Also, the southern boundary of the Pacific boreal region was positioned
some 700 to 800 km north of its present location (Lutaenko, 1993). But we neednt go back to even the mid-Holocene to
encounter warmer-than-present temperatures, as the Medieval Warm Period, centered on about AD 1100, had lots of
them. In fact, every single week since 1 Feb 2006, we have featured on our website (www.co2science.org) a different peer-
reviewed scientific journal article that testifies to the existence of this several-centuries-long period of
notable warmth, in a feature we call our Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week. Also, whenever it has been possible to
make either a quantitative or qualitative comparison between the peak temperature of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the
peak temperature of the Current Warm Period (CWP), we have included those results in the appropriate quantitative or qualitative
frequency distributions we have posted within this feature; and a quick perusal of these ever-growing databases
(reproduced below as of 23 May 2007) indicates that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the peak
warmth of the Medieval Warm Period was significantly greater than the peak warmth of the Current
Warm Period.
 Temperatures Limited
Worst case scenario warming will only be 1.5 degrees
deFreitas 2
(C. R., Associate Prof. in Geography and Enivonmental
Science @ U. Aukland, Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum
Geology, Are observed changes in the concentration of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere really dangerous?
50:2, GeoScienceWorld)
In any analysis of CO2 it is important to differentiate between three quantities: 1) CO2 emissions, 2) atmospheric CO2 concentrations,
and 3) greenhouse gas radiative forcing due to atmospheric CO2. As for the first, between 1980 and 2000 global CO2 emissions
increased from 5.5 Gt C to about 6.5 Gt C, which amounts to an average annual increase of just over 1%. As regards the second,
between 1980 and 2000 atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased by about 0.4 per cent per year. Concerning the third, between 1980
and 2000 greenhouse gas forcing increase due to CO2 has been about 0.25 W m2 per decade (Hansen, 2000). Because of the
logarithmic relationship between CO2 concentration and greenhouse gas forcing, even an
exponential increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration translates into linear forcing and
temperature increase; or, as CO2 gets higher, a constant annual increase of say 1.5 ppm has less and less effect on radiative
forcing, as shown in Figure 3 . Leaving aside for the moment the satellite temperature data and using the surface data set,
between 1980 and 2000 there has been this linear increase of both CO2 greenhouse gas forcing and temperature. If
one
extrapolates the rate of observed atmospheric CO2 increase into the future, the observed
atmospheric CO2 increase would only lead to a concentration of about 560 ppm in 2100, about
double the concentration of the late 1800s. That assumes a continuing increase in the CO2 emission rate of
about 1% per year, and a carbon cycle leading to atmospheric concentrations observed in the past. If one assumes, in addition,
that the increase of surface temperatures in the last 20 years (about 0.3 C) is entirely due to the increase in greenhouse gas forcing of
all greenhouse gas, not just CO2, that would translate into a temperature increase of about 1.5 C (or
approximately 0.15 C per decade). Using the satellite data, the temperature increase is correspondingly lower. Based on this, the
temperature increase over the next 100 years might be less than 1.5 C, as proposed in Figure 19.
 No "Global" Temperatures
Warming is incoherent - "global" temperatures don't exist

Essex et. al 7
(Chris, Prof. Applied Math @ U. Western Ontario, Ross
McKitrick, Assistant Prof. Econ @ U. Guelph, and Bjarne
Andersen, Prof. Physics @ Niels Bohr Institute @ U.
Copenhagen, Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics,
Does a Global Temperature Exist? 32,
http://www.reference-
global.com/doi/pdf/10.1515/JNETDY.2007.001)
Ranking a particular type of field average computed over a sequence of times amounts to determining a trend in that average. Here we
show that the sign and size of such a trend computed statistically is dependent on the choice of
averaging rules, which will suffice to demonstrate both that the global temperature trend is not
a unique physical variable, and that ranking this or that year as the warmest of the millennium
is not possible, since other averages will give other results with no grounds for choosing among them. To illustrate with actual
temperature data, we computed averages of temperatures over twelve sites (see Table 1) and computed a linear
trend in each case. The trends through the 19792000 period were computed with r-means and s-means. The raw data are themselves
averaged (simple monthly means: r 1) smoothing out some variability, but this could not be avoided, and does not aect the main
results below. Stations were selected to give reasonable geographic variation, but whether it is a global
sample or not is secondary for the purpose of the example. Stations had to be in continuous use during the 19792000 interval.
Missing months were interpolated linearly as long as there was no more than one missing month in sequence, and it was not at the
start or finish of the sample. For each value of r, s (cf. Eq. (23)), the monthly r; s-means across the stations were computed, then a
linear trend was fitted using ordinary least squares after deleting rows with missing data. The trend values are plotted in Figures 2 and
3. For the simple mean (r 1; s 0) the decadal warming trend was 0.06_C/decade . This turns out
to be the peak value of the trend: for most values of r and s the trends are negative, indicating
cooling across the 1979 to 2000 interval. It might seem contradictory that the same data show global
warming of about 0.02_C/decade for s 0:04, but global cooling of _0:04_C/decade for s
_0:04. But there is no contradiction in the data: They do not show global anything. The data are
local. The interpretation of global warming or cooling is an artificial imposition on the data
achieved by attaching a label to, respectively, a positive or negative trend in one particular average.
Warming Bad
 Impact - Generic
Warming causes extinction - a preponderance of evidence
proves it's real, anthropogenic, and outweighs other
threats

Deibel 7
International Relations @ Naval War College (Terry,
"Foreign Affairs Strategy: Logic of American Statecraft,"
Conclusion: American Foreign Affairs Strategy Today)
Finally, there
is one major existential threat to American security (as well as prosperity) of a nonviolent nature, which,
though far in the future, demands urgent action. It
is the threat of global warming to the stability of the climate
upon which all earthly life depends. Scientists worldwide have been observing the gathering of
this threat for three decades now, and what was once a mere possibility has passed through
probability to near certainty. Indeed not one of more than 900 articles on climate change
published in refereed scientific journals from 1993 to 2003 doubted that anthropogenic warming
is occurring. In legitimate scientific circles, writes Elizabeth Kolbert, it is virtually impossible to find evidence
of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming. Evidence from a vast international
scientific monitoring effort accumulates almost weekly, as this sample of newspaper reports
shows: an international panel predicts brutal droughts, floods and violent storms across the
planet over the next century; climate change could literally alter ocean currents, wipe away huge portions of Alpine Snowcaps
and aid the spread of cholera and malaria; glaciers in the Antarctic and in Greenland are melting much faster than expected, and
worldwide, plants are blooming several days earlier than a decade ago; rising sea temperatures have been accompanied by a
significant global increase in the most destructive hurricanes; NASA scientists have concluded from direct temperature
measurements that 2005 was the hottest year on record, with 1998 a close second; Earths warming climate is estimated
to contribute to more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year as disease spreads; widespread bleaching
from Texas to Trinidadkilled broad swaths of corals due to a 2-degree rise in sea temperatures. The world is slowly
disintegrating, concluded Inuit hunter Noah Metuq, who lives 30 miles from the Arctic Circle. They call it climate changebut we
just call it breaking up. From the founding of the first cities some 6,000 years ago until the beginning of the industrial revolution,
carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere remained relatively constant at about 280 parts per million (ppm). At present they are
accelerating toward 400 ppm, and by 2050 they will reach 500 ppm, about double pre-industrial levels. Unfortunately, atmospheric
CO2 lasts about a century, so there is no way immediately to reduce levels, only to slow their increase, we are thus in for
significant global warming; the only debate is how much and how serous the effects will be. As the
newspaper stories quoted above show, we are already experiencing the effects of 1-2 degree warming in more violent storms, spread
of disease, mass die offs of plants and animals, species extinction, and threatened inundation of low-lying
countries like the Pacific nation of Kiribati and the Netherlands at a warming of 5 degrees or less the Greenland and West Antarctic ice
sheets could disintegrate, leading to a sea level of rise of 20 feet that would cover North Carolinas outer
banks, swamp the southern third of Florida, and inundate Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village.
Another catastrophic effect would be the collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation that keeps
the winter weather in Europe far warmer than its latitude would otherwise allow. Economist William Cline once estimated the damage
to the United States alone from moderate levels of warming at 1-6 percent of GDP annually; severe warming could cost 13-26 percent
of GDP. But the most frightening scenario is runaway greenhouse warming, based on positive
feedback from the buildup of water vapor in the atmosphere that is both caused by and causes
hotter surface temperatures. Past ice age transitions, associated with only 5-10 degree changes in average global
temperatures, took place in just decades, even though no one was then pouring ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
Faced with this specter, the best one can conclude is that humankinds continuing enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect is
akin to playing Russian roulette with the earths climate and humanitys life support system. At worst, says physics professor Marty
Hoffert of New York University, were just going to burn everything up; were going to het the atmosphere to the
temperature it was in the Cretaceous when there were crocodiles at the poles, and then everything will collapse. During the
Cold War, astronomer Carl Sagan popularized a theory of nuclear winter to describe how a thermonuclear war between the Untied
States and the Soviet Union would not only destroy both countries but possible end life on this planet. Global warming is the
post-Cold War eras equivalent of nuclear winter at least as serious and considerably better
supported scientifically. Over the long run it puts dangers form terrorism and traditional military
challenges to shame. It is a threat not only to the security and prosperity to the United States, but
potentially to the continued existence of life on this planet.

Warming causes biodiversity loss, storms, and agriculture

Weart 11
(Spencer Weart, Director of the Center for History of
Physics of the American Institute of Physics, December
2011, The Discovery of Global Warming)
A large body of scientific studies, exhaustively reviewed, has produced a long list of possibilities.
Nobody can say that any of the items on the list are certain to happen. But the world's climate experts almost all agree that the impacts
listed below are more likely than not to happen. For some items, the probabilities range up to almost certain. The following
are the likely consequences of warming by a few degrees Celsiu s that is, what we may expect if
humanity manages to begin restraining its emissions soon, so that greenhouse gases do not rise beyond
twice the pre-industrial level. Without strong action the doubling will come well before the end of this century, bringing the planet to
temperatures not seen since the spread of agriculture. By 2007, many of the predicted changes were observed to be actually
happening. For details see reports referenced in this footnote: (22) * Most places will continue to get warmer,
especially at night and in winter. The temperature change will benefit some regions while
harming others for example, patterns of tourism will shift. The warmer winters will improve health and agriculture in some
areas, but globally, mortality will rise and food supplies will be endangered due to more frequent
and extreme summer heat waves and other effects. Regions not directly harmed will suffer
indirectly from higher food prices and a press of refugees from afflicted regions. * Sea levels
will continue to rise for many centuries. The last time the planet was 3C warmer than now,
the sea level was at least 6 meters (20 feet) higher.(23) That submerged coastlines where
many millions of people now live, including cities from New York to Shanghai . The rise will
probably be so gradual that later generations can simply abandon their parents' homes, but a ruinously swift rise cannot be entirely
ruled out. Meanwhile storm surges will cause emergencies. <=Sea rise & ice * Weather patterns will keep changing toward an
intensified water cycle with stronger floods and droughts. Most regions now subject to droughts will probably get drier (because of
warmth as well as less precipitation), and most wet regions will get wetter. Extreme weather events will become more frequent and
worse. In particular, storms with more intense rainfall are liable to bring worse floods. Some places will get more snowstorms, but
most mountain glaciers and winter snowpack will shrink, jeopardizing important water supply systems. Each of these things has
already begun to happen in some regions.(24) Drought in the 2060s * Ecosystems will be stressed, although some
managed agricultural and forestry systems will benefit, at least in the early decades of
warming. Uncounted valuable species, especially in the Arctic, mountain areas, and tropical
seas, must shift their ranges. Many that cannot will face extinction. A variety of pests and tropical
diseases are expected to spread to warmed regions. These problems have already been observed in numerous places. * Increased
carbon dioxide levels will affect biological systems independent of climate change. Some
crops will be fertilized, as will some invasive weeds (the balance of benefit vs. harm is
uncertain). The oceans will continue to become markedly more acidic, gravely endangering coral reefs, and probably harming
fisheries and other marine life. <=Biosphere * There will be significant unforeseen impacts. Most of these
will probably be harmful, since human and natural systems are well adapted to the present
climate. The climate system and ecosystems are complex and only partly understood, so
there is a chance that the impacts will not be as bad as predicted. There is a similar chance
of impacts grievously worse than predicted. If the CO2 level keeps rising to well beyond
twice the pre-industrial level along with a rise of other greenhouse gases, as must inevitably
happen if we do not take strong action soon, the results will certainly be worse. Under a "business
as usual" scenario, recent calculations give even odds that global temperature will rise 5C or more by the end of the century
causing a radical reorganization and impoverishment of many of the ecosystems that sustain our civilization.(25) All this is
projected to happen to people who are now alive. What of the more distant future? If
emissions continue to rise for a century whether because we fail to rein them in, or
because we set off an unstoppable feedback loop in which the warming itself causes ever
more greenhouse gases to be evaporated into the air then the gases will reach a level that the Earth has not seen since tens of
millions of years ago. The consequences will take several centuries to be fully realized, as the Earth settles into its new state. It is
probable that, as in the distant geological eras with high CO2, sea levels will be many tens of meters higher and the average global
temperature will soar far above the present value: a planet grossly unlike the one to which the human species is adapted.

Warming causes famine, disease, and resource wars

impacts already happening

Lean 7
(Geoffrey Lean, Enviorment Editor for The Indepedant,
news agency,
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-
change/wars-of-the-world-how-global-warming-puts-60-
nations-at-risk-442788.html)
Scores of countries face war for scarce land, food and water as global warming increases. This
is the conclusion of the most devastating report yet on the effects of climate change that scientists and governments prepare to issue
this week. More than 60 nations, mainly in the Third World, will have existing tensions hugely exacerbated
by the struggle for ever-scarcer resources. Others now at peace - including China, the United States
and even parts of Europe - are expected to be plunged into conflict. Even those not directly affected will be
threatened by a flood of hundreds of millions of "environmental refugees". The threat is worrying world leaders. The
new UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, told a global warming conference last month: "In
coming decades, changes in the environment - and the resulting upheavals, from droughts to inundated
coastal areas - are likely to become a major driver of war and conflict." Margaret Beckett, the Foreign
Secretary, has repeatedly called global warming "a security issue" and a Pentagon report
concluded that abrupt climate change could lead to "skirmishes, battles and even war due to
resource constraints". The fears will be increased by the second report this year by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The result of six years' work by 2,500 of the world's top scientists,
it will be published on Good Friday. The first report, released two months ago, concluded that global
warming was now "unequivocal" and it was 90 per cent certain that human activities are to
blame. The new one will be the first to show for certain that its effects are already becoming
evident around the world. Tomorrow, representatives of the world's governments will meet in Brussels to start four days of
negotiation on the ultimate text of the report, which they are likely to tone down somewhat. But the final confidential draft presented
to them by the scientists makes it clear that the consequences of global warming are appearing far sooner and faster than expected.
"Changes in climate are now affecting biological and physical systems on every continent," it says. In 20 years, tens of millions more
Latin Americans and hundreds of millions more Africans will be short of water, and by 2050 one billion Asians could face water
shortages. The glaciers of the Himalayas, which feed the great rivers of the continent, are likely to melt away almost completely by
2035, threatening the lives of 700 million people. Though harvests will initially increase in temperate countries - as the extra warmth
lengthens growing seasons - they could fall by 30 per cent in India, confronting 130 million people with starvation, by the 2050s. By
2080, 100 million people could be flooded out of their homes every year as the sea rises to
cover their land, turning them into environmental refugees. And up to a third of the world's wild species
could be "at high risk of irreversible extinction" from even relatively moderate warming. International Alert, "an
independent peace-building organisation", has complied a list of 61 countries that are
already unstable or have recently suffered armed conflict where existing tensions will be
exacerbated by shortages of food and water and by the disease, storm flooding and sea-level
rise that will accompany global warming, or by the deforestation that helps to cause it. The
list forms the basis of the map on the opposite page. Four years ago the Pentagon report
concluded: "As famine, disease and weather-related disasters strike... many countries'
needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense of desperation, which is
likely to lead to offensive aggression." Many experts believe this has begun. Last year John Reid, the Home
Secretary, blamed global warming for helping to cause the genocide in Darfur. Water supplies are seen as a key cause of the Arab-
Israeli conflicts. The Golan Heights are important because they control key springs and rivers and the Sea of Galilee, while vital
aquifers lie under the West Bank. John Ashton, the Government's climate change envoy, says that global warming should be addressed
"not as a long-term threat to our environment, but as an immediate threat to our security and prosperity".
 Impact - South Asia
Climate change leads to south Asian nuclear war

Sharma 10
(Rajeev Sharma, journalist-author who has been writing on international relations, foreign
policy, strategic affairs, security and terrorism for over two decades, 2/25/2010, "Climate
Change = War?" The Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2010/02/25/climate-change-war/)

For all the heat generated by discussions of global warming in recent months, it is an often overlooked fact that climate
change has the potential to create border disputes that in some cases could even provoke clashes
between states. Throw into the mix three nuclear-armed nations with a history of disagreements ,
and the stakes of any conflict rise incalculably. Yet such a scenario is becoming increasingly likely
as glaciers around the world melt, blurring international boundaries. The chastened United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, still doesnt dispute that glaciers are melting; the only question
is how fast. The phenomenon is already pushing Europeans and Africans to redraw their borders .
Switzerland and Italy, for example, were forced to introduce draft resolutions in their respective parliaments for fresh
border demarcations after alpine glaciers started melting unusually quickly. And in Africa, meanwhile, climate change has
caused rivers to change course over the past few years. Many African nations have rivers marking international
boundaries and are understandably worried about these changing course and therefore cutting into their borders.
Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan are just some of the African countries that have
indicated apprehension about their international boundaries. But it is in Asia where a truly nightmarish
scenario could play out between India, Pakistan and Chinanuclear weapon states that
between them have the highest concentration of glaciers in the world outside the polar regions. A case in
point is the Siachen Glacier in the Karakoram range, the largest glacier outside the polar region, which is the site
of a major bilateral dispute between India and Pakistan. According to scientific data, Siachen Glacier is
melting at the rate of about 110 meters a ye aramong the fastest of any glaciers in the world. The glaciers
melting ice is the main source of the Nubra River, which itself drains into the Shyok River. These are two of the main
rivers in Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir. The Shyok also joins the Indus River, and forms the major source of water for
Pakistan. It is clear, then, why the melting of glaciers in the Karakoram region could have a disastrous
impact on ties between India and Pakistan. French geologists have already predicted the Indus will
become a seasonal river by 2040, which would unnerve Pakistan as its granary basket ,
Punjab, would become increasingly drought-prone and eventually a desertall within a few decades. It
takes no great leap of imagination to see the potential for conflict as the two nations resort to military
means to control this water source. Meanwhile, glacier melting could also be creating a potential
flashpoint between India and China. The melting Himalayan glaciers will inevitably induce changes to the
McMahon Line, the boundary that separates India and China. Beijing has already embarked upon a long-term strategy of
throttling of Indias major water source in the north-eastthe Brahmaputra River that originates in China.

Indo-China territorial disputes go nuclear - results in

great-power draw-in

Kahn 9
(Jeremy Kahn, staff writer for Newsweek, 10/9/2009,
"Why India Fears China,"
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/10/09/why-
india-fears-china.print.html)
Ever since the anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet last year, progress toward settling the border dispute has stalled,
and the situation has taken a dangerous turn. The emergence of videos showing Tibetans beating up Han Chinese
shopkeepers in Lhasa and other Tibetan cities created immense domestic pressure on Beijing to crack down. The Communist
Party leadership worries that agitation by Tibetans will only encourage unrest by the country's other ethnic minorities, such as
Uighurs in Xinjiang or ethnic Mongolians in Inner Mongolia, threatening China's integrity as a nation. Susan Shirk, a former
Clinton-administration official and expert on China, says that "in the past, Taiwan was the 'core issue of sovereignty,' as they
call it, and Tibet was not very salient to the public." Now, says Shirk, Tibet is considered a "core issue of national
sovereignty" on par with Taiwan. The implications for India's securityand the world'sare
ominous. It turns what was once an obscure argument over lines on a 1914 map and some barren, rocky peaks hardly
worth fighting over into a flash point that could spark a war between two nuclear-armed neighbors. And
that makes the India-China border dispute into an issue of concern to far more than just the two parties
involved. The United States and Europe as well as the rest of Asia ought to take noticea conflict
involving India and China could result in a nuclear exchange. And it could suck the West ineither as
an ally in the defense of Asian democracy, as in the case of Taiwan, or as a mediator trying to
separate the two sides.
 Impact - Migrations
That results in sudden onset migrations which risk
resource warsescalation is likely

Bahati 10
Policy Analyst @ Africa Faith and Social Justice Network
Originally published in the Jan-Feb edition of Around
Africa, Climate Change: What About the Displaced?,
February 9, 2010, Bahati Ntama Jacques, Policy Analyst,
http://afjn.org/focus-campaigns/other/other-continental-
issues/82-general/792-climate-change-what-about-the-
displaced.html
Already, as a result of climate change, at least 18 islands have been submerged worldwide. These
include Lohachara Island in India, Bedford, Kabasgadi and Suparibhanga Island near India. Other islands are at risk of being
submerged. They include Bangladeshs Bhola Island, half of which is permanently flooded, Kutubdia in southeastern Bangladesh with
thousands of people already displaced and more to be displaced, in Shishmaref and Kivalini of Alaska, and Maldives, a state island in
the Indian Ocean whose President wishes to relocate the entire country. Climate change-related disasters not only
affect ecosystems, but cause people to relocate either by choice or by force. Some will be
displaced within the boundaries of their affected countries (Internal Displacement or ID) and others will
cross state borders. Some will be displaced because of sudden-onset hydro-meteorological
disasters, such as flooding, hurricanes, landslides, etc. Others will be affected by slow-onset
disasters, like desertification, rising sea levels and droughts. Sea level rise will, in some cases, lead to
permanent loss of small state islands, Maldives being an example, which means permanent displacement of the
inhabitants of the island. In high-risk zones authorities have to choose between the cost of rebuilding every time a disaster hits or of
just displacing the people permanently. Furthermore, as a result of displacement , disputes over resources such as water
and land will cause violence. It is more than likely that some of the violence will end up in armed
conflict.

Climate change diplaces millions and destroys

fundamental human rights

EFJ 11
Environmental Justice Foundation EJF a UK Registered
charity working internationally to protect the natural
environment and human rights 2011 Climate Change and
migration:forced displacement, climate refugees and the
need for a new legal instrument
http://www.ejfoundation.org/pdf/climate_briefing.pdf
Climate change is without doubt one of the foremost and most profound threats to environmental
security and basic human rights, and its effects are already being observed across the globe . For
human populations, the impacts are considerable, with an estimated 325 million people adversely affected, and 300,000 deaths each
year 1 . Climate change is deteriorating environmental conditions and compromising the most basic human rights to life, food,
shelter, health, and water. The short and long-term effects of climate change will compound existing
poverty levels and obstruct social and economic development. The overall impacts for the
developing world are sobering: within this century, hundreds of millions of people are likely to
be displaced by Sea Level Rise (SLR); accompanying economic and ecological damage will be severe for many. The
world has not previously faced a crisis on this scale, and planning for adaptation should begin
immediately 17 . Environmental factors arising from climate change and leading to migration
may be fast occurring. For example more intense tropical cyclones or in the longer-term, e ffects
such as desertication or sea level rise that inundates lowlying regions damaging homes and
infrastructure, increased health risks, declining soil fertility and lack of freshwater. Fisheries and
agriculture are already showing signs of stress, yet they are projected to face a 50% increase in demand by 2030 18 . In the
oceans, climate change is reducing the abundance and diversity of sh and other marine life
this could be devastating for the 520 million people around 8% of the global population who are dependent on
sheries for food and income. In Africa, an estimated 10 million people have migrated or been displaced
over the last two decades mainly because of environmental degradation and desertication 7,19 . A
recent (2009) report suggested that about 12 million people have fallen into poverty today because of climate change 1 .
 Impact - Water
Water Shortages are a form of structural violence driven
by colonialism and present day corporations plan breaks
down oppression
Mukherjee 7
Joia S Mukherjee. Medical Director of Partners in Health.
2007. Structural Violence, Poverty and the AIDS
Pandemic http://www.palgrave-
journals.com/development/journal/v50/n2/full/1100376a.ht
ml

Current global inequalities are often the legacies of oppression, colonialism and slavery, and are to-
day perpetuated by radical, market-driven inter- national financial policies that foment poor health. Neo-liberal
economic reforms imposed on poor countries by international financial insti- tutions such as the International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank force poor governments, as the recipients of qualified loans, to decrease their public sector budgets, privatize
health services and, when they would rather invest their minus- cule capital to protect their vulnerable citizens and educate their
children, these recipient coun- tries are instead forced to march in lock step to- ward the free market, enforcing policies such as
user fees for health and primary education. In poor countries, revitalizing the public health infrastructure and
improving the delivery of es- sentials such as vaccination, sanitation and clean water are critical aspects
to remediating the struc- tural violence that underlies disease . It is only with ongoing, large-scale
international assistance that poor governments will be able to address the right to health in a sustained way. Advocacy to re- dress
the violations of the basic right to health must recognize that more money is needed for health now, and for decades to come.
Further- more, the coercion by international financial in- stitutions of poor governments to
restrict health spending only serves to deepen inequalities in health care and perpetuate social
injustice.
 Impact - Arctic
Warming melts arctic ice that opens up new areas of
conflict

Kramnik 4/19
(Ilya Kramnik, writer for The Voice of Russia, News
Agency about Russian Affair, NATO, Russia stage Arctic
war games
4/19/12, http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_04_19/72301024/)

As global warming is thawing permafrost around the Earth's poles, the Arctic is
gradually emerging from under the eternal ice as a new geopolitical arena, a focal point of
interest and concern to the major world powers. The conflict of economic interests is already on the horizon and
wont probably be resolved any soon, although military clashes remain an equally hazy perspective. In the past, only scientist and
journalists seemed to be concerned about the opening up of the Arctic. Now, politicians and the military are
also turning their gaze to this region, which rising temperatures have made more
accessible than ever. The global media and especially local agencies are bristling with threats of a new Cold War in the
Arctic, while major northern states are meeting to discuss regional security. One of such meetings
was held by military chiefs of all Arctic powers in Canada on April 12, 13. It was attended, among others, by Gen. Nikolai
Makarov, Chief of Russias Armed Forces General Staff. The meeting took place at a time when the icy
region was buzzing with activity, with both Russia and NATO engaged in war games beyond
the Arctic Circle. In March, NATO wrapped up its Cold Response maneuvers on the stretch from Sweden to Canada, with 16,300
troops engaged in this unprecedented military exercise. The war game was only clouded by a crash, when a Norwegian C-130J
plane rammed into the western slope of the Swedish mountain, Kebnekaise, killing five servicemen. The Russian
military kept apace, staging their own maneuvers. Its 200th motor rifle brigade from Murmansk tested the
T-80 tanks, which are believed to be best-suited for the Arctic climate, with their gas turbine engines, which are much easier to
start in the cold weather than the traditional diesel ones. The Russian Northern Fleet, as well as Air Defense planes, choppers and
marine aviation participated in the drills. The Air Forces also trained in Russias northern reaches. On April 9-15, Russia
staged Ladoga 2012 maneuvers at the Karelian Besovets air base with 50 choppers and
aircraft, which engaged and shot down over 150 air targets. In their war games, NATO and Russia are
both pursuing one and the same goal. As rising temperatures are freeing larger and larger areas of the Arctic from its icy shackles,
all regional key players are flexing their military muscle to score psychological points in the information battlespace, the main
arena of modern diplomatic conflicts. No one wants a Hot War. Even more so, the US, the potential northern leader, is now
focused on more pressing issues in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Pacific, where it is engaged in a standoff with China. However,
Arctics natural riches, territorial disputes and expanding shipping lanes have rendered
it a very lucrative region and thus potentially a hot one. The situation around maritime traffic
nodes has never been simple. Such was the case with the Mediterranean, the Horn of Africa, or the Strait of Malacca.
If the Arctic emerges as another junction of sea lanes it will spawn conflicts among the world powers, depending on how
determined they will be to protect their national interests. Russia is one of such ambitious northern powers,
currently planning on boosting its Arctic infrastructure, for instance building twenty
frontier posts to protect its polar reaches. Some of them will be erected close to nine emergency and transport
ministerial centers, set up to further the development of Russias Northern Sea Route. The rest of the frontiers will be built on the
islands. A satellite system called Arktika will allow for their uninterrupted communication with the "mainland." These frontier
posts, which are to be erected in the upcoming years, will serve as Russias bulwark beyond the Arctic Circle and will be secured
by its Northern Fleet, air forces and the so-called Arctic brigades, specially trained to operate in the polar region. For now,
Arctic conflicts are still a matter of theoretical disputes and an inspiration for computer
games designers. For instance, the recent game called Naval Warfare: Arctic Circle tells
a story about navies and air forces of Russia and NATO fighting for Arctic dominance.
Today, major world powers are too busy wrestling with global economic crisis to let this story out of its cyber realm. But no one
knows what the nearest future has in store for us.
Nuclear war

Staples 9
(Stephen, Rideau Institute, Danish Institute of International Studies, "Steps Toward an Arctic
Nuclear Weapon Free Zone," August)

The fact is, the Arctic is becoming an zone of increased military competition. Russian President Medvedev
has announced the creation of a special military force to defend Arctic claims. Russian General Vladimir Shamanov declared that
Russian troops would step up training for Arctic combat, and that Russias submarine fleet would
increase its operational radius. This week, two Russian attack submarines were spotted off the U.S.
east coast for the first time in 15 years.6 In January, on the eve of Obamas inauguration, President Bush issued a National Security
Presidential Directive on Arctic Regional Policy. As Michael Hamel-Greene has pointed out, it affirmed as a priority to preserve U.S.
military vessel and aircraft mobility and transit throughout the Arctic, including the Northwest Passage, and foresaw greater
capabilities to protect U.S. borders in the Arctic. The Bush administrations disastrous eight years in office, particularly its decision to
withdraw from the ABM treaty and deploy missile defence interceptors and a radar in Eastern Europe, has greatly contributed to the
instability we are seeing today. The Arctic has figured in this renewed interest in Cold War weapons
systems, particularly the upgrading of the Thule Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radar for ballistic missile defence. The
Canadian government, as well, has put forward new military capabilities to protect Canadian sovereignty
claims in the Arctic, including proposed ice-capable ships, a northern military training base and a deep
water port. Denmark last week released an all-party defence position paper that suggests the country should create
a dedicated Arctic military contingent that draws on army, navy and air force assets with ship-based helicopters able to drop
troops anywhere. Danish fighter planes could be patrolling Greenlandic airspace. Last year, Norway chose to buy 48 Lockheed
F-35 fighter jets, partly because of their suitability for Arctic patrols. In March, that country held a major Arctic military
practice involving 7,000 soldiers from 13 countries in which a fictional country called Northland seized offshore oil rigs. The
manoeuvres prompted a protest from Russia which objected again in June after Sweden held its largest northern military exercise
since the end of the Second World War. About 12,000 troops, 50 aircraft and several warships were involved. Jayantha Dhanapala,
President of Pugwash and former UN Under-Secretary for Disarmament Affairs, summarizes the situation bluntly. He warns us that
From those in the international peace and security sector, deep concerns are being expressed over the fact that two nuclear weapon
states the United States and the Russian Federation , which together own 95 per cent of the nuclear
weapons in the world converge on the Arctic and have competing claims. These claims , together with
those of other allied NATO countries Canada, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway could, if unresolved, lead to
conflict escalating into the threat or use of nuclear weapons.
 Impact Calc - Resource Wars
Climate change escalates all wars that are already
happening

Evans 10
(Alex Evans, Center on International Cooperation, New
York University, September 9, 2010,
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTWDR2011/Resourc
es/6406082-
1283882418764/WDR_Background_Paper_Evans.pdf)

Even before climate change is taken into account, scarcity of land, food, water and oil is
likely to be an increasing driver of change between now and 2030, and beyond. Climate change
will exacerbate the challenge in all of these areas, and the combined effect of these changes is likely to put tens to hundreds of
millions more people at risk of impacts including hunger, disease, displacement, injury, poverty or other forms of hardship.
Although the conflict risk posed by climate change and resource scarcity will almost always
be better understood as a threat multiplier than as a sole cause of violent conflict, a range
of potential linkages between climate, scarcity and conflict risk can nonetheless be
identified, whether through intensifying existing problems, or through creating new
environmental problems that lead to instability.79The most obvious such linkage is the risk of direct conflict
over access to or control of scarce resources such as land or water. Most current examples of such conflicts take place within
countries, but intensifying resource scarcity and climate change could see an increase in strategic resource competition between states,
both at the regional level (particularly if abrupt climate effects, such as rapid glacial melting, manifest themselves and thus impact
trans-boundary water resources) and internationally (with some countries already pursuing third country access rights to oil, land, food
and potentially water). However, a range of other conflict risks arising from climate change and
resource scarcity also have the potential to make themselves felt in the future. Among them
are cases where livelihoods or economies are undermined by resource scarcity, potentially
increasing state fragility in the process; cases where violent conflict itself has the effect of
contributing to environmental degradation, thus potentially creating a cyclical relationship
between scarcity and conflict; large-scale unplanned migration as a result of climate
impacts or resource scarcity; and the risk that changing geographical circumstances, such
as rising sea levels or changing water flows in trans-boundary watercourses, render existing
legal agreements out of date. Making specific projections about the extent or location of future conflict risks driven by
climate change and resource scarcity is highly complex and resistant to specificity. In part this is because, as just noted, climate and
scarcity effects will rarely if ever be felt in isolation from the impacts of other risks. The extent of the impacts caused by climate and
scarcity will also depend as much on social, institutional, economic and ecological vulnerability as on the magnitude of the threats
themselves. Above all, projections of the future effects of climate and scarcity issues are highly uncertain and unpredictable, given not
only limitations in the current scientific outlook (particularly at more granular levels of geographical focus), but also the non-linear
nature of many of the changes involved and the complex feedback loops between different scarcity issues. For all these reasons,
policymakers will often face an uphill struggle in deciding on priorities for measures to invest in preparedness and reduce
vulnerability to increasing climate change and resource scarcity. However, some general observations may still be made about some
key areas for action.

Turns their impacts - creates strategic overstretch and

irrational actors

Harvey 11
(Fiona Harvey, Enviorment Correspondant for the Guardian,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/06/climate-change-war-chris-
huhne)
Climate change will lead to an increased threat of wars, violence and military action against the
UK, and risks reversing the progress of civilisation, the energy and climate secretary Chris Huhne will say
on Thursday, in his strongest warning yet that the lack of progress on greenhouse gas emission cuts would damage the UK's
national interests. "Climate change is a threat multiplier. It will make unstable states more
unstable, poor nations poorer, inequality more pronounced, and conflict more likely,"
Huhne is expected to say in a speech to defence experts. "And the areas of most geopolitical
risk are also most at risk of climate change." He will warn that climate change risks
reversing the progress made in prosperity and democracy since the industrial revolution,
arguing that the results of global warming could lead to a return to a "Hobbesian" world in
which life is "nasty, brutish and short". Huhne believes the UK and other countries must act urgently to prepare for
the threat. "We cannot be 100% sure that our enemies will attack our country, but we do not hesitate to prepare for the eventuality," he
plans to say. "The same principle applies to climate change, which a report published by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has identified
as one of the four critical issues that will affect everyone on the planet over the next 30 years." His comparison of climate
change and terrorism echoes Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser to the
government who warned in 2004 that global warning posed "a bigger threat than
terrorism". The warning so incensed the then US president George W Bush that he phoned
Tony Blair to ask him to gag the scientist. Huhne argues that it is clearly in the UK's national interest to cut carbon
dioxide emissions sharply, and persuade other nations to join in the effort. His speech comes at a delicate time for
the prime minister, David Cameron, who was embarrassed earlier in the week by an open
revolt over climate issues staged by his members of the European parliament. MEPs were
voting on whether to adopt more ambitious emissions reduction targets that would raise the
goal from a 20% cut in carbon by 2020, compared with 1990 levels, to a tougher 30% cut.
Despite Downing St intervention, more than two-thirds of Tory MEPs rebelled against the party line, to support the tougher target.
Their revolt was instrumental in defeating the proposal, part of a complex series of votes in the parliament. Green campaigners hope to
revive the issue in future votes, and with member states and the European commission, but the vote revealed the depths of climate
scepticism within the Tory party. Huhne has scored key victories in recent months in his attempts to put climate change at the centre of
coalition policy. He helped to persuade Cameron to accept the "fourth carbon budget" - a plan that would see the UK halve emissions
by 2025, the stiffest target of any developed country. Yesterday the prime minister announced tough new energy efficiency standards,
supported by Huhne, that would require central government to cut emissions by 25% in the five-year term of this parliament. Huhne
will quote military experts, including the MoD and the US Pentagon, who have warned that climate change will increase the risk of
conflict and potentially terrorism. Climate change intensifies security threats in three ways: increasing competition for resources; more
natural and humanitarian disasters, such as the droughts now causing famine in Africa, which will also lead to mass migration and the
conflicts that ensue; and threats to the security of energy supplies.
 Impact - Biodiversity

Warming kills biodiversity - leads to extinction

Coyne & Hoekstra 7

Prof Ecology @ Chicago AND Prof Biology @ Harvard
(Jerry AND Hopi, "The Greatest Dying," Truthout,
http://www.truthout.org/article/jerry-coyne-and-hopi-e-
hoekstra-the-greatest-dying)

We are relentlessly taking over the planet, laying it to waste and eliminating most of our fellow
species. Moreover, we're doing it much faster than the mass extinctions that came before. Every
year, up to 30,000 species disappear due to human activity alone. At this rate, we could lose half
of Earth's species in this century. And, unlike with previous extinctions, there's no hope that
biodiversity will ever recover, since the cause of the decimation - us - is here to stay. To scientists,
this is an unparalleled calamity, far more severe than global warming, which is, after all, only one
of many threats to biodiversity. Yet global warming gets far more press. Why? One reason is that,
while the increase in temperature is easy to document, the decrease of species is not. Biologists
don't know, for example, exactly how many species exist on Earth. Estimates range widely, from
three million to more than 50 million, and that doesn't count microbes, critical (albeit invisible)
components of ecosystems. We're not certain about the rate of extinction, either; how could we
be, since the vast majority of species have yet to be described? We're even less sure how the loss
of some species will affect the ecosystems in which they're embedded, since the intricate
connection between organisms means that the loss of a single species can ramify unpredictably.
But we do know some things. Tropical rainforests are disappearing at a rate of 2 percent per year.
Populations of most large fish are down to only 10 percent of what they were in 1950. Many
primates and all the great apes - our closest relatives - are nearly gone from the wild. And we
know that extinction and global warming act synergistically. Extinction exacerbates global
warming: By burning rainforests, we're not only polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide (a
major greenhouse gas) but destroying the very plants that can remove this gas from the air.
Conversely, global warming increases extinction, both directly (killing corals) and indirectly
(destroying the habitats of Arctic and Antarctic animals). As extinction increases, then, so does
global warming, which in turn causes more extinction - and so on, into a downward spiral of
destruction. Why, exactly, should we care? Let's start with the most celebrated case: the
rainforests. Their loss will worsen global warming - raising temperatures, melting icecaps, and
flooding coastal cities. And, as the forest habitat shrinks, so begins the inevitable contact between
organisms that have not evolved together, a scenario played out many times, and one that is never
good. Dreadful diseases have successfully jumped species boundaries, with humans as prime
recipients. We have gotten aids from apes, sars from civets, and Ebola from fruit bats. Additional
worldwide plagues from unknown microbes are a very real possibility. But it isn't just the
destruction of the rainforests that should trouble us. Healthy ecosystems the world over provide
hidden services like waste disposal, nutrient cycling, soil formation, water purification, and
oxygen production. Such services are best rendered by ecosystems that are diverse. Yet, through
both intention and accident, humans have introduced exotic species that turn biodiversity into
monoculture. Fast-growing zebra mussels, for example, have outcompeted more than 15 species
of native mussels in North America's Great Lakes and have damaged harbors and water-treatment
plants. Native prairies are becoming dominated by single species (often genetically homogenous)
of corn or wheat. Thanks to these developments, soils will erode and become unproductive -
which, along with temperature change, will diminish agricultural yields. Meanwhile,with
increased pollution and runoff, as well as reduced forest cover, ecosystems will no longer be able
to purify water; and a shortage of clean water spells disaster. In many ways, oceans are the most
vulnerable areas of all. As overfishing eliminates major predators, while polluted and warming
waters kill off phytoplankton, the intricate aquatic food web could collapse from both sides. Fish,
on which so many humans depend, will be a fond memory. As phytoplankton vanish, so does the
ability of the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. (Half of the oxygen we
breathe is made by phytoplankton, with the rest coming from land plants.) Species extinction is
also imperiling coral reefs - a major problem since these reefs have far more than recreational
value: They provide tremendous amounts of food for human populations and buffer coastlines
against erosion. In fact, the global value of "hidden" services provided by ecosystems - those
services, like waste disposal, that aren't bought and sold in the marketplace - has been estimated
to be as much as $50 trillion per year, roughly equal to the gross domestic product of all countries
combined. And that doesn't include tangible goods like fish and timber. Life as we know it would
be impossible if ecosystems collapsed. Yet that is where we're heading if species extinction
continues at its current pace. Extinction also has a huge impact on medicine. Who really cares if,
say, a worm in the remote swamps of French Guiana goes extinct? Well, those who suffer from
cardiovascular disease. The recent discovery of a rare South American leech has led to the
isolation of a powerful enzyme that, unlike other anticoagulants, not only prevents blood from
clotting but also dissolves existing clots. And it's not just this one species of worm: Its wriggly
relatives have evolved other biomedically valuable proteins, including antistatin (a potential
anticancer agent), decorsin and ornatin (platelet aggregation inhibitors), and hirudin (another
anticoagulant). Plants, too, are pharmaceutical gold mines. The bark of trees, for example, has
given us quinine (the first cure for malaria), taxol (a drug highly effective against ovarian and
breast cancer), and aspirin. More than a quarter of the medicines on our pharmacy shelves were
originally derived from plants. The sap of the Madagascar periwinkle contains more than 70
useful alkaloids, including vincristine, a powerful anticancer drug that saved the life of one of our
friends. Of the roughly 250,000 plant species on Earth, fewer than 5 percent have been screened
for pharmaceutical properties. Who knows what life-saving drugs remain to be discovered? Given
current extinction rates, it's estimated that we're losing one valuable drug every two years. Our
arguments so far have tacitly assumed that species are worth saving only in proportion to their
economic value and their effects on our quality of life, an attitude that is strongly ingrained,
especially in Americans. That is why conservationists always base their case on an economic
calculus. But we biologists know in our hearts that there are deeper and equally compelling
reasons to worry about the loss of biodiversity: namely, simple morality and intellectual values
that transcend pecuniary interests. What, for example, gives us the right to destroy other
creatures? And what could be more thrilling than looking around us, seeing that we are
surrounded by our evolutionary cousins, and realizing that we all got here by the same simple
process of natural selection? To biologists, and potentially everyone else, apprehending the
genetic kinship and common origin of all species is a spiritual experience - not necessarily
religious, but spiritual nonetheless, for it stirs the soul. But, whether or not one is moved by such
concerns, it is certain that our future is bleak if we do nothing to stem this sixth extinction. We are
creating a world in which exotic diseases flourish but natural medicinal cures are lost; a world in
which carbon waste accumulates while food sources dwindle; a world of sweltering heat, failing
crops, and impure water. In the end, we must accept the possibility that we ourselves are not
immune to extinction. Or, if we survive, perhaps only a few of us will remain, scratching out a
grubby existence on a devastated planet. Global warming will seem like a secondary problem
when humanity finally faces the consequences of what we have done to nature: not just another
Great Dying, but perhaps the greatest dying of them all.
Warming decimates biodiversity - decreases genetic
variation

Romm 11
(Joe Romm, a Senior Fellow at American Progress and
holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT, 9/20/11, "Global
Warming: Extinction of Biodiversity," Think Progress)
If global warming continues as expected, it is estimated that almost a third of all flora and fauna
species worldwide could become extinct. Scientists discovered that the proportion of actual biodiversity loss
should quite clearly be revised upwards: by 2080, more than 80% of genetic diversity within species may
disappear in certain groups of organisms, according to researchers in the title story of the journal Nature Climate Change. The
study is the first world-wide to quantify the loss of biological diversity on the basis of genetic diversity. Thats from the
news release of a study, Cryptic biodiversity loss linked to global climate change (subs. reqd).
The recent scientific literature continues to paint a bleak picture of what Homo sapiens sapiens is doing to the other species on the
planet. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that as global average
temperature increase exceeds about 3.5C [relative to 1980 to 1999], model projections suggest
significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe. That is a temperature rise over pre-industrial
levels of a bit more than 4.0C. So the 5C rise we are facing on our current emissions path would likely put extinctions beyond the
high end of that range. Last fall, the Royal Society ran a special issue on Biological diversity in a
changing world, concluding There are very strong indications that the current rate of
species extinctions far exceeds anything in the fossil recor d. I realize that the mass extinction of non-human
life on this planet isnt going to be a great driver for human action. Most people simply dont get that the mass extinctions we are
causing could directly harm our children and grandchildren as much as sea level rise. Such extinctions threaten the
entire fabric of life on which we depend for food, among other things. This may be clearest
in the case of marine life see Geological Society (8/10): Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown by end of
century. And then theres the worst-case scenario in Nature Stunner Global warming blamed
for 40% decline in the oceans phytoplankton: Microscopic life crucial to the marine food
chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic. Life matters. Heres more from the release:
Most common models on the effects of climate change on flora and fauna concentrate on classically described species, in other
words groups of organisms that are clearly separate from each other morphologically. Until now, however, so-called cryptic
diversity has not been taken into account. It encompasses the diversity of genetic variations
and deviations within described species, and can only be researched fully since the
development of molecular-genetic methods. As well as the diversity of ecosystems and
species, these genetic variations are a central part of global biodiversity. In a pioneering study,
scientists from the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) and the Senckenberg Gesellschaft fr Naturkunde have now
examined the influence of global warming on genetic diversity within species. Over 80 percent of genetic variations
may become extinct The distribution of nine European aquatic insect species, which still
exist in the headwaters of streams in many high mountain areas in Central and Northern
Europe, was modelled. They have already been widely researched, which means that the regional distribution of the inner-
species diversity and the existence of morphologically cryptic, evolutionary lines are already known. If global warming
does take place in the range that is predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), these creatures will be pushed back to only a few small refugia, e.g. in
Scandinavia and the Alps, by 2080, according to model calculations. If Europes climate warms up by
up to two degrees only, eight of the species examined will survive, at least in some areas; with an increase in temperature of 4 degrees,
six species will probably survive in some areas by 2080. However, due to the extinction of local populations, genetic diversity will
decline to a much more dramatic extent. According to the most pessimistic projections, 84 percent of all genetic variations would die
out by 2080; in the best case, two-thirds of all genetic variations would disappear. The aquatic insects that were examined are
representative for many species of mountainous regions of Central Europe. Slim chances in the long term for the emergence of new
species and species survival Carsten Nowak of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) and the Senckenberg
Gesellschaft fr Naturkunde, explains: Our models of future distribution show that the species as such will usually
survive. However, the majority of the genetic variations, which in each case exist only in certain
places, will not survive. This means that self-contained evolutionary lineages in other regions such as the
Carpathians, Pyrenees or the German Central Uplands will be lost. Many of these lines are currently in the process of
developing into separate species, but will become extinct before this is achieved, if our model calculations are
accurate. Genetic variation within a species is also important for adaptability to changing habitats and climatic conditions. Their
loss therefore also reduces the chances for species survival in the long term. New approach for conservation
So the extinction of species hides an ever greater loss, in the form of the massive disappearance of genetic diversity. The loss of
biodiversity that can be expected in the course of global warming has probably been greatly
underestimated in previous studies, which have only referred to species numbers, says Steffen Pauls,
Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F), of the findings. However, there is also an opportunity to use genetic diversity in
order to make conservation and environmental protection more efficient. A topic that is subject to much discussion at present is how to
deal with conservation areas under the conditions of climate change. The authors of the study urge that conservation areas should also
be oriented to places where both a suitable habitat for the species and a high degree of inner-species genetic diversity can be preserved
in the future. It is high time, says Nowak, that we see biodiversity not only as a static accumulation of
species, but rather as a variety of evolutionary lines that are in a constant state of change. The loss of
one such line, irrespective of whether it is defined today as a species in itself, could potentially mean a massive loss in biodiversity
in the future.

Warming ruins biodiversity tropical habitats, reefs, and

aquaculture

Hannah 12
(Lee Hannah, senior researcher in climate change biology
at Conservation International (CI), As Threats to
Biodiversity Grow,Can We Save Worlds Species?,
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/as_threats_to_biodiversity_gr
ow_can_we_save_worlds_species/2518/, 19 APR 2012)

To date, marine systems have experienced the most extensive impacts of climate change . From
coral bleaching to melting sea ice, marine systems are changing on global and regional
scales. Coral bleaching occurs when water temperatures exceed regional norms, causing corals to expel symbiotic micro-organisms
from their tissues, ultimately leading to morbidity or death. Bleaching has exterminated some coral species from entire ocean basins.
Global extinctions may follow as temperatures continue to rise. Corals face a second threat from acidification
as CO2 builds up in the atmosphere and oceans, which prevents corals and many other
marine organisms, including clams and oysters, from forming their calcium carbonate
shells. Overall, the evidence suggests that the worlds roughly 5 million marine species face as severe threats from climate change
as their terrestrial counterparts. On land, tropical biodiversity hotspots in places such as the Amazon and
the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia are especially at risk. All global climate models
now show significant future warming in the tropics, even if more muted than warming at
high latitudes. Tropical animals, insects, and plants are tightly packed along climatic
gradients from lowlands to mountaintops, and these organisms are sensitive to changes in
temperature and rainfall. Already, scores of amphibians in South America have disappeared as a warmer, drier climate has
led to outbreaks of disease such as the chytrid fungus. At the same time, large areas of tropical forest are being cleared for timber,
ranching, and farming such crops as soybeans and oil palm. While these circumstances point to likely
biological extinctions in the oceans and on land, functional extinctions may be of even
greater concern. Functional extinctions occur when a species population crashes to the
point We need to protect species not only where they are, but also where they will be as the
world warms. at which its functional roles within an ecosystem collapse . Functional extinction always
accompanies biological extinction, but can happen before biological extinction is complete. Corals, for example, may be lost from
huge areas, resulting in ecosystem conversion from coral reef to algal mat while some coral individuals still persist in isolation. Bark
beetle outbreaks driven by climate change have killed tens of millions of trees from Colorado to Canada, causing functional
extinctions of lodgepole pine across large areas of western North America. The repercussions of these tree losses are felt in a host of
ways, from declining food for keystone species, such as bears, to increased risk of fire.
Warming kills 80% of genetic diversity

Science Daily 11
(Science Daily, News Agencyabout Science, Aug. 24,
2011,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110824091
146.htm)
If global warming continues as expected, it is estimated that almost a third of all flora and fauna species
worldwide could become extinct. Scientists from the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre
(Biodiversitt und Klima Forschungszentrum, BiK-F) and the SENCKENBERG Gesellschaft fr Naturkunde di scovered that
the proportion of actual biodiversity loss should quite clearly be revised upwards: by 2080, more
than 80 % of genetic diversity within species may disappear in certain groups of organisms ,
according to researchers in the title story of the journal Nature Climate Change. The study is the first world-wide to quantify the loss
of biological diversity on the basis of genetic diversity.Most common models on the effects of climate change
on flora and fauna concentrate on "classically" described species, in other words groups of
organisms that are clearly separate from each other morphologically. Until now, however, so-called
cryptic diversity has not been taken into account. It encompasses the diversity of genetic variations and deviations within described
species, and can only be researched fully since the development of molecular-genetic methods. As well as the diversity of ecosystems
and species, these genetic variations are a central part of global biodiversity. In a pioneering study, scientists from the Biodiversity and
Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) and the Senckenberg Gesellschaft fr Naturkunde have now examined the influence of global
warming on genetic diversity within species. Over 80 percent of genetic variations may become extinct The distribution of
nine European aquatic insect species, which still exist in the headwaters of streams in many
high mountain areas in Central and Northern Europe, was modelled. They have already been widely
researched, which means that the regional distribution of the inner-species diversity and the existence of morphologically cryptic,
evolutionary lines are already known. If global warming does take place in the range that is predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), these creatures will be pushed back to only a few small refugia, e.g. in Scandinavia and the Alps , by
2080, according to model calculations. If Europe's climate warms up by up to two degrees
only, eight of the species examined will survive, at least in some areas; with an increase in
temperature of 4 degrees, six species will probably survive in some areas by 2080. However,
due to the extinction of local populations, genetic diversity will decline to a much more
dramatic extent. According to the most pessimistic projections, 84 percent of all genetic variations would die out by 2080; in
the "best case," two-thirds of all genetic variations would disappear. The aquatic insects that were examined are representative for
many species of mountainous regions of Central Europe. Slim chances in the long term for the emergence of new species and species
survival Carsten Nowak of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) and the Senckenberg Gesellschaft fr Naturkunde,
explains: "Our models of future distribution show that the "species" as such will usually survive. However, the majority of the genetic
variations, which in each case exist only in certain places, will not survive. This means that self-contained evolutionary lineages in
other regions such as the Carpathians, Pyrenees or the German Central Uplands will be lost. Many of these lines are currently in the
process of developing into separate species, but will become extinct before this is achieved, if our model calculations are accurate."
Genetic variation within a species is also important for adaptability to changing habitats and climatic conditions. Their loss therefore
also reduces the chances for species survival in the long term.

Warming kills biodiversity

Hannah 12
(Lee Hannah, senior researcher in climate change biology
at Conservation International (CI), As Threats to
Biodiversity Grow,Can We Save Worlds Species?,
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/as_threats_to_biodiversity_gr
ow_can_we_save_worlds_species/2518/, 19 APR 2012)
With soaring human populations and rapid climate change putting unprecedented pressure on
species, conservationists must look to innovative strategies from creating migratory corridors to
preserving biodiversity hotspots if we are to prevent countless animals and plants from heading to extinction. by lee hannah
Throughout much of the Pleistocene era, which began 2.5 million years ago, many of the worlds large mammals survived periods of
glaciation and deglaciation by moving across a landscape devoid of humans. Then as the Pleistocene drew to a close at the end of the
last Ice Age some 20,000 to 12,000 years ago creatures such as the wooly mammoth had to confront not only shrinking habitat
caused by climate change. They also faced thousands of humans with stone-tipped weapons, a one-two punch that led to the extinction
of dozens of so-called megafauna species, including the wooly mammoth, across Eurasia and North and South America. Now , with
7 billion people on the planet heading to 10 billion and with greenhouse gas emissions
threatening more rapid temperature rises than the warming that brought the last Ice Age to
an end, the many millions of living things on Earth face an unprecedented squeeze . Is a wave of
extinctions possible, and if so, what can we do about it? The late climate scientist and biologist Stephen Schneider
once described this confluence of events species struggling to adapt to rapid warming in a world heavily modified
by human action as a no-brainer for an extinction A million species could face extinction due to
human encroachment and climate change. spasm. My colleagues Barry Brook and Anthony Barnosky recently put it this way,
We are witnessing a similar collision of human impacts and climatic changes that caused so
many large animal extinctions toward the end of the Pleistocene . But today, given the greater magnitude
of both climate change and other human pressures, the show promises to be a wide-screen technicolor version of the (by comparison)
black-and-white letterbox drama that played out the first time around. The magnitude of the threat was first
quantified in a 2004 Nature study, Extinction Risk from Climate Change. This paper
suggested that in six diverse regions, 15 to 37 percent of species could be at risk of
extinction. If those six regions were typical of the global risk, the studys authors later calculated, more than a million terrestrial
and marine species could face extinction due to human encroachment and climate change assuming conservatively that 10 million
species exist in the world. Headlines around the world trumpeted the 1 million figure. Whether that scenario will unfold is unclear. But
signs of what is to come are already all around us: nearly 100 amphibian species in South America vanishing in a disease outbreak
linked to climate change, large areas of western North American facing massive die-offs of trees because of warming-driven beetle
outbreaks, and increasing loss of coral reefs worldwide because of human activities and coral bleaching events driven by rising ocean
temperatures. Most of the worlds biologically unique areas have already lost more than 70 percent of their high-quality habitat.
 Impact - Resources
Warming causes resource scarcity

Evans 10
(Alex Evans, Center on International Cooperation, New
York University, September 9, 2010,
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTWDR2011/Resourc
es/6406082-
1283882418764/WDR_Background_Paper_Evans.pdf)
Climate change and its effects on resource scarcity
All of these potential limitations to supply growth are before climate change is considered , which
is likely to be the most important long-term driver of change on all of the above sectors. Since pre-industrial times, global
average temperatures have increase by 0.7 Celsius, and emissions already in the atmosphere
mean that the world is committed to a further increase of 0.6 Celsius .18 Overall, even stringent
global mitigation action may not be enough to avoid a 2.0 Celsius increase on pre-industrial temperatures. Even if the 2009
Copenhagen summit had agreed that global emissions would peak in 2015 and decline by 3% a year thereafter, this would still have
left the world with an even chance of exceeding a 2 Celsius temperature increase.19 As it is, the summits outcome appears
insufficient to prevent warming of 3 Celsius or more.20 Most of the key near-term impacts of climate change
will result from reduced freshwater availability, which will expose hundreds of millions of
people to additional water stress.21 Decreased crop yields (in all areas except mid and high latitudes, and in
all areas above 2.0 Celsius), will also be particularly important, and will expose tens to hundreds
of millions more people to the risk of hunger.22 The IPCC also highlights a number of
regions that will be particularly exposed to climate change, including the Arctic, Africa,
small islands, and densely populated coastal megadeltas in Asia and Africa such as the
Nile, Ganges-Brahmaputra and Mekong, where tens of millions will be at increased risk of
acute flood and storm damage, chronic coastal flooding and loss of coastal wetlands .23
Significantly, these regions high exposure is in some cases as much the result of their high vulnerability as of the scale of climate
impacts they are projected to experience; Africa, for example, is likely to be especially affected by climate change because of its low
adaptive capacity, whilst the high population densities of Asian and African megadeltas are also factors in determining their
exposure.24However, assessments of the climate and scarcity outlook are complicated by a number of methodological issues,
particularly in the area of climate change. New science findings continue to emerge rapidly, with the effect that overall estimates
quickly become dated: the IPCCs 2007 Fourth Assessment Report is already out of date in some key respects, for example, whilst the
next assessment is not due to be published until 2014.25 Although climate models are improving all the time, their findings remain
subject to a substantial degree of uncertainty, a problem that increases at more specific levels of geographical focus. A further
challenge for policymakers arises from the fact that while some estimates of future climate
impacts may seem to imply steady, gradual changes that can be adapted to over time, in fact
past changes in the earths climate have been the opposite: highly non-linear and
unpredictable, and hallmarked by sudden shifts as key thresholds are passed. Accordingly, an
increasing concern for policymakers in recent years has been the risk of abrupt climate change that could result from positive feedback
effects, such as: rapid die-back of tropical forests or melting of Arctic tundra (both of which would release large amounts of
methane into the atmosphere);26 rapid melting of polar ice sheets or glaciers (which would result in higher sea levels);27 or
reduction in the capacity of atmospheric sinks such as the worlds oceans to absorb carbon dioxide (which would magnify the impact
of current emissions).28 While these kinds of risk are largely omitted from IPCC assessments, due to the high degree of uncertainty
associated with them, they nonetheless remain a real consideration for policymakers wanting to take a risk management approach
based on feasible worst case scenarios.29 Some best-guess estimates suggest that global average warming of around 2.0 Celsius may
be a key threshold for some of these effects, while the IPCC concluded in its Third Assessment Report that there is low to medium
confidence that a rapid warming of over 3 Celsius would trigger large-scale singularities in the climate system, but such assessments
are highly uncertain.30
 Impact - Poverty
Warming exacerbates poverty - resource scarcities

UNDP et al 3
( United Nations Development Programme, African
Development Bank, Asian Development Bank Department
for International Development, United Kingdom
Directorate-General for Development, European
Commission Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation
and Development, Germany Ministry of Foreign Affairs -
Development Cooperation, The Netherlands Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development United
Nations Development Programme United Nations
Environment Programme The World Bank, June, 2003,
http://www.unpei.org/PDF/Poverty-and-Climate-
Change.pdf)

Poor people are often directly dependent on goods and services from ecosystems, either as a
primary or supplementary source of food, fodder, building materials, and fuel. This makes them
highly vulnerable to ecosystem degradation. While local economic and social conditions drive poor
people into marginal areas and force them to exploit natural resources to support their livelihoods, climate change
further erodes the quality of the natural resource base, thereby reinforcing conditions of poverty. Changes in
ecosystem composition and provision of goods and services may also have wider economic effects. Essential ecosystem services
include breaking down wastes and pollutants, purifying water, and maintaining soil fertility. Climate change will alter the
quality and functioning of ecosystems, reducing their capacity to perform their role as important
life support systems. This will have important impacts on key economic sectors such as agriculture, water supply, and others.

This adversely affects the poor - agricultural growth

UNDP et al 3
( United Nations Development Programme, African
Development Bank, Asian Development Bank Department
for International Development, United Kingdom
Directorate-General for Development, European
Commission Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation
and Development, Germany Ministry of Foreign Affairs -
Development Cooperation, The Netherlands Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development United
Nations Development Programme United Nations
Environment Programme The World Bank, June, 2003,
http://www.unpei.org/PDF/Poverty-and-Climate-
Change.pdf)
Agriculture is the most important sector for most least developed countries as the impact of
agricultural growth on poverty reduction tends to exceed the impact of growth in other sectors
(ODI 2002). Food security is a function of several interacting factor s, including food production as well as food
purchasing power. Climate change could worsen the prevalence of hunger through direct negative
effects on production and indirect impacts on purchasing powers. Land degradation, price shocks,
and population growth are already a major concern for sustaining agricultural productivity. Changes
in temperature, precipitation, and climatic extremes will add to the stress on agricultural resources in many developing country regions
and reduce the quality of land areas for agricultural production. This will be particularly serious for areas where droughts and land
degradation, including desertification, are already severe. As access to productive land is important for reducing rural poverty, the
impacts of climate change on the productivity of land will further constrain efforts to combat rural poverty. Low-lying coastal
communities will have to deal with sea level rise and the impact of climate change on marine
resources. Sea level rise may lead to salinization and render agriculture areas unproductive. In areas where fish
constitute a significant source of protein for poor people, declining and migration of fish stocks
due to climate change and associated changes in the marine environment will further need to be
considered in their impact on the local food security. The impact of climate change on food
supply varies significantly by region. In general, crop yields are projected to decrease in most tropical and subtropical
regions due to changes in temperature and rainfall (IPCC 2001b). Consequently, there is a real risk that climate change will worsen
food security and exacerbate hunger in some developing-country regions. In the short term, however, the greater impact on food
security could come from the projected increases and severity of extreme weather events rather than from gradual changes in the
climate (FAO 2002). The impact of climate change on food security will be a major concern for Africa.
In conjunction with the previously discussed changes in water supply, the production losses for Sub-Saharan countries could be
substantial as the length of suitable growing periods decreases. Livestock activities and crop yields for many countries in Asia and
Latin America are also projected to decrease.

It's structurally most likely to displace individuals who are

already disadvantaged

UNDP et al 3
( United Nations Development Programme, African
Development Bank, Asian Development Bank Department
for International Development, United Kingdom
Directorate-General for Development, European
Commission Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation
and Development, Germany Ministry of Foreign Affairs -
Development Cooperation, The Netherlands Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development United
Nations Development Programme United Nations
Environment Programme The World Bank, June, 2003,
http://www.unpei.org/PDF/Poverty-and-Climate-
Change.pdf)
The direct and indirect effects of climate change and their interaction with other vulnerabilities
and environmental exposures may lead to mass migrations, as crucial resources become degraded and
livelihoods are threatened. Loss of land mass in coastal areas due to sea level rise is, for example, likely to lead to
greater permanent or semi-permanent displacement of populations, which may have considerable
economic and political ramifications. Areas most vulnerable to sea level rise lie in the tropics: the west coast of Africa;
the north and eastern coast of South America; South and Southeast Asia; and small island states in the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian
Oceans (IPCC 2001a). Of the worlds 19 mega-cities (those with over 10 million people), 16 are on coastlines and all but 4 are in the
developing world. The poor living in Asian mega-cities are particularly at risk, as sea level rise
compounds subsidence caused by excessive groundwater extraction in Manila, Bangkok,
Shanghai, Dhaka, and Jakarta. To this should be added the risk for potential conflicts, including
social unrest, political instability, and wars over decreasing water or other natural resources and
possible mass migration due to, for example, land loss or degradation and extreme weather
events. Such conflicts may have considerable costs both in macroeconomic terms and in human suffering.

Warming increases poverty

Science Daily 9
(Science Daily, Science news agency, Climate Change
Could Deepen Poverty In Developing Countries, Study
Finds Aug. 21, 2009,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820082
101.htm)

ScienceDaily (Aug. 21, 2009) Urban workers could suffer most from climate change as the cost of
food drives them into poverty, according to a new study that quantifies the effects of climate on the world's poor
populations.A team led by Purdue University researchers examined the potential economic influence of
adverse climate events, such as heat waves, drought and heavy rains, on those in 16 developing countries.
Urban workers in Bangladesh, Mexico and Zambia were found to be the most at risk. "Extreme weather affects
agricultural productivity and can raise the price of staple foods, such as grains, that are
important to poor households in developing countries," said Noah Diffenbaugh, the associate
professor of earth and atmospheric sciences and interim director of Purdue's Climate
Change Research Center who co-led the study. "Studies have shown global warming will likely increase the
frequency and intensity of heat waves, drought and floods in many areas. It is important to understand which socioeconomic groups
and countries could see changes in poverty rates in order to make informed policy decisions." The team used data from
the late 20th century and projections for the late 21st century to develop a framework that
examined extreme climate events, comparable shocks to grain production and the impact on
the number of impoverished people in each country. Thomas Hertel, a distinguished professor of agricultural
economics and co-leader of the study, said that although urban workers only contribute modestly to total poverty rates in the sample
countries, they are the most vulnerable group to changes in grains production. "Food is a major expenditure for the
poor and, while those who work in agriculture would have some benefit from higher grains
prices, the urban poor would only get the negative effects," said Hertel, who also is
executive director of Purdue's Center for Global Trade Analysis. "This is an important
finding given that the United Nations projects a continuing shift in population
concentrations from rural to urban areas in virtually all of these developing countries." With
nearly 1 billion of the world's poor living on less than $1 a day, extreme events can have a devastating impact, he said. "Bangladesh,
Mexico and Zambia showed the greatest percentage of the population entering poverty in the wake of extreme drought, with an
additional 1.4 percent, 1.8 percent and 4.6 percent of their populations being impoverished by future climate extremes, respectively,"
Hertel said. "This translates to an additional 1.8 million people impoverished per country for Bangladesh and Mexico and an
additional half million people in Zambia." A paper detailing the work will be published in Thursday's (Aug. 20) issue of
Environmental Research Letters. In addition to Diffenbaugh and Hertel, Syud Amer Ahmed, a recent Purdue graduate and a member
of the development research group for The World Bank, co-authored the paper. The World Bank's Trust Fund for Environmentally and
Socially Sustainable Development funded the research. The team identified the maximum rainfall, drought
and heat wave for the 30-year periods of 1971-2000 and 2071-2100 and then compared the
maximums for the two time periods. The global climate model experiments developed by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, were used for the future projections of extreme events. The team used an IPCC scenario that has
greenhouse gas emissions continuing to follow the current trend, Diffenbaugh said. "The occurrence and magnitude
of what are currently the 30-year-maximum values for wet, dry and hot extremes are
projected to substantially increase for much of the world," he said. "Heat waves and
drought in the Mediterranean showed a potential 2700 percent and 800 percent increase in
occurrence, respectively, and extreme rainfall in Southeast Asia was projected to potentially
increase by 900 percent." In addition, Southeast Asia showed a projected 40 percent
increase in the magnitude of the worst rainfall; central Africa showed a projected 1000
percent increase in the magnitude of the worst heat wave; and the Mediterranean showed a
projected 60 percent increase in the worst drought. A statistical analysis was used to determine grain
productivity shocks that would correspond in magnitude to the climate extremes, and then the economic impact of the supply shock
was determined. Future predicted extreme climate events were compared to historical agricultural productivity extremes in order to
assess the likely impact on agricultural production, prices and wages. Because the projected changes in extreme rainfall and heat wave
events were too large for the current model to accept, only the extreme drought events were incorporated into the economic
projections, making the projected poverty impacts a conservative estimate, he said. To assess the potential economic impact of a given
change in wages and grains prices, the team used data from each country's household survey. The estimates of likely wage and price
changes following an extreme climate event were obtained from a global trade model, called the Global Trade Analysis Project, or
GTAP, which is maintained by Purdue's agricultural economics department. Purdue's GTAP framework is supported by an
international consortium of 27 national and international agencies and is used by a network of 6,500 researchers in 140 countries.
Large reductions in grains productivity due to extreme climate events are supported by historical data. In 1991 grains productivity in
Malawi and Zambia declined by about 50 percent when southern Africa experienced a severe drought. Diffenbaugh said this is an
initial quantification of how poverty is tied to climate fluctuations, and the team is working to improve the modeling and analysis
system in order to enable more comprehensive assessments of the link between climate volatility and poverty vulnerability.

Warming specifically affects the poor

Stone 10
(Chad Stone, Chief Economist, and Hannah Shaw,
Research Assistant, the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, Posted March 29, 2010,
http://www.spotlightonpoverty.org/ExclusiveCommentary.
aspx?id=d760b301-190c-4c0d-b9b2-5ce4edaeb4da)

Fighting global warming requires policies that significantly restrict greenhouse gas
emissions. Current legislative proposals put a limit (or "cap") on the overall amount of greenhouse gases mainly carbon
dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels that businesses are allowed to emit each year. Electric power plants, oil refineries, and
other firms responsible for emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are then required to purchase permits (called
allowances) for each ton of greenhouse gas pollution they emit. The number of allowances is capped at an amount below
business-as-usual emissions levels, forcing companies to find ways to reduce their emissions to the capped amount. As a
result of the cost to companies of obtaining scarce emissions allowances and the cost of
reducing emissions to the capped level, the price of fossil-fuel energy products from
home energy and gasoline to food and other goods and services with significant energy
inputs will rise. Those higher prices will create incentives, sometimes referred to as a
price signal, for energy efficiency and conservation measures and for the development
and increased use of clean energy alternatives. But they will also put a squeeze on
consumers budgets, and low-income consumers will feel the squeeze most acutely. The
impact of higher prices for energy and energy-intensive products is smaller in dollar terms for
lower-income households than it is for higher-income householdsbecause low-income households dont spend
as much to begin with. As a share of their income, however, the impact is substantially greater
for low-income households (see Figure 1). FIGURE 1: Without Assistance, Low-Income Households Would Bear
Disproportionate Costs from Climate Legislation Source: Congressional Budget Office These people are vulnerable not only
because they spend a larger share of their budgets on necessities like energy than do better-off consumers, but also because they
already face challenges making ends meet and are the people least able to afford purchases of new, more energy-efficient
automobiles, heating systems, and appliances. Thats why it is vital that climate change legislation include low-income
protections. Protecting the budgets of low-income households does not mean that those
households should be exempt from doing their share to reduce emissions. But it does mean
that they should not have to face additional financial hardship in the process. The key is
to design policies that draw on the revenue that is available from the sale of emissions
allowances to finance refunds that preserve both the purchasing power of low-income
households and the price signal that encourages energy-saving behavior by all
households.
 Impact - Disease
Warming causes disease spread

Adair 12
( KIRSTEN ADAIR, CONTRIBUTING REPORTER for Daily Yale News, Wednesday, April 11, 2012,
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/apr/11/global-warming-may-intensify-disease/)

There may be more to fear from global warming than environmental changes. Accordingto several leading climate
scientists and public health researchers, global warming will lead to higher incidence and
more intense versions of disease. The direct or indirect effects of global warming might
intensify the prevalence of tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, dengue and Lyme disease, they said, but
the threat of increased health risks is likely to futher motivate the public to combat global
warming. The environmental changes wrought by global warming will undoubtedly result in major ecologic changes that will
alter patterns and intensity of some infectious diseases, said Gerald Friedland, professor of medicine and epidemiology and public
health at the Yale School of Medicine. Global warming will likely cause major population upheavals,
creating crowded slums of refugees, Friedland said. Not only do areas of high population
density facilitate disease transmission, but their residents are more likely to be vulnerable to
disease because of malnutrition and poverty, he said. This pattern of vulnerability holds for both tuberculosis
and HIV/AIDS, increasing the incidence of both the acquisition and spread of the diseases, he explained. He said these potential
effects are not surprising, since tuberculosis epidemics historically have followed major population and environmental upheavals. By
contrast, global warming may increase the infection rates of mosquito-borne diseases by
creating a more mosquito-friendly habitat. Warming, and the floods associated with it, are
like to increase rates of both malaria and dengue, a debilitating viral disease found in
tropical areas and transmitted by mosquito bites, said Maria Diuk-Wasser, assistant
professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. The direct effects of temperature increase
are an increase in immature mosquito development, virus development and mosquito biting rates, which increase contact rates (biting)
with humans. Indirect effects are linked to how humans manage water given increased uncertainty in the water supply caused by
climate change, Diuk-Wasser said. Global warming may affect other diseases in even more complicated ways, Diuk-Wasser said. The
effect of global warming on the incidence of Lyme disease, a tick-borne chronic disease, is more difficult to examine and measure,
though she said it will probably increase. One possible way in which temperature may limit tick populations is by increasing the
length of their life cycle from two to three years in the north, where it is colder, she said. Climate change could be reverting that and
therefore increasing production of ticks. The transmission of the Lyme bacterium is so complex, though, that it is difficult to tease
out a role of climate change. Diuk-Wasser added, however, that scientists do find an effect of climate change on the distribution of
Lyme disease in their data, but are not yet sure of the reasons behind such results. While the study of global warming itself is relatively
new, research on the impact of global warming on disease is an even more recent endeavor that draws on the skills and expertise of a
wide variety of scientists and researchers. The field is multi-sourced, and recently interest has been
evolving among climatologists, vector biologists, disease epidemiologists, ecologists, and
policymakers alike, said Uriel Kitron, professor and chair of the environmental studies
department at Emory University. Kitron said that in order to mitigate the effects of global warming on disease, the
public must turn its attention to water management and an increased understanding of the connecting between global processes and
local impact. Diuk-Wasser said that raising awareness about the public health effects of global warming might aid climate control
efforts, because it made the potential impact of global warming more personal. Theres been a great interest in climate advocacy
groups to look for negative effects of climate change on health, since studies have found that this motivates people to adopt measures
to curb climate change, Diuk-Wasser said. The Yale Climate and Engery Institute recently won a grant to study the direct and indirect
effects of climate change on dengue transmission in Colombia.

Warming spreads tropical disease everywhere

Irfan 12
(Umfair Irfan, reporter for Scientific America, a scientific
news agency, June 4, 2012,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=exotic-
diseases-warmer-climate-us-gain)
Diseases once thought to be rare or exotic in the United States are gaining a presence and
getting new attention from medical researchers who are probing how immigration, limited
access to care and the impacts of climate change are influencing their spread. Illnesses like
schistosomiasis, Chagas disease and dengue are endemic in warmer, wetter and poorer areas of the world, often closer to the equator.
According to the World Health Organization, almost 1 billion people are afflicted with more than one tropical disease. Caused by
bacteria, parasites and viruses, these diseases are spread through bites, excrement and dirty
water stemming from substandard housing and sanitation. Consequently, the United States
has been largely isolated from them. But Americans are traveling more, and as tropical vacationers return home, they
may unwittingly bring back dangerous souvenirs. Immigrants from endemic regions are also bringing in these diseases, some of which
can lie dormant for years. All the while, the flies, ticks and mosquitoes that spread these illnesses are moving north as rising
temperatures make new areas more welcoming. In 2009, dengue emerged in south Florida and infected
more than 60 people, the first outbreak since 1934, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC). Dengue is caused by four closely related viruses spread by
mosquitoes. It results in joint and muscle pain, severe headaches and bleeding. The outbreak was
first detected in a Rochester, N.Y., woman who traveled to Key West, Fla., for one week, with several Key West residents subsequently
reporting infections. The infection rate rose to 5 percent, which CDC said indicated "a serious risk of transmission." According
to the Monroe County Health Department, there hasn't been a confirmed dengue case in the
Florida Keys since November 2010. "We keep the public aware that they need to be
dumping standing water and wearing mosquito repellent," explained Chris Tittle, public
information officer at the health department. The outbreak may have been linked to travel
from Latin America and the Caribbean, where the disease's incidence has risen fourfold
over the past 30 years. In 2010, Puerto Rico faced the largest dengue epidemic in its history.
However, not every outbreak is imported, and future epidemics may come from within. "There's a substantial but hidden burden of
tropical disease in the United States, particularly among people in poverty," said Peter Hotez, founding dean of the National School of
Tropical Medicine, the first such school in the United States, at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. Diseases like leishmaniasis often
are not tracked rigorously in this country and are classified as neglected, unlike vector-borne illnesses like Lyme disease that are
monitored.

Warming spreads disease mosquitos

Surendran et al 12
(Ranjan Ramasamy and Sinnathamby Noble Surendran,
National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S.
National Library of Medicine, Published online 2012 June
19,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3377959/)

Models have been developed for forecasting the impact of global climate change on
mosquito-borne diseases, notably the global distributions of malaria (Lindsay and Martens, 1998;
Githeko et al., 2000; Rogers and Randolph, 2000; Paaijmans et al., 2009) and dengue (Hales et al., 2002). One model
used current temperature, rainfall, and humidity ranges that permit malaria transmission
to forecast malaria distribution in 2050 in a global climate change scenario (Rogers and Randolph,
2000). This model found surprisingly few changes, but predicted that some parts of the world
that are presently free of malaria may be prone to a greater risk of malaria transmission
while certain malaria-endemic areas will have a decreased risk of malaria transmission
(Rogers and Randolph, 2000). Larger areas of northern and eastern Australia are expected to become more conducive for the
transmission of dengue (McMichael et al., 2006) and a greater proportion of the global population at risk of dengue (Hales et al.,
2002) as a result of global climate change. While these models did not specifically address changes in coastal zones, the transmission
of malaria (Rogers and Randolph, 2000) and dengue (Hales et al., 2002; McMichael et al., 2006) were generally predicted to increase
in coastal areas of northern and eastern Australia. Many modeling forecasts are limited by uncertainties in the extent of global climate
change as a result of the inability to accurately predict major drivers such as future emission rates of greenhouse gases. Other factors
such as the resilience of the geosphere and biosphere that are difficult to estimate precisely, and regional characteristics, can also
influence climate change parameters. Furthermore, the considerable adaptability of mosquito vectors and their pathogens to changing
environments are difficult to model. Models however have an important role in highlighting potential problems and the need to
develop measures to counter possible increases in disease transmission. Global climate change has led to
observable alterations in the global distribution of plants and animals with species adapted
to warmer temperatures moving to higher latitudes (Root et al., 2003). However there is no
unequivocal evidence yet that global climate change has already affected the distribution of
a mosquito-borne disease in inland or coastal areas. The reports of increased incidence of malaria epidemics
related to warmer temperatures in the Kenyan highlands have been controversial as changes in many other factors could have
influenced malaria transmission in this area, and perhaps even masked an increase in transmission due to higher temperatures (Githeko
et al., 2000; Alonso et al., 2011; Omumbo et al., 2011; Chaves et al., 2012). However it is clear that the incidence of
malaria has decreased over the last decade in many countries due primarily to better case
detection and treatment, the use of insecticide treated mosquito nets and indoor residual
spraying of more effective insecticides (World Health Organization, 2011). It seems quite likely that
such improvements in malaria control measures worldwide have masked any tendency for
the incidence of malaria to increase as a result of global climate change (Gething et al., 2010). On
the other hand, there is evidence that short term changes in global climate can influence the
incidence of mosquito-borne diseases. The El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) entails
multi-annual cyclic changes in the temperature of the eastern Pacific Ocean that influences
air temperature and rainfall in large areas of the bordering continents, spreading as far as
Africa. ENSO has been associated with a higher incidence of dengue in some countries, notably in parts of Thailand in recent times
(Tipayamongkholgul et al., 2009). Global warming due to the greenhouse effect may increase the frequency of ENSO events
(Timmermann et al., 1999) and therefore cause more numerous epidemics of dengue. The warming of surface sea temperatures in the
western Indian Ocean due to short term fluctuations known as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is associated with higher malaria
incidence in the western Kenyan highlands (Hashizume et al., 2009). The effects of short term ENSO and IOD events are a likely
indication of the potential impacts of long term global climate change on mosquito-borne diseases that can also affect coastal zones.
There have been very few studies on other primary climate changes like wind and atmospheric pollution that can also affect mosquito
populations in coastal areas. Changes in wind patterns as a result of climate change are difficult to predict and likely to be locality-
specific. It can be expected that higher onshore wind velocities will tend to disperse mosquito populations further inland. Atmospheric
pollution will be higher in the vicinity of urban coastal areas, and it may be anticipated that mosquitoes will adapt to pollution with
time. The gaps in knowledge in these areas need to be addressed.

Warming causes disease parasites

SPPI 12
(Science and Public Policy Institute, Center for the Study
of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. "Global Warming
and Animal Parasitic Diseases. Last modified February 8,
2012.
http://www.co2science.org/subject/p/summaries/animalpar
asites.php.)
One of the perceived great tragedies of CO2-induced global warming is that rising
temperatures will increase the development, transmission, and survival rates of parasites in
general, leading to a perfect storm of biological interactions that will raise the prevalence of
parasitic disease among animals in the future. But is this really so? In a provocative paper
analyzing the intricacies of this complex issue, Hall et al. (2006)1 begin their analysis of the
subject by asking Will an increasingly warmer world necessarily become a sicker world?
They posed this question because, in their words, increased temperatures can accelerate
the fitness of parasites, reduce recruitment bottlenecks for parasites during winter, and
weaken hosts, while further noting that warmer temperatures may allow vectors of
parasites to expand their range, which would enable them to introduce diseases to novel
habitats, which is something climate alarmists frequently claim about mosquitoes and
malaria. However, as they continue, these doom-and-gloom scenarios do not necessarily apply to all taxa or all situations, and
they note that warming does not necessarily increase the fitness of all parasites. Enlarging upon these latter points,
the four biologists and their statistician co-author write that the virulence of parasites may
not change, may decrease, or may respond unimodally to increasing temperatures (Stacey et
al., 2003; Thomas and Blanford, 2003), and in this regard they further note that vital
rates increase with temperature until some optimum is reached, and that once
temperature exceeds this optimum, vital rates decline gradually with increasing
temperature for some taxa, but rapidly for others, such that in some host-parasite
systems, a parasites optimum occurs at cooler temperatures than the optimum of its host,
citing the work of Carruthers et al. (1992), Blanford and Thomas (1999) and Blanford et al. (2003) on fungus-grasshopper associations
in substantiation of this scenario. In such cases, as they describe it, a host can use warmer temperatures to help defeat its parasites
through behavioral modification of its thermal environment.However, the situation sometimes can be even more complex than this;
for Hall et al. write that warmer temperatures can also lead to shifts in temperature optima (Huey and Hertz, 1984; Huey and
Kingsolver, 1989, 1993), and that the exact evolutionary trajectory of host-parasite systems in a warmer world may depend
sensitively upon underlying genetic correlation structures and interactions between host genotypes, parasite genotypes, and the
environment (Blanford et al., 2003; Thomas and Blanford, 2003; Stacey et al., 2003; Mitchell et al., 2004). Consequently,
they conclude that longer-term response of the physiology of host-parasite systems to
global warming becomes difficult to predict. But these considerations are not the end of the
story either; for the researchers note that other species can profoundly shape the outcome
of parasitism in host populations, and that predators provide an important example
because, as they elucidate, predators can actually inhibit epidemics by selectively culling
sick hosts and/or by maintaining host densities below levels required for parasites to persist
(Hudson et al., 1992; Packer et al., 2003, Lafferty, 2004; Ostfeld and Holt, 2004; Duffey et al., 2005; Hall et al., 2005). When all is
said and done, therefore, Hall et al. conclude that global warming does not necessarily mean that disease prevalence will increase in
all systems.
 Impact - Ice Age
Warming melts arctic sea ice that leads to an ice age

The Telegraph 2/27

(The Telegraph, news agency, 27 Feb 2012, Freezing winters ahead due to melting Arctic Sea
ice, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9109106/Freezing-winters-ahead-due-to-
melting-Arctic-Sea-ice.html)

Climate change means autumn levels of sea ice have dropped by almost 30 percent since
1979 - but this is likely to trigger more frequent cold snaps such as those that brought
blizzards to the UK earlier this month. And Arctic sea ice could be to blame . Dr Jiping Liu and
colleagues studied the extensive retreat of the ice in the summer and its slow recovery
focusing on the impacts of this phenomenon on weather in the Northern Hemisphere.
Information about snow cover, sea level pressure, surface air temperature and humidity was used to generate model simulations for the
years 1979-2010. The researchers say dramatic loss of ice may alter atmospheric circulation
patterns and weaken the westerly winds that blow across the North Atlantic Ocean from
Canada to Europe. This will encourage regular incursions of cold air from the Arctic into
Northern continents - increasing heavy snowfall in the UK. Dr Liu said: "The results of this
study add to an increasing body of both observational and modeling evidence that indicates
diminishing Arctic sea ice plays a critical role in driving recent cold and snowy winters over
large parts of North America, Europe and east Asia." While the Arctic region has been warming strongly in
recent decades there has been abnormally large snowfall in these areas. Dr Liu, of Georgia Institute if Technology in
Atlanta, said: "Here we demonstrate the decrease in autumn Arctic sea ice area is linked to
changes in the winter Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation . "This circulation
change results in more frequent episodes of blocking patterns that lead to increased cold
surges over large parts of northern continents. "Moreover, the increase in atmospheric water vapor content in the
Arctic region during late autumn and winter driven locally by the reduction of sea ice provides enhanced moisture sources, supporting
increased heavy snowfall in Europe during early winter and the northeastern and midwestern United States during winter. "We
conclude the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters." In November research
showed there is less Arctic sea ice now than there has been at any time in the last 1,450 years.

Warming causes a second ice age melting ice

Black 2/27
(By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News, Melting Arctic link to cold, snowy
UK winters, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17143269)

The progressive shrinking of Arctic sea ice is bringing colder, snowier winters to the UK and
other areas of Europe, North America and China, a study shows. As global temperatures
have risen, the area of Arctic Ocean covered by ice in summer and autumn has been falling .
Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a US/China-based team show this affects the jet stream and
brings cold, snowy weather. Whether conditions will get colder still as ice melts further is unclear.
There was a marked deterioration in ice cover between the summers of 2006 and 2007,
which still holds the record for the lowest extent on record; and it has not recovered since.
The current winter is roughly tracking the graph of 2007, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The new
study is not the first to propose a causal relationship between low Arctic ice in autumn and Europe's winter weather. But it has gone
further than others in assessing the strength of the link. Through observations and computer modelling, the
team headed by Jiping Liu from Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, US, and the
Insitute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing has also elucidated the mechanisms involved.
"For the past four winters, for much of the northern US, east Asia and Europe, we had this
persistent above-normal snow cover," Dr Liu told BBC News. "We don't see a predictive
relationship with any of the other factors that have been proposed, such as El Nino; but for
sea ice, we do see a predictive relationship." How it happens If less of the ocean is ice-covered in
autumn, it releases more heat, warming the atmosphere. This reduces the air temperature
difference between the Arctic and latitudes further south, over the Atlantic Ocean. The
dwindling Arctic summer ice may have severe consequences for wildlife In turn, this
reduces the strength of the northern jet stream, which usually brings milder, wetter weather
to Europe from the west. It is these "blocking" conditions that keep the UK and the other
affected regions supplied with cold air. The researchers also found that the extra evaporation from the Arctic Ocean
makes the air more humid, with some of the additional water content falling out as snow. "I agree with the study - I have no beef with
the case that declining Arctic sea ice can drive easterly winds and produce colder winters over Europe," commented Adam Scaife,
head of monthly to decadal prediction at the UK Met Office. Research in other institutions, including the Met Office, confirmed the
argument, he said. Dr Scaife was involved with another study published last year that showed how small, natural changes in the Sun's
output can also affect winter weather. And he emphasised that the declining Arctic ice cover was just one of several factors that could
increase blocking. "You can hit a bell with anything, and you still produce the same note," he told BBC News. "This is no bigger than
the solar effect or the El Nino effect. But they vary, whereas Arctic ice is on a pretty consistent downward trend." The picture is further
complicated by the involvement of the Arctic Oscillation, a natural variation of air pressure that also changes northern weather. Dr
Len Shaffrey, University of Reading: "This is very early days for this research" The oscillation is not understood well enough to
predict - and even if it were, any pattern it has may be changing due to escalating greenhouse gas concentrations. Nevertheless, the
research suggests that on average, winters in the UK and the rest of the affected region will be colder in years to come than they have
been in recent decades. Various computer simulations have generated a range of dates by which the Arctic might be completely ice-
free in summer and autumn, ranging from 2016 to about 2060. A few years ago, one projection even showed 2013 was possible,
though this now appears unlikely. So a related question is whether UK winters will get colder and snowier still as the melting
progresses, "It's possible that future winters will be colder and snowier, but there are some uncertainties," cautioned Dr Liu. His
team's next research project is to feed Arctic ice projections and the mechanisms they have deciphered into various computer models
of climate, and see whether they do forecast a growing winter chill.
 Impact - Authoritarianism
Climate change leads to authoritarianism studies prove
Fritsche 12
(Immo Fritsche, Institut fr Psychologie, Lehrstuhl fr
Sozialpsychologie, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitt Jena,
Germany, J. Christopher Cohrs, School of Psychology,
Queens University Belfast, United Kingdom, Thomas
Kessler, Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin, Germany, Judith
Bauer, Institut fr Psychologie, Abteilung
Sozialpsychologie, Universitt Leipzig, Germany, journal
published on 3/12, published online on 9/24/11, Global
warming is breeding social conflict: The subtle impact of
climate change threat on authoritarian tendencies,
Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 32, Issue 1,
pages 1-10, ScienceDirect)

Climate change can increase societies propensity to conflict by changes in

socio-structural conditions (e.g., resource scarcity, migration). We propose an
additional, subtle, and general effect of climate change threat via increases in
authoritarian attitudes. Three studies in Germany and the UK support this
suggestion. Reminding participants of the adverse consequences climate change
may have for their country increased the derogation of societal groups that
may threaten the collective (e.g., criminals) as well as general authoritarian
attitudes. Salient climate change threats also led to system justification and approval of system supporting groups (e.g.,
judges) in those people who were highly identified with their nation. We discuss the implications of these findings for the
explanation of authoritarian attitudes and the question of how societies may cope with the subtle social psychological effects of
climate change.

Climate change doubles risk of civil conflict

Schiermeier 11
(Quirin Schiermeier, staff writer, published online on
8/24/11, Climate cycles drive civil war, Nature,
International weekly journal of science, accessed
online,
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110824/full/news.2011.
501.html)

Previous studies have focused on the question of how anthropogenic climate change might increase conflict risk. A 2009
study2 by economist Marshall Burke at the University of California,
Berkeley, and his co-workers found that the probability of armed conflict in sub-
Saharan Africa was about 50% higher than normal in some unusually warm
years since 1981. But critics point to statistical problems for instance when linking possibly random local
temperature and rainfall variations with outbreaks of civil war that may have resulted in a false
appearance of causality. To overcome this problem, Solomon Hsiang, an
economist currently at Princeton University in New Jersey, and his colleagues opted to look
at how historical changes in the global, rather than local, climate affect
conflict risk1. Clear signal The team designed a 'quasi-experiment' for which they
divided the world into regions strongly affected by the ENSO the tropical parts of
South America, Africa and the AsiaPacific region, including parts of Australia and regions only weakly
affected by it. They then searched for a link between climate and armed conflicts that arose in the first group
between 1950 and 2004. A very clear signal appeared in the data. The team found that the risk
of annual civil conflict doubles, from 3% to 6%, in countries of the ENSO-
affected, or 'teleconnected', group during El Nio years relative to La Nia years. In
many cases, conflicts that might have broken out anyway may have occurred earlier owing to the effects of El Nio, Hsiang
suggests.

Climate change is linked directly to historical global civil

conflict

Schiermeier 11
(Quirin Schiermeier, staff writer, published online on
8/24/11, Climate cycles drive civil war, Nature,
International weekly journal of science, accessed
online,
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110824/full/news.2011.
501.html)
Civil conflicts have been by far the most common form of organized political violence in recent decades, Hsiang says.
Globally, one-fifth of the 240 or so civil conflicts since 1950 could be linked
to the 47-year climate cycle originating in the southern Pacific, the study
concludes. The results were unaffected by any modification to the
statistical set-up of the analysis such as excluding particularly crisis-prone African countries
which the team performed to confirm the robustness of their findings.

Climate change impacts stability doubles likelihood of

civil war and may have caused one fifth of global conflicts

Goodman 11
interview conducted by Amy Goodman, host of
Democracy Now!, A Daily Independent Global News
Hour, 8/29/11, Global Warming & War: New Study Finds
Link Between Climate Change and Conflict, an interview
with Solomon Hsiang, lead author of a study linking civil
wars with global climate change, and postdoctoral
researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs at Princeton University, Democracy
Now!)

A new study has found that war is associated

We move to another issue around climate.
with global climate. According to the report, there are links between the
climate phenomenon El Nio and outbreaks of violence in countries from
southern Sudan to Indonesia and Peru. In fact, the scientists find that El Nio,
which brings hot and dry conditions to tropical nations, doubles the risk of
civil war in up to 90 countries. The study was published online last week in the journal Nature. El
Nio may help account for a fifth of conflicts worldwide during the past 50
years.
 AT: Warming Solves Itself
Atmospheric CO2 lingers and decay is slow

Cherubini et al. 11
(FRANCESCO CHERUBINI*, GLEN P. PETERSw, TERJE
BERNTSENwz, ANDERS H. STRMMAN*andEDGAR
HERTWICH* *Department of Energy and Process
Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and
Technology (NTNU), NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway, wCenter
for International Climate and Environmental Research
Oslo (CICERO), Oslo, Norway, zDepartment of
Geosciences, University of Oslo, Norway) 2011 (Francesco,
CO2 emissions from biomass combustion for bioenergy:
atmospheric decay and contribution to global warming,
GCB Bioenergy (2011) 3,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1757-
1707.2011.01102.x/full, Pages 415-416)
*Note in this article C refers to carbon as indicated by the author at the beginning
Atmospheric decay. Thanks to the elaboration of these CC models itis possible to predict the atmospheric decay
of CO2 emissions (Maier-Reimer & Hasselmann, 1987; Lashof & Ahuja, 1990; Caldeira & Kasting, 1993; Joos et al.,
1996, 2001; Enting et al., 2001). In all the cases, CO2 does not follow a simple decay according to one
single lifetime (as it is for the two other main GHG, N2O and CH4), but its decay is described by several time
constants and there is a fraction of the initial emission that always remains in the atmosphere .
The fraction of CO2 remaining in the air following a CO2 release depends on future atmospheric CO2
concentrations, because the partial pressure of CO2 in the ocean surface is a nonlinear function of surface total dissolved
inorganic C concentration (Caldeira & Kasting, 1993). The analytical form of the atmospheric decay of anthropogenic CO2 is
given by a superposition of a number of exponentials of different amplitude Ai and relaxation time ti The value of this function at
any time represents the fraction of the initial emission which is still found in the atmosphere, and the removed fraction
corresponds to the ocean/biosphere uptake. The amplitude A0 represents the asymptotic airborne fraction of CO2 which remains
in the atmosphere because of the equilibrium response of the oceanatmosphere system. The amplitudes Ai may be interpreted as
the relative capacity of the other sinks, which are filled up by the atmospheric input at rates characterized by the relaxation time
scales ti. These time scales determine the redistribution of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in the climate system and are linked to
the time scales of the natural C cycle. Because of this exponential decay trend, more than half of the
initial input is removed from the atmosphere within few decades after emissions through
uptake by the upper ocean layer and the fast overturning reservoirs of the land biosphere.
However, a certain fraction is still found in the atmosphere after 1000 years; this fraction is
only very slowly reduced further by oceansediment interaction and the weathering cycle
(Archer et al., 1998)
 AT: Aerosols
Aerosols cannot completely reverse the effects of
warming

Global Warming Focus 12

(6/11/12, Global Warming and Climate Change; Data
from University of Washington Provide New Insights into
Global Warming and Climate Change Global Warming
Focus, ProQuest)
Our news editors obtained a quote from the research by the authors from the University of Washington,
"The Community Climate System Model, version 3, is used to evaluate simulations with enhanced CO2
and prescribed stratospheric sulfate to investigate the effects on regional climate. To further explore the
sensitivity of these regions to ocean dynamics, a suite of simulations with and without ocean dynamics
is run. The authors find that, when global average warming is roughly canceled by aerosols, temperature
changes in the polar regions are still 20%-50% of the changes in a warmed world. Atmospheric
circulation anomalies are also not canceled, which affects the regional climate response. It is also found
that agreement between simulations with and without ocean dynamics is poorest in the high latitudes.
The polar climate is determined by processes that are highly parameterized in climate models. Thus,
one should expect that the projected climate response to geoengineering will be at least as uncertain in
these regions as it is to increasing greenhouse gases. In the context of climate emergencies, such as
melting arctic sea ice and polar ice sheets and a food crisis due to a heated tropics, the authors find that,
while it may be possible to avoid tropical climate crises, preventing polar climate emergencies is not
certain."

Aerosols cause warming

Idso et. al 11
(Craig, Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, CO2 Magazine, Robert Carter, paleontologist,
stratiagrapher, geologist, research fellow at James Cook
Univ., Fred Singer, Environmental Science @ UVA, Susan
Crockford, PhD Anthropology @ Victoria, Joseph D'Aleo,
Executive Director of ICECAP, Co-Chief Meteorologist,
Indur Goklany, founded the Electronic Journal of
Sustainable Development, Sherwood Idso, president of
the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, Madhav Khandekarhas, PhD, Editorial Board
Member of natural hazards, AR4 Climate Assessment,
Anthony Lupo, PhD, Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric
Sciences at Mizzou - Columbia, Willie Soon, PhD, Mitch
Taylor, Geography @ Lakehead Univ., "Climate Change
Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report," NIPCC Rport
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterim
report.pdf)
Some scientists believe aerosols could have a warming effect. Kiendler-Scharr et al. (2009) present
evidence from simulation experiments conducted in a plant chamber that isoprene can significantly
inhibit new particle formation. The significance of this finding derives from the fact that the most
abundant volatile organic compounds emitted by terrestrial vegetation are isoprene and its derivatives,
such as monoterpenes and sesquiterpenes, and the fact, as described in the This Issue abstract
section of the Nature issue in which the paper appeared (p. 311), that these compounds are involved
in the formation of organic aerosols [the new particles mentioned by them], which act as seeds for
cloud formation and hence as cooling agents via an effect on radiative forcing. Ziemann (2009), in a
News & Views article that discusses the Kiendler-Scharr et al. paper, writes that clouds formed at
higher CCN [cloud condensation nuclei] concentrations have more and smaller drops than those
formed at lower concentrations, and so reflect more sunlight and are longer-livedeffects that, at the
global scale, enhance the planetary cooling that counteracts some of the warming caused by
greenhouse gases. Thus, if vegetative isoprene emissions were to increase, driven directly by rising
temperatures and/or indirectly by warming-induced changes in the species composition of boreal
forests (as further suggested by Ziemann), the resulting decrease in CCN concentrations could lead
to increased global-warming trends, as suggested by Kiendler-Scharr in a Making the Paper article
in the same issue of Nature (p. 313).
 AT: Post-Hoc Analysis
Uncertainty is inevitable - even if warming isn't the sole
cause of wars it's a huge proximate cause

Evans 10
(Alex Evans, Center on International Cooperation, New
York University, September 9, 2010,
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTWDR2011/Resourc
es/6406082-
1283882418764/WDR_Background_Paper_Evans.pdf)

As concern over both climate change and resource scarcity has increased in recent years,
so speculation has grown that they will lead to increased risk or incidence of violent
conflict. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, for example, said in 2007 that changes in our environment and the resulting
upheavals - from droughts to inundated coastal areas to loss of arable lands - are likely to become a major driver of war and
conflict.31 However, while climate change and resource scarcity do pose risks especially for poor
people and fragile states, which as discussed below are most vulnerable to their effects caution
is needed in
forecasting their effects, particularly in the area of violent conflict .In part, this is because the
impacts of resource scarcity or climate change will in practice almost always blur with
those of other risk drivers, with the effect that it becomes extremely difficult to attribute
particular impacts solely to climate change or resource scarcity. The rise in the number of
undernourished people from 854 million people in 2007 to over 1 billion in late 2009, for example, is only partly attributable to
the effects of the food price spike: also critical were the subsequent effects of the global downturn, which further eroded the
purchasing power of many poor people.32 Similarly, while poor people are undoubtedly vulnerable to the direct impacts of
climate change, the most far-reaching effects of global warming may be the indirect consequences of consequences such as
political instability, economic weakness, food insecurity or large-scale migration (see below).33 Secondly, it is important
to remember that the actual risk of violent conflict posed by climate change or resource
scarcity depends as much on the vulnerability of populations, ecosystems, economies and
institutions as on the strength of climate or scarcity impacts. The fact that poor people are more
exposed to price spikes, resource scarcity and climate impacts is well-established, for example as is the fact that environmental
risks are among the most frequent, costly and impactful causes of the kinds of shock that can cause people to become poor in the
first place, and that make escape from poverty so difficult.34 Similarly, the institutional and political
weaknesses of fragile states have been argued to make them more susceptible to conflict
risk arising from climate change and resource scarcity. A 2007 report from International Alert, for
example, found that 46 countries, home to 2.7 billion people, would experience a high risk of violent conflict as a result of
climate change interacting with economic, social and political problems, while in a further 56 countries with 1.2 billion
inhabitants the institutions of government will have great difficulty taking the strain of climate change on top of all their other
current challenges.35 Climate change and resource scarcity are rarely, if ever, the sole cause of
violent conflict, then: instead, they are better understood as threat multipliers that will
in practice interact both with other risk drivers, and with diverse sources of
vulnerability.36 However, this is not to say that climate and scarcity do not increase the
risk of violent conflict. On the contrary, as a United Nations Environment Programme report recently argued: the
exploitation of natural resources and related environmental stresses can be implicated in all phases of the conflict cycle, from
contributing to the outbreak and perpetuation of violence to undermining prospects for peace.37 Kahl (2006) cites a range of
evidence for the argument that scarcity can increase the risk of violent conflict, including quantitative studies that suggest
population size and density are significant conflict risk factors, and statistical work indicating that countries highly dependent on
natural resources, as well as those experiencing high rates of deforestation and soil degradation or low per capita availability of
arable land and freshwater, have higher than average risks of conflict.
 AT: Oceans Check
Ocean sinks flow aff- Oceans absorb Co2 that kills
everything in it

Hutchings et al 12
(Jeffery Hutchings, Prof. Isabelle M. Ct Prof. Julian J.
Dodson Prof. Ian A. Fleming Prof. Je rey A. Hutchings
(Chair) Prof. Simon Jennings Prof. Nathan J. Mantua Prof.
Randall M. Peterman Dr. Brian E. Riddell Prof. Andrew J.
Weaver, FRSC, The Royal Society of Canada Acedmic of
Arts, February 2012,
http://www.rsc.ca/documents/RSC_MBD_1_3_25_Twenty-
Five_EN_FORMAT.pdf)

Climate Change: Observed and Projected Stressors The immediate consequences of climate change are
likely to include ocean warming, altered sea levels, and acidification of the ocean . All of these
are already changing marine biodiversity. Water and air temperature are both pivotal in determining
distribution of ocean plants and animals. Altered temperature patterns affect marine biodiversity, and
potential yields from fisheries, by changing where different species live. Increased
precipitation and warmer temperatures can change salt content and the density of water,
or wash more nutrients from land into rivers and then into the sea; those kinds of
changes reach right down to primary production, the development of the most basic
organisms in the food chain. Changes there could reduce the transfer of food value from organic matter. Inevitably,
every organism is affected. Climate change can also cause disconnects between the needs species
have for survival and their access to vital resources. An earlier bloom of plankton, for
example, may mean that fish larvae or newly hatched seabirds dont get the food that
they need. The consequences of these resource mismatches can be transferred up the food chain. At the species level, effects
can be seen in Chinook salmon, where climate change is making some streams too warm or too shallow for young fish to survive
and grow properly. Thats projected to reduce population abundance and significantly increase the chance of extinction for
affected populations. Temperature change also affects where species live. Empirical and theoretical studies suggest marine fish
and invertebrates respond to ocean warming by shifting between 30-130 km per decade pole-wards and 3.5 m per decade deeper.
That could lead to local extinction of some species, while others invade new areas. We think this will inevitably
lead to significant changes in fisheries. In the northern hemisphere, that could mean
declines in fishing in temperate regions (25oN-50oN), but increases at higher latitudes,
particularly in the sub-Arctic. However, benefits further north might be countered by the loss of species at lower
latitudes in Canadian waters.Climate change also plays a role in depleting oxygen in water. When surface water gets warmer, the
water may not produce and exchange oxygen well. Heavier precipitation that increases freshwater discharge and the flux of
nutrients adds to the problem. Along the Oregon coast, low-oxygen events have caused fish and crab kills during the last several
years, events that were not observed in the previous century. The worlds oceans absorb some 84 per cent of
the carbon dioxide generated by burning fossil fuels. As the concentration of CO2 in the
oceans increases, more carbonic acid (H2CO3) is formed, which partially dissociates into
bicarbonate (HCO3) and hydrogen (H+) ions. The combination of increased acidity and decreased carbonate
means many marine organisms that use calcium carbonate to construct their shells or skeletons including corals, some
phytoplankton, lobsters, mussels, snails and sea urchinsare at risk from acidification. Analyses of corals on the Great Barrier
Reef show that calcification rates declined 21% between 1988 and 2003. By the middle of this century, coral reefs may be eroding
faster than they are growing
Warming No Impact
 AT: Disease
No good scientific link between climate change and
disease

Idso 11
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2011 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) The Effects of Climate Change on Infectious
Diseases http://co2science.org/articles/V14/N40/EDIT.php

In an Opinion article published in a recent issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Rhor et al. (2011) state that "the
notion
that climate change will generally increase human and wildlife diseases has garnered
considerable public attention, but remains controversial and seems inconsistent with the
expectation that climate change will also cause parasite extinctions ." Therefore, they decided to review
the subject in some detail to see what the bulk of the scientific studies that have addressed the topic have concluded on this
contentious matter. In describing the nature of their review, the eight scientists say they highlighted frontiers in climate change-
infectious disease research by "reviewing knowledge gaps that make this controversy difficult to resolve." And in doing so, they
came to the conclusion that "understanding climate change-disease interactions is a formidable
problem because of its interdisciplinary nature and the complexities of hosts, parasites and
their interactions with the multiple factors that can co-vary with climate change." As a result of this
enlightenment, they go on to state that "effective forecasting of climate-change impacts on disease will
require filling the many gaps in data, theory and scale," adding that their findings suggest that "forecasts of
climate-change impacts on disease can be improved by more interdisciplinary collaborations, better linking of data and models,
addressing confounding variables and context dependencies, and applying metabolic theory to host-parasite systems with
consideration of community-level interactions and functional traits." In terms of the implications of their findings, the eight U.S.
researchers -- who hail from the University of South Florida, Princeton University, the University of Colorado, the University of
California at Santa Cruz, Cornell University and the Pennsylvania State University -- write that "although there should
be genuine concern regarding future disease risk for humans and wildlife, we discourage
alarmist claims and encourage rigor, open-mindedness and broad thinking regarding this
crucial and interdisciplinary global issue." We agree. For far too long, we have heard only one catastrophic scare
story after another in regard to how humanity will suffer from climate-change-induced impacts on various vector-borne diseases
and other maladies, nearly all of which have been based on studies lacking the "rigor, open-mindedness and broad thinking" that
Rhor et al. state is essential for evaluating all of the many interrelated aspects of the subject. We can only hope their plea will be
taken to heart by all researchers working in this most important field of endeavor.

No disease

Kenny 12
(Charles Kenny, senior fellow at the Center for Global
Development, a Schwartz fellow at the New America
Foundation, 4/9/12, "Not Too Hot to Handle," Foreign
Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/09/not_too_hot_to_handle )

And what about the impact on global health? Suggestions that malaria has already spread as a result of
climate change and that malaria deaths will expand dramatically as a result of warming in the
future don't fit the evidence of declining deaths and reduced malarial spread over the last
century. The authors of a recent study published in the journal Nature conclude that the forecasted future
 effects of rising temperatures on malaria "are at least one order of magnitude smaller than the
changes observed since about 1900 and about two orders of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved
by the effective scale-up of key control measures." In other words, climate change is and will likely remain a
small factor in the toll of malaria deaths into the foreseeable future.

Burnout - powerful diseases kill their hosts off too quickly

to spread

Carlson 6
(Shawn Carlson, PhD MacArthur Fellow, The Citizen
Scientist, 2006, Dealing with Doctor Doom,
http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-
07/editorial-p/index.html)
The data stand utterly against this idea. Plagues have run rampant through human populations throughout
time. Millions have died. Huge fractions of some populations have been wiped out. But the net death rate
has never come close to the fractions that Pianka envisions. Virulent diseases that kill quickly tend to burn
themselves out. Natural selection creates less lethal varieties because an organism can't spread if it kills its
host before it can propagate. The flu pandemic of 1918 (the influenza virus is championed by Pianka) may
have killed 50 million people, but that was only about 5 percent of those infected. Moreover, every year
sees medical advancementsscreening techniques improve, as do our methods of creating new vaccines
and treating illness of all kinds. Not only that, a desperate situation would be met by desperate measures,
including the implementation of martial law, the halting of all air and ground traffic except for emergency
vehicles and so on, to stop contagion.
 AT: Biodiversity
Climate change does not cause mass extinction
empirically proven
Idso 11
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2011 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) Thoughts on Species' Abilities to Survive Rapid
Climate Change
http://co2science.org/articles/V14/N47/EDIT.php

In an Opinion article published in Global Change Biology, Hof et al. (2011) note that recent and projected climate
change is
assumed to be exceptional because of its supposedly unprecedented velocity; and they say that
this view has fuelled the prediction that CO2-induced global warming "will have
unprecedented effects on earth's biodiversity," primarily by driving many species to extinction, because of the
widespread belief that earth's plants and animals are unable to migrate poleward in latitude or upward in altitude fast enough to
avoid that deadly consequence, as well as the assumption that current climate change simply outpaces evolutionary adaptation.
But are these assumptions correct? The four biological researchers address this important question in stages. First,
"recent geophysical studies challenge the view that the speed of
they present evidence demonstrating that
current and projected climate change is unprecedented." In one such study, for example, they report that
Steffensen et al. (2008) showed that temperatures in Greenland warmed by up to 4C/year near the end of the last glacial period.
And they state that this change and other rapid climate changes during the Quaternary (the last
2.5 million years) did not cause a noticeable level of broad-scale, continent-wide extinctions
of species. Instead, they state that these rapid changes appeared to "primarily affect a few specific groups, mainly large
mammals (Koch and Barnosky, 2006) and European trees (Svenning, 2003)," with the result that "few taxa became extinct during
the Quaternary (Botkin et al., 2007)." So how were the bulk of earth's species able to survive what
many today believe to be unsurvivable? Hof et al. speculate that "species may have used
strategies other than shifting their geographical distributions or changing their genetic make-
up." They note, for example, that "intraspecific variation in physiological, phenological,
behavioral or morphological traits may have allowed species to cope with rapid climatic
changes within their ranges (Davis and Shaw, 2001; Nussey et al., 2005; Skelly et al., 2007)," based on "preexisting
genetic variation within and among different populations, which is an important prerequisite for adaptive responses," noting that
"both intraspecific phenotypic variability and individual phenotypic plasticity may allow for rapid adaptation without actual
microevolutionary changes." So do these observations imply that all is well with the planet's many and varied life forms? Not
necessarily, because, as Hof et al. continue, "habitat destruction and fragmentation, not climate change per se, are usually
identified as the most severe threat to biodiversity (Pimm and Raven, 2000; Stuart et al., 2004; Schipper et al., 2008)." And since
Hof et al. conclude that "species are probably more resilient to climatic changes than anticipated in most model assessments of the
effect of contemporary climate change on biodiversity," these several observations suggest to us that
addressing habitat destruction and fragmentation, rather than climate change, should take
center stage when it comes to striving to protect earth's biosphere, since the former more direct
and obvious effects of mankind are more destructive, more imminent and more easily
addressed than are the less direct, less obvious, less destructive, less imminent, and less easily
addressed effects of the burning of fossil fuels.

Robust peer reviewed evidence indicates ecosystems are

resilient

McDermott 09
 (Matthew McDermott, Good news: most ecosystems can
recover in one lifetime from human induced or natural
disturbance 2009,
www.treehugger.com/files/2009/05/most-ecosystems-can-
recover-from-disturbance-in-one-lifetime.php)
There's a reason the phrase "let nature take its course" exists: New research done at the Yale University
School of Forestry & Environmental Science reinforces the idea that ecosystems are quiet resilient and can
rebound from pollution and environmental degradation. Published in the journal PLoS ONE, the study shows
that most damaged ecosystems worldwide can recover within a single lifetime, if the source of pollution is
removed and restoration work done: Forests Take Longest of Ecosystems Studied The analysis found that
on average forest ecosystems can recover in 42 years, while in takes only about 10 years for the ocean
bottom to recover. If an area has seen multiple, interactive disturbances, it can take on average 56 years
for recovery. In general, most ecosystems take longer to recover from human-induced disturbances than
from natural events, such as hurricanes. To reach these recovery averages, the researchers looked at data
from peer-reviewed studies over the past 100 years on the rate of ecosystem recovery once the source of
pollution was removed. Interestingly, the researchers found that it appears that the rate at which an
ecosystem recovers may be independent of its degraded condition: Aquatic systems may recover more
quickly than, say, a forest, because the species and organisms that live in that ecosystem turn over more
rapidly than in the forest.
 AT: Ocean Biodiversity
Ocean ecosystem is resilient
A. deep-sea floor checks.
SOUTH BEND TRIBUNE, October 19, 95, p. A10

Rough estimates for the number of species on the deep-sea floor

have now soared to 10 million or even 100 million, hundreds of times
larger than the old projections of 200,000 species for all types of marine life.
The new figures also contrast starkly with the sum of the earth's plants,
animals and microbes that scientists have so far named, about 1.4 million
species in all. And they match the 10 million to 100 million that experts had
projected as possible totals for the number of terrestrial species. "It's
changing our whole view about biodiversity," said Dr. P. John D.
Lambshead, a marine biologist at the Natural History Museum in
London who studies the abundance of deep ocean species. "The quantity of
life we've found is incredible," he added in an interview. "All sorts of
ecologic theories that looked good, based on terrestrial models,
suddenly fall apart. We're having to change all our ideas."

B. massive size of oceans checks snowball and ensures

slow timeframe.
Bjrn Lomborg, Director, Environmental Assessment Institute, THE
SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST, 1 p. 189

But the oceans are so incredibly big that our impact on them has
been astoundingly insignificant - the oceans contain more than
1,000 billion liters of water. The UNs overall evaluation of the
oceans concludes: The open sea is still relatively clean. Low levels
of lead, synthetic compounds and artificial radionuclides , though
widely detectable, are biologically insignificant. Oil slicks and litter
are common among sea leans, but are, at present, a minor
consequences to communities of organisms living in ocean waters.

Oceans resilient
Kennedy 2 (Victor, Coastal and Marine Ecosystems and Global Climate
Change, http://www.pewclimate.org/projects/marine.cfm)

There is evidence that marine organisms and ecosystems are resilient to

environmental change. Steele (1991) hypothesized that the biological
components of marine systems are tightly coupled to physical factors,
allowing them to respond quickly to rapid environmental change and thus
rendering them ecologically adaptable. Some species also have wide genetic
variability throughout their range, which may allow for adaptation to climate change.
Alt causes doom solvency
Kunich 6 Professor of Law, Appalachian School of Law (John, Killing Our
Oceans, p 122-3, AG)

It is crucial, albeit perhaps counterintuitive, that we pay close attention to

land-based activities even as we focus on marine hotspots. There are
enormous threats to marine biodiversity that originate, not in the oceans, but
on dry land in the coastal zones of the world. Part of the reason these threats
are prevalent is that an estimated 67 percent of the entire global human
population lives either on the coast or within 37 miles of the coast, and that
percentage is increasing.14 These huge and growing populations often cause
overutilization of fishing and other resources in coastal areas, habitat
destruction and degradation, pollution (both organic and inorganic),
eutrophication and related issues such as pathogenic bacteria and algal
toxins, introduction of invasive species, watershed alteration, marine littering,
and other harms to the nearby marine regions .15 Given that so many key
marine centers of biodiversity reside in the near-coast coral reefs and
continental shelf areas, it is of tremendous importance that our legal
approach embrace appropriate controls over these land-based threats. Any
plan that shortsightedly and narrowly focuses too much on ocean-based activities
will, paradoxically, miss the boat.
 AT: Sea Level Rise
Sea level rise is junk sciencemodels empirically fail

Gupta et al 12
Climate Change Research Centre @ University of New South Wales, et al., 12
(Alexander Sen, Climate Drift in the CMIP3 Models, Journal of Climate Vol. 25, Issue 13, p.
4621-4640)

drift in temperature and salinity dominates 20C3M trends

As discussed above,
throughout most of the subsurface ocean. In the calculation of steric sea level
rise, a given temperature or salinity change will generally have less
effect at depth than near the surface. As the amount of expansion for a given change
in temperature or salinity is itself a function of temperature, salinity, and pressure (in particular warmer
changes in
water expands more than colder water for the same increase in heat content), the
temperature near the warm surface ocean have a proportionally
larger influence on steric sea level rise than temperature changes in the cold deeper
ocean (at least away from the wellmixed high-latitude regions). Nevertheless, given that the global
warming signal over the twentieth century is predominantly limited to the top few hundred meters, in most
regions, while ocean drift extends through the entire water column, drift still introduces
considerable bias into both regional and global sea level rise. The CMIP3
models show a broad range of estimates for steric sea level rise over
19502000 (Fig. 10a). The spread in the raw 20C3M estimates is considerable
(standard deviation ;0.76 mm yr21 with a multimodel mean of 0.45 mm yr21). In addition a number
of the models indicate a lowering of sea level over the period. For the
drift-corrected sea level rise (i.e., by using drift corrected temperature and salinity) values become
considerably more consistent (standard deviation ;0.36 mm yr21) and all models now indicate a rise in sea
level. While considerable intermodel variability still exists the driftcorrected multimodel mean (;0.59 mm
yr21) is consistent with the Domingues et al. (2008) observational estimate (0.526 0.08 mm yr21, for 0
700 m, 19502003). Figure 10a shows raw 20C3M trends and drift-corrected estimates of forced trend for
steric sea level rise, including multiple ensemble members where available; ensemble members for a
given model are generally initialized from the same PICNTRL experiment but from different points in time,
the drift, which is derived
usually separated by multiple years (Table 1). Nevertheless
from different time periods from a single PICNTRL simulation, is very
similar across ensemble members, suggesting that the linear drift approximation is valid
and that natural variability is not having a major effect on the drift estimates. Figure 10b shows a scatter of
the raw 20C3M trend magnitudes versus drift magnitudes. The drift-related error varies considerably
across the models from less than 10% to over 200% for the ECHAM4 model (see previous discussion of this
drift in temperature and salinity is
model). As with surface drift, subsurface
spatially heterogeneous and so can result in a larger bias on regional
scales. This is particularly important for assessing twentieth-century regional changes, where
the steric component of sea level rise is a major component of the total (e.g.,
Domingues et al. 2008). Figure 11 shows both the raw 20C3M and driftcorrected 19502000 trends for
three models (calculated from the surface to the bottom). A few models (e.g., MRI-CGCM2.3.2) have a well-
equilibrated preindustrial control throughout the ocean and so are essentially untroubled by drift. However,
most models are significantly affected in certain regions. In fact for
many models and regions the sign of the sea level trend is changed
by the spurious drift. For instance in the CSIRO Mk3.0 model the steric sea level anomaly over
much of the tropics and midlatitudes, estimated from the raw 20C3M temperature and salinity, changes
sign once the drift is taken into account.
 AT: Resource Wars
Resource shortages dont cause wars, surplus does
empirically proven

Salehyan 07
(Idean Salehyan is a Professor of Political Science at the
University of North Texas, 8/14/07, The New Myth About
Climate Change Corrupt, tyrannical governmentsnot
changes in the Earths climatewill be to blame for the
coming resource wars
foreignpolicy.com/articles/2007/08/13/the_new_myth_abou
t_climate_change)

First, aside from a few anecdotes, there is little systematic empirical evidence that resource scarcity and
changing environmental conditions lead to conflict. In fact, several studies have shown that an
abundance of natural resources is more likely to contribute to conflict . Moreover, even as the planet has
warmed, the number of civil wars and insurgencies has decreased dramatically. Data collected by researchers at Uppsala University
and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo shows a steep decline in the number of armed conflicts around the world. Between
1989 and 2002, some 100 armed conflicts came to an end, including the wars in Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Cambodia. If global
warming causes conflict, we should not be witnessing this downward trend. Furthermore, if famine and drought led to the crisis in
Darfur, why have scores of environmental catastrophes failed to set off armed conflict elsewhere? For instance, the U.N. World Food
Programme warns that 5 million people in Malawi have been experiencing chronic food shortages for several years. But famine-
wracked Malawi has yet to experience a major civil war. Similarly, the Asian tsunami in 2004 killed hundreds of thousands of people,
generated millions of environmental refugees, and led to severe shortages of shelter, food, clean water, and electricity. Yet the tsunami,
one of the most extreme catastrophes in recent history, did not lead to an outbreak of resource wars. Clearly then, there is
much more to armed conflict than resource scarcity and natural disasters.

Turn resource scarcity solves conflict, no resource wars

Dinar 11
(Shlomi, 8/12/11, Beyond Resource Wars
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?
ttype=2&tid=12531)
This volume asserts that while resource scarcity and environmental degradation may well constitute sources
of conflict, political dispute, and mismanagement between states, they may also be the impetus for coop-
eration, coordination, and negotiation between them. While the volume recognizes both sides of the
resource scarcity and environmental degra- dation coin, the cooperative relationship is of particular interest
and scrutiny. Indeed, conflict frequently motivates cooperation, and resource scarcity and environmental
degradation are important elements of this relationship. Generally, the authors in this volume maintain that
increasing scarcity and degradation induce cooperation across states. To that Solve Extent, we provide a
different perspective than that of the resource wars argument made with regard to particular natural
resources such as oil, freshwater, minerals, and fisheries. Yet beyond this claim, the volume systematically
explores the intricacies and nuances of this scarcity and degradation contention across a set of additional
resources and environmental prob- lems, which may merely motivate political conflicts such as climate
change, ozone depletion, oceans pollution, transboundary air pollution, and biodiversity conservation. In
particular, and in line with the collec- tive action school, the volume investigates the notion that as scarcity
and degradation worsen, interstate cooperation becomes difficult to achieve since it may be too costly to
manage the degradation or there is simply too little of the resource to share (Ostrom 2001). Similarly, low
levels of scarcity may depress cooperation as there is less urgency to organize and coordinate. Scarcity and
degradation levels, in other words, should matter in explaining the intensity of cooperation.
 AT: Arctic War
Russia will cooperate on arctic they dont want conflict
and will work through international organizations
Shuster 10
(Simon Shuster, The Race for Arctic Oil: Is Russia Ready
to Share? Sept. 27, 2010,
www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2021644,00.html
#ixzz1x4fGS8Fk)
Russia's leaders have never been coy about their designs on the Arctic. In recent years, their message has been clear: We want a a big,
fat slice of it, including the seas of oil and gas underneath, and we are ready to defend our claim. The country expressed its intentions
blatantly in August 2007, when a Russian lawmaker planted a flag on the seabed at the top of the world, and a year later, when
President Dmitri Medvedev told his top generals at a meeting that defending Russia's interests in the Arctic was nothing less than
"their direct duty to posterity." Which is why so many of the world's Arctic decisionmakers were amazed last week when they were
called to a forum in Moscow to hear a very different message. Russia wants the Arctic to be "a zone of peace and
cooperation," Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told them. But could he possibly be serious? Many observers, including a large
portion of the guests at the Sept. 23 forum, say the rhetoric is welcome, but the world will have to wait and see. For now, no one is
rushing to dismantle the huge military capacities all of the Arctic countries the U.S., Canada, Denmark,
Norway (all members of NATO) and Russia have been building north of the Arctic Circle. Ebbing and swelling over the past
half-century, the intensity of this militarization has largely depended on Russia's assertiveness over the years. (See pictures of the
Arctic.) It began, of course, at the height of the Cold War, when the Arctic was studded with more nuclear weapons than
virtually any other part of the world. Then, in the late 1980s, as the Soviet Empire approached its collapse, the military build-up
tapered off and began to decline after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made his famous Murmansk speech in October 1987 in which
he said the Arctic should become "a zone of peace and fruitful cooperation." When Gorbachev used that phrase, it meant something
very different from how Putin used it last week. By the end of the 1980s, Russia was financially incapable of waging an arms race in
the polar regions. With no more threat from the Russians, the four other Arctic powers began to let their northern militaries lapse.
Attitudes changed after 2001, when soaring oil prices put jets beneath the Russian economy and Putin's government began allocating
billions to its Arctic infrastructure. Canada and other Arctic states responded with a greater focus on military spending in the north. At
the same time, it became obvious to everyone that the polar ice caps were melting fast and the potential for drilling for and shipping
oil and gas in the Arctic would soon be considerable. The northern powers were suddenly facing the last great energy frontier, with a
quarter of the world's untapped reserves in the Arctic more than 400 billion bbl. of oil and oil-equivalent natural gas and the
scramble to claim it began. (See pictures of the rise and fall of Gorbachev.) By the end of 2014, the U.N. will receive
competing claims for parts of the Arctic from Canada, Denmark and Russia , which are using seabed
samples to try to prove that the oil-rich regions are extensions of their continental shelves and therefore belong to them. But even
though the U.N. will rule on whether the science behind these claims is accurate (it already rejected a
Russian claim in 2001 based on poor evidence), it is not the job of the U.N. to delineate borders . That will be up to
the countries themselves, and that is where things might get sticky. A hopeful sign on this front came on Sept. 15, when Russia and
Norway settled an Arctic border dispute that had been festering for four decades. The agreement came
in the lead-up to last week's forum in Moscow, "The Arctic Territory of Dialogue," and was seen as part of Russia's push to
shed its image as the Arctic aggressor. "We're at a transition," says Paul Berkman, professor of Arctic Ocean geopolitics
at the University of Cambridge. "Russia, from the perspective of the West, had been the difficult entity and is now
inviting the international community to participate." The reasoning behind Russia's change of tune is both
pragmatic and political. A gentler approach to Arctic policy is in line with Medvedev's broader effort to win over the West, as
symbolized by his budding friendship with President Obama. (Remember the french fries they shared at Ray's Hell Burger in June?)
And as Russia realizes, exploiting the energy wealth of the Arctic will be much harder if the region
gets mired in conflict. "In the absence of stability, none of the energy opportunities are possible," says Berkman.
 AT: Crop Yields
Cuts in crop yields due to warming are negligible

Gillis 11
(Environmental specialist staff writer for the New York
Times) 2011 (Justin, Global Warming Reduces Expected
Yields of Harvests in Some Countries, Study Says, May 5,
2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/science/earth/06war
ming.html)

Some countries saw small gains from the temperature increases , however. And in all countries, the
extra carbon dioxide that humans are pumping into the air acted as a fertilizer that encouraged plant
growth, offsetting some of the losses from rising temperatures caused by that same greenhouse gas.
Consequently, the studys authors found that when the gains in some countries were weighed against the
losses in others, the overall global effect of climate change has been small so far: losses of a
few percentage points for wheat and corn from what they would have been without climate
change. The overall impact on production of rice and soybeans was negligible, with gains in some regions
entirely offsetting losses in others.
 AT: Weather = War
Intense weather doesn't cause violence - post-hoc fallacy
Kenny 11
(Charles Kenny, senior fellow at the Center for Global
Development, a Schwartz fellow at the New America
Foundation, 8/29/12, "Cloudy with a chance of
insurgency," Foreign Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/29/cloudy_
with_a_chance_of_insurgency?page=0,1)
But is the relationship between climate and violence really that clear? First off, even when rainfall
and temperature patterns were directly included in Hsiang and colleague's statistical analysis, the
association between El Nio years and civil violence remained. In other words, whatever the
impact of El Nio on violence, it apparently isn't connected to its effect on precipitation levels or high
temperatures in tropical countries. Perhaps, the paper suggests, El Nio's impact on violence is due to the
timing of the rainfall, or altered wind patterns, or humidity, or cloud cover -- but those theories
are (so far) untested. And these results regarding temperature and precipitation should come as
no surprise given earlier studies on the climate-conflict link . In 2010, Halvard Buhaug, a researcher at
the Peace Research Institute Oslo, re-examined Burke's earlier study of weather and war in Africa and
concluded that it didn't stand up to further scrutiny. With more data, he argued, the link between
rainfall, temperature, and violence disappeared -- a point accepted by Burke and his colleagues. Second,
Hsiang and his co-authors are careful to clarify that they don't think El Nio caused warfare, but rather
that it was a contributing factor -- that in many cases, conflicts that would have broken out anyway
may have occurred earlier owing to the effects of the El Nio cycle. That fits with the conclusions of a 2008 review
of the evidence linking climate to conflict in the Journal of Peace Research, which suggested that any link is
contingent on a range of factors from governance through wealth to land-use patterns and
"claims of environmental determinism leading seamlessly from climate change to open
warfare are suspect." Indeed, saying the weather is responsible for civil war is like saying drought is responsible for
famine. At most, weather can be an additional stressor to an environment already made combustible by human
activities. For example, experts on the Shining Path insurgency in Peru or the Sudanese conflict might be surprised at the
idea that these two conflicts are seen as prime examples of the impact of Pacific weather patterns on civil war, given that
both have a whole range of causes (including poverty, twisted ideology, and a cruel and incompetent government and
military response in the case of the Shining Path).

Geopolitical factors overwhelm

Kenny 11
(Charles Kenny, senior fellow at the Center for Global
Development, a Schwartz fellow at the New America
Foundation, 8/29/12, "Cloudy with a chance of
insurgency," Foreign Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/29/cloudy_
with_a_chance_of_insurgency?page=0,1)
Second, the analysis points to the relative importance of factors like geopolitics in explaining the outbreak of
violence. The second-highest risk of civil war between 1950 and 2004, according to the paper, was in 1989 -- a
La Nia year -- part of a dramatic peak in war risk that continued until 1994, and has gone unmatched before or
since. That speaks to the impact of the end of the Cold War on civil conflict. The good news is that in the
period since the mid-1990s, conflict risk has been on the decline as global cooperation to settle
disputes has been on the rise. Even if climate cycles are a short-term influence on conflict, the
long-term trends are dominated by factors other than the weather. The argument that we should reduce
greenhouse gas emissions to slow climate change is beyond reasonable dispute -- but that it will make for a more pacific
world is yet to be demonstrated.
 AT: Ice Caps Melting
No tipping pointthe aff reverses current warming
causes polar ice to come back; kills shipping lanes

Science Daily 11
Science Daily Aug. 18, 2011; Polar Ice Caps Can Recover from Warmer Climate-Induced
Melting, Study Shows; http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110817194235.htm;

ScienceDaily (Aug. 18, 2011) A growing body of recent research indicates that, in Earth's warming climate, there
is no "tipping point," or threshold warm temperature, beyond which polar sea ice cannot
recover if temperatures come back down. New University of Washington research indicates that even if Earth
warmed enough to melt all polar sea ice, the ice could recover if the planet cooled again. In
recent years scientists have closely monitored the shrinking area of the Arctic covered by sea ice in warmer summer months , a
development that has created new shipping lanes but also raised concerns about humans living
in the region and the survival of species such as polar bears . In the new research, scientists used one of two
computer-generated global climate models that accurately reflect the rate of sea-ice loss under current climate conditions, a model
so sensitive to warming that it projects the complete loss of September Arctic sea ice by the middle of this century. However, the
model takes several more centuries of warming to completely lose winter sea ice, and doing so
required carbon dioxide levels to be gradually raised to a level nearly nine times greater than
today. When the model's carbon dioxide levels then were gradually reduced, temperatures slowly came down and the sea ice
eventually returned. "We expected the sea ice to be completely gone in winter at four times the current level of carbon dioxide but
we had to raise it by more than eight times," said Cecilia Bitz, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences. "All that
carbon dioxide made a very, very warm planet. It was about 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees
Fahrenheit) warmer than it is now, which caused the Arctic to be completely free of sea ice in
winter."
 AT: Drought
Warming doesnt cause extreme weather or drought

Taylor 12
(Managing editor of Environment & Climate News, senior
fellow at The Heartland Institute, bachelors degree from
Dartmouth College, law degree from Syracuse University
College of Law) 2012 (John M., Climate Change Weekly:
Global Warming Skeptics More Knowledgeable than
Alarmists, June 1, 2012,
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-
article/2012/06/01/climate-change-weekly-global-
warming-skeptics-more-knowledgeable-alarmi)
NOAA DATA SHOW NO INCREASE IN TORNADOES Federal government data show no increase
in tornadoes in recent decades as the planet has warmed. According to the data, tornado activity has
declined significantly during the past 40 years, contradicting alarmist assertions that global warming is
causing more extreme weather events. NO LINK BETWEEN GLOBAL WARMING AND
SOUTHWEST U.S. DROUGHTS Global warming models predict lower drought stress in the U.S.
Southwest, which is consistent with real-world data showing global soil moisture has improved as the
planet has warmed. While the U.S. Southwest has experienced above-average drought in recent years, a
new study shows global warming is not to blame.

Warming does not cause greater frequency or severity of

droughts

Idso 11
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2011 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) Droughts of Southwestern North America: Past
and Present
http://co2science.org/articles/V14/N41/EDIT.php
The world's climate alarmists claim that rising temperatures will bring ever worse droughts to
precipitation-deficient regions of the earth. One such region is Southwest North America, for which Woodhouse et al.
(2010) developed a 1200-year history of drought that allowed them to compare recent droughts with those of prior centuries; and in
spite of the fact that the warmth of the last few decades is said by alarmists to have been
unprecedented over the past millennium or more, the review and analysis presented by the five
U.S. researchers demonstrates that major 20th century droughts "pale in comparison to droughts
documented in paleoclimatic records over the past two millennia (Cook et al., 2009)," which suggests that
recent temperatures have not been unprecedented. Presenting a little more detail, Woodhouse et al. report that "the medieval period,
~AD 900-1300," was "a period of extensive and persistent aridity over western North America," with paleoclimatic evidence
suggesting that drought in the mid-12th century (AD 1146-1155) "far exceeded the severity, duration, and extent of subsequent
droughts," including the 21st century drought of 2000-2009; and they also state that the AD 1146-1155 period was "anomalously
warm," which would seem to confirm the climate-alarmist contention that greater warmth leads to greater droughts. However, the
five scientists contend that temperature was "almost certainly higher during the 21st century
drought," which again contradicts the climate-alarmist claim that greater warmth translates into
greater drought in precipitation-deficient regions of the earth. These observations do little to advance the
climate-alarmist cause; for in order for their claim that rising temperatures promote more severe and expansive droughts to be correct,
the peak warmth of the Medieval Warm Period would have had to have been greater than the Current Warm Period has been to date;
but that situation is in conflict with their even more basic claim that recent temperatures have been unprecedented compared to those
of the prior millennium or two.

No flooding
Idso et. al 11
(Craig, Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, CO2 Magazine, Robert Carter, paleontologist,
stratiagrapher, geologist, research fellow at James Cook
Univ., Fred Singer, Environmental Science @ UVA, Susan
Crockford, PhD Anthropology @ Victoria, Joseph D'Aleo,
Executive Director of ICECAP, Co-Chief Meteorologist,
Indur Goklany, founded the Electronic Journal of
Sustainable Development, Sherwood Idso, president of
the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, Madhav Khandekarhas, PhD, Editorial Board
Member of natural hazards, AR4 Climate Assessment,
Anthony Lupo, PhD, Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric
Sciences at Mizzou - Columbia, Willie Soon, PhD, Mitch
Taylor, Geography @ Lakehead Univ., "Climate Change
Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report," NIPCC Rport
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterimreport.pdf )

The IPCC claims flooding has become more frequent and severe in response to twentieth
century global warming. But it is important to establish whether floods are truly becoming more frequent or severe, and
whether other factors might be behind such trends if they in fact exist. In this section we highlight studies addressing both questions.
To test for long-term changes in flood magnitudes and frequencies in the Mississippi River system of the United States, Pinter et al.
(2008) constructed a hydrologic database consisting of data from 26 rated stations (with both stage and discharge measurements)
and 40 stage-only stations.Then, to help quantify changes in flood levels at each station in response to construction of wing dikes,
bendway weirs, meander cutoffs, navigational dams, bridges, and other modifications,they put together a geospatial database
consisting of the locations, emplacement dates, and physical characteristics of over 15,000 structural features constructed along the
study rivers over the past 100150 years.As a result of these operations, Pinter et al. write, significant climate- and/or
land use-driven increases in flow were detected, but they indicate the largest and most
pervasive contributors to increased flooding on the Mississippi River system were wing dikes
and related navigational structures, followed by progressive levee construction .In discussing the
implications of their findings, Pinter et al. write, the navigable rivers of the Mississippi system have been intensively engineered,
and some of these modifications are associated with large decreases in the rivers capacity to convey flood flows.Hence, it would
appear man has indeed been responsible for the majority of the increased flooding of the rivers of
the Mississippi system over the past century or so, but not in the way suggested by the IPCC.
The question that needs addressing by the regions inhabitants has nothing to do with CO2 and everything to do with
how to balance the local benefits of river engineering against the potential for large-scale flood magnification.In a study designed
to determine the environmental origins of extreme flooding events throughout the southwestern United States, Ely (1997) wrote,
paleoflood records from nineteen rivers in Arizona and southern Utah, including over 150 radiocarbon dates and evidence of over
250 flood deposits, were combined to identify regional variations in the frequency of extreme floods, and that information was
then compared with paleoclimatic data to determine how the temporal and spatial patterns in the occurrence of floods reflect the
prevailing climate.The results of this comparison indicated long-term variations in the frequency of extreme
floods over the Holocene are related to changes in the climate and prevailing large-scale atmospheric
circulation patterns that affect the conditions conducive to extreme flood-generating storms in
each region.These changes, in Elys view, are very plausibly related to global-scale changes in the climate system.With
respect to the Colorado River watershed, which integrates a large portion of the interior western United States, she writes, the
largest floods tend to be from spring snowmelt after winters of heavy snow accumulation in the mountains of Utah, western
Colorado, and northern New Mexico,such as occurred with the cluster of floods from 5 to 3.6 ka,which occurred in conjunction
with glacial advances in mountain ranges throughout the western United Statesduring the cool, wet period immediately
following the warm mid-Holocene.The frequency of extreme floods also increased during the early and middle portions of the first
millennium AD, many of which coincided with glacial advances and cool, moist conditions both in the western U.S. and globally.
Then came a sharp drop in the frequency of large floods in the southwest from AD 1100-1300,which corresponded, in her words,
to the widespread Medieval Warm Period, which was first noted in European historical records.With the advent of the Little Ice
Age, however, there was another substantial jump in the number of floods in the southwestern U.S.,which was associated with
a switch to glacial advances, high lake levels, and cooler, wetter conditions.Distilling her findings down to a single succinct
statement and speaking specifically of the southwestern United States, Ely writes, global warm periods, such as
the Medieval Warm Period, are times of dramatic decreases in the number of high-magnitude
floods in this region[emphasis added].

No flood

Idso et. al 11
(Craig, Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, CO2 Magazine, Robert Carter, paleontologist,
stratiagrapher, geologist, research fellow at James Cook
Univ., Fred Singer, Environmental Science @ UVA, Susan
Crockford, PhD Anthropology @ Victoria, Joseph D'Aleo,
Executive Director of ICECAP, Co-Chief Meteorologist,
Indur Goklany, founded the Electronic Journal of
Sustainable Development, Sherwood Idso, president of
the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, Madhav Khandekarhas, PhD, Editorial Board
Member of natural hazards, AR4 Climate Assessment,
Anthony Lupo, PhD, Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric
Sciences at Mizzou - Columbia, Willie Soon, PhD, Mitch
Taylor, Geography @ Lakehead Univ., "Climate Change
Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report," NIPCC Rport
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterim
report.pdf
Looking at the other side of the continent, Villarini and Smith (2010) examined the distribution of flood peaks for the
eastern United States using annual maximum flood peak records from 572 U.S. Geological Survey stream gaging stations with at
least 75 years of observations.This work revealed, in general, the largest flood magnitudes are concentrated in the mountainous
central Appalachians and the smallest flood peaks are concentrated along the lowgradient Coastal Plain and in the northeastern United
States.They also found landfalling tropical cyclones play an important role in the mixture of flood generating mechanisms, with
the frequency of tropical cyclone floods exhibiting large spatial heterogeneity over the region.They additionally write, warm
season thunderstorm systems during the peak of the warm season and winter-spring extratropical systems contribute in complex
fashion to the spatial mixture of flood frequency over the eastern United States.Of greater interest to the climate change debate,
however, were their more basic findings: (1) only a small fraction of stations exhibited significant
linear trends, (2) for those stations with trends, there was a split between increasing and
decreasing trends, and (3) no spatial structure was found for stations exhibiting trends. Thus
they concluded, (4) there is little indication that human-induced climate change has resulted
in increasing flood magnitudes for the eastern United States.
No droughts

Idso et. al 11
(Craig, Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, CO2 Magazine, Robert Carter, paleontologist,
stratiagrapher, geologist, research fellow at James Cook
Univ., Fred Singer, Environmental Science @ UVA, Susan
Crockford, PhD Anthropology @ Victoria, Joseph D'Aleo,
Executive Director of ICECAP, Co-Chief Meteorologist,
Indur Goklany, founded the Electronic Journal of
Sustainable Development, Sherwood Idso, president of
the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, Madhav Khandekarhas, PhD, Editorial Board
Member of natural hazards, AR4 Climate Assessment,
Anthony Lupo, PhD, Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric
Sciences at Mizzou - Columbia, Willie Soon, PhD, Mitch
Taylor, Geography @ Lakehead Univ., "Climate Change
Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report," NIPCC Rport
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterim
report.pdf)
As in the case of floods, the IPCC foresees drought as one of the many dangers of CO2-induced global warming. An examination of
the pertinent scientific literature, however, demonstrates droughts are not becoming more frequent, more severe,
or longerlasting. Springer et al. (2008) constructed a multidecadalscale history of east-central North
Americas hydroclimate over the past 7,000 years , based on Sr/Ca ratios and 13 C data obtained from a
stalagmite in West Virginia, USA. Their results indicated the presence of seven significant mid- to late-
Holocene droughts that correlate with cooling of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as part of the
North Atlantic Ocean ice-rafted debris [IRD] cycle, which has been linked to the solar irradiance cycle,as demonstrated by Bond et
al. (1997, 2001). In addition, they found the Sr/Ca and 13 C time series display periodicities of ~200 and ~500 years,and the
~200-year periodicity is consistent with the de Vries (Suess) solar irradiance cycle,and that the ~500-year periodicity is likely a
harmonic of the IRD oscillations.They also reported cross-spectral analysis of the Sr/Ca and IRD time series yields statistically
significant coherencies at periodicities of 455 and 715 years,noting the latter values are very similar to the second (725-years)
and third (480- years) harmonics of the 1450 500-years IRD periodicity. The five researchers concluded these findings
corroborate works indicating that millennial-scale solar-forcing is responsible for droughts and ecosystem changes in central and
eastern North America (Viau et al., 2002; Willard et al., 2005; Denniston et al., 2007)and that their high-resolution time series
provide much stronger evidence in favor of solar-forcing of North American drought by yielding unambiguous spectral analysis
results.

Greenhouse gases dont affect droughts

Idso et. al 11
(Craig, Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, CO2 Magazine, Robert Carter, paleontologist,
stratiagrapher, geologist, research fellow at James Cook
Univ., Fred Singer, Environmental Science @ UVA, Susan
Crockford, PhD Anthropology @ Victoria, Joseph D'Aleo,
Executive Director of ICECAP, Co-Chief Meteorologist,
Indur Goklany, founded the Electronic Journal of
Sustainable Development, Sherwood Idso, president of
the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, Madhav Khandekarhas, PhD, Editorial Board
Member of natural hazards, AR4 Climate Assessment,
Anthony Lupo, PhD, Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric
Sciences at Mizzou - Columbia, Willie Soon, PhD, Mitch
Taylor, Geography @ Lakehead Univ., "Climate Change
Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report," NIPCC Rport
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterim
report.pdf)

Cook et al. (2009) note IPCC Assessment Report 4 model projections suggest
Writing in the Journal of Quaternary Science,
that the subtropical dry zones of the world will both dry and expand poleward in the future due
to greenhouse warming and the US southwest is particularly vulnerable in this regard and model projections
indicate a progressive drying there out to the end of the 21st century. They then note the USA has been
in a state of drought over much of the West for about 10 years now,but while severe, this turn of the century drought has not yet
clearly exceeded the severity of two exceptional droughts in the 20th century.Therefore, they conclude, while the coincidence
between the turn of the century drought and projected drying in the Southwest is cause for concern, it is premature to claim that the
model projections are correct. We begin to understand this fact when we compare the turn-of-the-century-drought with the two
exceptional droughtsthat preceded it by a few decades. Based on gridded instrumental Palmer Drought Severity indices for tree-
ring reconstruction that extend back to 1900, Cook et al. calculated the turn-of-the-century drought had its greatest Drought Area
Index value of 59 percent in the year 2002, whereas the Great Plains/Southwest drought covered 62 percent of the United States in
its peak year of 1954 and the Dust Bowl drought covered 77 percent of the United States in 1934. In terms of drought duration,
things are not quite as clear. Stahle et al. (2007) estimated the first two droughts lasted for 12 and 14 years, respectively; Seager
et al. (2005) estimated them to have lasted for eight and ten years; and Andreadis et al. (2005) estimated periods of seven and
eight years. That yields means of nine and 11 years for the two exceptional droughts, compared to ten or so years for the turn-of-
the-century drought. This, too, makes the latter drought not unprecedented compared with those that occurred in the twentieth
century. Real clarity, however, comes when the turn-ofthe-century drought is compared to droughts of the prior millennium. Cook et
al. write, perhaps the most famous example is the Great Drouth [sic] of AD 12761299 described by A.E. Douglass (1929,
1935).This 24-year drought was eclipsed by the 38- year drought found by Weakley (1965) to have occurred in Nebraska from AD
1276 to 1313, which Cook et al. say may have been a more prolonged northerly extension of the Great Drouth.But even these
multi-decade droughts pale in comparison with the two extraordinary droughts discovered by Stine (1994) in California that lasted
more than two centuries before AD 1112 and more than 140 years before AD 1350.Each of these megadroughts, as Cook et
al. describe them, occurred, in their words, in the so-called Medieval Warm Period.They add, all of this happened prior
to the strong greenhouse gas warming that began with the Industrial Revolution .In further ruminating
about these facts in the Conclusions and Recommendationssection of their paper, Cook et al. again state the medieval
megadroughts occurred without any need for enhanced radiative forcing due to anthropogenic
greenhouse gas forcingbecause, of course, there was none at that timeand therefore, they say, there is no
guarantee that the response of the climate system to greenhouse gas forcing will result in
megadroughts of the kind experienced by North America in the past.
 AT: War
Climate change related disasters do not cause war

Lujala 12
(Paavi, Department of Economics & Department of
Geography NTNU) 2012 Climate-related natural disasters,
economic growth, and armed civil conflict
http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/49/1/147.full
By using ordinary least squares (OLS) and panel data on climate-related disasters and short-run economic growth,2 we confirm that
climate-related disasters have a negative impact on growth. However , our analysis of disaster data and
conflict onset shows that climate-related natural disasters do not have any direct effect on conflict onset .
We then instrument economic growth using our disaster measure in a two-stage least squares (2SLS) analysis to study whether
climate-related disasters have an indirect effect on conflict onset via slowdown in economic growth. By doing this, we also address the
simultaneity problem between income and conflict: we recognize that slow and negative economic growth may
cause conflict, but also that an approaching conflict may lead to slow growth, for example, when
extractive industries withdraw from unstable countries that are on the brink of sliding into
conflict. Instrumenting growth using climatic disasters allows us to impose exogenous variation
in growth. However, we do not find any evidence that economic shocks caused by climate-related
disasters have an effect on conflict onset . This result differs from the negative causal link between economic growth
and conflict found in other studies, including Collier & Hoeffler (2004) and Miguel, Satyanath & Sergenti (2004). However, our
findings are similar to those in the recent cross-country study by Ciccone (2011).

Climate change does not lead to conflict- best model

Koubi et al 12
Vally Koubi, Thomas Bernauer, Anna Kalbhenn, Gabriele
Spilker, Center for Comparative and International Studies
2012 Climate variability, economic growth, and civil
conflict http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/49/1/113.full

human-induced changes in the global

Whether increasing local or regional climate variability due to large-scale,
atmosphere is associated with an increased risk of violent conflict remains contested , both among
policymakers and in academic circles. In this article we contribute in two ways to the existing literature on the climate changeconflict
nexus. First, we conceptualize this nexus in terms of a two-stage process in which climatic variability affects the probability of violent
intrastate conflict via climate effects on economic growth, and where these effects may be contingent on political system
characteristics. Second, we employ a measure of climatic variability that has advantages over those used
in the existing literature, primarily because it takes into account the adaptation of economic
activity to persistent climatic changes. Our results suggest that climate variability, measured as
deviations in temperature and precipitation from their past, long-run levels (a 30-year moving
average), does not affect violent intrastate conflict through economic growth. This finding is
important because the causal pathway leading from climate variability via (deteriorating)
economic growth to conflict is a key part of most theoretical models of the climateconflict
nexus. While our empirical results provide no support for the climate changeeconomic growthconflict pathway, further research is
required before we can move towards closure of the debate. In particular, it would be very useful to improve on existing indicators of
climatic variability, adaptation to climate variability, and relevant (from the viewpoint of violent conflict) economic performance. For
instance, in the absence of appropriate indicators for adaptation it remains difficult to estimate the effect of climatic variability on
economic performance and hence on the probability of violent conflict.
AT: Resource Wars
 No resource conflict
Buckland 7
Benjamin, Research Associate @ Centre for Applied Studies in International
Negotiations, A Climate of War? Stopping the Securitisation of Global Climate
Change A contribution to contemporary debates, June, Scholar
Since the 1970s there have been calls for a broader security framework encompassing
environmental issues. As early as 1971 Richard Falk was talking about possible links between
environment and security, although climate change was not yet in the frame. 4 Falk was followed in
the 1980s by scholars such as Essam El Hinnawi, who first introduced the term environmental
refugee, and in 1987 by the landmark Report of the World Commission on Environment and
Development, the Brundtland Report. 5 Again, not mentioning climate change, the Brundtland
Report clearly enunciated links between environmental issues and dangers for human security.
These studies form a backdrop to the explosion of interest in the links between the environment
and violent conflict that occurred at the end of the Cold War in 1989-91. As national security
institutions sought a new raison dtre, scholars like Thomas Homer-Dixon and his Toronto School,
Paul Erlich, Rob Swart, and Robert Kaplan gained early traction for their ideas about resource
scarcity leading to conflict. 6 Often dubbed Neo-Malthusians, due to the intellectual debt owed to
the English economist and clergyman Thomas Malthus who, in 1798, argued that exponential
population growth combined with linear growth in food output would eventually lead to conflict, war
and epidemic, these thinkers moved beyond food scarcity to add a whole host of environmental
issues to those linked with conflict. Talking about supply and demand-induced scarcity as well as
inequity (so-called structural scarcity), Homer-Dixon and others were quick to identify the links
between their earlier work and the new threat of climate change that was beginning to be
enunciated by the regular Assessment Reports of the UNs influential Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. 7 As Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall two leading proponents of this school of
thought made clear: Violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by
abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat than we are
accustomed to today. Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for
natural resources such as energy, food and water. 8 These warnings were taken up
in-turn by governments and other actors, perhaps most notably by the Pentagon in its
above mentioned report of 2003, which sketched an apocalyptic scenario of runaway climate
change and war. More recently still, the ongoing conflict in Sudans Darfur region has been
increasingly mentioned as the first of the future climate change wars. First speculated about by
Michael Byers and Nick Dragojlovic in a 2004 editorial in the Human Security Bulletin, this idea has
frequently popped up in the popular press ever since. 9 Garnering less publicity were early
defectors from the climate change and conflict school described above. Most notable is perhaps the
State Failure Taskforce, set up in 1994 by the then United States (US) Vice-President Al Gore to look
Against expectations, the
for environmental and political causes of state failure.
Taskforce found no evidence for a link between environmental
degradation and violent conflict, conclusions which are cogent
with a number of contemporary and more recent studies. A
further blow to the environment and conflict link suggested by
the Neo-Malthusian thinkers cited above has come in the form
of criticism which directly attacks their research design. Perhaps
most persuasive among these attacks is the contention that many of the case studies
used to support the Neo-Malthusian argument are selected on
the dependent variable, that is to say, they treat only cases in
which environmental degradation and conflict are both present .
Without more comprehensive data, it is argued, their usefulness is reduced to
that of well-researched anecdotes interesting but hardly predictive
of conflict elsewhere. 10 The second major criticism is that Neo-Malthusian
models of conflict are underspecified. In other words, they offer
little indication as to which variables may or may not be
important in triggering or prolonging conflict they are simply too
elaborate to do so. 11 Alternative models and schools of thought (such as that elaborated by the
State Failure Taskforce above and the systematic 1998 study of Hague and Ellingsen) emphasise
the fact that, while there is consensus on several factors causing conflict, there are many others for
 which direct causal links simply do not exist. 12 With regard to the former category, factors
generally agreed to influence the likelihood of intrastate conflict include: levels of economic
development, history of conflict and the existence of either ethnic dominance or ethnic polarisation.
In the second category, factors that are likely to increase the risk of conflict but that do not act as
independent variables are: political instability, the time elapsed since independence, dependency
on natural resources, large population size and rough terrain. 13 Turning to interstate conflict, the
factors on which there is general consensus include: geographical proximity, non-democratic
regimes, relative power and a history of conflict. 14 What is clear from these two sets of variables is
thatenvironmental factors are, at best, of secondary importance. 15
Some scholars even go so far as to suggest that resource
scarcity may have precisely the opposite effect from that
predicted by proponents of Neo-Malthusianism. An example of this is a
recent study Aaron T. Wolf which suggests that shared freshwater resources may in
fact lead to greater cooperation between riparian states. 16 This
conclusion is supported by data from the BAR Project Database which lists 1831 water- related
events (either conflict or cooperation) between riparian states. Of these, 1228 are examples of
cooperation and many of the others are small-scale disputes rather than full-blown armed conflict.
While Wolfs study, and the many criticisms cited above, mean that the expectations of the Neo-
Malthusians are largely unsubstantiated, it does not, of course, immediately follow that climate
change will not lead to any conflict at all. Indeed, it is quite plausible that some of the more dire
climate change scenarios could result in some instances of conflict. 17 As Clionadh Raleigh and
Henrik Urdal point out, while it is generally agreed that the resource scarcity and
conflict link has been overstated, few would agree that there are no links at all. 18
What is important, and what we argue in this paper, is that claims about climate change leading to
conflict are highly speculative. 19 As Raleigh and Urdal again make clear: There is every reason to
Existing environment
be cautious about the links between climate change and conflict.
and conflict research has simply not produced sufficient
evidence to enable us to make anything but highly speculative
claims about the effects of climate change and violent conflict. 20 As we will see in the
following sections, it is a dramatic erosion of human security and not the risk of violent conflict that
is the real threat of climate change.

Warming promotes peace history and multiple studies

prove

Chen et al 11
Liang Chen et al Karin A.F. Zonnevelda, b, Gerard J.M.
Versteegh Fachbereich Geowissenschaften, Universitt
Bremen October 2011, Short term climate variability
during Roman Classical Period in the eastern
Mediterranean
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379111003039

To date, there have been a lot of studies devoted to understand the relationship between climate
change and ancient civilization. Most of these investigations suggest that cooling and drying climate might have played a
significant role in the collapse of cultures as it might have caused crop failure and the enhancement of the occurrence of cultural
conflicts caused by adverse environmentalconditions (e.g. [Hodell et al., 1995], [Binford et al., 1997], [Haug et al., 2003] and
[Yancheva et al., 2007]). Our study shows that the investigated part of the Roman Period might have
been warmer than the 20th century, and it is interesting to note that our study interval is more or
less the same as the Pax Romana (27 BC to 180 AD), which denotes a long period of relative peace (Gibbon
and Saunders, 2001). We speculate that the booming period Pax Romana might be related to this relatively
warm and stable situation. Interestingly, wars between Roman and neighboring cultures became
more frequent along with the subsequent Roman decline after 200 AD, shortly after our records
show a declining temperature trend. It would therefore be extremely interesting to dedicate more studies to this time
interval to be able to pinpoint the relationship between climate and civilization.
 AT: Flooding
Warming causes reduced flooding-empirically proven

Stewart et al 11
Monique M. Stewart et al Martin Grosjeana, Franz G.
Kuglitscha, Samuel U. Nussbaumerb, Lucien von Guntena
15 November 2011Reconstructions of late Holocene
paleofloods and glacier length changes in the Upper
Engadine, Switzerland (ca. 1450 BCAD 420)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018
211004597
Insight into the relationship between floods and climate, under a wide range of climate variability in Central Europe from ca. 1450 BC
to AD 420, can be found in the sediments of Lake Silvaplana (Upper Engadine, Switzerland). The frequency of local paleofloods can
be reconstructed from turbidite frequency. Long-term cool and/or wet and warm and/or dry climate phases can be
reconstructed from anomalies in low-frequency Mass Accumulation Rates (MAR). This is because low-frequency
MAR reflects glacier length changes in the Swiss Alps and glacier lengths are a response to long-term climate conditions. Transitions
between cool and/or wet and warm and/or dry climate phases can be inferred from centennial trends in low-frequency MAR.
Furthermore, quantitative absolute June-JulyAugust (JJA) temperatures reconstructed from Biogenic Silica (BSi) flux and
chironomids in the sediments of Lake Silvaplana are available from ca. 570 BC to AD 120 (Stewart et al., 2011). Comparison of
turbidite frequency to MAR-inferred climate phases (ca. 1450 BCAD 420) and JJA temperatures (ca. 570 BCAD 120)
suggests an increase in the frequency of paleofloods during cool and/or wet climates and windows of cooler
JJA temperatures. Specifically, the frequency of turbidites was reduced during warm and/or dry climates of
ca. 1450 BC to AD 420. Following the transition to cool and/or wet climates, the frequency of turbidites
increased. However, no discernable relationship between the rate of transition from warm and/or dry to cool and/or wet climate and
turbidite could be found.
 AT: Phytoplankton
Climate change does not harm plankton, it makes them
more resilient
Cermeno 11
Pedro Cermeno Departamento de Ecologa y Biologa
Animal, Universidad de Vigo July 20, 2011 Marine
planktonic microbes survived climatic instabilities in the
past
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1728/4
74.full

The results presented here demonstrate that the probability of extinction of microbial plankton
species did not increase during periods of enhanced climatic instability over the past 65 Myr.
Arguably, ubiquitous dispersal of marine planktonic microbes and their potential to revive
after long periods of metabolic quiescence facilitated environmental tracking, habitat recolonization and
community re-assembly, buffering species against extinction. Indeed, previous work has shown that communities of marine
planktonic diatoms [10] and calcareous nannoplankton [34,35] recovered from climatic perturbations in the past and that their
populations thrived later, once environmental conditions returned to previous-like states. However, my results also show that
exceptional climatic contingencies such as those occurring across the Late PalaeoceneEocene and the Eocene
Oligocene boundary transitions caused substantial morphological diversification. This signature is not
manifest in the analysis of generic survivorship curves almost certainly because to a large
extent these arising species were classified as new genera . It must be noted that only the evolutionary
dynamics of species in pre-existing genera is considered in the survivorship analysis.
 AT: Natural Disasters
Climate Change does not cause more natural disasters

Buntgen et al 11
Ulf Buntgen et al Rudolf Brzdilc, d, Karl-Uwe Heussnere,
Jutta Hofmannf, Raymond Konticg, Tom Kynclh,
Christian Pfisterb, Kateina Chromc, Willy Tegeli (Swiss
Federal Research Institute) November 2011 Combined
dendro-documentary evidence of Central European
hydroclimatic springtime extremes over the last
millennium
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379111003246

A predicted rise in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and associated effects on the Earths climate system likely imply
more frequent and severe weather extremes with alternations in hydroclimatic parameters expected to be most critical for
ecosystem functioning, agricultural yield, and human health. Evaluating the return period and amplitude of modern climatic
extremes in light of pre-industrial natural changes is, however, limited by generally too short instrumental meteorological
observations. Here we introduce and analyze 11,873 annually resolved and absolutely dated ring width measurement series from
living and historical fir (Abies alba Mill.) trees sampled across France, Switzerland, Germany, and the Czech Republic, which
continuously span the AD 9622007 period. Even though a dominant climatic driver of European fir growth was not found, ring
width extremes were evidently triggered by anomalous variations in Central European AprilJune precipitation. Wet conditions
were associated with dynamic low-pressure cells, whereas continental-scale droughts coincided with persistent high-pressure
between 35 and 55N. Documentary evidence independently confirms many of the dendro signals over the past millennium, and
further provides insight on causes and consequences of ambient weather conditions related to the reconstructed extremes. A
fairly uniform distribution of hydroclimatic extremes throughout the Medieval Climate
Anomaly, Little Ice Age and Recent Global Warming may question the common believe that
frequency and severity of such events closely relates to climate mean stages. This joint dendro-
documentary approach not only allows extreme climate conditions of the industrial era to be placed against the backdrop of
natural variations, but also probably helps to constrain climate model simulations over exceptional long timescales.
 AT: Ocean Acidification
No impact to acidification- empirics trump their models

Idso et al 11
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2011 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) Calcifying Marine Invertebrates "Living in the
Future" http://co2science.org/articles/V14/N18/EDIT.php

Many are the doom-and-gloom prognostications for earth's calcifying marine invertebrates --
based on what Thomsen et al. (2010) describe as "short to intermediate (days to weeks) CO2 perturbation experiments" -- if the
air's CO2 content continues to rise and the pH values of the world's ocean waters concomitantly decline, in a phenomenon that has
come to be known by the fright-inducing moniker of ocean acidification. However, the eleven German researchers note that "as
most laboratory experiments cannot account for species genetic adaptation potential, they are
limited in their predictive power," and that "naturally CO2-enriched habitats have thus recently
gained attention, as they could more accurately serve as analogues for future, more acidic
ecosystems." Taking this latter course, Thomsen et al. studied the macrobenthic community in Kiel
Fjord -- a naturally-CO2-enriched site in the Western Baltic Sea -- that is dominated by
calcifying marine invertebrates, where they determined that in 34%, 23% and 9% of the 42 weeks they were there, the
partial pressure (p) of CO2 in the water exceeded pre-industrial pCO2 (280 ppm) by a factor of three (>840 ppm), four (>1120
ppm) and five (>1400 ppm), respectively. And what did they find under these conditions? The team of German scientists reports
that "the macrobenthic community in Kiel Fjord is dominated by calcifying invertebrates," such as the blue mussel (Mytilus
edulis), the barnacle Amphibalanus improvisus and the echinoderm Asterias rubens; and they say that "juvenile mussel
recruitment peaks during the summer months, when high water pCO2 values of ~1000 ppm prevail." In addition, they say their
short-term laboratory research indicates that "blue mussels from Kiel Fjord can maintain control rates of somatic and shell growth
at a pCO2 of 1400 ppm." At 4000 ppm pCO2, however, they say that both shell mass and extension rates were significantly
reduced; but they found that "regardless of the decreased rates of shell growth at higher [1400] pCO2, all mussels increased their
shell mass at least by 150% during the 8-week trial, even at arg (calc) as low as 0.17 (0.28)," where is the calcium carbonate
saturate state of either aragonite (arg) or calcite (calc). In concluding the report of their field and laboratory work, as well as their
mini-review of the pertinent scientific literature, Thomsen et al. state that it is likely that "long-term acclimation to
elevated pCO2 increases the ability to calcify in Mytilus spp.," citing the studies of Michaelidis et al. (2005) and
Ries et al. (2009) in addition to their own. And they say that they could find "no causal relationship
between the acid-base status and metabolic depression in this species at levels of ocean
acidification that can be expected in the next few hundred years (IPCC, 2007)," after discovering in the
waters of Kiel Fjord (and demonstrating in the laboratory) that "communities dominated by calcifying
invertebrates can thrive in CO2-enriched coastal areas ."

There is virtually no scientific understanding of ocean

acidification, and it will probably be beneficial to
organisms

Idso et al 12
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2012 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) The Unsettled Science of Ocean Warming and
Acidification
http://co2science.org/articles/V15/N19/EDIT.php
 The world's climate alarmists would have us believe that they know all they need to know about earth's
climate system and its biological ramifications to justify an unbelievably expensive and radical
restructuring of the way the industrialized world both obtains and utilizes energy. But is this really so?
In an eye-opening "perspective" article published a couple of years ago in the 9 December 2009 issue of
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, three researchers
from the Marine Biogeochemistry Section of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany,
describe their assessment of various possible responses of the global ocean's seawater carbonate system,
plus its physical and biological carbon pumps, to ocean warming and associated changes in vertical
mixing and overturning circulation, as well as the closely-allied phenomena of ocean acidification and
carbonation. All of these phenomena, many of which are nonlinear and extremely complicated, are
interlinked; and Riebesell and his colleagues thus conclude, from their objective review of the pertinent
scientific literature, that the magnitude and even the sign of the global ocean's carbon cycle feedback to
climate change are, in their words, "yet unknown." They note, for example, that "our understanding of
biological responses to ocean change is still in its infancy." With respect to ocean acidification, in
particular, they write that the impact it will have on marine life "is still uncertain," and that the
phenomenon itself is but "one side of the story," the other side being what they call "ocean
carbonation," which, as they describe it, "will likely be beneficial to some groups of photosynthetic
organisms." Thus, they write that "our present understanding of biologically driven feedback
mechanisms is still rudimentary," and that with respect to many of their magnitudes, "our understanding
is too immature to even make a guess." What is more, they imply that even what we do think we know
could well be wrong, because, as they elucidate, "our present knowledge of pH/CO2 sensitivities of
marine organisms is based almost entirely on short-term perturbation experiments, neglecting the
possibility of evolutionary adaptation."

Adaptation solves
Idso et al 12
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2012 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) The Potential for Adaptive Evolution to Enable
the World's Most Important Calcifying Organism to Cope
with Ocean Acidification
http://co2science.org/articles/V15/N28/EDIT.php
In an important paper published in the May 2012 issue of Nature Geoscience, Lohbeck et al. write that
"our present understanding of the sensitivity of marine life to ocean acidification is based primarily on
short-term experiments," which often depict negative effects. However, they go on to say that
phytoplanktonic species with short generation times "may be able to respond to environmental
alterations through adaptive evolution." And with this tantalizing possibility in mind, they studied, as
they describe it, "the ability of the world's single most important calcifying organism, the
coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi, to evolve in response to ocean acidification in two 500-generation
selection experiments." Working with freshly isolated genotypes from Bergen, Norway, the three
German researchers grew them in batch cultures over some 500 asexual generations at three different
atmospheric CO2 concentrations - ambient (400 ppm), medium (1100 ppm) and high (2200 ppm) -
where the medium CO2 treatment was chosen to represent the atmospheric CO2 level projected for the
beginning of the next century. This they did in a multi-clone experiment designed to provide existing
genetic variation that they said "would be readily available to genotypic selection," as well as in a
single-clone experiment that was initiated with one "haphazardly chosen genotype," where evolutionary
adaptation would obviously require new mutations. So what did they learn? Compared with
populations kept at ambient CO2 partial pressure, Lohbeck et al. found that those selected at increased
CO2 levels "exhibited higher growth rates, in both the single- and multi-clone experiment, when tested
under ocean acidification conditions." Calcification rates, on the other hand, were somewhat lower
under CO2-enriched conditions in all cultures; but the research team reports that they were "up to 50%
higher in adapted [medium and high CO2] compared with non-adapted cultures." And when all was said
and done, they concluded that "contemporary evolution could help to maintain the functionality of
microbial processes at the base of marine food webs in the face of global change [our italics]." In other
ruminations on their findings, the marine biologists indicate that what they call the swift adaptation
processes they observed may "have the potential to affect food-web dynamics and biogeochemical
cycles on timescales of a few years, thus surpassing predicted rates of ongoing global change including
ocean acidification." And they also note, in this regard, that "a recent study reports surprisingly high
coccolith mass in an E. huxleyi population off Chile in high-CO2 waters (Beaufort et al., 2011)," which
observation is said by them to be indicative of "across-population variation in calcification, in line with
findings of rapid microevolution identified here."
 AT: Coral
Coral will adapt to acidification and climate change

Idso et al 12
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2012 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) The Future of Earth's Coral Reefs Debated in
Science http://co2science.org/articles/V15/N3/EDIT.php
In our editorial of 17 August 2011, we discussed the paper of Pandolfi et al. (2011a) that was published
in Science on 22 July 2011, wherein we briefly reported the many ways in which they suggested Earth's
coral reefs might successfully respond to the dual challenge of projected rapid increases in temperature
and ocean acidification. As might have been expected, however, their optimistic analysis was not well
received by the world's climate alarmists, who in the 16 December 2011 issue of Science - via the
persons of Hoegh-Guldberg et al. (2011) - cast many aspersions on it. Fortunately, Pandolfi et al.
(2011b) were given the opportunity of responding to them and deflating their arguments. The four
researchers begin by rebutting Hoegh-Guldberg et al.'s claim that evolutionary responses of corals to
global warming are highly improbable in light of the warming's IPCC-projected rapidity, noting that
"the hypothesis that adaptation cannot occur over decadal time scales has been shown repeatedly to be
incorrect." More specifically, they state that research has shown that "numerous and complex
physiological, metabolic, and morphological changes can occur rapidly and repeatedly among
independently evolving lineages," citing in this regard the studies of Hendry and Kinnison (1999),
Levinton et al. (2003) and Tobler et al. (2011). Pandolfi and colleagues next rebut Hoegh-Guldberg et
al.'s contention that characteristics of endosymbiosis will impede adaptation in corals. This they do by
noting that "endosymbionts and hosts, if anything, evolve more rapidly than their free-living
counterparts," citing in this regard the research findings of Woolfit and Bromham (2003) and Pal et al.
(2007).

Coral adapt to climate change

Idso et al 12
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2012 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) Corals Dying from Weather-Induced Heating
and Cooling ... But Surviving Climate-Induced Heating and
Cooling http://co2science.org/articles/V15/N7/EDIT.php
In a paper published in Global Change Biology, Kemp et al. (2011) write that "considerable attention
has been given to worldwide coral reef decline over the last several years with major emphasis placed
on the negative effects of increased seawater temperatures," which typically lead to coral bleaching and
subsequent death; but they also note that "imposed low-temperature stress can cause coral bleaching by
inducing responses similar to elevated-temperature, including reduction in Symbiodinium cell density
and chlorophyll a content, as well as photoinhibition," citing the work of Steen and Muscatine (1987),
Saxby et al. (2003), Hoegh-Guldberg and Fine (2004) and Hoegh-Guldberg et al. (2005). And they go
on to demonstrate this latter fact via an analysis of coral responses to two closely-spaced cold fronts that
caused sudden and severe seawater cooling in February and March of 2010 in the upper Florida (USA)
Keys that led to "a mass die-off of reef-building corals," thereby convincingly illustrating that both
unusually warm and unusually cold temperatures, such as are caused by fluctuations in weather
conditions, are equally adept at killing corals and their algal symbionts. Over the long term, however,
when either warmer or cooler conditions are the result of much slower changes in climate, such need
not be the case. Consider, for example, the Little Ice Age (LIA). In a study of the Atlantic Warm Pool
(AWP) - which is defined by the >28.5C isotherm and develops annually in the northern Caribbean
during early summer (June) and expands into the Gulf of Mexico and western tropical North Atlantic
through the late summer (July-October) - Richey et al. (2009) found that "geochemical proxy records
from corals, sclerosponges and foraminifera in the region encompassed by the AWP show a large (2-
3C) cooling during the LIA," citing, in this regard, the work of Winter et al. (2000), Watanabe et al.
(2001), Nyberg et al. (2002), Haase-Schramm et al. (2003), Black et al. (2007) and Kilbourne et al.
(2008). And in reporting the results of a study of a large brain coral that lived throughout the 17th
century on the shallow seafloor off the island of Bermuda, Cohen and Madin (2007) say that although
seawater temperatures at that time and location were about 1.5C colder than it is there today, "the coral
grew faster than the corals there now." Other studies have shown earth's corals to be able to cope with
climate-induced warmings as well as coolings. In a study of patch reefs of the Florida Keys, for
example, Greenstein et al. (1998) found that Acropora cervicornis corals exhibited "long-term
persistence" during both "Pleistocene and Holocene time," the former of which periods exhibited
climatic changes of large magnitude, some with significantly greater warmth than currently prevails on
earth; and these climate changes had almost no effect on this long-term dominant of Caribbean coral
reefs. Hence, there is good reason to not be too concerned about long-term changes in climate possibly
harming earth's corals. They apparently have the ability to handle whatever nature may throw at them in
this regard.
 AT: Cyclones
Co2 reduces destructive power of extratropical cyclones.

Michaels & Balling 9

(Michaels has a Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, Michaels holds A.B.
and S.M. degrees in biological sciences and plant ecology
from the University of Chicago, now a Senior Research
Fellow for Policy and Economic Development at George
Mason University, a contributing author and reviewer of
the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in
2007, Balling is a professor of geography at Arizona State
University, and the former director of its Office of
Climatology. 2009 "Climate of Extremes : Global Warming
Science They Don't Want You to Know" The Cato Institute.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/umich/Doc?
id=10379650&ppg=20)
Every strong European cyclone in the last decade has prompted a similar outcry. If theres a big storm, a
reporter will find an expert who will conflate the wind with global warming. Just Google news
after the next one to prove this to yourself. All of this seems a bit illogical. Although hurricanes are, in
part, driven by the heat of the ocean, theres a pretty strong debate, noted in chapter 3, about their
relation to global warming. But the mechanism that creates and feeds extratropical cyclones is a lot
different. Theyre driven by the jet stream, a circumpolar vortex of high-energy westerly winds that
undulates over all our hemisphere with the exception of the low latitudes. In fact, when the jet does
manage to reach into the tropics and encounters a hurricane, the hurricanes days, if not hours, are
numbered because of massive wind shear. The top of the storm can be blown a hundred miles away
from the bottom. Consequently, the same mechanism that causes extratropical cyclones is one that
destroys hurricanes. You would think, then, if global warming were making extratropical storms
stronger, there should be some concomitant weakening of hurricanes. The jet stream is natures way of
dissipating the temperature difference between polar and tropical regions in the form of motion. The
greater the temperature difference between the poles and the tropics, the stronger the jet, and,
everything else being equal (dangerous words), the stronger extratropical storms can become. But the
reverse is what should happen. As noted in chapter 1, changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide result in a
preferential warming of the coldest days, and of cold, dry air more than warm, moist air. Changing the
greenhouse effect then must reduce the temperature contrast between the (warm, moist) tropical and
(dry, cold) polar regions, which reduces the temperature difference that drives the jet stream. In turn,
this should tame the power of extratropical cyclones.
 AT: Nighttime Warming
Nighttime warming has negligent effects on
photosynthesis
Albert et al. 11
(K. R. ALBERT1, H. RO-POULSEN2, T. N. MIKKELSEN1, A.
MICHELSEN2, L. VAN DER LINDEN1 & C. BEIER,
1Biosystems Division, Ris DTU, Frederiksborgvej 399,
4000 Roskilde and 2Terrestrial Ecology, Department of
Biology, University of Copenhagen, ster Farigmagsgade
2D, 1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark) 2011 (K.R., Effects of
elevated CO2, warming and drought episodes on plant
carbon uptake in a temperate heath ecosystem are
controlled by soil water status , Plant, Cell and
Environment (2011) 34, 12071222 Pages 11-12)
The night-time warming generally had limited effects on the leaf surface temperature, but did under
some conditions increase vegetation surface temperature for up to 35 h after sunrise, although
normally much less (Mikkelsen et al. 2008). This could potentially induce short-term stimulation of
photosynthesis via more optimal growth temperatures (Sage & Kubien 2007). However, these direct
effects were not detected in this study, for various reasons. Too few measurements were conducted
during the early daytime hours where the night-time warming effects persisted. Further, such effects
would most likely not influence the overall treatment effects reported here as the sampling pro- cedure
with a large number of plots and the several hours of measuring time for a complete campaign would
have con- strained this variation to the experimental blocks, causing it not to be detected as a treatment
effect in the anova. Instead, the potential effect of the night-time warming on photosynthesis must be
indirect. Warming increased the amount of GDDs (Mikkelsen et al. 2008), and increased photosynthesis
and photosynthetic capacity in the early season (Pn in May, and Pmax in May and June). This suggests
that the warming treatment may have caused an earlier onset of plant growth or faster development of
the photo- synthetic machinery in the spring in accordance with other studies demonstrating earlier
growth season start-up in response to warming (Harte & Shaw 1995; Menzel & Fabian 1999; Wan et al.
2005; Menzel et al. 2006). Later in the season, the maturation of photosynthetic capacity in the non-
warmed treatments caught up and warming effects did not translate into significant effects on
photosynthesis, except for marginal reductions of net photosynthesis in warmed plots in August.
Furthermore, the night-time warming reduced SWC in most months, and reduced PWP in July and
September, but only influenced net photosyn- thesis negatively in the dry midsummer (August). The
reduced SWC indicates increased plant water consumption per ground area or increased soil
evaporation in response to night-time warming, but apart from the midsummer, this reduction was not
strong enough to induce a general reduc- tion in photosynthesis. Our finding of a small response of
photosynthesis to warming in this relatively dry site may be further supported by previous findings from
passive night- time warming studies across a European gradient indicating that photosynthetic plant
carbon uptake may be more responsive on wet sites compared to dry sites (Llorens et al. 2004; Peuelas
et al. 2007). Thus, the primary effect of night-time warming on photosynthesis in our study was
associated with earlier seasonal onset and maturation of the photosynthetic capacity.
 AT: Migrations
Climate change does not create refugees - empirically
proven

Asian Correspondent 11
April 11, 2011 What happened to the climate refugees?
http://asiancorrespondent.com/52189/what-happened-to-the-climate-refugees/

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create
50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters
including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to
food production. The UNEP even provided a handy map. The map shows us the places most at
risk including the very sensitive low lying islands of the Pacific and Caribbean . It so happens that just a
few of these islands and other places most at risk have since had censuses, so it should be possible for us now to get some idea of the
devastating impact climate change is having on their populations. Lets have a look at the evidence: Bahamas: Nassau, The Bahamas
The 2010 national statistics recorded that the population growth increased to 353,658 persons in The Bahamas. The population
change figure increased by 50,047 persons during the last 10 years. St Lucia: The island-nation of Saint Lucia recorded an overall
household population increase of 5 percent from May 2001 to May 2010 based on estimates derived from a complete enumeration of
the population of Saint Lucia during the conduct of the recently completed 2010 Population and Housing Census. Seychelles:
Population 2002, 81755 Population 2010, 88311 Solomon Islands: The latest Solomon Islands population has surpassed half a
million thats according to the latest census results. Its been a decade since the last census report, and in that
time the population has leaped 100-thousand. Meanwhile, far from being places where people are
fleeing, no fewer than the top six of the very fastest growing cities in China, Shenzzen,
Dongguan, Foshan, Zhuhai, Puning and Jinjiang, are absolutely smack bang within the shaded
areas identified as being likely sources of climate refugees. Similarly, many of the fastest
growing cities in the United States also appear within or close to the areas identified by the UNEP
as at risk of having climate refugees. More censuses are due to come in this year, and we await the results for
Bangladesh and the Maldives - said to be places most at risk - with interest. However, a very cursory look at the first
available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the UNEP as most at risk of having
climate refugees are not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing
regions in the world. (Footnote: As requested, credit goes to the cartographer of the UNEP map, Emmanuelle Bournay.)

Climate change does not create refugees or conflict - best

study

Idso et al 10
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2010 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) War and Peace ... and Climate Change
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V13/N13/EDIT.php
In an insightful new study recently published in Climatic Change, Richard Tol and Sebastian Wagner
write that in "gloomier scenarios of climate change, violent conflict plays a key part," noting that in
such visions of the future "war would break out over declining water resources, and millions of refugees
would cause mayhem." In this regard, the two researchers state that "the Nobel Peace Prize of 2007 was
partly awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore for their contribution to slowing climate change and thus
preventing war." However, they say that "scenarios of climate-change-induced violence can be painted
with abandon," citing the example of Schwartz and Randall (2003), because, as they continue, "there is
 "little research to either support or refute such claims." Consequently, and partly to fill this gaping
research void, Tol and Wagner proceeded to go where but few had gone before, following in the
footsteps of Zhang et al. (2005, 2006), who broke new ground in this area when they (1) constructed a
dataset of climate and violent conflict in China for the last millennium, and (2) found that the Chinese
were "more inclined to fight each other when it was cold," which propensity for violence they attributed
to the reduced agricultural productivity that typically prevailed during cooler times. Hence, the two
researchers essentially proceeded to do for Europe what Zhang et al. had done for China. The results of
Tol and Wagner's analyses provide additional evidence that, as they describe it, "periods with lower
temperatures in the pre-industrial era are accompanied by violent conflicts." However, they determined
that "this effect is much weaker in the modern world than it was in pre-industrial times," which implies,
in their words, "that future global warming is not likely to lead to (civil) war between (within) European
countries." Therefore, they conclude that "should anyone ever seriously have believed that, this paper
does put that idea to rest." In light of this refutation of the rational for the awarding of the 2007 Nobel
Peace Prize, we are inclined to say to its most visible recipient -- in the spirit of the sentiment expressed
by President Ronald Reagan on 12 June 1987 at the base of the Brandenburg Gate, near the Berlin wall
-- Mr. Gore, give back that prize!

Warming saves refugees lives cold kills

Idso et al 2k
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2k (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) Temperature Trends -- Asia Summary
http://www.co2science.org/subject/a/summaries/asiantem
ptrends.php
The winter of 2000/2001 was bitterly cold in many parts of Asia; in fact, many cold-temperature records
were set. According to NBC News correspondent Dana Lewis, extreme cold blasted Russia into the
coldest winter in a century (see "The Planet is Warming Up!"). From Siberia to the Far East, bone-
chilling temperatures some 30 degrees below normal made it "a battle just to survive." Similar
information was obtained from a report by Red Cross staff writer Stephanie Kriner, who wrote about
some other cold-induced disasters. She reported, for example, that in the first week of January 2001,
many people died "as a result of a bitter cold front sweeping across northern India," which brought "the
coldest temperatures to hit the region in several years." Kriner noted that the same cold front also swept
into Pakistan, threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees. In China, she says
that "the worst winter weather conditions in decades" left many people dead, and that Barbara Wetsig of
the American Red Cross feared that thousands of other people were "at risk of frostbite, hypothermia
and starvation," especially "the poor, homeless, elderly and children." In fact, Kriner says that the Inner
Mongolian Branch of the Russian Red Cross estimated that up to 1.35 million people were affected.
She also reports that "the worst snowstorm in 50 years" stranded "tens of thousands of herders and their
livestock" in Inner Mongolia, and that blizzards paralyzed South Korea in what weather forecasters
there described as "the worst snowstorm in 20 years," adding that the Central Asian state of Kazakhstan
was subjected to "its coldest winter weather in 40 years." At a time when were told the world is hotter
than its ever been in the past thousand years, this information is not exactly what one would expect to
hear, unless, of course, this claim is wrong. And indeed it may be; for a number of recent papers
provide evidence that Asian temperatures during the past century and beyond were at times much
warmer than they are presently. Furthermore, some of them suggest that temperature trends of the past
few decades have been negative, rather than positive.
Climate change is not the root cause of refugees, and
they dont solve for the institutions that actually cause
displacement

Hartmann 10
Betsy Hartmann professor of development studies and
director of the Population and Development Program ,
B.A. from Yale University, Ph.D. from the London School of
Economics 23 FEB 2010 Rethinking climate refugees and
climate conflict: Rhetoric, reality and the politics of policy
discourse
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jid.1676/abstrac
t
The narrative ignores basic elements of Sudanese political economy that helped create and sustain the
conict. These include gross inequalities in wealth and power between the elite in the capital and the
rural population; government agricultural policies that favour large mechanised farms and irrigation
schemes over rain-fed, small farmer agriculture, causing both political grievances and land degradation;
forced migration, such as the 1990s removal of Nuba farmers from their lands into so-called peace
villages where they became a source of captive labour for mechanised farms; and what Alex de Waal
calls militarised tribalism (de Waal, 2007). In particular, the nationalisation of land in 1970, by which
customary laws were set aside and people could obtain access only through lease agreements with the
government, set the stage for widespread land-grabbing by elites and the marginalisation of pastoralists.
As one scholar of the region notes, . . .not all resource conicts are based on a situation of resource
scarcity; rather, they are political in nature and have to do with the workings of the Sudanese state
(Manger, 2005, p. 135). The discovery but rather to heighten it, if the government controls the water for
its own interests (Polgreen, 2007). The construction of Darfur as a climate conict should serve as
canary in the coal mine that something is amiss when environmental determinism overrides serious
analysis of power relations. This is not to deny that environmental changes due to global warming could
in some instances exacerbate already existing economic and political divisions. However, whether or
not violent conict and mass migrations result depends on so many other factors that it is far too
simplistic to see climate change as a major cause or trigger. Moreover, such threat scenarios ignore the
way many poorly resourced communities manage their affairs without recourse to violence. Brown et
al. (2007) cite the case of the semi-arid regions of Northern Nigeria where conicts between pastoralists
and agricultural communities occur over water and fodder, but seldom spread because of the existence
of traditional conict resolution institutions. They argue that helping these communities adapt to climate
change should involve strengthening such institutions.
 Alt Cause - Forest Sinks
Forests contribute to global warming

Power 8
(Matt Power is a staff writer for Wired Magazine. 5/19/8.
Old-Growth Forests Can Actually Contribute to Global
Warming
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-
06/ff_heresies_04forests/)
Ronald Reagan's infamous claim that "trees cause more pollution than automobiles" contained a grain
of truth. In warm weather, trees release volatile chemicals that act as catalysts for smog. But the Gipper
didn't mention another point that's even more likely to make nature lovers blanch. When it comes to
fighting climate change, it's more effective to treat forests like crops than like majestic monuments to
nature. Over its lifetime, a tree shifts from being a vacuum cleaner for atmospheric carbon to an emitter.
A tree absorbs roughly 1,500 pounds of CO2 in its first 55 years. After that, its growth slows, and it
takes in less carbon. Left untouched, it ultimately rots or burns and all that CO2 gets released. Last year,
the Canadian government commissioned a study to determine the quantity of carbon sequestered by the
country's woodlands, which account for a tenth of global forests. It hoped to use the CO2-gathering
power of 583 million acres of woods to offset its Kyoto Protocol-mandated responsibility to cut
greenhouse gas emissions. No such luck. The report found that during many years, Canadian forests
actually give up more carbon from decomposing wood than they lock down in new growth.
 No Extinction - Empirics
Climate change does not lead to extinction- empirically
proven

Idso et al 12
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2012 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) Plant Responses to Significant and Rapid
Global Warming
http://co2science.org/articles/V15/N24/EDIT.php
In an impressive and enlightening review of the subject, Willis and MacDonald (2011) begin by noting
that key research efforts have focused on extinction scenarios derived from "a suite of predictive species
distribution models (e.g., Guisan and Thuiller, 2005)" - which are most often referred to as bioclimatic
envelope models - that "predict current and future range shifts and estimate the distances and rates of
movement required for species to track the changes in climate and move into suitable new climate
space." And they write that one of the most-cited studies of this type - that of Thomas et al. (2004) -
"predicts that, on the basis of mid-range climatic warming scenarios for 2050, up to 37% of plant
species globally will be committed to extinction owing to lack of suitable climate space." In contrast,
the two researchers say that "biotic adaptation to climate change has been considered much less
frequently." This phenomenon - which is sometimes referred to as evolutionary resilience - they
describe as "the ability of populations to persist in their current location and to undergo evolutionary
adaptation in response to changing environmental conditions (Sgro et al., 2010)." And they note that
this approach to the subject "recognizes that ongoing change is the norm in nature and one of the
dynamic processes that generates and maintains biodiversity patterns and processes," citing MacDonald
et al. (2008) and Willis et al. (2009). The aim of Willis and MacDonald's review, therefore, was to
examine the effects of significant and rapid warming on earth's plants during several previous intervals
of the planet's climatic history that were as warm as, or even warmer than, what climate alarmists
typically predict for the next century. These intervals included the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal
Maximum, the Eocene climatic optimum, the mid-Pliocene warm interval, the Eemian interglacial, and
the Holocene. And it is important to note that this approach, in contrast to the approach typically used
by climate alarmists, relies on empirical (as opposed to theoretical) data-based (as opposed to model-
based), reconstructions (as opposed to projections) of the past (as opposed to the future). And what
were the primary findings of the two researchers? As they describe them, in their own words,
"persistence and range shifts (migrations) seem to have been the predominant terrestrial biotic response
(mainly of plants) to warmer intervals in Earth's history," while "the same responses also appear to have
occurred during intervals of rapid climate change." In addition, they make a strong point of noting that
"evidence for global extinctions or extinctions resulting from reduction of population sizes on the scale
predicted for the next century owing to loss of suitable climate space (Thomas et al., 2004) is not
apparent." In fact, they state that sometimes an actual increase in local biodiversity is observed, the case
for which we lay out in Section II (Physiological Reasons for Rejecting the CO2-Induced Global
Warming Extinction Hypothesis) of our Major Report The Specter of Species Extinction: Will Global
Warming Decimate Earth's Biosphere? Read it and rejoice!

No extinction- their models dont account for TGP

Idso et al 11
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2011 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) Transgenerational Plasticity: A Third Way of
Adapting to Climate Change
http://co2science.org/articles/V15/N16/EDIT.php
In introducing their intriguing new study, two U.S. scientists, Salinas and Munch (2012), write that
historical attempts to address the issue of organismal responses to changing temperature have focused
almost exclusively on evolutionary change and phenotypic plasticity; but they turn their attention to a
third way: transgenerational plasticity or TGP. This phenomenon, as they describe it, "occurs when the
environment experienced by the parents prior to fertilization directly translates, without DNA sequence
alteration, into significant changes in the shape of offspring reaction norms (Fox and Mousseau, 1998),
resulting in a significant interaction between parental and offspring environment effects." Such effects
have been observed in many traits of several species; yet they note that "TGP in thermal growth
physiology has never been demonstrated for vertebrates," which is consequently what they set out to do
for sheepshead minnows (Cyprinodon variegatus), a small fish that is common to nearshore marine and
estuarine waters along the east coast of the United States and throughout the Caribbean. Working with
fish they had raised from the egg stage to adults in aquaria they had maintained at constant temperatures
of either 24, 29 or 34C, Salinas and Munch allowed the soon-to-become parent fish to spawn, after
which they collected the newly fertilized eggs from each of the three temperature treatments and
allowed a third of each group to develop within each of a new set of aquaria maintained at the same
three standard temperatures, during which time the growth rates of the new sets of juveniles were
determined. So what did they learn? The two researchers report that offspring from high (34C) and
low (24C) temperature-raised parents grew best at high and low temperature, respectively, "suggesting
an adaptive response," with growth rates differing by as much as 32% (0.60 vs. 0.46 mm/day, when
both sets of offspring were maintained at 34C). And in discussing this result, Salinas and Munch say
that the rate of adaptive response change that they observed "is roughly two orders of magnitude greater
than the median rate of phenotypic change found in a review of the subject (Hendry and Kinnison,
1999)." In terms of the range of applicability of the TGP phenomenon, the two scientists say that it has
so far "only been demonstrated for milkweed bugs (Groeters and Dingle, 1988), butterflies (Steigenga
and Fischer, 2007), and thale cress (Blodner et al., 2007; Whittle et al., 2009)," but they note that "in all
cases, offspring growth is maximized at the temperature experienced by the parents." As for the
importance of TGP, Salinas and Munch write that it "may allow for a rapid response to environmental
changes," citing Bossdorf et al. (2008), while specifically noting that "changes in precipitation may be
counteracted via TGP in desiccation tolerance in invertebrates (Yoder et al., 2006) or drought tolerance
in plants (Sultan et al., 2009)," and more especially noting that "higher CO2 concentrations have been
shown to elicit a TGP response in three plant species (Lau et al., 2008) and to alter predator-induced
TGP responses in aphids (Mondor et al., 2004)." All in all, therefore, Salinas and Munch say of this
exciting new "area of active current research" that it "may qualitatively change projections for
extinction risk and other climate impacts" ... and, we might add, change them for the better.
 Aerosols = Cooling
Aerosols lead to long term cooling

Tian et. al 10
(Feng, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at U
Colorado, Mark Cliare, Virtual Planetary Laboratory and
Astrobiology @ U Washington, Jacob Haqq-Misra,
Meteorology @ Penn State, Megan Smith, Meteorology @
Penn State, David Crisp, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Caltech, David Catling, Earth and Space Sciences at U
Washington, Kevin Zahnle, NASA Ames Research Center,
James F. Kastin, Geosciences @ Penn State, 2010,
"Photochemical and climate consequences of sulfur
outgassing on early Mars," Earth and Planetary Science
Letters, Vol. 250)
On modern Earth, SO2 produced by volcanic eruptions cools the surface by creating highly reective
sulfate aerosols that persist for months to years in the stratosphere (Turco et al., 1982; Robock, 2000).
Models for the anoxic early Earth atmosphere also predict that a signicant fraction of outgassed SO2
would still have been converted to sulfate aerosols (Pavlov and Kasting, 2002; Zahnle et al., 2006).
Plescia (1993) estimated the volatile release from Elysium volcanism on Mars and suggested that the
short-term effect of SO2 volcanic outgassing would have been to warm the climate but the long term
effect would have been surface cooling, because of the formation of sulfate aerosols. As the sulfate
aerosols settled from the atmosphere, the climate could have returned to its pre-eruption equilibrium.
 Warming Solves Itself - Algae
Warming causes increased algal blooms

Moore et al 08
Stephanie K. Moore et al, associate scientist for the
NOAA, November 7 2008, Impacts of climate variability
and future climate change on harmful algal blooms and
human health,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586717/
Anthropogenically-derived increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations have been
implicated in recent climate change, and are projected to substantially impact the climate on a global
scale in the future. For marine and freshwater systems, increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases
are expected to increase surface temperatures, lower pH, and cause changes to vertical mixing,
upwelling, precipitation, and evaporation patterns. The potential consequences of these changes for
harmful algal blooms (HABs) have received relatively little attention and are not well understood.
Given the apparent increase in HABs around the world and the potential for greater problems as a result
of climate change and ocean acidification, substantial research is needed to evaluate the direct and
indirect associations between HABs, climate change, ocean acidification, and human health. This
research will require a multidisciplinary approach utilizing expertise in climatology, oceanography,
biology, epidemiology, and other disciplines. We review the interactions between selected patterns of
large-scale climate variability and climate change, oceanic conditions, and harmful algae.

Warming causes algae growth that will solve warming

Williams 9
Andrew Williams, writer for clean technical a website
dedicated to environmental news, JANUARY 4, 2009, Clean
technical, Green Algae Bloom Process Could Stop Global
Warming, http://cleantechnica.com/2009/01/04/green-
algae-bloom-process-could-stop-global-warming/
The researchers, aboard the Royal Navys HMS Endurance, have found that melting icebergs off the
coast of Antarctica are releasing millions of tiny particles of iron into the southern Ocean, helping to
create huge blooms of algae that absorb carbon emissions. The algae then sinks to the icy depths,
effectively removing CO2 from the atmosphere for hundreds of years. According to lead researcher,
Prof. Rob Raiswell of Leeds University, The Earth itself seems to want to save us. Scientists have
known for some time that artificially created algal blooms could be used to absorb greenhouse gases,
but the technique has been banned for fear of causing unforeseen side effects in fragile ecosystems.
However, based on the UK teams evidence that the process has been occurring naturally for millions of
years, and on a wide scale, the UN has given the green light for a ground-breaking experiment later this
month. The team will seek to create a massive algae bloom by releasing several tons of iron sulphate
into the sea off the coast of the British island of South Georgia. The patch will apparently be large
enough to be visible from space. If successful, the technique could be rolled out across vast swathes of
the Great Southern Ocean. Scientists calculate that if the whole 20 million square miles was treated, it
could remove up to three and a half Gigatons of C02, equivalent to one eighth of all global annual
emissions from fossil fuels. It would be a huge irony if melting icebergs, until now a powerful symbol
of the damage caused by global warming, reveal a process that may enable scientists to take steps that
might drastically reduce, and potentially even halt, the threat of environmental catastrophe.
 Climate =/= Weather
No warming - evidence conflates weather with climate

Keating 12
(Joshua Keating, associate editor of Foreign Policy, 7/5/12,
"Atmosphere of Distortion," Foreign Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/05/atmosph
ere_of_distortion?page=0,1)

But while the planet is undoubtedly getting warmer, attributing

a particular weather phenomenon to this
shift is a bit problematic. Although the science may be on the side of climate change, blaming one particular
weather incident on global warming is just as misleading as saying that a cold winter disproves it.
"I don't think anybody in the climate change community had even heard the word 'derecho' before last week," says Gavin
Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "If you really want the nation to be aware of
climate change, severe weather outbreaks are certainly a way to get people's attention. But to attribute a
specific one to climate change is, at this stage of the game, impossible," says Otis Brown of NOAA's National
Climatic Data Center. According to Brown, by 2100 Chicago is projected to have the kind of temperatures we now
associate with Dallas, but the change will be gradual and far more difficult for the public to comprehend than a two-week
spell of 100-degree days that may or may not have anything to do with global warming. As the late science fiction author
Robert Heinlein famously put it, "climate is what you expect, weather is what you get." But that's often unsatisfying for a
public that wants tangible evidence of climate change before they're willing to fully buy into the concept or
support policies aimed at mitigating it. "Most people don't assimilate global statistics or long-term trends
-- you feel what's going on by the weather," says NASA's Schmidt. "When weird weather happens, a lot of people just
instinctively think its climate change."
 Oceans Check
Warming would be slow ocean absorption solves

Roe & Bauman 11

(Gerald Roe, Department of Earth and Space Sciences,
University of Washington, AND Yoram Bauman, Professor,
Program on the Environment, University of Washington, 1-
1-2011, Should the climate tail wag the policy dog?)

A key player in the physical system is the enormous thermal inertia represented by the deep
ocean. The whole climate system cannot reach a new equilibrium until the deep ocean has also
reached equilibrium. In response to a positive climate forcing (i.e., a warming tendency), the deep
ocean draws heat away from the surface ocean, and so buffers the surface temperature
changes, making them less than they would otherwise be. The deep ocean is capable of
absorbing enormous amounts of heat and not until this reservoir has been exhausted can the
surface temperatures attain their full equilibrium values. A second key player is the inherent relationship
between feedbacks and adjustment time scales in physical systems. If it transpires that we do in fact, live on a planet with a high
climate sensitivity, it will be because we live on a planet with strong positive feedbacks. In other words, the net effect of all of the
dynamic processes (clouds, water vapor, ice reflectivity, etc.) is to strongly amplify the planet's response to radioactive forcing. In
this event, it would mean that we live on a planet that is inefficient in eliminating energy perturbations:
a positive feedback reflects a tendency to retain energy within the system, inhibiting its ultimate
emission to space, and therefore requiring a larger temperature response in order to achieve energy equilibrium. Moreover. it is
generally true that, all else being equal, an inefficient system takes longer to adjust than an efficient one. A useful rule of-thumb is
that the relevant response time of the climate system is given by the effective thermal inertia of the deep ocean multiplied by the
climate sensitivity parameter (defined as AEX/AR" , see. eg., Roe. 2009). This behavior is absolutely fundamental and widely
appreciated (e.g., Hansen et al.. 1985: Vlligley and Schlessinger. 1985). As time progresses, more and more of the
ocean abyssal waters become involved in the warming, and so the effective thermal inertia of
the climate system increases. Hansen et al. (1985) solve a simple representation of this effect and show that the
adjustment time of climate is proportional to the square of climate sensitivity. In other words, if it takes 50 yrs to equilibrate with
a climate sensitivity of 1.5C, it would take 100 times longer, or 5,000 yrs to equilibrate if the climate sensitivity is 15C.
Although Nature is of course more complicated than this (see eg., Gregory, 2000), the basic picture described here is reproduced
in models with a more realistic ocean circulation. In particular see results Held et al. (2010) for results from fully-coupled global
climate models. In the context of the PDF of climate sensitivity, its effects have been reviewed in Baker and Roe (2009).
 Oceans Check - AT: They Run Out
Reaching ocean carbon sink capacities take centuries

Cherubini et al. 11
(FRANCESCO CHERUBINI*, GLEN P. PETERSw, TERJE
BERNTSENwz, ANDERS H. STRMMAN*andEDGAR
HERTWICH* *Department of Energy and Process
Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and
Technology (NTNU), NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway, wCenter
for International Climate and Environmental Research
Oslo (CICERO), Oslo, Norway, zDepartment of
Geosciences, University of Oslo, Norway) 2011 (Francesco,
CO2 emissions from biomass combustion for bioenergy:
atmospheric decay and contribution to global warming,
GCB Bioenergy (2011) 3,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1757-
1707.2011.01102.x/full, Page 415)
*Note in this article C refers to carbon as indicated by the author at the beginning
C cycle climate models. CO2 emissions play a key role in the earths C cycle and climate system.
Those which are classified as anthropogenic (i.e. from fossil fuel combustion, cement production, deforestation and
land-use change) are one of the main responsible for anthropogenic climate change (Forster et al., 2007).
Complex C cycle climate (CC) models, which establish the link between atmospheric CO2
concentration and anthropogenic C emissions by modeling uptake and exchange fluxes of the atmosphere with
the oceans and the terrestrial biosphere, are used to model the time evolution of airborne CO2. In order to make analysis easier for
smaller case studies, such as LCA, impulse response functions (IRF) are often used to represent CO2 atmospheric decay under
given assumptions (Tubiello & Oppenheimer, 1995; Joos & Bruno, 1996; Enting et al., 2001). The oceans play an
important role for the removal of anthropogenic C. They are generally distinguished into the upper layer,
which has a very fast turnover rate (Wanninkhof, 1992), and the deep ocean, to which C is transported
through oceanic circulation (Joos, 2003). This latter process is the limiting factor for the oceans
uptake capacity, which is determined by ocean volume and sea water chemistry. This uptake capacity is only
reached after several centuries, and it takes millennia to equilibrate ocean water and sediments
after a perturbation in oceanic C content . Changes in the land biosphere and in the upper ocean influence
atmospheric CO2 concentrations on seasonal to century time scales. Several models dealing with the C cycle in the oceans have
been formulated (Oeschger et al., 1975; Siegenthaler & Joos, 1992; Blanke & Delecluse, 1993; Caldeira & Kasting, 1993).
 Sulfur Dioxide Turn
Emissions removal causes warming so2 cools the earth

Prinn et al 5
(Ronald G. Prinn, John Reilly, Marcus Sarofim, Chien Wang
and Benjamin Felzer, MIT Joint Program on the Science
and Policy of Global Change, January 2005,
http://18.7.29.232/bitstream/handle/1721.1/7510/MITJPSP
GC_Rpt118.pdf?sequence=1)
The impact of these various pollutant caps on global and hemispheric mean surface temperature and sea
level changes from 2000 to 2100 are shown in Figure 6 as percentages relative to the global-average
reference case changes of 2.7C and 0.4 meters respectively. The largest increases in temperature and
sea level occur when SOx alone is capped due to the removal of reflecting (cooling) sulfate aerosols.
Because most SOx emissions are in the northern hemisphere, the temperature increases are greatest
there. For the NOx caps, temperature increases in the southern hemisphere (driven by the CH4
increases), but decreases in the northern hemisphere (due to the cooling effects of the O3 decreases
exceeding the warming driven by the CH4 increases). For CO and VOC reductions, there are small
decreases in temperature driven by the accompanying aerosol increases and CH4 reductions, with the
greatest effects being in the northern hemisphere where most of the CO and VOC emissions (and
aerosol production) occur. When NOx, CO, and VOCs are all capped, the nonlinearity in the system is
evidenced by the fact that the combined effects are not simple sums of the effects from the individual
caps. Ozone decreases and aerosol increases (offset only slightly by CH4 increases) lead to even less
warming and sea level rise than obtained by adding the CO/VOC and NOx capping cases. Finally the
capping of all emissions yields temperature and sea level rises that are smaller but qualitatively similar
to the case where only SOx is capped, but the rises are greater than expected from simple addition of the
SOx-capped and CO/VOC/NOx-capped cases. Nevertheless, the capping of CO, VOC and NOx serves
to reduce the warming induced by the capping of SOx. Note that these climate calculations in Figure 6
omit the cooling effects of the CO2 reductions caused by the lessening of the inhibition of the land sink
by ozone (Figure 5). This omission is valid if we presume that anthropogenic CO2 emissions, otherwise
restricted by a climate policy, are allowed to increase to compensate for these reductions. This was the
basis for our economic analysis in the previous section. To illustrate the lowering of climate impacts if
we allowed the sink-related CO2 reductions to occur, we show a sixth case in Figure 6 (allcap+sink)
which combines the capping of all air pollutant emissions with the enhanced carbon sink from Figure 5.
Now we see that the sign of the warming and sea level rise seen in the allcap case is reversed in the
allcap+sink case. If we could value this lowering of climate impacts, it would provide an alternative
to the economic analysis in section 4.3.

SO2 is key to global cooling

OSU 92
(Department of Geoscience, Oregon State University,
http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/book/export/html/156)

Symonds, Rose, Bluth, and Gerlach concluded that stratospheric injection of sulfur dioxide (SO2) is the
principal atmospheric and global impact of volcanic eruptions via SO2 + OH + 3H2O -> H2SO4 (l) + HO2
The SO2 converts to sulfuric acid aerosols that block incoming solar radiation and contribute to ozone
destruction. The blocked solar radiation can cause global cooling. The amount of SO2 released by
volcanoes is much less compared to man-made sources but the impact of some eruptions might be
disproportionately large. The gases emitted by most eruptions and by man-made sources never leave the
troposphere, the layer in the atmosphere from the surface to about 10 km. However, volcanic gases reach
the stratosphere, a layer in the atmosphere from about 10 km to about 50 km in altitude, during large
eruptions. This relationship is complicated by the fact that the elevation between the volcano summit and
the distance to the troposphere/stratosphere decreases with latitude. So, some smaller eruptions at higher
latitudes can eject as much SO2 gas into the stratosphere as larger eruptions closer to the equator. Factors
influencing the amounts of SO2 in the stratosphere were described and modeled by Bluth and others
(1997). For eruptions in the last 25 years, El Chichon and Mount Pinatubo emitted the greatest amounts of
SO2 into the stratosphere. El Chichon produced 7 Mt of SO2 and Mount Pinatubo produced 20 Mt. Both of
these volcanoes are at low latitudes but they both had high eruption rates. The importance of latitude is
obvious for four of the next five volcanoes that had a major influence on SO2 amounts in the stratosphere.
Hudson, St. Helens, Alaid, and Redoubt are all at latitudes greater than 45 degrees, where the distance to
the stratosphere is less. The eruption rate of Hudson was comparable to El Chichon and Mount Pinatubo.
However, the eruption rates of St. Helens, Alaid, and Redoubt where an order of magnitude less. These
volcanoes emitted 1, 1.1, and 0.2 Mt of SO2. The other eruption was at Ruiz, which had a high eruption
rate, comparable to El Chichon and Mount Pinatubo, but is near the equator. Ruiz emitted 0.7 Mt of SO2.
Bluth and others (1997) used the changes in aerosol optical depth as a measure of the impact of the
eruptions. The impact of eruptions may not last very long. The aerosols in the stratosphere from mid-range
eruptions (St. Helens, Alaid) settled back to the troposphere in about 5-8 months (Kent and McCormick,
1984). For large eruptions like El Chichon it takes about 12 months for SO2 levels in the stratosphere to
return to pre-eruption levels. Pinto and others (1989) suggested that at high eruption rates aerosols tend to
make larger particles, not greater numbers of same size aerosol particles. Larger particles have smaller
optical depth per unit mass, relative to smaller particles, and settle out of the stratosphere faster. These self-
limiting effects may restrict the total number of particles in the stratosphere and may moderate the impact
of volcanic clouds (Rampino and Self, 1982; Pinto and others,1989). More complicated patterns of
warming and cooling have been found on regional scales. Robock and Mao (1992) found warming over
Eurasia and North America and cooling over the Middle East and northern Africa during the winters after
the 12 largest volcanic eruptions from 1883-1992. For eruptions in the tropics the temperature changes
were noted in the first winter after the eruption. For eruptions in the mid-latitudes changes were observed in
the first or second winter after the eruption. For eruptions in high latitudes changes were observed in the
second winter after the eruption. Robock and Mao (1992) proposed that heating of the tropical stratosphere
by the volcanic aerosols led to an enhanced zonal winds. The zonal winds heated some areas while
blocking of solar radiation cooled other areas.

So2 is key to offset warming studies prove

Biello 11
(David Biello, reporter for scientific american, science
news agency, July 22, 2011,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?
id=stratospheric-pollution-helps-slow-global-warming)
Despite significant pyrotechnics and air travel disruption last year, the Icelandic volcano
Eyjafjallajokull simply didn't put that many aerosols into the stratosphere. In contrast, the eruption of
Mount Pinatubo in 1991, put 10 cubic kilometers of ash, gas and other materials into the sky, and
cooled the planet for a year. Now, research suggests that for the past decade, such stratospheric aerosols
injected into the atmosphere by either recent volcanic eruptions or human activities such as coal
burningare slowing down global warming. "Aerosols acted to keep warming from being as big as it
would have been," says atmospheric scientist John Daniel of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory, who helped lead the research published
online in Science on July 21. "It's still warming, it's just not warming as much as it would have been."
Essentially, sulfur dioxide gets emitted near the surface, either by a coal-fired power plant's smokestack
or a volcano. If that SO2 makes it to the stratospherethe middle layer of the atmosphere 10 kilometers
 upit forms droplets of diluted sulfuric acid, known as aerosols. These aerosols reflect sunlight away
from the planet, shading the surface and cooling temperatures. And some can persist for a few years,
prolonging that cooling. By analyzing satellite data and other measures, Daniel and his colleagues
found that such aerosols have been on the rise in Earth's atmosphere in the past decade, nearly doubling
in concentration. That concentration has reflected roughly 0.1 watts per meter squared of sunlight away
from the planet, enough to offset roughly one-third of the 0.28 watts per meter squared of extra heat
trapped by rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The
researchers calculate that the aerosols prevented 0.07 degrees Celsius of warming in average
temperatures since 2000.

Coal burning emits SO2 which cools the earth

Biello 11
(Environmental specialist staff writer for the Scientific
American) 2011 (David, Stratospheric Pollution Helps
Slow Global Warming, Energy & Sustainability, July 22,
2011, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?
id=stratospheric-pollution-helps-slow-global-warming)
Particles of sulfuric acid--injected by volcanoes or humans--have slowed the pace of climate change in
the past decade Despite significant pyrotechnics and air travel disruption last year, the Icelandic volcano
Eyjafjallajokull simply didn't put that many aerosols into the stratosphere. In contrast, the eruption of
Mount Pinatubo in 1991, put 10 cubic kilometers of ash, gas and other materials into the sky, and
cooled the planet for a year. Now, research suggests that for the past decade, such stratospheric aerosols
injected into the atmosphere by either recent volcanic eruptions or human activities such as coal
burningare slowing down global warming. "Aerosols acted to keep warming from being as big as it
would have been," says atmospheric scientist John Daniel of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory, who helped lead the research published
online in Science on July 21. "It's still warming, it's just not warming as much as it would have been."
Essentially, sulfur dioxide gets emitted near the surface, either by a coal-fired power plant's smokestack
or a volcano. If that SO2 makes it to the stratospherethe middle layer of the atmosphere 10 kilometers
upit forms droplets of diluted sulfuric acid, known as aerosols. These aerosols reflect sunlight away
from the planet, shading the surface and cooling temperatures. And some can persist for a few years,
prolonging that cooling. By analyzing satellite data and other measures, Daniel and his colleagues
found that such aerosols have been on the rise in Earth's atmosphere in the past decade, nearly doubling
in concentration. That concentration has reflected roughly 0.1 watts per meter squared of sunlight away
from the planet, enough to offset roughly one-third of the 0.28 watts per meter squared of extra heat
trapped by rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The
researchers calculate that the aerosols prevented 0.07 degrees Celsius of warming in average
temperatures since 2000. The question is: why the increase in such aerosols? There have been plenty of
smaller volcanic eruptions in recent years, such as the continuously erupting Soufriere Hills on
Montserrat and Tavurvur on Papua New Guinea, which may have exploded enough SO2 into the
atmosphere. And there has been plenty of coal burning in countries such as China, which now burns
some 3 billion metric tons of the fuel rock per year, largely without the pollution controls that would
scrub out the SO2, as is sometimes done in the U.S. In fact, a computer model study published July 5 in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested that such SO2 pollution in China has
cancelled out the warming effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations globally since 1998.
Determining whether humans or volcanoes explain more of the increase in stratospheric aerosols is the
focus of ongoing research, says PhD candidate Ryan Neely of the University of Colorado, who
contributed to the NOAA research. Combined with a decrease in atmospheric water vapor and a weaker
sun due to the most recent solar cycle, the aerosol finding may explain why climate change has not been
accelerating as fast as it did in the 1990s. The effect also illustrates one proposal for so-called
 geoengineeringthe deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environmentthat would use
various means to create such sulfuric acid aerosols in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and thereby
hopefully forestall catastrophic climate change. But that points up another potential problem: if aerosol
levels, whether natural or human-made, decline in the future, climate change could accelerateand
China is adding scrubbing technology to its coal-fired power plants to reduce SO2 emissions and
thereby minimize acid rain. In effect, fixing acid rain could end up exacerbating global warming. China
"could cause some decreases [in stratospheric aerosols] if that is the source," Neely says, adding that
growing SO2 emissions from India could also increase cooling if humans are the dominant cause of
injecting aerosols into the atmosphere. On the other hand, "if some volcanoes that are large enough go
off and if they are the dominant cause [of increasing aerosols], then we will probably see some
increases" in cooling.

This is consistent with the conclusion of their studies

Robock 8
(Alan Robock1, Luke Oman2, and Georgiy L. Stenchikov1
1Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers
University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 2Department of
Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore, Maryland March, 2008,
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs/Climate%20change/Geo-
politics/GeoengineeringJGR9inPress.pdf)
Anthropogenic stratospheric aerosol production, so as to reduce solar insolation and cool Earth, has
been suggested as an emergency response to geoengineer the planet in response to global warming.
While volcanic eruptions have been suggested as innocuous examples of stratospheric aerosols cooling
the planet, the volcano analog actually argues against geoengineering because of ozone depletion and
regional hydrologic and temperature responses. To further investigate the climate response, here we
simulate the climate response to both tropical and Arctic stratospheric injection of sulfate aerosol
precursors using a comprehensive atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE. We inject SO and
the model converts it to sulfate aerosols, transports the aerosols and removes them through dry and wet
deposition, and calculates the climate response to the radiative forcing from the aerosols. We conduct
simulations of future climate with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change A1B business-as-
usual scenario both with and without geoengineering, and compare the results. We find that 2if there
were a way to continuously inject SO2 into the lower stratosphere, it would produce global cooling.
Tropical SO2 injection would produce sustained cooling over most of the world, with more cooling
over continents. Arctic SO2 injection would not just cool the Arctic. Both tropical and Arctic SO2
injection would disrupt the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing precipitation to the food
supply for billions of people. These regional climate anomalies are but one of many reasons that argue
against the implementation of this kind of geoengineering.
Ice Age
 Warming Good - Ice Age
Current CO2 levels prevent an ice age

Science Daily, 2007

(Science Daily Next Ice Age Delayed By Rising Carbon
Dioxide Levels. August 30 2007.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070829193
436.htm)
Future ice ages may be delayed by up to half a million years by our burning of fossil fuels. That is the
implication of recent work by Dr Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and
Earth Science at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.Arguably, this work demonstrates the
most far-reaching disruption of long-term planetary processes yet suggested for human activity.Dr
Tyrrell's team used a mathematical model to study what would happen to marine chemistry in a world
with ever-increasing supplies of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.The world's oceans are absorbing
CO2 from the atmosphere but in doing so they are becoming more acidic. This in turn is dissolving the
calcium carbonate in the shells produced by surface-dwelling marine organisms, adding even more
carbon to the oceans. The outcome is elevated carbon dioxide for far longer than previously assumed.
Computer modelling in 2004 by a then oceanography undergraduate student at the University, Stephanie
Castle, first interested Dr Tyrrell and colleague Professor John Shepherd in the problem. They
subsequently developed a theoretical analysis to validate the plausibility of the phenomenon.The work,
which is part-funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, confirms earlier ideas of David
Archer of the University of Chicago, who first estimated the impact rising CO2 levels would have on
the timing of the next ice age.Dr Tyrrell said: 'Our research shows why atmospheric CO2 will not return
to pre-industrial levels after we stop burning fossil fuels. It shows that it if we use up all known fossil
fuels it doesn't matter at what rate we burn them. The result would be the same if we burned them at
present rates or at more moderate rates; we would still get the same eventual ice-age-prevention
result.'Ice ages occur around every 100,000 years as the pattern of Earth's orbit alters over time.
Changes in the way the sun strikes the Earth allows for the growth of ice caps, plunging the Earth into
an ice age. But it is not only variations in received sunlight that determine the descent into an ice age;
levels of atmospheric CO2 are also important.Humanity has to date burnt about 300 Gt C of fossil fuels.
This work suggests that even if only 1000 Gt C (gigatonnes of carbon) are eventually burnt (out of total
reserves of about 4000 Gt C) then it is likely that the next ice age will be skipped. Burning all
recoverable fossil fuels could lead to avoidance of the next five ice ages.

This causes extinction by 2020

Chapman 8
geophysicist and astronautical engineer, 2008
(Phil Chapman. April 23 2008 Sorry to ruin the fun, but
an ice age cometh.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,235
83376-7583,00.html)
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into
another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850. There is no doubt that the next little ice age
would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There
are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially
in the US and Canada. Global
warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will
decrease it. Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to
compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases. There is also another possibility, remote but
much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe
glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet. The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North
America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted
occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years. The interglacial
we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years
ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in
global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years. The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may
not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in
typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in
2027. By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice,
and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining. Australia may
escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation
starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.
 AT: Warming = Ice Age
Warming cannot cause ice agesthe North Atlantic
Current is not the key regulator and it could only shut
down after an ice age has already begun

Marsh 8
(retired physicist from the Argonne National Laboratory
and a former consultant to the Department of Defense on
strategic nuclear technology), 2008
(Gerald Marsh, retired physicist from the Argonne
National Laboratory and a former consultant to the
Department of Defense on strategic nuclear technology,
Climate Stability and Policy: A Synthesis
http://www.winningreen.com/site/epage/59619_621.htm)
There has been much speculation in both the scientific and popular literature that increased warming as
a consequence of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions could lead to an increased flow of fresh
water into the north Atlantic that would shut down the thermohaline circulation, known alternately as
the meridional overturning circulation or the Atlantic heat conveyor [21]. This in turn it is argued, could
initiate a new ice age in Europe. There are two major misconceptions behind such speculation: First, the
Gulf Stream is not responsible for the transport of most of the heat that gives Europe its mild climate
[22]; and while the shut down of the thermohaline circulation does appear to play an important role in
the dramatic drop in temperature due to Heinrich and Dansgaard- Oeschger events [23], such shutdowns
can only occur during an ice age. Indeed, Broecker [24], who first linked the thermohaline circulation to
the ice ages, now discounts the fear that a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation could trigger an ice
age. He has pointed out that for that scenario to work feedback amplification from extensive sea ice is
required [25]. The possibility that global warming could trigger an ice age through shutdown of the
thermohaline circulation may therefore be discounted.
 AT: Warming Kills Gulf Stream
Global warming makes the ocean saltier stabilizing the
Gulf Stream

Brahic 07
(New Scientists environmental reporter , Saltier North
Atlantic should give currents a boost.
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12528)
The surface waters of the North Atlantic are getting saltier, suggests a new study of records spanning
over 50 years. And this might actually be good news for the effects of climate change on global ocean
currents in the short-term, say the study's researchers. This is because saltier waters in the upper levels
of the North Atlantic ocean may mean that the global ocean conveyor belt the vital piece of planetary
plumbing which some scientists fear may slow down because of global warming will remain
stable. The global ocean conveyor belt is the crucial circulation of ocean waters around the Earth. It
helps drive the Gulf Stream and keeps Europe warm. The density of waters which drives the flow of
ocean currents is dependent on temperature and salinity, so any change in saltiness may have an
impact. Tim Boyer of the US National Oceanographic Data Center and colleagues compiled salinity
data gathered by fisheries, navy and research ships travelling across the North Atlantic between 1955
and 2006. They found that during this time, the layer of water that makes up the top 400 metres has
gradually become saltier. The seawater is probably becoming saltier due to global warming, Boyer says.
"We know that upper ocean is warming in the North Atlantic, so it stands to reason that there should be
more evaporation, making waters more salty," he says. Polar 'pulse' The global ocean conveyor belt is
in part driven by salty and relatively dense subpolar waters sinking and flowing south to the
equator. So when a huge "pulse" of less dense freshwater was found to have been dumped into the sub-
polar waters of the North Atlantic in the mid-1960s, researchers speculated the sub-polar waters might
just stay floating where they were and cause circulation to stagnate. The freshwater pulse probably
came from a combination of increased rainfall and melting ice, as well as big chunks of ice suddenly
pushing through the Fram Straight into the Atlantic. When in their recent study Boyer and his
colleagues zoomed in on the subarctic Atlantic, they found that the waters there became much less salty
in the 1960s, as expected. But since the 1990s, they have been getting saltier again, and are now about
as salty as they were in the 1970s. Backing up this finding, when the team looked at the salinity of
deeper waters, those flowing more than 1300 metres beneath the surface, they found that these have
been getting less salty since the late 1980s. They see this as a sign that the pulse of freshwater has been
slowly making its way south. It takes roughly 10 to 15 years for subpolar water to move away from the
Arctic and down to the equator.

Even if theyre right only minor climate changes will occur,

Global warming wont lead to an ice age or a collapse of
the AMO

Weaver and Hillaire 2004

(Andrew Weaver and Claud Hillaire, Gordon head of the
School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of
Victoria and a Canadian geoscientist of great distinction
and a world leader in Quaternary research. He is known
for his groundbreaking research on the environment,
climate change, and oceanography. He is a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada and professor at l'Universit du
Qubec Montral, 4/16/2004, Global Warming and the
next Ice Age, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?
vid=1&hid=14&sid=5e63d5e2-5a5a-4141-a53a-
7826e5e7c1bb%40sessionmgr2)
Models that eventually lead to a collapse of the AMO under global warming conditions typically fall
into two categories: (i) flux-adjusted coupled general circulation models, and (ii) intermediate-
complexity models with zonally averaged ocean components. Both suites of models are known to be
more sensitive to freshwater perturbations. In the first class of models, a small perturbation away from
the present climate leads to large systematic errors in the salinity fields (as large flux adjustments are
applied) that then build up to cause dramatic AMO transitions. In the second class of models, the
convection and sinking of water masses are coupled (there is no horizontal structure). In contrast, newer
non flux-adjusted models find a more stable AMO under future conditions of climate change ( 11,
13, 14). Even the recent observations of freshening in the North Atlantic ( 15) (a reduction of salinity
due to the addition of freshwater) appear to be consistent with the projections of perhaps the most
sophisticated non flux-adjusted model ( 11). Ironically, this model suggests that such freshening is
associated with an increased AMO ( 16). This same model proposes that it is only Labrador Sea Water
formation that is susceptible to collapse in response to global warming. In light of the paleoclimate
record and our understanding of the contemporary climate system, it is safe to say that global warming
will not lead to the onset of a new ice age. These same records suggest that it is highly unlikely that
global warming will lead to a widespread collapse of the AMO despite the appealing possibility
raised in two recent studies ( 18, 19) although it is possible that deep convection in the Labrador Sea
will cease. Such an event would have much more minor consequences on the climate downstream over
Europe.
 Ice Age - CO2 Key
CO2 emissions are the only thing preventing the next ice
age

Tzedakis et al 12
P. C. Tzedakis, et al J. E. T. Channell,D. A. Hodell,H. F.
Kleiven & L. C. January 2012 Skinner Determining the
natural length of the current interglacial
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng
eo1358.html
Climate modelling studies show that a reduction in boreal summer insolation is the primary trigger for
glacial inception, with CO2 playing a secondary role3, 5. Lowering CO2 shifts the inception threshold to
higher insolation values1, but modelling experiments indicate that preindustrial concentrations of 280ppmv
would not be sufficiently low to lead to new ice growth given the subdued insolation minimum2, 3, 4.
However, the extent to which preindustrial CO2 levels were natural has been challenged10, 11 by the
suggestion that anthropogenic interference since the mid-Holocene led to increased greenhouse gas (GHG)
concentrations, which countered the natural cooling trend and prevented a glacial inception. The overdue
glaciation hypothesis has been tested by climate simulations using lower preindustrial GHG concentrations,
with contrasting results, ranging from no ice growth5 to a linear increase in ice volume4 to large increases
in perennial ice cover6. Empirical evidence from intervals characterized by similar boundary conditions to
the current interglacial may also be used to infer the timing of the next natural glacial inception, assuming
that, for a given insolation and CO2 forcing, ice-volume responses between two periods are also similar.
Here, we limit the search for potential Holocene analogues to the past 800kyr, for which ice-core records
of atmospheric GHG concentrations are available12, 13. We then explore approaches to constraining the
timing of glacial inception and assess the relevance of this information to the current interglacial.
 Ice Age - Impact Calc
Ice age makes every impact scenario inevitable

Stipp 4
(Staff writer for CNN) 04
(David Stipp. Staff writer. The Pentagon's Weather
Nightmare The climate could change radically, and fast.
That would be the mother of all national security issues.
February 9. 2004
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/02/09/360120
/index.htm)

For planning purposes, it makes sense to focus on a midrange case of abrupt change. A century of cold,
dry, windy weather across the Northern Hemisphere that suddenly came on 8,200 years ago fits the bill-
its severity fell between that of the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age. The event is thought to have
been triggered by a conveyor collapse after a time of rising temperatures not unlike today's global
warming. Suppose it recurred, beginning in 2010. Here are some of the things that might happen by
2020: At first the changes are easily mistaken for normal weather variation, allowing skeptics to dismiss
them as a "blip" of little importance and leaving policymakers and the public paralyzed with
uncertainty. But by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening. The average
temperature has fallen by up to five degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of North America and Asia and
up to six degrees in parts of Europe. (By comparison, the average temperature over the North Atlantic
during the last ice age was ten to 15 degrees lower than it is today.) Massive droughts have begun in key
agricultural regions. The average annual rainfall has dropped by nearly 30% in northern Europe, and its
climate has become more like Siberia's. Violent storms are increasingly common as the conveyor
becomes wobbly on its way to collapse. A particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through
levees in the Netherlands, making coastal cities such as the Hague unlivable. In California the delta
island levees in the Sacramento River area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting
water from north to south. Megadroughts afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states, along with
winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now, causing widespread dust storms and soil
loss. The U.S. is better positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse growing
climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources. That has a downside, though: It magnifies the
haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America. Turning inward, the U.S.
effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold
back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands, waves of boat
people pose especially grim problems. Tension between the U.S. and Mexico rises as the U.S. reneges
on a 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into Mexico. America is forced to
meet its rising energy demand with options that are costly both economically and politically, including
nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern contracts. Yet it survives without catastrophic losses.
Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with immigrants from Scandinavia seeking
warmer climes to the south. Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in
Africa and elsewhere. But Western Europe's wealth helps buffer it from catastrophe. Australia's size and
resources help it cope, as does its location. The conveyor shutdown mainly affects the Northern
Hemisphere. Japan has fewer resources but is able to draw on its social cohesion to cope. Its
government is able to induce population-wide behavior changes to conserve resources. China's huge
population and food demand make it particularly vulnerable. It is hit by increasingly unpredictable
monsoon rains, which cause devastating floods in drought-denuded areas. Other parts of Asia and East
Africa are similarly stressed. Much of Bangladesh becomes nearly uninhabitable because of a rising sea
level, which contaminates inland water supplies. Countries whose diversity already produces conflict,
such as India and Indonesia, are hard-pressed to maintain internal order while coping with the unfolding
changes. As the decade progresses, pressures to act become irresistible. History shows that whenever
humans have faced a choice between starving or raiding, they raid. Imagine Eastern European countries,
struggling to feed their populations, invading Russia, which is weakened by a population that is already
in decline, for access to its minerals and energy supplies. Or picture Japan eyeing nearby Russian oil
and gas reserves to power desalination plants and energy-intensive farming. Envision nuclear-armed
Pakistan, India, and China skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable
land. Or Spain and Portugal fighting over fishing rights, fisheries are disrupted around the world as
water temperatures change, causing fish to migrate to new habitats. Growing tensions engender novel
alliances. Canada joins fortress America in a North American bloc. (Alternatively, Canada may seek to
keep its abundant hydropower for itself, straining its ties with the energy-hungry U.S.) North and South
Korea align to create a technically savvy, nuclear-armed entity. Europe forms a truly unified bloc to
curb its immigration problems and protect against aggressors. Russia, threatened by impoverished
neighbors in dire straits, may join the European bloc.) Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable. Oil
supplies are stretched thin as climate cooling drives up demand. Many countries seek to shore up their
energy supplies with nuclear energy, accelerating nuclear proliferation. Japan, South Korea, and
Germany develop nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt, and North Korea. Israel, China,
India, and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.
 Ice Age - Checks Warming
Melting Icebergs dump iron into the ocean - solves
catastrophic effects of warming
Williams 9
Andrew Williams, writer for clean technical a website
dedicated to environmental news, JANUARY 4, 2009, Clean
technical, Green Algae Bloom Process Could Stop Global
Warming, http://cleantechnica.com/2009/01/04/green-algae-bloom-
process-could-stop-global-warming/

The researchers, aboard the Royal Navys HMS Endurance, have found that melting icebergs off the
coast of Antarctica are releasing millions of tiny particles of iron into the southern Ocean, helping to
create huge blooms of algae that absorb carbon emissions. The algae then sinks to the icy depths,
effectively removing CO2 from the atmosphere for hundreds of years. According to lead researcher,
Prof. Rob Raiswell of Leeds University, The Earth itself seems to want to save us. Scientists have
known for some time that artificially created algal blooms could be used to absorb greenhouse gases,
but the technique has been banned for fear of causing unforeseen side effects in fragile ecosystems.
However, based on the UK teams evidence that the process has been occurring naturally for millions of
years, and on a wide scale, the UN has given the green light for a ground-breaking experiment later this
month. The team will seek to create a massive algae bloom by releasing several tons of iron sulphate
into the sea off the coast of the British island of South Georgia. The patch will apparently be large
enough to be visible from space. If successful, the technique could be rolled out across vast swathes of
the Great Southern Ocean. Scientists calculate that if the whole 20 million square miles was treated, it
could remove up to three and a half Gigatons of C02, equivalent to one eighth of all global annual
emissions from fossil fuels. It would be a huge irony if melting icebergs, until now a powerful symbol
of the damage caused by global warming, reveal a process that may enable scientists to take steps that
might drastically reduce, and potentially even halt, the threat of environmental catasrophe

Increased oceanic iron levels solve CO2 emissions

Nature 12
Quirin Schiermeier, 18 July 2012, Dumping iron at sea
does sink carbon, http://www.nature.com/news/dumping-
iron-at-sea-does-sink-carbon-1.11028
In the search for methods to limit global warming, it seems that stimulating the growth of algae in the
oceans might be an efficient way of removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere after all.
Despite other studies suggesting that this approach was ineffective, a recent analysis of an ocean-
fertilization experiment eight years ago in the Southern Ocean indicates that encouraging algal blooms
to grow can soak up carbon that is then deposited in the deep ocean as the algae die. In February 2004,
researchers involved in the European Iron Fertilization Experiment (EIFEX) fertilized 167 square
kilometres of the Southern Ocean with several tonnes of iron sulphate. For 37 days, the team on board
the German research vessel Polarstern monitored the bloom and demise of single-cell algae
(phytoplankton) in the iron-limited but otherwise nutrient-rich ocean region Each atom of added iron
pulled at least 13,000 atoms of carbon out of the atmosphere by encouraging algal growth which,
through photosynthesis, captures carbon. In a paper in Nature today, the team reports that much of the
captured carbon was transported to the deep ocean, where it will remain sequestered for centuries1 a
'carbon sink'. At least half of the bloom was exported to depths greater than 1,000 metres, says Victor
Smetacek, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in
Bremerhaven, Germany, who led the study. The team used a turbidity meter a device that measures
the degree to which water becomes less transparent owing to the presence of suspended particles to
establish the amount of biomass, such as dead algae, that rained down the water column towards the sea
floor. Samples collected outside the experimental area showed substantially less carbon being deposited
in the deep ocean. Iron findings The EIFEX results back up a hypothesis by the late oceanographer John
Martin, who first reported in 1988 that iron deficiency limits phytoplankton growth in parts of the
subarctic Pacific Ocean2. Martin later proposed that vast quantities of iron-rich dust from dry and
sparsely vegetated continental regions may have led to enhanced ocean productivity in the past, thus
contributing to the drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide during glacial climates3 an idea given
more weight by the EIFEX findings. Some advocates of geoengineering think that this cooling
mechanism might help to mitigate present-day climate change. However, the idea of deliberately
stimulating plankton growth on a large scale is highly controversial. After noting that there were gaps in
the scientific knowledge about this approach, the parties to the London Convention the international
treaty governing ocean dumping agreed in 2007 that commercial ocean fertilization is not justified
(see 'Convention discourages ocean fertilization'). The finding that ocean fertilization does work,
although promising, is not enough to soothe concerns over potentially harmful side effects on ocean
chemistry and marine ecosystems, says Smetacek. Some scientists fear that massive ocean fertilization
might produce toxic algal blooms or deplete oxygen levels in the middle of the water column. Given the
controversy over another similar experiment (see 'Ocean fertilization experiment draws fire'), which
critics said should not have been approved in the first place, the Alfred Wegener Institute will not
conduct any further artificial ocean-fertilization studies, according to Smetacek. We just dont know
what might happen to species composition and so forth if you were to continuously add iron to the sea,
says Smetacek. These issues can only be addressed by more experiments including longer-term studies
of natural blooms that occur around some Antarctic islands. But some experts argue that artificial
ocean-fertilization studies should not be abandoned altogether. We are nowhere near the point of
recommending ocean fertilization as a geoengineering tool, says Ken Buesseler, a geochemist at the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. But just because we don't know all the
answers, we shouldn't say no to further research.
 Russia Oil - Shell
Continued global warming is key to melting the Arctic and
opening new resources

Armour et al 11
(Department of Physics, University of Washington) 11
K. C. Armour,1 I. Eisenman,2,3 E. Blanchard
Wrigglesworth,3 K. E. McCusker,3 and C. M. Bitz3, climate
scientists, The reversibility of sea ice loss in a stateof
theart climate model,
http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/gl1116/2011GL048739/201
1GL048739.pdf
Rapid Arctic sea ice retreat has fueled speculation about the possibility of threshold (or tipping point)
behavior and irreversible loss of the sea ice cover. We test sea ice reversibility within a stateoftheart
atmosphere ocean global climate model by increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide until the Arctic
Ocean becomes icefree throughout the year and subsequently decreasing it until the initial ice cover
returns. Evidence for irreversibility in the form of hysteresis outside the envelope of natural variability
is explored for the loss of summer and winter ice in both hemispheres. We find no evidence of
irreversibility or multiple icecover states over the full range of simulated sea ice conditions between
the modern climate and that with an annually icefree Arctic Ocean. Summer sea ice area recovers as
hemispheric temperature cools along a trajectory that is indistinguishable from the trajectory of summer
sea ice loss, while the recovery of winter ice area appears to be slowed due to the long response times of
the ocean near the modern winter ice edge. The results are discussed in the context of previous studies
that assess the plausibility of sea ice tipping points by other methods. The findings serve as evidence
against the existence of threshold behavior in the summer or winter ice cover in either hemisphere.

Russian oil production has peaked, new arctic fields are

key to preventing Russian economic collapse

Weir 8
(Correspondent for CSM) 08
Fred Weir, May 28, 2008, Has Russian oil output peaked?,
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-
Central/2008/0528/p01s04-wosc.html
The Kremlin often touts Russia's image as an "energy superpower," but now the country's oil production
is declining. Some say Russia may have already reached peak oil output. Underscoring the urgency of
the issue, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's new cabinet made its first order of business on Monday the
approval of a package of measures to relieve the oil-production crisis. "It's a good first step," says
Natalia Milchakova, an oil and gas analyst for Otkritiye, a Moscow-based brokerage firm. But she adds
that "rapidly slowing" oil production, which was growing by more than 10 percent five years ago, isn't
"something that can be quickly fixed with political declarations." As the world's second-largest oil
exporter, Russia joins a growing number of top oil suppliers wrestling with how to address declining or
peaking production. Like Venezuela and Mexico, Russia is heavily dependent on oil, which accounts for
more than two-thirds of government revenue and 30 percent of the country's gross domestic product.
Now, Moscow is trying to remedy a situation caused in part by outdated technology, heavy taxation of
 oil profits, and lack of investment in oil infrastructure. The Presidium of the Cabinet, as it is officially
known, in its inaugural meeting Monday approved tax holidays of up to 15 years for Russian companies
that open new oil fields and proposed raising the threshold at which taxation begins from the current $9
per barrel to $15. Oil companies welcomed the measures, but experts say that after almost two decades
of post-Soviet neglect, which have seen little new exploration, it may be too little, too late. After rising
steadily for several years to a post-Soviet high of 9.9 million barrels per day (bpd) in October, Russian
oil production fell by 0.3 percent in the first four months of this year, while exports fell 3.3 percent - the
first Putin-era drop. Russia's proven oil reserves are a state secret, but the Oil & Gas Journal, a US-
based industry publication, estimates it has about 60 billion barrels - the world's eighth largest - which
would last for 17 years at current production rates. Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko recently admitted
the decline, but suggested it might be overcome by fresh discoveries in underexplored eastern Siberia or
in new Arctic territories recently claimed by Russia. "The output level we have today is a plateau, or
stagnation," he said. But Leonid Fedun, vice president of Russia's largest private oil company LUKoil,
went one step further in an interview with the Financial Times last month. "Russian oil production has
peaked and may never return to current levels," he said. That poses problems for Russia, which has
talked of expanding beyond its main oil market - Europe - to China, Japan, and the US. In 2006, then-
President Putin approved construction of an $11 billion pipeline across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean to
carry eastward exports. Putin and his successor, Dmitri Medvedev, have insisted Russia can meet
demand by increasing output but oil analysts around the globe are pessimistic that oil supplies can meet
rising consumption in the coming decade.

Extinction

Filger 9
(Sheldon Filger, columnist, writer for
Globaleconomiccrisis.com, 2009, "Russia's Economy Faces
a Disastrous Free Fall Contraction," Huffington Post)
In Russia historically, economic health and political stability are intertwined to a degree that is
rarely encountered in other major industrialized economies. It was the economic stagnation of the
former Soviet Union that led to its political downfall. Similarly, Medvedev and Putin, both intimately
acquainted with their nations history, are unquestionably alarmed at the prospect that Russias economic crisis will
endanger the nations political stability, achieved at great cost after years of chaos following the demise of the Soviet Union.
Already, strikes and protests are occurring among rank and file workers facing unemployment or non-payment of their
salaries. Recent polling demonstrates that the once supreme popularity ratings of Putin and Medvedev are eroding rapidly. Beyond the
political elites are the financial oligarchs, who have been forced to deleverage, even unloading their yachts and executive jets in a
desperate attempt to raise cash. Should the Russian economy deteriorate to the point where economic
collapse is not out of the question, the impact will go far beyond the obvious accelerant such an
outcome would be for the Global Economic Crisis. There is a geopolitical dimension that is even more
relevant then the economic context. Despite its economic vulnerabilities and perceived decline from superpower status, Russia
remains one of only two nations on earth with a nuclear arsenal of sufficient scope and capability
to destroy the world as we know it. For that reason, it is not only President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin who will
be lying awake at nights over the prospect that a national economic crisis can transform itself into a virulent
and destabilizing social and political upheaval. It just may be possible that U.S. President Barack Obamas national
security team has already briefed him about the consequences of a major economic meltdown in Russia for the peace of the world.
After all, the most recent national intelligence estimates put out by the U.S. intelligence community have already concluded that the
Global Economic Crisis represents the greatest national security threat to the United States, due to its facilitating political instability in
the world.
 Russia Oil - Warming k2 Arctic
Global warming will melt the arctic

Schneider 04
SCHNEIDER 2004 (Doug, NewsVOA.com, October 22,
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2004-10/2004-10-22-voa61.cfm?
CFID=12777931&CFTOKEN=29167729)

More than 250 scientists from around the Arctic spent four years compiling the report for the
Arctic Council, an organization of government officials, scientists and indigenous people from Canada, Denmark, Finland,
Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Russia and the United States. The report is expected to conclude that the Arctic is
undergoing dramatic environmental change as a result of a climate that has warmed an average of five
degrees in recent decades. Among the changes are disappearing sea ice, melting permafrost and glaciers ,
and the colonization of the tundra by trees and shrubs. The report also draws on five separate computer models to
predict the Arctic's future climate. Weller says that while each model offers somewhat different
scenarios, they all point to an Arctic with much less ice and snow in coming decades.
 Russia Oil - Arctic k2 Oil
Melting Arctic will allow Russia access to new oil fields

CSM 07
Fred Weir, writer for the Christian Science monitor, July
31, 2007, As icecaps melt, Russia races for Arctic's
resources, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0731/p01s01-
woeu.html
As milder temperatures make exploration of the Arctic sea floor possible for the first time, Russia's
biggest-ever research expedition to the region is steaming toward the immense scientific prestige of
being the first to explore the seabed of the world's crown. In the next few days, two manned minisubs
will be launched through a hole blasted in the polar ice to scour the ocean floor nearly three miles
below. They will gather rock samples and plant a titanium Russian flag to symbolize Moscow's claim
over 460,000 square miles of hitherto international territory an area bigger than France and Germany
combined in a region estimated to contain a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves.
The issue of who owns the North Pole, now administered by the International Seabed Authority, has
long been regarded as academic since the entire region is locked in year-round impenetrable ice. But
with global warming thinning the icecaps, the question has vaulted to the front burner. "The No. 1
reason for the urgency about this is global warming, which makes it likely that a very large part of the
Arctic will become open to economic exploitation in coming decades," says Alexei Maleshenko, an
expert with the Carnegie Center in Moscow. "The race for the North Pole is becoming very exciting."
The US Geological Survey estimates that 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves lie
beneath the Arctic Ocean. Experts at the Russian Institute of Oceanology calculate that the saddle-
shaped territory that Russia is planning to claim may contain up to 10 billion tons of petroleum, plus
other mineral resources and vast, untapped fishing stocks. Russia stakes its claim The 1982 Law of the
Sea Convention establishes a 12-mile offshore territorial limit for each country, plus a 200-mile
"economic zone" in which it has exclusive rights. But the law leaves open the possibility that the
economic zone can be extended if it can be proved that the seafloor is actually an extension of a
country's geological territory. In 2001, Russia submitted documents to the United Nations (UN)
claiming that the Lomonosov Ridge, which underlies the Arctic Ocean, is actually an extension of the
Siberian continental shelf and should therefore be treated as Russian territory. The case was rejected.
But a group of Russian scientists returned from a six-week Arctic mission in June insisting that they had
uncovered solid evidence to support the Russian claim. That paved the way for the current expedition,
which includes the giant nuclear-powered icebreaker Rossiya, the huge research ship Akademik
Fyodorov, two Mir deep-sea submersibles previously used to explore the wreck of the Titanic and
about 130 scientists. The subs were tested Sunday, near Franz-Joseph Land in the frozen Barents Sea,
and found to be working well. "It was the first-ever dive of manned vehicles under the Arctic ice,"
Anatoly Sagelevich, one of the pilots, told the official ITAR-Tass agency. "We now know that we can
perform this task." The upcoming dive beneath the North Pole will be far more difficult, and involve
collecting evidence about the age, sediment thickness, and types of rock, as well as other data all of
which will be presented to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (a
body of scientists chosen by parties to the Law of the Sea Convention) to support Russia's claim to the
territory.

Specifically melting now is aiding Russia

The Economist 12
The Economist, Jun 16th 2012 The melting north,
(http://www.economist.com/node/21556798)
Yet the melting Arctic will have geostrategic consequences beyond helping a bunch of resource-fattened
countries to get fatter. An obvious one is the potentially disruptive effect of new trade routes. Sailing
along the coast of Siberia by the north-east passage, or Northern Sea Route (NSR), as Russians and
mariners call it, cuts the distance between western Europe and east Asia by roughly a third. The passage
is now open for four or five months a year and is getting more traffic. In 2010 only four ships used the
NSR; last year 34 did, in both directions, including tankers, refrigerated vessels carrying fish and even a
cruise liner. Asias big exporters, China, Japan and South Korea, are already investing in ice-capable
vessels, or planning to do so. For Russia, which has big plans to develop the sea lane with trans-
shipment hubs and other infrastructure, this is a double boon. It will help it get Arctic resources to
market faster and also, as the NSR becomes increasingly viable, diversify its hydrocarbon-addicted
economy.
 Russia Oil - AT: SQ Solves
Russian oil deposits cant keep up with demand. Need to
spread to the Arctic

Konoczuk 12
(head of the department of eastern European studies and
a major researcher in eastern European politics) 12
Wojciech Konoczuk, April 2012 , RUSSIAS BEST ALLY THE
SITUATION OF THE RUSSIAN OIL SECTOR AND FORECASTS
FOR ITS FUTURE,
http://www.osw.waw.pl/sites/default/files/PRACE_39_en.pdf

As production levels in the traditional oil fields are regularly falling, the development of new regions is
a problem. Eastern Siberia with the northern part of Krasnoyarsk Krai and the Far East (and the Arctic
shelf in the longer term) stand the greatest chance of becoming major production sources. Production
has already started in some of these regions, although its level is still low. An increase in output is also
expected on the Caspian and the Black Sea continental shelves, which will however have less impact on
the Russian oil sector. What these regions have in common is that they all have been explored
geologically to only a small extent so far, which makes it difficult to assess the volume of the oil
deposits there. Furthermore, investments in geological and exploration research are at low levels, the
discovered fields are at the initial stage of development and most of them are classified as medium in
terms of confirmed deposits. What makes Eastern Siberia, the Far East and the Arctic shelf different
from the present chief production centres are the much harsher climate conditions; this significantly
raises the costs of investment and requires the application of new, often still undeveloped technologies
(as in the case of the Arctic shelf). Another crucial aspect regarding the new fields is the feasibility of
production, while in 80% of them production is unprofitable, given the present fiscal situation.
 AT: Ice Age
No ice age for another 130,000 years

Brock 11
(Chris Brock, TIMES STAFF WRITER, SATURDAY, MARCH
19, 2011,
http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20110319/CU
RR04/303199998/?loc=interstitialskip)
PAUL SMITHS Chalk one up for the humans: we staved off an ice age. That's one conclusion
ecologist and paleoclimatalogist Curt Stager makes in his book "Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years
of Life on Earth," released Tuesday by St. Martin's Press. And we have it in our power to prevent
another ice age, which, compared to global warming, would be much worse for humans. "An ice age is
to global warming as thermonuclear war is to a bar brawl," Mr. Stager writes in "Deep Future." Most of
the scholarly studies about humans and global warming deal with the issue within the next century or
so. But Mr. Stager looks ahead dozens of centuries. Mr. Stager takes a deep look at climate and its long-
term patterns. "I try to make the point that we have a whole lot of power as to what the future holds,"
said Mr. Stager, a professor at Paul Smith's College and a research associate at the University of Maine's
Climate Change Institute. In "Deep Future," he looks at the bright and dark sides of what is at stake on
Earth thousands of years from now. The book has received a starred review in the journal Kirkus
Reviews, which called it "essential reading." One of the bottom lines in "Deep Future" is that each
generation should realize what we're doing to Earth and pay attention to the cumulative effect. "Along
with power comes responsibility," Mr. Stager said in a phone interview from Paul Smith's campus,
located near Saranac Lake. "Without sounding like a preacher and 'Thou shalt do this,' I think it's
important for people to realize the consequences of our actions are going to last a lot longer than folks
had anticipated." He writes in "Deep Future": "Our very existence at this pivotal moment in history
gives us the amazing ability some might say the honor to set the world's thermostat for hundreds
of thousands of years." Mr. Stager writes that most climate models predict another ice age at the year
50,000. Humans, he said, have stopped that "in its tracks" because of carbon dioxide emissions. The
next ice age will arrive around the year 130,000. But not if "we burn through all our remaining coal
reserves during the next century or so," Mr. Stager writes. If we do that, he said, the next ice age won't
hit for the next half million years.

Your evidence is wrong cooling is a factor of warming

SAMARDI 10
(LJILJANA SAMARDI, Reporter on interntational news,
http://www.wavemagazine.net/arhiva/40/topic/false-ice-
age.htm)
"Despite cool temperatures over most of the Arctic Ocean in January, Arctic sea ice extent continued to
track below normal." This means that the alleged states about mini ice age are far from truth By
LJILJANA SAMARDI (ljiljana.samardzic@wavemagazine.net) from Sombor, SERBIA During
UN's World Climate Conference in 2009 Mr. Mojib Latif, a climate expert at the Leibniz Institute at
Kiel University in Germany, held a speech about climate predictions, which were concluded from his
research. However, New Scientist, along with few others medias, reported that Mr. Latif research shows
that we are entering new little ice age, which is supposed to last for next 20 or 30 years. With reports,
speeches, surveys available online even laics could see that words of Mr. Latif were misinterpreted.
After this misquoting, he gave a statement in which he refutes his alleged conclusions and sayings.
 Next decade turned into several decades The confusion was about a final line of the abstract: "Our
results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate
variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic
warming." First of all, the scientist said that this "may" happen, which means that this climate
phenomenon is not something that will surely happen. There is only a possibility and lots of factors
might influence on the final result. Secondly, the author said "over the next decade" and that, somehow,
turn into "decade or two" and even "several decades". Besides, Mr. Latif said that "we don't trust our
forecast beyond 2015" which means that their model is not precise when it comes to one specific year.
Global warming on hold The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that "sea ice extent increased
at a fairly steady rate in the early part of the month and then slowed towards the end of January. A brief
slowdown in ice growth is not unusual during winter." In comparison to January of few past years "ice
extent averaged for January 2010 was the fourth lowest for the month since the beginning of satellite
records". It is also concluded by analyzing data from last three decades that "the summer Arctic sea ice
melt season now lasts nearly a month longer than it did in the 1980s. A later start of freeze-up and an
earlier start to the melt season both contribute to the change." Those statements refute the headlines that
brought confusion among settlers of the Earth which tend to make us believe that global warming will
be shortly postponed. According to Mr. Latif, the warming had been only slowed down and acceleration
might happen again in period between 2015 and 2020: "We did only forecasts for the time until 2015.
However, if we look further, then we have some indications that there are after, say after 2015 or 2020,
you know, global warming will accelerate again." So, the global warming is not postponed, stopped or
anything alike. Due to natural fluctuations it happens only to be on hold for the "another 10 years or
so".

The earth is warming proves ice age is false

LDEO 10
(Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Study Adds New Clue
to How Last Ice Age Ended, September 8, 2010,
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/study-adds-
new-clue-how-last-ice-age-ended)
As the last ice age was ending, about 13,000 years ago, a final blast of cold hit Europe, and for a
thousand years or more, it felt like the ice age had returned. But oddly, despite bitter cold winters in the
north, Antarctica was heating up. For the two decades since ice core records revealed that Europe was
cooling at the same time Antarctica was warming over this thousand-year period, scientists have looked
for an explanation. A new study in Nature brings them a step closer by establishing that New Zealand
was also warming, indicating that the deep freeze up north, called the Younger Dryas for the white
flower that grows near glaciers, bypassed much of the southern hemisphere. Glaciers in New Zealand
receded dramatically at this time, suggesting that much of the southern hemisphere was warming with
Antarctica, said study lead author, Michael Kaplan, a geochemist at Columbia Universitys Lamont-
Doherty Earth Observatory. Knowing that the Younger Dryas cooling in the northern hemisphere was
not a global event brings us closer to understanding how Earth finally came out of the ice age. Ice core
records show that warming of the southern hemisphere, starting 13,000 years ago, coincided with rising
levels of the heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide. The study in Nature is the first to link this spike in CO2
to the impressive shrinking of glaciers in New Zealand. The scientists estimate that glaciers lost more
than half of their extent over a thousand years, and that their creep to higher elevations was a response
to the local climate warming as much as 1 degree C. Samples of glacial debris, like this boulder, lets
researchers retrace the path of ancient glaciers. Credit: Mike Kaplan. (Alice Doughty, University of
Maine pictured) . To reconstruct New Zealands past climate, the studys authors tracked one glaciers
retreat on South Islands Irishman Basin. When glaciers advance, they drag mounds of rock and dirt
with them. When they retreat, cosmic rays bombard these newly exposed ridges of rock and dirt, called
moraines. By crushing this material and measuring the build-up of the cosmogenic isotope beryllium
10, scientists can pinpoint when the glacier receded. The beryllium-10 method allowed the researchers
 to track the glaciers retreat upslope through time and indirectly calculate how much the climate
warmed. Rock samples were flown out of Irishman Basin by helicopter and shipped to the U.S. for
analysis. Credit: Mike Kaplan. The overall trigger for the end of the last ice age came as Earths
orientation toward the sun shifted, about 20,000 years ago, melting the northern hemispheres large ice
sheets. As fresh melt water flooded the North Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf Stream weakened, driving the
north back into the ice age. During this time, temperatures in Greenland dropped by about 15 degrees C.
For years, scientists have tried to explain how the so-called Younger Dryas cooling fit with the
simultaneous warming of Antarctica that eventually spread across the globe. The Nature paper
discusses the two dominant explanations without taking sides. In one, the weakening of the Gulf Stream
reconfigures the planets wind belts, pushing warm air and seawater south, and pulling carbon dioxide
from the deep ocean into the air, causing further warming. In the other, the weakened Gulf Stream
triggers a global change in ocean currents, allowing warm water to pool in the south, heating up the
climate. Bob Anderson, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty who argues the winds played the dominant
role, says the Nature paper adds another piece to the puzzle. This is one of the most pressing problems
in paleoclimatology because it tells us about the fundamental processes linking climate changes in the
northern and southern hemispheres, he said. Understanding how regional changes influence global
climate will allow scientists to more accurately predict regional variations in rain and snowfall. Other
researchers involved in the study: Joerg Schaefer and Roseanne Schwartz, also of Lamont-Doherty;
George Denton and Aaron Putnam, University of Maine; David Barrell, GNS Science, New Zealand;
Trevor Chinn, Alpine and Polar Processes Consultancy, New Zealand; Bjrn Andersen, University of
Oslo; Robert Finkel, University of California, Berkeley; Alice Doughty, Victoria University of
Wellington."

No ice age and warming outweighs

Chameides 8
Professor of Environment @ Duke (Bill, PhD, Yale
University, Pulse of the Planet: A New Ice Age IS
Coming ... but Don't Hold Your Breath, 11-17-2008,
http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/iceage-
nature)
Skeptics have been arguing that we should forget about global warming -- a new ice age is imminent.
Maybe, some say, it's already started. In fact, a new study does predict the coming of an ice age, one
promising to be more permanent than others. Is it imminent? Depends on how you characterize 10,000
years. It may surprise you to know that in our current climate, ice ages are more the norm than not.
Over the past three million years, covering the end of the Pliocene and the present Pleistocene epoch,
the Earths climate has oscillated between cold times (called ice ages or glaciations) and warmer times,
interglaciations. In the recent past (the last one million years or so) the ice ages have lasted for about
100,000 years, and the warmer periods tens of thousands of years. The last ice age ended about 12,000
years ago. The questions most relevant to us are: when will the next ice age occur and should we be
concerned about a global cold wave or the current global warming? The answers lie in the mechanism
behind the climate swings. The oscillations between ice ages and warm periods can be qualitatively
explained by the Milankovitch theory (for more details see here). The theory's basic tenet is that the ice
ageinterglacial swings are triggered by changes in the Earths orbit about the sun (eccentricity),
rotational changes of the Earth on its axis (precession), and changes in the tilt of the axis (obliquity,
which is what causes the seasons). The orbital changes affect how much sunlight reaches the Earth at
different latitudes. These changes in solar radiation are then amplified by feedbacks involving carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the ice albedo, and the large temperature swings inferred between
ice ages and interglacials. One of the major puzzles in the Milankovitch theory is the so-called Mid-
Pleistocene transition. Before about one million years ago, the glacial periods lasted about 40,000 years
(which corresponds to the frequency of obliquity changes). Then the glaciations transitioned to a
100,000-year cycle (which corresponds to the frequency of changes in eccentricity). Why this
transition? Scientists continue to discuss the cause. Now Tom Crowley of the University of Edinburgh
(previously at Duke University) and William Hyde of the University of Toronto have added a new
wrinkle to the debate in a paper just published in Nature. Using a simplified, coupled climate-ice sheet
model, they conclude that the shift in the ice age cycling kicked off a slow transition to a new climate
regime, one that will be characterized by a permanent ice sheet in the northern mid-latitudes. They
argue that this transition is being driven by snow-ice albedo effects. A permanent ice sheet in the mid-
latitudes of the North Hemisphere sounds like bad news. But panic is a little premature. Tom Crowley
states that "our model predicts a rapid transition [to an ice age] beginning in the 10,000-100,000 years.
But the timing of this transition is surely model dependent -- it could easily be a quarter of million years
or so -- still short from the context of geology but almost infinite from the viewpoint of society. Our
results in no way can be interpreted as justification for continued use of fossil fuels, as that problem is
near term and very significant."
CO2 Agriculture
 Warming Bad - Empirics
Warming kills argiculture 4 reasons

Hatfield 11
(Jeremy Hatfield, PHD, Laboratory Director and
Supervisory Plant Physiologist @ Agricultural Research
Service,
http://www.ars.usda.gov/pandp/people/people.htm?
personid=2378)
Climate change over the next 30 to 50 years will place new stresses on agricultural production
because of the increasing temperatures, increased variability in precipitation, enhanced potential
for more extreme storms, and more differences within the growing season. There have been several
assessments of the potential scenarios for climate change and Meehl et al. (2007) summarized that on a
global basis it is very likely that heat waves will be more intense, more frequent and longer
lasting in a future warmer climate. Cold episodes are projected to decrease significantly in a
future warmer climate. Almost everywhere, daily minimum temperatures are projected to increase
faster than daily maximum temperatures, leading to a decrease in diurnal temperature range.
Decreases in frost days are projected to occur almost everywhere in the middle and high latitudes, with
a comparable increase in growing season length. In terms of precipitation, they stated that For a
future warmer climate, the current generation of models indicates that precipitation generally
increases in the areas of regional tropical precipitation maxima (such as the monsoon regimes) and
over the tropical Pacific in particular, with general decreases in the subtropics, and increases at
high latitudes as a consequence of a general intensification of the global hydrological cycle.
Globally averaged mean water vapor, evaporation and precipitation are projected to increase (Meehl et
al., 2007). These summaries point out the expected global change in temperature and
precipitation. Across North America there are expected changes in climate mirroring the
worldwide changes. These have been summarized recently by Karl et al. (2009) where temperature and
precipitation patterns across the United States for the next 50 years show a warming trend for most of
the United States of 1.5 to 2.0C and a slight increase in precipitation over most of the United States.
Their projections of an increase in the number of days which the temperature will be higher than the
climatic normals by 5C (heat-waves) will impact agricultural systems. They also project an increase in
warm nights, defined as occurring when the minimum temperature is above the 90th percentile of the
climatological distribution for the day (Tebaldi et al., 2006; Karl et al., 2009). Coupled with these
changes is the decrease in the number of frost days by 10% in the eastern half of the U.S. and an
increase in the length of the growing season by over 10 days. Karl et al. (2009) showed that
precipitation events would change in frequency and intensity with a projected increase in spring
precipitation, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest of the United States, and a decline in the
Southwestern U.S.. The increase in extreme temperature events, warm nights, and more variable
precipitation will impact agriculture and agricultural production. A trend for warmer winters will affect
perennial crops and weeds, and also expand the potential habitable range of some insect and disease
pests. Although there is uncertainty about the absolute magnitude of the changes over the next 50
years, there is general agreement that CO2 levels will increase to near 450 mol mol-1 (ppm),
temperatures will increase by 0.8 to 1.0C, and precipitation will become more variable as defined
in the IPCC AR4 analysis (IPCC, 2007). Changes in temperature have caused longer growing seasons
and directly impacted phenological phases (Schwartz et al., 2006; Wolfe et al., 2005, Xiao et al., 2008;
Karl et al., 2009). There are changes occurring in climate and these will directly and indirectly affect
plant growth and ultimately biofuel production. In this paper we summarize some of the potential
scenarios in climate change and relate these to plant production in order to demonstrate the impact of
climate change on biofuel production.
Warming hurts plants new long term study proves

Science Daily 12
(4/9/12, Climate Change Helps, Then Quickly Stunts
Plant Growth, Decade-Long Study Shows Science Daily,
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120409103253.ht
m)
Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long, according to new research
conducted at Northern Arizona University. The study, published this week in Nature Climate Change,
shows that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but begin to deteriorate
quickly. n"We were really surprised by the pattern, where the initial boost in growth just went away,"
said Zhuoting Wu, NAU doctoral graduate in biology. "As the ecosystems adjust, the responses
changed." Researchers subjected four grassland ecosystems to simulated climate change during the
decade-long study. Plants grew more the first year in the global warming treatment, but this effect
progressively diminished over the next nine years, and finally disappeared. The research reports the
long-term effects of global warming on plant growth, the plant species that make up the community, and
the changes in how plants use or retain essential resources like nitrogen. The team transplanted four
grassland ecosystems from higher to lower elevation to simulate a future warmer environment, and
coupled the warming with the range of predicted changes in precipitation -- more, the same, or less. The
grasslands studied were typical of those found in northern Arizona along elevation gradients from the
San Francisco Peaks down to the great basin desert. The researchers found that long-term warming
resulted in loss of native species and encroachment of species typical of warmer environments, pushing
the plant community toward less productive species. The warmed grasslands also cycled nitrogen more
rapidly, an effect that should make more nitrogen available to plants, helping them grow more. But
instead much of the nitrogen was lost, converted to nitrogen gases lost to the atmosphere or leached out
with rainfall washing through the soil. Bruce Hungate, senior author of the study and NAU Biological
Sciences professor, said the research findings challenge the expectation that warming will increase
nitrogen availability and cause a sustained increase in plant productivity. "Faster nitrogen turnover
stimulated nitrogen losses, likely reducing the effect of warming on plant growth," Hungate said. "More
generally, changes in species, changes in element cycles -- these really make a difference. It's classic
systems ecology: the initial responses elicit knock-on effects which here came back to bite the plants.
These ecosystem feedbacks are critical. You just can't figure this out with plants grown in a greenhouse.
" The findings caution against extrapolating from short-term experiments, or experiments in a
greenhouse, where experimenters cannot measure the feedbacks from changes in the plant community
and from nutrient cycles. The research will continue at least five more years with current funding from
the National Science Foundation and, Hungate said, hopefully for another five years after that. "The
long-term perspective is key. We were surprised, and I'm guessing there are more surprises in store."
Additional coauthors include George Koch, NAU professor of Biological Sciences, and Paul Dijkstra,
assistant research professor of Biological Sciences.
 Warming Bad - Nutrition

Higher CO2 levels decreases the nutritional value of

plants
Khan 10
(Amina Khan,5/15/10, Global warming bad for plant life
Calgary Herald, ProQuest)
Some biologists had theorized earlier that rising greenhouse gas levels would encourage plant growth
over the long term because of the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Plant
physiologists from the University of California, Davis, may have further dashed those hopes. They've
shown that too much carbon dioxide, which plants need for energy, actually can inhibit a plant's ability
to assimilate nitrates -- nitrogen-based nutrients pulled from the soil that plants use to make enzymes
and other essential proteins. Without those essential proteins, plant health -- and food quality -- may
suffer, the researchers say in a study published online Thursday in the journal Science. Scientists had
previously observed that a rise in carbon dioxide levels -- 39 per cent globally since 1800, according to
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- would boost photosynthesis, the sunlight-fuelled
process by which plants make sugar. But previous studies showed that after an initial spike in sugar-
making activity, photosynthesis appeared to level off, even if the carbon dioxide rate remained high.
"Here we have this quandary where we thought rising carbon dioxide levels might actually have some
benefit, but it proves to be wrong. ... Over a period of time, be it weeks or years, that stimulation
disappears," said lead author Arnold Bloom, a professor in the department of plant sciences at UC
Davis. Other studies showed that after plants were exposed to excess carbon dioxide, their protein
content also dropped. In a series of five experiments, Bloom and his colleagues found an explanation.
The team exposed plants to high carbon dioxide (or low oxygen), fertilized them with nitrates and
tracked how much nitrogen they successfully incorporated into their systems. In each case, the
researchers found that the more carbon dioxide exposure, the less plants were able to assimilate
nitrogen. Without enough nitrogen, the plants could not make as many proteins, including those
enzymes used in photosynthesis -- and thus, would be unable to take advantage of all that extra carbon
dioxide in the air anyway. The findings have significant implications for agriculture, biologists said.
They suggest that, as global warming continues and carbon dioxide levels rise, food may become poorer
in quality and less nutritious, and farmers may have to worry about lower-quality crop yields that could
perhaps be more prone to pest infestations (as plant eaters may have to eat more to get the same
nutritional value as before).
 Warming Bad - Pests
Plant pests and diseases increase with warming

Roos et al. 11
(Jonas Roos1, Richard Hopkins2, Anders Kvarnheden1 and Christina Dixelius1,1Department of
Plant Biology and Forest Genetics, Uppsala BioCenter, 2Department of Ecology, Agricultural
Entomology Division) 2011 (Jonas, The impact of global warming on plant diseases and insect
vectors in Sweden, European Journal of Plant Pathology. Volume: 129 Number: 1,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10658-010-9692-z, page 5)

It has been put forward that diseases and pests will be more favoured than crops due to changed
environmental conditions and prolonged growing seasons in Sweden and Finland (Fgelfors et al. 2009;
Peltonen-Sainio et al. 2009). Plant diseases and pests that are expected to increase in their importance
are summarised in table 1. However, there are uncertainties in this prediction and several unexpected
problems may occur. Also, whether new resistance breeding efforts will be successful is unclear. A
milder climate will in general favour insects and thereby also a range of virus diseases. Various rust
diseases (brown, yellow) on wheat and barley are expected to increase due to the extended growing
seasons (SJV 2007) and more aggressive strains might be introduced, e.g. stem rust on wheat
(Chakraborty et al. 2010). Willows grown for biofuel are also expected to face increased leaf rust
(Melampsora) problems (Karnosky et al. 2002; Rnnberg-Wstljung et al. 2008). Not all plant diseases
are expected to cause significant damages. For example, scald (Rhynchosporium secalis), powdery
mildew (caused by different fungi within the Erysiphales) and Septoria leaf blotch (Mycosphaerella
graminicola) are predicted to decrease in importance in areas with dry summers (SJV 2007). However,
the future impact of leaf blotch diseases is difficult to foresee but it may become important in northern
areas concurrently with the moving limit of cultivation and increase of humidity. Similarly, snow mould
fungi and other pathogens causing over wintering diseases will decrease in importance due to milder
winters and less snow cover (SJV 2007).
 Warming Bad - Viruses
Warming causes aphid and plant virus populations to
explode

Roos et al. 11
(Jonas Roos1, Richard Hopkins2, Anders Kvarnheden1 and
Christina Dixelius1,1Department of Plant Biology and
Forest Genetics, Uppsala BioCenter, 2Department of
Ecology, Agricultural Entomology Division) 2011 (Jonas,
The impact of global warming on plant diseases and
insect vectors in Sweden, European Journal of Plant
Pathology. Volume: 129 Number: 1,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10658-010-9692-z, page 7)
There are two distinct mechanisms by which climate change can impact the relationship between pests
and crop plants. Firstly, changes in climate have a direct impact on the biology of insects, including
vectors, leading to differences in their survival, reproduction and spread. Secondly, there are the likely
changes in agricultural practice that will take place as a result of climate change, and the influence of
these changes on the availability of host plants for the pest species; e.g. the introduction of new crop
species and plant genotypes, and changes in husbandry practice. Insects cause damage and crop loss in
a range of ways, and are mostly associated with the direct impact of their feeding in the form of yield
loss and fall in harvest quality due to cosmetic damage. However, sucking insects, such as aphids, are
also associated with the transmission of viruses, which can lead to major economic crop losses. The
insect transmission of plant viruses can be classified as persistent, semi-persistent or non-persistent.
Persistent transmission requires sustained feeding by the insect, while non-persistent transmission is
dependent on a more superficial relationship between the insect and the plant. Amongst the
insects that are commonly associated with virus transmission, aphids are of particular interest in the
Nordic region for a number of reasons. Aphids generally have a low developmental temperature
threshold and a short generation time, so that when they continuously reproduce in a parthenogenetic
manner they achieve 18 generations a year in British conditions (Harrington 1994; Harrington 2007).
Yamamura and Kiritani (1998) suggested that aphids are amongst the insects best adapted to take
advantage of a warming climate, and could go through an extra five generations a year following a
warming of 2C. Others have suggested that besides increases in CO2 concentration, differences in soil
nitrogen content and population density also play a part for aphid abundance (Newman et al. 2003), but
nevertheless they are expected to increase in importance as pests in Sweden (Fgelfors et al. 2009).
Aphids show a considerable variation in their life-cycle traits, and even within species variation can be
very high. Some species, termed holocyclic, respond to the oncoming winter with a sexual phase, often
placing eggs on woody plants. Anholocyclic aphids on the other hand, do not go through the sexual
phase and continue with parthenogenetic and viviparous reproduction throughout the year. Some
species are a mix of holocyclic and anholocyclic clones. Within a species, the proportion of individuals
that are holocyclic tends to be greater in colder regions, as the eggs resulting from sexual reproduction
are very much more cold-hardy than the active, viviparous forms which persist year round in
anholocyclic clones. Research from Poland suggests that there has been a radical reduction in the
proportion of holocyclic clones of some aphid species in recent years (Ruszkowska et al. 2010). If this
trend is reflected in Sweden, then aphids may soon be reproducing asexually all year round. This
biological change may take place simultaneously with man-mediated changes in the availability of host
plants. Autumn sowing for example will become more common, and autumn sown cereals have doubled
in acreage in Sweden from 1981 to 2009 (Svensson 2010). This leads to the risk of a so-called green
bridge, when winter crops may emerge sufficiently early to receive insects migrating from maturing
crops, which can be especially important for vectors such as aphids and the transmission of virus.
 Warming Bad - Winter Crops
Increased viruses due to warming will devastate winter
crops

Roos et al. 11
(Jonas Roos1, Richard Hopkins2, Anders Kvarnheden1 and
Christina Dixelius1,1Department of Plant Biology and
Forest Genetics, Uppsala BioCenter, 2Department of
Ecology, Agricultural Entomology Division) 2011 (Jonas,
The impact of global warming on plant diseases and
insect vectors in Sweden, European Journal of Plant
Pathology. Volume: 129 Number: 1,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10658-010-9692-z, pages 7-8)
Warmer autumns and winters will increase the risk for insect transmission of viruses into winter crops,
such as winter wheat, winter barley and winter oilseed rape. They are now sown when the number of
active insect vectors has decreased significantly. Wheat dwarf virus (WDV) is transmitted in a
persistent manner by the leafhopper Psammotettix alienus. Already at the beginning of the last century
(1912, 1915 and 1918), a disease presumed to be caused by WDV severely affected wheat in central
Sweden (Lindsten & Lindsten 1999). It has since then periodically damaged winter wheat in the central
parts of Sweden. The periodic re-appearance of the disease has been associated with changes in
agricultural practices (Lindsten & Lindsten 1999; Lindblad & Waern 2002). The host range of WDV
includes many common grasses, and a recent study has shown that grasses growing in vicinity to WDV-
affected wheat fields are infected (Ramsell et al. 2008). These grasses may act as a long-term reservoir
for the virus. The leafhoppers acquire WDV from infected volunteer plants or grasses and then transmit
the virus into winter wheat at the beginning of the autumn. They overwinter as nymphs and in spring,
wingless nymphs transmit WDV from the infected wheat plants in the field (Lindblad & Sigvald 2004).
A study in Sweden showed that the catches in autumn of adult P. alienus in fields of winter wheat
increased with higher temperatures. During weeks with an average maximum temperature below 10C
only few leafhoppers were caught in yellow water traps, but during weeks above 10C, the numbers
increased with temperature, with high insect numbers noted above 15C (Lindblad & Aren 2002).
When the crop is not infected in the autumn, the damage from WDV will be very limited. Wheat shows
mature plant resistance against WDV with resistance becoming evident at growth stage DC31, when the
first node is detectable (Lindblad and Sigvald 2004). Therefore, when the winged adult form of P.
alienus is ready to transmit WDV between wheat fields, the wheat has already reached the resistant
stage. In continental and southern Europe, winter barley is affected by the barley strain of WDV. This
strain is distinct from the wheat strain infecting wheat in Sweden and other parts of Europe and Asia
(Ramsell et al. 2009). There is now a risk that the barley strain of WDV may appear also in Sweden.
Similar problems with autumn infection of winter crops are expected with Barley yellow dwarf virus-
PAV (BYDV-PAV) and BYDV-MAV, which are persistently transmitted by different aphid species. With
increased temperatures in temperate regions, disease epidemics caused by aphid- borne viruses are
likely to be more severe (Jones 2009). In Germany, a clear relation was recently found between the
number of infection days in autumn and BYDV-attack in winter barley fields (Habeku et al. 2009).
 Warming Bad - Yields
Warming cuts into crop yields causes price spikes

Gillis 11
(Environmental specialist staff writer for the New York
Times) 2011 (Justin, Global Warming Reduces Expected
Yields of Harvests in Some Countries, Study Says, May 5,
2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/science/earth/06war
ming.html)
Global warming is already cutting substantially into potential crop yields in some countries to such
an extent that it may be a factor in the food price increases that have caused worldwide stress in recent
years, researchers suggest in a new study. Wheat yields in recent years were down by more than 10
percent in Russia and by a few percentage points each in India, France and China compared with what
they probably would have been without rising temperatures, according to the study. Corn yields were
off a few percentage points in China, Brazil and France from what would have been expected, said the
researchers, whose findings were published in Fridays issue of the journal Science.

Warming kills crops & leads to price hikes 60 billion

dollars of losses

Gillis 11
(Environmental specialist staff writer for the New York
Times) 2011 (Justin, Global Warming Reduces Expected
Yields of Harvests in Some Countries, Study Says, May 5,
2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/science/earth/06war
ming.html)
But the authors of the study David Lobell and Justin Costa-Roberts of Stanford University, and
Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University pointed out that temperature increases were expected to
accelerate in coming decades, making it likely that the challenges to food production will grow in an era
when demand is expected to rise sharply. Over the period covered by the study, 1980 to 2008,
temperatures increased briskly in many of the worlds important agricultural regions. A notable
exception was the United States: for reasons climate scientists do not fully understand, temperatures in
the Midwestern corn and soybean belt during the summer crop-growing season have not increased in
recent decades. One way to think of it is that we got a pass on the first round of global warming, Dr.
Lobell said. However, the study found that in virtually all of Europe, large parts of Asia and some parts
of Africa and South America, temperatures during the growing season have warmed by an average of
several degrees since 1980, increasing the likelihood of extremely hot summer days. The study also
looked at rainfall, but changes were relatively minor compared with the temperature increases. Plants
are known to be sensitive to high temperatures, especially if the hot days occur when they are
flowering. In many of these countries, a typical year now is like a very warm year back in 1980, Dr.
Lobell said. Wheat, rice, corn and soybeans account for the majority of calories consumed by the
human race, either directly or as meat from animals raised on grains. Because demand for these grains
is inflexible and rising, the losses from climate change probably accounted for price increases of about
 6 percent in the four major commodities, the studys authors found. At todays grain prices, that
calculation implies that climate change is costing consumers, food companies and livestock producers
about $60 billion a year. We arent talking about the sky falling, Dr. Lobell said. But we are talking
about billions of dollars of losses. Every little bit of production is valuable when were trying to feed
the world.

Their CO2 args are false warming kills crop yields

Sinclair 12
(Peter Sinclair, climate advocate, Studies: Climate Change
will threaten Global Wheat Harvest, January 31, 2012,
http://climatecrocks.com/2012/01/31/studies-climate-
change-will-threaten-wheat-harvest/

A tired and recycled shibboleth dear to the hearts of aging climate deniers, as clueless about agriculture as they are
about climate - CO2 is good for plants - covered in the video above. The real world continues to
provide tangible evidence of how wrong headed this is. The Economic Times: PARIS: More
intense heat waves due to global warming could diminish wheat crop yields around the world
through premature ageing, according to a study published Sunday in Nature Climate Change.
Nature Asia-Pacific: Extreme heat can accelerate wheat aging an effect that reduces
crop yields and is currently underestimated in most crop models according to a study published online this
week in Nature Climate Change. These findings imply that climate warming presents even greater challenges to
wheat production than current models predict. An important source of uncertainty in anticipating the effects of climate change on
agriculture is limited understanding of crop responses to extremely high temperatures. David Lobell and co-workers used
satellite measurements of wheat growth in northern India to monitor the rates of wheat
aging known as senescence following exposure to temperatures greater than 34 C (93.2 F)
New Scientist: In Indias breadbasket, the Ganges plain, winter wheat is planted in November
and harvested as temperatures rise in spring. David Lobell of Stanford University in California used
nine years of images from the MODIS Earth-observation satellite to track when wheat in
this region turned from green to brown, a sign that the grain is no longer growing. He
found that the wheat turned brown earlier when average temperatures were higher, with spells over 34 C having a particularly
strong effect. [...] Lobells work suggests losses could be sooner and greater. This is an early indication that a
situation that was already bad could be even worse, says Andy Challinor of the University of Leeds, UK.
Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting on a separate Indian study with similar implications. NYTimes: China
and India, which constitute about 37 percent of the worlds population, face a future of sharply lower crop
yields as a consequence of climate change, leading scientists in both nations warned recently. Yields from
rain-irrigated wheat could drop by 44 percent by 2050 under warmer conditions forecasted by
climate models, the Indian farm scientist M.S. Swaminathan told reporters during the 97th Indian Science Congress last week.
Mr. Swaminathan is considered the architect of Indias Green Revolution for his work in the 1960s developing high-yield grain
varieties that ended decades of severe famine. India continues to suffer from high inflation in food
prices and widespread chronic hunger. Such problems will be vastly worse if global temperatures continue to
rise, Mr. Swaminathan said. For every one degree Celsius rise in mean temperature, the wheat loss is estimated to be of the
order of six million tons per year, he said, according to The Hindu newspaper. Indias total wheat production was about 75
million metric tons in 2009. China could face a similar climate-induced grain crisis, Zheng
Guoguang, director of the China Meteorological Administration, the official weather
forecasting agency in China, warned in a December essay in an influential Communist
party journal. Yields of rice, wheat and corn could fall as much as 37 percent by 2050 due
to increased drought conditions and other climate impacts, Mr. Zheng estimated. Citing Mr. Zhengs
essay, a statement by the Chinese Meteorological Association urged the countrys leaders to focus on adapting to, rather than
mitigating, climate change. Since climate change is an objective fact, it is more realistic and
urgent for China, a big developing country, to adapt to than mitigate climate change, the
statements author concluded. So China should put adaptation as top strategy of addressing climate change and put enhancing
grain production and ensuring food security as first task.
Warming Bad - "Even If"
Framing issue warming kills yeilds of crops produced by
CO2 increase prefer our comparative evidence

EPA 11
(Enviormental Protection Agency, US government program
to preserve the enviorment, Agriculture and Food Supply
Impacts & Adaptation,
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/impacts-
adaptation/agriculture.html)
Crops grown in the United States are critical for the food supply here and around the world. U.S.
exports supply more than 30% of all wheat, corn, and rice on the global market. [2] Changes in
temperature, amount of carbon dioxide (CO2), and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather
could have significant impacts on crop yields. Warmer temperatures may make many crops grow
more quickly, but warmer temperatures could also reduce yields. Crops tend to grow faster in
warmer conditions. However, for some crops (such as grains), faster growth reduces the amount of
time that seeds have to grow and mature. [1] This can reduce yields (i.e., the amount of crop
produced from a given amount of land). For any particular crop, the effect of increased temperature
will depend on the crop's optimal temperature for growth and reproduction. [1] In some areas, warming
may benefit the types of crops that are typically planted there. However, if warming exceeds a
crop's optimum temperature, yields can decline. Higher CO2 levels can increase yields. The yields
for some crops, like wheat and soybeans, could increase by 30% or more under a doubling of CO2
concentrations. The yields for other crops, such as corn, exhibit a much smaller response (less than 10%
increase). [3] However, some factors may counteract these potential increases in yield. For
example, if temperature exceeds a crop's optimal level or if sufficient water and nutrients are not
available, yield increases may be reduced or reversed. More extreme temperature and precipitation
can prevent crops from growing. Extreme events, especially floods and droughts, can harm crops
and reduce yields. For example, in 2008, the Mississippi River flooded just before the harvest period
for many crops, causing an estimated loss of $8 billion for farmers. [1] Dealing with drought could
become a challenge in areas where summer temperatures are projected to increase and
precipitation is projected to decrease. As water supplies are reduced, it may be more difficult to
meet water demands. Many weeds, pests and fungi thrive under warmer temperatures, wetter
climates, and increased CO2 levels. Currently, farmers spend more than $11 billion per year to fight
weeds in the United States. [1] The ranges of weeds and pests are likely to expand northward. This
would cause new problems for farmers' crops previously unexposed to these species. Moreover,
increased use of pesticides and fungicides may negatively affect human health. [1]
Co2 root cause of decreasing crop yields

Cao et al 12
(Pongratz, J., Lobell, D. B., Cao L. and Caldeira, K. (2012),
Stanford University. Crop yields in a geoengineered
climate. Nature Climate Change. DOI:
10.1038/NCLIMATE1373,
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/new
salert/pdf/279na3.pdf)
Unless emissions of CO2 from human activities are reduced, climate change will affect crop yields,
particularly through changes in rainfall and temperature. The impact will vary across regions and
there is the risk that food supply, particularly in already vulnerable areas, could be threatened. One
short-term measure proposed in the fight against climate change is to reflect back some of the
suns radiation before it reaches the Earth, thereby counteracting global warming. An example of
such an approach, called solar radiation management (SRM), is to deflect sunlight off sulphate particles
that have been injected into the stratosphere (upper atmosphere). However, there are concerns that
such sunshade geoengineering schemes could reduce crop yields and lower the global production
of food by causing changes in precipitation. This study compared large-scale changes in crop
yields under two future climate scenarios. Changes in global temperatures and precipitation
relative to today were modelled first for: a) a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of CO2
compared with current levels (2 x CO2 scenario) and b) a doubling of the atmospheric
concentration of CO2, but with a climate modified by SRM to maintain average global
temperatures at current levels (SRM scenario). These two climate change scenarios were then used
to estimate changes in the yields and production of three major crops: wheat, maize and rice. In
addition to the effects of temperature and precipitation on crop yields, the impact of elevated
levels of CO2 on crop productivity was included in the analysis, as previous studies have found
that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 act like a fertiliser and can increase yields. For the 2 x CO2
scenario, overall small changes in global yields of the three crops were found. There was a slight fall in
yield for maize and a slight increase for wheat and rice. These were caused by the combined negative
effects of climate change and the positive impact of increased fertilisation by CO2. Higher
temperatures, rather than changes in precipitation, were responsible for most of the reduction in crop
yields. Under the SRM scenario, the yields of all three crops increased at all latitudes, mainly
through the beneficial influence of higher CO2 levels, compared with current conditions, but
lower temperatures compared with the 2 x CO2 scenario. Nevertheless, changes in yields and
production are not uniform across all regions and it is likely that the current pattern of food
production and global food markets will be altered. Although on a large regional scale SRM is
simulated to increase yields compared to the 2xCO2 scenario, individual small regions may exhibit
losses in yields due to local climate change. In particular when these regions are areas of subsistence
farming, this may cause local food insecurity. In addition, the researchers point out that SRM does not
modify other harmful effects of higher CO2 levels, such as ocean acidification, which could also affect
marine food supplies. Given the anticipated and unknown consequences of modifying the climate by
SRM, the researchers point out that the reduction of CO2 emissions is the most certain way to reduce
risks of dangerous climate change impacts.

Elevated CO2 increases photosynthesis

Albert et al. 11
(K. R. ALBERT1, H. RO-POULSEN2, T. N. MIKKELSEN1, A.
MICHELSEN2, L. VAN DER LINDEN1 & C. BEIER,
1Biosystems Division, Ris DTU, Frederiksborgvej 399,
4000 Roskilde and 2Terrestrial Ecology, Department of
Biology, University of Copenhagen, ster Farigmagsgade
2D, 1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark) 2011 (K.R., Effects of
elevated CO2, warming and drought episodes on plant
carbon uptake in a temperate heath ecosystem are
controlled by soil water status , Plant, Cell and
Environment (2011) 34, 12071222 Pages 10-11)
Elevated CO2 increased photosynthesis and WUE during most of the growing season. The increased
photosynthesis was associated with, or driven by, increased intercellular CO2 concentration (Fig. 5)
generating higher substrate availability for Rubisco, in line with, for example Ainsworth & Long (2005)
and Ainsworth & Rogers (2007), and thus stimulation of photosynthesis also led to increased leaf C/N
ratios. Surprisingly, no general reduc- tion in stomatal conductance was seen in elevated CO2, although
this is often reported (e.g. Ainsworth & Long 2005; Ainsworth & Rogers 2007). This suggests that the
improved WUE observed in our elevated CO2 plots was caused by increased photosynthesis. The soil
water savings observed under elevated CO2 were not clearly coupled to reductions in stomatal
conductance, which, together with LAI adjustments, have been the primary water-saving mechanisms in
other elevated CO2 studies (Niklaus, Spinnler & Krner 1998; Morgan et al. 2004; Leuzinger & Krner
2007). However, the conserva- tion of soil water in our study may have been associated with reduced
stomatal conductance, as shown by the marginally significant effects seen in August and October. The
robust detection of these responses may have been hindered by the lesser statistical power provided by
the monthly measurements of leaf gas exchange, compared to the greater statistical power provided by
the half-hourly measurements of SWC. Further, heterogeneous structural conditions may prevail within
the Calluna canopy, and we cannot exclude that shoots, other than the uppermost shoots selected for
measurement, may have responded to the elevated CO2 by reducing stomatal conductance. This
demonstrates that more frequent measurements of leaf gas exchange may be necessary to fully monitor
changes in stomatal conductance through periods of water scarcity, but also that Calluna seems to take
advantage of the soil water savings occurring to sustain photosynthesis in elevated CO2 during dry
periods. Because rewetting clearly increased photosynthesis, leaf-to-shoot ratio and the C/N ratio in
elevated CO2 plots, it seems that the photosynthetic stimu- lation is closely dependent on water
availability, with low photosynthesis stimulation during dry periods and high photosynthesis stimulation
when water availability is high. Interestingly, soil water savings were not detected over the upper 020
cm, but only over 060 cm. This suggests that intensive competition for water in the upper 020cm
occurred and that the species with the largest capacity for water uptake in the 2060 cm compartment,
for example via a deeper and more extensive roots system, are likely to be the primary species causing
the water saving. Reduced water consumption, via stomatal conductance or biomass reduction in the co-
occuring grass Deschampsia flexuosa, could potentially also influence the SWC. In Calluna, the rooting
systems may extend down to 84 cm (Gimingham 1960), while the co-occuring Deschampsia extends
down to 58 cm (Scurfield 1954). On the CLIMAITE field site, total root biomass in 015 cm was
reported not to differ between species, but fine root biomass were magnitudes higher in Deschampsia
(Andresen et al. 2009). This may indicate larger capacity for water uptake in Calluna in the deeper soil
layers, but more information taking into account both above- and below-ground biomass distributions,
as well as stomatal conductance, are needed to investigate these issues.
 Warming Bad - Productivity
Warming increases plant productivity

Albert et al. 11
(K. R. ALBERT1, H. RO-POULSEN2, T. N. MIKKELSEN1, A.
MICHELSEN2, L. VAN DER LINDEN1 & C. BEIER,
1Biosystems Division, Ris DTU, Frederiksborgvej 399,
4000 Roskilde and 2Terrestrial Ecology, Department of
Biology, University of Copenhagen, ster Farigmagsgade
2D, 1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark) 2011 (K.R., Effects of
elevated CO2, warming and drought episodes on plant
carbon uptake in a temperate heath ecosystem are
controlled by soil water status , Plant, Cell and
Environment (2011) 34, 12071222 Pages 1-2)
Climate is changing, and the anthropogenic forcing has been thoroughly documented (IPCC 2007). The
level of atmospheric CO2 has increased from a pre-industrial level of 270 ppm to current values around
380 ppm, and is expected to increase to around 700 ppm (IPCC 2007). This will lead to temperature
increases of 1.45.8 C during the next 100 years, with more pronounced warming during night-time
relative to daytime (IPCC 2001). Precipitation changes with prolonged summer droughts, heavy
precipita- tion events and higher frequency of extremes are also expected (IPCC 2007). This has
attracted focus on ecosys- tem responses to climatic changes and on ecosystem feedbacks to climate,
and much effort is invested in under- standing these complex impacts (Rustad 2006, 2008; Heimann &
Reichstein 2008). Photosynthetic carbon uptake is controlled directly by the factors that are predicted to
change in the future, atmospheric CO2 concentration, temperature and water availability (Morison &
Lawlor 1999; Sage & Kubien 2007; Lawlor & Tezara 2009), and will therefore almost certainly be
affected by climate change. It is likely that the relative importance of the factors limiting carbon uptake
may change as climate change affects various regulators of photosynthesis and ecosystems adjust to the
new condi- tions. Carbon demand for storage, growth, metabolism or export also influences the
residence time in the carbon pools and the flux rates between them (Krner 2006); this may interact
with the factors that control carbon uptake. Elevated CO2 decreases stomatal conductance and increases
intercellular CO2 concentration, light saturated net photosynthesis and plant WUE (Curtis & Wang
1998; Ainsworth & Long 2005; Ainsworth & Rogers 2007). Elevated CO2 often down-regulates
photosynthetic capac- ity via the maximal velocity of ribulose 15-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase
(Rubisco) carboxylation, Vcmax and to lesser degree the maximal rate of RuBP regeneration, Jmax
which may decrease the maximal light and CO2 satu- rated net photosynthesis, Pmax (Drake,
Gonzalez-Meler & Long 1997; Moore et al. 1999; Ainsworth & Rogers 2007). This is in part caused by
the build-up of carbon compounds produced in the Calvin cycle, and in part caused by limita- tions in
the nitrogen supply (Drake et al. 1997; Ainsworth & Rogers 2007). Leaf carbon uptake may be
sustained in elevated CO2 if photosynthetic down-regulation does not occur, as reported from
grasslands (Hungate et al. 1997a) and forests (Krner et al. 2005). In the long term, however, nutrient
availability is likely to be of increasing importance for sustained productivity in elevated CO2 (Oren et
al. 2001; Lou et al. 2004; Reich et al. 2006; Menge & Field 2007). Plant water status also affects the
magnitude of plant carbon uptake in elevated CO2 (Krner 2000; Volk, Niklaus & Krner 2000; Knapp
et al. 2002; Morgan et al. 2004). Elevated CO2 often results in reduced plant water consump- tion and
leads to reduced soil water depletion, so-called water savings caused by reduced stomatal conductance
(Morison & Gifford 1984; Hungate et al. 1997b; Leuzinger & Krner 2007; Robredo et al. 2007). This
enables maintained plant carbon uptake in dry periods in elevated CO2 relative to ambient CO2
(Morison & Gifford 1984; Hungate et al. 1997b; Leuzinger & Krner 2007; Robredo et al. 2007).
Changes in plant water availability affect photosynthesis, particularly during dry conditions that limit
photosynthesis because of metabolic impairments, as well as diffusion limi- tations (Jones 1985; Chaves
1991; Flexas & Medrano 2002; Lawlor 2002; Lawlor & Cornic 2002; Flexas et al. 2006a). The
responsiveness is highly species specific (Knapp et al. 2002; Heisler & Weltzin 2006). However, the
carbon balance of a plant enduring a water stress period not only depends on the degree of
photosynthetic decline during water deple- tion, but also on the rate and degree of photosynthetic
recovery, although information on these aspects is scarce (Flexas et al. 2006b; Galmes, Medrano &
Flexas 2007; Lawlor & Tezara 2009). Warming has been demonstrated to increase productivity (Arft et
al. 1999; Rustad et al. 2001; Shaw et al. 2002; Dukes et al. 2005; Sage & Kubien 2007), but the impacts
of this driver are complex; the confounding of direct and indirect effects can make it difficult to
elucidate the underlying mechanisms of the responses of plants and ecosystems (Shaver et al. 2000;
Peuelas & Filella 2001). Warming can directly stimulate photosynthesis via provision of more optimal
growth temperatures (e.g. Sage & Kubien 2007), and may be of particular importance in temperate
ecosys- tems during periods of sub-optimal temperatures. Increased daytime respiration or changes in
temperature acclimation can occur and may reduce the photosynthetic plant carbon uptake (Atkin &
Tjoelker 2003). Indirect stimulation of daytime photosynthesis has been demonstrated in response to
night-time warming, where an increased night-time plant respiration increased the carbon sink strength
and in turn stimulated the following daytime net photosynthesis (Turnbull, Murthy & Griffin 2002;
Turnbull et al. 2004). Warming may also affect photosynthesis and plant carbon uptake indirectly
through increased length of the growing season (Menzel & Fabian 1999; White, Running & Thornton
1999; Walther et al. 2002; Cleland et al. 2006; Piao et al. 2007), plant phenology changes (Harte &
Shaw 1995; Wan et al. 2005) and increased nutrient availability (Rustad et al. 2001). Some authors have
argued that the indirect effects, via changes in nutrient and soil water availability, are more important
than direct effects (Krner 2000; Shaver et al. 2000; Volk et al. 2000; Morgan et al. 2004; Wan et al.
2005; Lou 2007). Clearly, the effects of warming on plants and ecosystems are not straightforward and
depend on the out- comes of the individual effects on many processes.
 Warming Bad - Trees
Global warming kills trees

Pennisi 9
(Elizabeth Pennisi is a staff writer for Science Magazine
with a focus on biology. She has an undergraduate degree
in biology from Cornell University and a master's degree
in science writing from Boston University. 1/23/9 Western
U.S. Forests Suffer Death by Degrees Science Magazine,
Volume 323, p. 447
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5913/447.full.pdf
?sid=49a55c00-2c7a-49cf-8e97-c99c265e0371)
An insidious problem has taken hold in the forests of the American West, quietly thinning their ranks. Mortality
rates in
seemingly healthy conifer stands have doubled in the past several decades. Often, new trees arent
replacing dying ones, setting the stage for a potentially dramatic change in forest structure, says Phillip J. van Mantgem, a forest
ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Arcata, California. Warmer temperatures and subsequent water
shortfalls are the likely cause of the trees increased death rate , he and his colleagues report on page 521. This
is a stunningly important paper, says David Breshears, an ecologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson. For years, he and others
have lamented massive diebacks that occur when fungal and insect pests ravage stands of trees. Whats harder to detect, he explains,
is any subtle but significant shift in the trees background death rate. They have done a very thorough job of documenting it. In
2005, mortality rates werent even on van Mantgems radar. But while he was evaluating long-term data about forests in Californias
Sierra Nevada mountains for changes in species composition and other forest characteristics, he noticed an upward trend in tree
deaths. At first he thought it was an artifact. Once he and his colleagues became convinced that the trend was real, they looked to see
how widespread it might be. Forest ecologist Nathan Stephenson of USGS in Three Rivers, California, combed the literature and
canvassed his colleagues for long-term sites in the western United States where forest experts had tracked mortality and other
parameters at regular intervals. They considered only old-growth forests, as these well-established communities would be less likely to
undergo changes that could confound the analysis. They were extremely rigorous in site selection, says Nate McDowell, an
ecologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. All told, they wound up with 76 sites in the Pacific Northwest,
California, Idaho, Colorado, and Arizona. They found that in the Pacific Northwest, mortality rates jumped to
1.3% today from 0.3% in the 1970s; in California, that percentage went to 1.7% from 1% in
1983; mortality in the interior forests climbed to 0.6% from 0.2% in roughly the same period.
Its not just one local spot, says van Mantgem. In contrast, they detected no trends in recruitment, the number of seedlings
that survive to become mature trees. New growth is often failing to replace dying trees , he notes. Oliver Phillips, a
tropical ecologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, says mortality rates have similarly increased in the tropics, but
forest growth rates have increased there, more than compensating for the loss. At first glance, a shift of a percent or less may seem
insignificant. The change in forests is subtle so far, says Stephenson. But just as a small percent difference in interest rates can
compound the cost of a loan, a small difference in mortality rates can have a big effect over time. As the
forest thins, ever smaller trees become dominant, affecting the lands carbon storage capacity and
ability to support wildlife. Next, the researchers evaluated the possible causes of the increased mortality rate. No matter
how they sliced and analyzed the tree databy size, type, elevation, and locationthey still
detected the increase in mortality. Air pollution couldnt be blamed because the increase occurred in pristine as well as
polluted areas. Ultimately, the finger seems to be pointed to warming. says Breshears. Temperatures in the
United States have risen about 0.4C per decade in the past 40 years. Snowpack of the regions examined diminished over the time
period they studied and is melting earlier, effectively lengthening the summer drought. Warmer air also
leads to more evaporative loss, exacerbating the effect . Michael Goulden, an ecosystem ecologist at the University
of California, Irvine, thinks the data fall short of pinning the problem on global warming, as regional warming related to natural
climatic variation could be to blame. But Julio Betancourt of USGS in Tucson, Arizona, disagrees. Models suggest that
most of this change was due to the buildup of greenhouse gases , he says. Moreover, local Pacific Northwest
and Southwest climates tend to fluctuate in opposite directions. However, Betancourt, who is not a coauthor of the paper, stresses that
forest researchers need to focus on seedlings, not mortality, in these threatened ecosystems. If there is an affordable point of
intervention, a way to adaptively manage for climate change, he points out, it may be in how we manage seedlings, not mature
forests and adult trees.
 Warming Good - Crop Gains
Warming good crop gains, CO2 fertilizer, negligible
losses

Gillis 11
(Environmental specialist staff writer for the New York
Times) 2011 (Justin, Global Warming Reduces Expected
Yields of Harvests in Some Countries, Study Says, May 5,
2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/science/earth/06war
ming.html)
Some countries saw small gains from the temperature increases, however. And in all countries, the extra
carbon dioxide that humans are pumping into the air acted as a fertilizer that encouraged plant growth,
offsetting some of the losses from rising temperatures caused by that same greenhouse gas.
Consequently, the studys authors found that when the gains in some countries were weighed against the
losses in others, the overall global effect of climate change has been small so far: losses of a few
percentage points for wheat and corn from what they would have been without climate change. The
overall impact on production of rice and soybeans was negligible, with gains in some regions entirely
offsetting losses in others.
 Warming Good - Oceans
Turnwarming is key to oceans

Idso 10
President of the CO2 Magazine, PhD in Botany (Craig,
"Study: Global Warming Will Benefit Marine Life,"
Heartland Newspaper, October)
Seventeen Australian and Canadian scientists have published a study in the peer-reviewed journal
Global Change Biology concluding global warming will benefit marine life. The study finds "climate
change is altering the rate and distribution of primary production in the world's oceans," which in turn
"plays a fundamental role in structuring marine food webs which are "critical to maintaining
biodiversity and supporting fishery catches." Hence, the studys authors write they are keen to examine
what the future might hold in this regard, noting, "effects of climate-driven production change on
marine ecosystems and fisheries can be explored using food web models that incorporate ecological
interactions such as predation and competition. The scientists first used the output of an ocean general
circulation model driven by a "plausible" greenhouse gas emissions scenario (IPCC 2007 scenario A2)
to calculate changes in climate over a 50-year time horizon. The results were then fed into a suite of
models for calculating primary production of lower trophic levels (phytoplankton, macroalgae,
seagrass, and benthic microalgae), after which the results of the latter set of calculations were used as
input to "twelve existing Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) dynamic marine food web models to describe
different Australian marine ecosystems." The protocol predicted positive "changes in fishery catch,
fishery value, biomass of animals of conservation interest, and indicators of community composition.
The 17 scientists state under the IPCC's "plausible climate change scenario, primary production will
increase around Australia" with "overall positive linear responses of functional groups to primary
production change," and "generally this benefits fisheries catch and value and leads to increased
biomass of threatened marine animals such as turtles and sharks." The calculated responses "are robust
to the ecosystem type and the complexity of the model used," In the concluding sentence of their paper,
the authors state the primary production increases their work suggests will result from future IPCC-
envisioned greenhouse gas emissions and their calculated impacts on climate "will provide
opportunities to recover overfished fisheries, increase profitability of fisheries and conserve threatened
biodiversity." Those highly positive consequences are a great contrast to climate alarmists claims that
global warming would be an unmitigated climate catastrophe.
 AT: "Even If"
Warm climates are empirically more peaceful and more
prosperous

Idso et al 11
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2011 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) Two-and-a-Half Millennia of European Climate
Variability and Societal Responses
http://co2science.org/articles/V14/N17/EDIT.php
Buntgen et al. (2011) recently developed a set of tree ring-based reconstructions of central European
summer precipitation and temperature variability over the past 2500 years, which suggests, in their
opinion, that "recent warming is unprecedented, but modern hydroclimatic variations may have at times
been exceeded in magnitude and duration." Although we question their claim about recent warming
being unprecedented within this context (see both our Medieval Warm Period Project and the materials
we have archived under Roman Warm Period (Europe) in our Subject Index), we will not argue this
subject further here. Instead, we will concentrate on the primary conclusion that Buntgen et al. draw
from their work, which is that their data "may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and
fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change." In the abstract of their paper, the twelve
researchers state that "wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval
prosperity," which is indeed correct; and in the body of their paper they write that "average precipitation
and temperature showed fewer fluctuations during the period of peak medieval and economic growth,
~1000 to 1200 C.E. (Kaplan et al., 2009; McCormick, 2001), which is also correct, but which is
something that suggests to us that warmer is better than colder, especially when it comes to assessing
what could be called the wellness-state of humanity. Support for this point of view is provided by
Buntgen et al.'s description of what happened as temperatures declined and the Medial Warm Period
gave way to the Little Ice Age, with its onset "likely contributing," in their words, "to widespread
famine across central Europe," when they say that "unfavorable climate may have even played a role in
debilitating the underlying health conditions that contributed to the devastating economic crisis that
arose from the second plague pandemic, the Black Death, which reduced the central European
population after 1347 C.E. by 40 to 60% (Buntgen et al., 2010; Kaplan et al., 2009; Kausrud et al.,
2010)." In addition, the team of Austrian, German, Swiss and U.S. scientists notes that this period "is
also associated with a temperature decline in the North Atlantic and the abrupt desertion of former
Greenland settlements (Patterson et al., 2010)," and that "temperature minima in the early 17th and 19th
centuries accompanied sustained settlement abandonment during the Thirty Years' War and the modern
migrations from Europe to America." And a quick trip to the heading of War and Social Unrest in our
Subject Index will provide many more real-world examples of cold times typically leading to bad times
in terms of the wellness-state of humanity in many other parts of the planet. Clearly, maintaining the
planet's current level of warmth is a good thing for earth's inhabitants, as is maintaining -- and actually
increasing -- the atmosphere's CO2 concentration, because of CO2's impressive aerial fertilization effect
and its anti-transpiration effect, which working together significantly boost the water use efficiencies of
nearly all plants, including those that supply us and the rest of the planet's animal life with the food we
need to sustain ourselves. And since there is no compelling reason to attribute the planet's current level
of warmth to its current level of atmospheric CO2 -- seeing there was much less CO2 in the air during
the comparable (or even greater) warmth of the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods -- there is no
reason to believe that attempting to reduce the air's CO2 content (which we can't do anyway) or even
slow its rate-of-rise (which we cannot do to any significant degree) would alter the planet's temperature
to any significant degree. In addition, the planet's temperature has remained essentially level for the past
decade or more; and some scientists believe we are facing a future cooling. Consequently, we believe
that the work of Buntgen et al. "may provide a basis for [not] counteracting the recent political and
 fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change," as those mitigating efforts are known to likely
have but a miniscule thermal impact even if successful, and they would come at an ungodly economic
cost at a time when the world's economy is in an ungodly world of hurt.

Carbon Fertilization is false

Jackson 2009
Research molecular biologist @ USDA (Eric, 2009, The
international food system and the climate crisis, The
Panama News, Lexis)

A major weakness in the forecasts of the IPCC and others when it comes to agriculture is that
their predictions accept a theory of carbon fertilisation, which argues that higher levels CO2
in the atmosphere will enhance photosynthesis in many key crops, and boost their yields. Recent
studies show that this is a mirage. Not only does any initial acceleration in
growth slow down significantly after a few days or weeks, but the
increase in CO2 reduces nitrogen and protein in the leaves by more than
12 per cent. This means that, with climate change, there will be less
protein for humans in major cereals such as wheat and rice. There will also be less
nitrogen in the leaves for bugs, which means that bugs will eat more leaf, leading to
important reductions in yield.
 Ag Good - Impact Calc
Resource wars and food conflicts outweigh warming
reversibility and magnitude

Idsos 1
(Craig Idso, President of the CO2 Magazine, PhD Botany
AND Keith Idso, VP of the CO2 Magazine, PhD in Botany,
CO2 Science Magazine, Vol 4(24), June 2001, Two Crises
of Unbelievable Magnitude: Can We Prevent One Without
Exacerbating the Other?)

Two potentially devastating environmental crises loom ominously on

the horizon. One is catastrophic global warming, which many people
claim will occur by the end of the next century. The other is the need to
divert essentially all usable non-saline water on the face of the earth to
the agricultural enterprises that will be required to meet the food and
fiber needs of humanity's growing numbers in but half a century
(Wallace, 2000; Tilman et al., 2001). This necessary expansion of
agriculture will also require the land that currently supports a full third
of all tropical and temperate forests, savannas and grasslands,
according to Tilman, et al., who also correctly state that the destruction
of that important natural habitat will lead to the extinction of untold
numbers of plant and animal species. How do the magnitudes of the
two crises compare? Tilman et al. suggest that the coming
agriculturally-driven crisis is likely to rival that of predicted climate
change, placing the two disasters on pretty much an equal footing.
Wallace, however, is unequivocal in his contention that the agricultural
crisis dwarfs the climate crisis. "There can be," he says, "no greater
global challenge today on which physical and social scientists can work
together than the goal of producing the food required for future
generations." It is our judgment that the conclusion of Wallace is the
more robust of the two, based on the simple fact that the
agriculturally-driven crisis is almost certain to occur, whereas there is
still doubt about the climate crisis. We also believe that Tilman et al.
would probably not dispute this contention; for it is their own
conclusion that "even the best available technologies, fully deployed,
cannot prevent many of the forecasted problems," meaning the future
scarcity of food, fiber, land and water described above. This conclusion
as to the unavoidability of the agricultural crisis is further buttressed
by the fact that Tilman et al.'s analysis even assumed a reasonable
rate of advancement in technological expertise, as we also assumed in
an earlier analysis of the identical problem that arrived at essentially
the same conclusion (Idso and Idso, 2000).
 CO2 Good - Solves Warming
Negative feedback means that CO2 solves warmingplants act as
a carbon sink which slows down warming
Idsos 1 (Craig Idso, President of the CO2 Magazine, Researcher at the
National Science Foundation, Director of Environmental Science at
Peabody Energy, PhD Botany AND Keith Idso, VP of the CO2 Magazine,
PhD in Botany, Member of the Arizona Advisory Council on Environmental
Education, Vol. 7, 2001, Recent Studies Show Global Warming May
Enhance Soil Carbon Storage and Thereby Slow Its Own Progression)
The amount of carbon stored above and beneath a unit area of land is
basically a function of two biochemical processes, photosynthesis and
respiration. During photosynthesis, plants remove CO2 from the
atmosphere and utilize it to construct their tissues, where it is safely
retained until it is respired back to the atmosphere. Thus, if the total
amount of photosynthesis occurring over a given area of land is
greater than the total amount of respiration occurring above and
beneath its surface, that area of land is said to be a carbon sink.
Conversely, if the amount of photosynthesis is less than the amount of
respiration, the area is said to be a carbon source. For many years,
theoretical models of ecosystem dynamics suggested that global
warming would reduce both the magnitude and number of terrestrial
carbon sinks by increasing ecosystem respiration more than it
increased ecosystem photosynthesis. If true, this result would dash all
hopes of mitigating CO2-induced global warming via biological carbon
sequestration. However, like model-based predictions of climate
change, there are a number of problems with this prediction as well.
The primary problem is the simple fact that most observational
evidence does not support the model predictions of reduced soil
carbon storage under elevated temperatures. Fitter et al. (1999), for
example, evaluated the effect of temperature on plant decomposition
and soil carbon storage, finding that upland grass ecosystem soils
artificially heated by nearly 3C increased both root production and
root death by equivalent amounts. Hence, they concluded that in these
ecosystems, elevated temperatures "will have no direct effect on the
soil carbon store." Similarly, Johnson et al. (2000) warmed Arctic tundra
ecosystems by nearly 6C for eight full years and still found no
significant effect of that major temperature increase on ecosystem
respiration. Furthermore, Liski et al. (1999) showed that carbon storage
in soils of both high- and low-productivity boreal forests in Finland
actually increased with warmer temperatures along a natural
temperature gradient. Why the big discrepancy between model
predictions and reality? According to a recent paper in the Annals of
Botany, there are two potential explanations: (1) ecosystem modelers
are over-estimating the temperature dependency of soil respiration,
and (2) warming may increase the rate of certain physico-chemical
processes that transfer organic carbon to more stable soil organic
matter pools, thereby enabling the protected carbon to avoid or more
strongly resist decomposition (Thornley and Cannell, 2001). That the
first of these explanations is viable is demonstrated by the results of
 the studies just described. The second explanation is also reasonable.
Thornley and Cannell hypothesize, for example, that the pertinent
physico-chemical processes require a certain amount of activation
energy to attach organic materials onto soil minerals or bring them
together into aggregates that are less subject to decomposition; and
they suggest that higher temperatures can provide that energy. Taking
their hypothesis one step further, Thornley and Cannell developed a
dynamic soil model in which they demonstrate that if their thinking is
correct, "long-term soil carbon storage will appear to be insensitive to
a rise in temperature, even if the respiration rates of all [soil carbon]
pools respond to temperature as assumed by [most models]," which is,
in fact, what experimental and real-world data clearly indicate to be
the case. The upshot of these several observations is that global
warming does not cause terrestrial carbon sinks to release additional
CO2 to the atmosphere and thereby exacerbate the warming, as was
fervently believed up until the last few years. In fact, it is much more
likely that rising temperatures may do just the opposite, inducing a
negative feedback phenomenon that enables greater amounts of
carbon to be sequestered, which would tend to decrease the rate of
CO2-induced warming. Clearly, the biosphere is well adapted to
responding to environmental challenges; and this one is no exception.
When the going gets hot, the earth knows how to keep its cool.

CO2 increases biomass productionnegative feedback means that emissions

actually solve warming

Idso, et. al 3
(Craig Idso, et al., Research Physicist with the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research
Service, Vice President of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change with a PhD in Botany,
former Director of Environmental Science at Peabody
Energy in St. Louis, Missouri and is a member of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science,
American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological
Society, Arizona-Nevada Academy of Sciences, Association
of American Geographers, Ecological Society of America,
and The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi 2003,[10-15, C02
Science Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 42, The Center for the Study
of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change])

In light of these observations, plus the fact that Saxe et al. (1998) have
determined that a doubling of the air's CO2content leads to more than
a doubling of the biomass production of coniferous species, it logically
follows that the ongoing rise in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration is
increasing carbon sequestration rates in the soils upon which conifers
grow and, hence, is producing a significant negative feedback
phenomenon that slows the rate of rise of the air's CO2 content, which
would be assumed by many to be reducing the rate of global warming.
 CO2 Good - Agriculture
Food crises are coming now - only CO2 can sustain
agricultural growth

Parry & Hawkesford 11

Retired Sargeant AND Fellow at Rothamstead Research
for Environmental Research (M.A.J. and M.J., "Meeting the
Food Needs of a Growing World Population," NIPCC
Report, July)
Parry and Hawkesford (2010) introduce their study of the global problem by noting that "food
production needs to increase 50% by 2030 and double by 2050 to meet projected demands," and they
note that at the same time the demand for food is increasing, production is progressively being limited
by "non-food uses of crops and cropland," such as the production of biofuels, stating that in their
homeland of the UK, "by 2015 more than a quarter of wheat grain may be destined for bioenergy
production," which surely must strike one as both sad and strange, when they also note that "currently,
at least one billion people are chronically malnourished and the situation is deteriorating," with more
people "hungrier now than at the start of the millennium."So what to do about it: that is the question the
two researchers broach in their review of the sad situation. They begin by describing the all-important
process of photosynthesis, by which the earth's plants "convert light energy into chemical energy, which
is used in the assimilation of atmospheric CO2 and the formation of sugars that fuel growth and yield,"
which phenomena make this natural and life-sustaining process, in their words, "a major target for
improving crop productivity both via conventional breeding and biotechnology." Next to a plant's need
for carbon dioxide comes its need for water, the availability of which, in the words of Parry and
Hawkesford, "is the major constraint on world crop productivity." And they state that "since more than
80% of the [world's] available water is used for agricultural production, there is little opportunity to use
additional water for crop production, especially because as populations increase, the demand to use
water for other activities also increases." Hence, they rightly conclude that "a real and immediate
challenge for agriculture is to increase crop production with less available water."Enlarging upon this
challenge, they give an example of a success story: the Australian wheat variety 'Drysdale', which
gained its fame "because it uses water more efficiently." This valued characteristic is achieved "by
slightly restricting stomatal aperture and thereby the loss of water from the leaves." They note, however,
that this ability "reduces photosynthetic performance slightly under ideal conditions," but they say it
enables plants to "have access to water later in the growing season thereby increasing total
photosynthesis over the life of the crop." Of course, Drysdale is but one variety of one crop; and the
ideal goal would be to get nearly all varieties of all crops to use water more efficiently. And that goal
can actually be reached by doing nothing, by merely halting the efforts of radical environmentalists to
deny earth's carbon-based life forms -- that's all of us and the rest of the earth's plants and animals -- the
extra carbon we and they need to live our lives to the fullest. This is because allowing the air's CO2
content to rise in response to the burning of fossil fuels naturally causes the vast majority of earth's
plants to progressively reduce the apertures of their stomata and thereby lower the rate at which water
escapes through them to the air. And the result is even better than that produced by the breeding of
Drysdale, because the extra CO2 in the air more than overcomes the photosynthetic reduction that
results from the partial closure of plant stomatal apertures, allowing even more yield to be produced per
unit of water transpired in the process. Yet man can make the situation better still, by breeding and
selecting crop varieties that perform better under higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations than the
varieties we currently rely upon, or he can employ various technological means of altering them to do
so. Truly, we can succeed, even where "the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of
substantially reducing the world's hungry by 2015 will not be met," as Parry and Hawkesford accurately
inform us. And this truly seems to us the moral thing to do, when "at least one billion people are
 chronically malnourished and the situation is deteriorating," with more people "hungrier now than at the
start of the millennium."

Mass crop and water scarcities are comingincreasing

atmospheric CO2 is key to divert these crises

Idsos 7
(Sherwood Idso, Research Physicist with the US
Department of Agricultures Agricultural Research Service
AND Craig Idso, President of the CO2 Magazine, PhD in
Botany, 2007,
http://co2science.org/education/reports/hansen/HansenTe
stimonyCritique.pdf p. 17-19)

Finally, with respect to the third effort increasing crop yield per unit of
water used Tilman et al. note that water is regionally scarce, and
that many countries in a band from China through India and Pakistan,
and the Middle East to North Africa either currently or will soon fail to
have adequate water to maintain per capita food production from
irrigated land. Increasing crop water use efficiency, therefore, is also a
must. Although the impending man vs. nature crisis and several
important elements of its potential solution are thus well defined,
Tilman and his first set of collaborators concluded that even the best
available technologies, fully deployed, cannot prevent many of the
forecasted problems. This was also the finding of Idso and Idso
(2000), who concluded that although expected advances in
agricultural technology and expertise will significantly increase the
food production potential of many countries and regions, these
advances will not increase production fast enough to meet the
demands of the even faster-growing human population of the planet.
How can we prevent this unthinkable catastrophe from occurring,
especially when it has been concluded by highly-credentialed
researchers that earth possesses insufficient land and freshwater
resources to forestall it, while simultaneously retaining any semblance
of the natural world and its myriad animate creations? Although the
task may appear next to impossible to accomplish, it can be done; for
we have a powerful ally in the ongoing rise in the atmospheres CO2
concentration that can provide what we can't. Since atmospheric CO2
is the basic food of nearly all plants, the more of it there is in the air,
the better they function and the more productive they become. For a
300-ppm increase in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration above the
planets current base level of slightly less than 400 ppm, for example,
the productivity of earth's herbaceous plants rises by something on the
order of 30% (Kimball, 1983; Idso and Idso, 1994), while the
productivity of its woody plants rises by something on the order of 50%
(Saxe et al., 1998; Idso and Kimball, 2001). Thus, as the air's CO2
content continues to rise, so too will the productive capacity or land-
use efficiency of the planet continue to rise, as the aerial fertilization
 effect of the upward-trending atmospheric CO2 concentration boosts
the growth rates and biomass production of nearly all plants in nearly
all places. In addition, elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations
typically increase plant nutrient-use efficiency in general and
nitrogen-use efficiency in particular as well as plant water-use
efficiency, as may be verified by perusing the many reviews of
scientific journal articles we have produced on these topics and
archived in the Subject Index of our website (www.co2science.org).
Consequently, with respect to fostering all three of the plant
physiological phenomena that Tilman et al. (2002) contend are needed
to prevent the catastrophic consequences they foresee for the planet
just a few short decades from now, a continuation of the current
upward trend in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration would appear to
be essential. In the case we are considering here, for example, the
degree of crop yield enhancement likely to be provided by the increase
in atmospheric CO2 concentration expected to occur between 2000
and 2050 has been calculated by Idso and Idso (2000) to be sufficient
but only by the slightest of margins to compensate for the huge
differential that is expected to otherwise prevail between the supply
and demand for food earmarked for human consumption just 43 years
from now. Consequently, letting the evolution of technology take its
natural course, with respect to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, would
appear to be the only way we will ever be able to produce sufficient
agricultural commodities to support ourselves in the year 2050 without
the taking of unconscionable amounts of land and freshwater resources
from nature and decimating the biosphere in the process.

Warming key to food productionstatistics prove

Avery & Burnett 5

(Dennis T. Avery, director of the Center for Global Food
Issues at Hudson AND H. Sterling Burnett, PhD, Senior
Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, Brief
Analyses, No. 517, 5-19-2005, Warming: Famine or
Feast?)

The available evidence undermines Brown's claims. Indeed, a warmer

planet has beneficial effects on food production. It results in longer
growing seasons - more sunshine and rainfall - while summertime high
temperatures change little. And a warmer planet means milder winters
and fewer crop-killing frosts. Global warming also increases carbon
dioxide (CO2), which acts like fertilizer for plants. As the planet warms,
oceans naturally release huge tonnages of additional CO2. (Cold water
can hold much more of a gas than warmer water.) Since 1950, in a
period of global warming, these factors have helped the world's grain
production soar from 700 million to more than 2 billion tons last year.
CO2 emissions are key to a second green revolution
solves food crises globally

CEW 6
(Climate and Environment Weekly, peer-reviewed journal
by multiple experts writing for the Center for Science and
Public Policy, a non-partisan policy group, Issue 34, 1-12-
2006, AgricultureOur Greatest Challenge ff.org)

Also writing about the need to increase global food production near the
close of the 20th century were the Rockefeller Foundation's Conway
and Toenniessen (1999), who stated that "the Green Revolution was
one of the great technological success stories of the second half of the
twentieth century," but that its benefits were dropping and that a
number of arguments "point to the need for a second Green
Revolution." It is enlightening to consider the arguments made by
Conway and Toenniessen. First, they note that the world already
produces more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, but
that it is not evenly distributed, due to "notoriously ineffective" world
markets that leave 800 million people chronically undernourished.
Hence, it would seem that requirement number one for the second
Green Revolution should be that the agricultural benefits to be reaped
should be equitably distributed among all nations. Second, the
Rockefeller representatives say that food aid programs designed to
help countries most in need "are also no solution," as they reach "only
a small portion of those suffering chronic hunger." In addition, they say
that such programs, if prolonged, "have a negative impact on local
food production." Hence, it would seem that requirement number two
for the second Green Revolution should be that local food production
should be enhanced worldwide. Third, Conway and Toenniessen state
that 650 million of the world's poorest people live in rural areas and
that many of them live in "regions where agricultural potential is low
and natural resources are poor." Hence, it would seem that
requirement number three for the second Green Revolution should be
that regions of low agricultural potential lacking in natural resources
should be singled out for maximum benefits. All three of these
requirements represent noble causes; but if mankind already produces
more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet and we don't
do it, i.e., we don't feed everyone, it is clear that mankind must not be
noble enough to rise to the challenge currently confronting us. So why
does anyone think we will do any better in the future? Based on
humanity's prior track record, it would seem to us that the second
Green Revolution envisioned by the Rockefeller Foundation will also fall
short of its noble goal, depending, as it were, on a less-than-noble
humanity to see it through.
 CO2 Good - Water Wars
CO2 key to preventing water wars and famine

Idso et al 10
Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2010 (Craig, PhD in
geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U
Nebraska) The World's Looming Food and Water Shortage
http://co2science.org/articles/V13/N49/EDIT.php
This water deficiency, according to Hanjra and Qureshi, "will lead to a food gap unless concerted
actions are taken today." Some of the things they propose, in this regard, are to conserve water and
energy resources, develop and adopt climate-resilient crop varieties, modernize irrigation, shore up
domestic food supplies, reengage in agriculture for further development, and reform the global food and
trade market. And to achieve these goals, they say that "unprecedented global cooperation is required,"
which by the looks of today's world is an even more remote possibility than that implied by the
proverbial wishful thinking. So, on top of everything else they suggest (a goodly portion of which will
not be achieved), what can we do to defuse the ticking time-bomb that is the looming food and water
crisis? We suggest doing nothing. But not just any "nothing." The nothing we suggest is to not mess
with the normal, unforced evolution of civilization's means of acquiring energy. We suggest this,
because on top of everything else we may try to do to conserve both land and freshwater resources, we
will still fall short of what is needed to be achieved unless the air's CO2 content rises significantly and
thereby boosts the water use efficiency of earth's crop plants, as well as that of the plants that provide
food and habitat for what could be called "wild nature," enabling both sets of plants to produce more
biomass per unit of water used in the process. And to ensure that this happens, we will need all of the
CO2 that will be produced by the burning of fossil fuels, until other forms of energy truly become more
cost-efficient than coal, gas and oil. In fact, these other energy sources will have to become much more
cost-efficient before fossil fuels are phased out; because the positive externality of the CO2-induced
increase in plant water use efficiency provided by the steady rise in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration
due to the burning of fossil fuels will be providing a most important service in helping us feed and
sustain our own species without totally decimating what yet remains of wild nature.
 CO2 Good - Disease
Increased CO2 emissions key to curing a laundry list of
diseases

Idso and Idso 12

Craig and Keith Idso and Idso (Craig, PhD in geography
@Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U Nebraska) 2012
Here's to Your Health! ... Courtesy of Carbon Dioxide
http://co2science.org/articles/V15/N18/EDIT.php
At the turn of the last millennium, when our father was still an actively-working researcher, he and five
colleagues grew common spider lily (Hymenocallis littoralis) plants out-of-doors at the U.S. Water
Conservation Laboratory in Phoenix, Arizona. This they did for two consecutive two-year cycles, within
clear-plastic-wall open-top chambers that had their atmospheric CO2 concentrations continuously
maintained at either the normal concentration, which at their urban site was about 400 ppm, or at an
enriched level of 700 ppm. Then, at the ends of each of the two-year periods, they harvested the bulbs
produced by the plants and measured their biomass, along with the concentrations of several substances
they contained that had previously been proven to be effective in fighting various human maladies. In
doing so, they found that the 75% increase in the air's CO2 concentration resulted in a 48% increase in
aboveground plant biomass and a 56% increase in belowground bulb biomass. In addition, the extra
CO2 also increased the concentrations of five bulb constituents that possessed anti-cancer and anti-viral
properties. These substances are listed in table below, along with the percentage increases they each
exhibited, which when considered in their totality yield a mean increase of 12%. And combined with
the 56% increase in bulb biomass, the net result was a mean active-ingredient increase of 75% due to
the 75% increase in the air's CO2 concentration. What is especially exciting about these findings is that
the substances the six scientists studied have been demonstrated to be effective in fighting a number of
debilitating human diseases, including leukemia, ovary sarcoma, melanoma, brain cancer, colon cancer,
lung cancer, renal cancer, Japanese encephalitis, yellow fever, dengue fever, Punta Tora fever and Rift
Valley fever, as reported (with pertinent supporting citations) in their paper. Furthermore, there is reason
to believe that many other such substances in other medicinal plants may also be benefited by
atmospheric CO2 enrichment. See, for example, Health Effects (CO2 - Health-Promoting Substances:
Medicinal Plants in our Subject Index. This larger body of work also points to the tantalizing possibility
that there may be a number of still other health-promoting substances in the tissues of the foods we
regularly eat that may additionally have their concentrations enhanced by the ongoing rise in the air's
CO2 concentration. And indeed there are, as may readily be seen by perusing the items archived under
Health Effects (CO2 - Health-Promoting Substances: Common Food Plants in our Subject Index. And
these findings lead to our speculation that the ever-lengthening life-span of people all around the world
may well be due, at least in part, to the historical - and still ongoing - rise in the air's CO2 content. So
here's to our health ... and the health of our children's children ... courtesy (in part) of the atmosphere's
steadily rising carbon dioxide concentration; for if the world's climate alarmists can attribute nearly
everything bad that happens nowadays, to the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content, surely we can point
out a possible benefit or two. And the potential benefit we describe here is a huge one.
 CO2 Good - Photosynthesis
CO2 increases photosynthesis and plant growth

Kirschbaum 11
(Miko U.F. Kirschbaum, Ph.D. (Environmental Biology) and
B.Sc. (Agricultural Science), Plant Physiology, Does
Enhanced Photosynthesis Enhance Growth? Lessons
Learned from CO2 Enrichment Studies
http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/155/1/117.short)
Plants typically convert only 2% to 4% of the available energy in radiation into new plant growth. This
low efficiency has provided an impetus for trying to genetically manipulate plants in order to achieve
greater efficiencies. But to what extent can increased photosynthesis be expected to increase plant
growth? This question is addressed by treating plant responses to elevated CO2 as an analog to
increasing photosynthesis through plant breeding or genetic manipulations. For plants grown under
optimal growth conditions and elevated CO2, photosynthetic rates can be more than 50% higher than
for plants grown under normal CO2 concentrations. This reduces to 40% higher for plants grown under
the average of optimal and suboptimal conditions, and over the course of a full day, average
photosynthetic enhancements under elevated CO2 are estimated to be about 30%. The 30%
enhancement in photosynthesis is reported to increase relative growth rate by only about 10%. This
discrepancy is probably due to enhanced carbohydrate availability exceeding many plants ability to
fully utilize it due to nutrient or inherent internal growth limitations. Consequently, growth responses to
elevated CO2 increase with a plants sink capacity and nutrient status. However, even a 10%
enhancement in relative growth rate can translate into absolute growth enhancements of up to 50%
during the exponential growth phase of plants. When space constraints and self-shading force an end to
exponential growth, ongoing growth enhancements are likely to be closer to the enhancement of relative
growth rate. The growth response to elevated CO2 suggests that increases in photosynthesis almost
invariably increase growth, but that the growth response is numerically much smaller than the initial
photosynthetic enhancement. This lends partial support to the usefulness of breeding plants with greater
photosynthetic capacity, but dramatic growth stimulation should not be expected. The usefulness of
increasing photosynthetic capacity can be maximized through changes in management practices and
manipulation of other genetic traits to optimize the conditions under which increased photosynthesis
can lead to maximal growth increases.
 CO2 Good - Harvests
CO2 increases plant harvest

Idso et al. 11
Craig D. Idso is the founder, former president and current
chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Robert M. Carter is a
palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist and
adjunct professorial research fellow in earth sciences at
James Cook University. Fred Singer is a physicist and
emeritus professor of environmental science at the
University of Virginia. Susan Crockford has a Ph.D. and in
the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Victoria. Joseph DAleo is the Executive Director of ICECAP
Co-Chief Meteorologist at WeatherBell Analytics and
Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Indur
Goklany has a Ph. D., an Independent Scholar and the
founder and co-editor of Electronic Journal of Sustainable
Development. Sherwood Idso is the president of the
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change. Madhav Khandekarhas a Ph.D and is an Editorial
Board Member of natural Hazards and an Expert Reviewer
IPCC AR4 Climate Change assessment. Anthony Lupo has
a Ph. D and is in the Department of Soil, Environmental,
and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Missouri-
Columbia. Willie Soon has a Ph. D and is an Independent
Scientist. Mitch Taylor has a Ph.D. and is in the
Department of Geography at Lakehead University. 2011.
Climate Change Reconsidered 2011 Interim Report
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterim
report.pdf)
We begin our review of atmospheric CO2 enrichment effects on Earths vegetation with a consideration
of C3 plantsthose in which the enzyme RuBisCO is involved in the uptake of CO2 and the
subsequent photosynthetic process, which results in its incorporation into a 3-carbon compound
starting with the study of Norikane et al. (2010). They focused on the genus Cymbidium, which
comprises about 50 species distributed throughout tropical and subtropical Asia and Oceania. The four
researchers worked with shoots of Music Hour Maria, a type of orchid, possessing two to three
leaves, which they obtained from a mass of protocorm-like bodies they derived from shoot-tip culture.
They grew them in vitro on a modified Vacin and Went medium in air augmented with either 0, 3,000,
or 10,000 ppm CO2 under two photosynthetic photon flux densities (either 45 or 75 mol m -1 s -1 )
provided by cold cathode fluorescent lamps for a period of 90 days. They then transferred the plants to
ex vitro culture for 30 more days. Relative to plants grown in vitro in ambient air, the percent increases
in shoot and root dry weight due to enriching the air in which the plants grew by 3,000 ppm CO2
were, respectively, 216 percent and 1,956 percent under the low-light regime and 249 percent and
1,591 percent under the high-light regime, while corresponding increases for the plants grown in air
enriched with an extra 10,000 ppm CO2 were 244 percent and 2,578 percent under the low-light
regime and 310 percent and 1,879 percent under the high-light regime. Similarly, in the ex vitro
experiment, the percent increases in shoot and root dry weight due to enriching the air in which the
plants grew by 3,000 ppm CO2 were 223 percent and 436 percent under the low-light regime and 279
percent and 469 percent under the high-light regime, while corresponding increases for the plants
grown in air enriched with an extra 10,000 ppm CO2 were 271 percent and 537 percent under the low-
light regime and 332 percent and 631 percent under the high-light regime. Consequently, the Japanese
scientists concluded, super-elevated CO2 enrichment of in vitro-cultured Cymbidium could
positively affect the efficiency and quality of commercial production of clonal orchid plantlets.
Turning from ornamental plants to food crops, Vanaja et al. (2010) note grain legumes provide
much needed nutritional security in the form of proteins to the predominant vegetarian populations of
India and also the world. They further state that legumesof which pigeon peas are an important
examplehave the potential to maximize the benefit of elevated CO2 by matching stimulated
photosynthesis with increased N2 fixation, citing Rogers et al. (2009). Therefore, they grew pigeon
peas (Cajanus cajan L. Millsp.) from seed to maturity outdoors at Hyderabad, India within open-top
chambers maintained at atmospheric CO2 concentrations of either 370 or 700 ppm. They then harvested
the plants and measured pertinent productivity parameters. This work revealed, according to the team
of nine Indian scientists, that in the higher of the two CO2 concentrations, total biomass recorded an
improvement of 91.3%, grain yield 150.1% and fodder yield 67.1%. They also found the major
contributing components for improved grain yield under elevated CO2 were number of pods, number
of seeds and test weight, with these items exhibiting increases of 97.9 percent, 119.5 percent, and 7.2
percent, respectively. In addition, they found there was a significant positive increase of harvest
index at elevated CO2 with an increment of 30.7% over ambient values, which they say was due to
the crops improved pod set and seed yield under enhanced CO2 concentration. These multiple
positive findings, according to the scientists from Indias Central Research Institute for Dryland
Agriculture, illustrate the importance of pigeon peas for sustained food with nutritional security
under a climate change scenario. This work revealed, according to the team of nine Indian scientists,
that in the higher of the two CO2 concentrations, total biomass recorded an improvement of 91.3%,
grain yield 150.1% and fodder yield 67.1%. They also found the major contributing components
for improved grain yield under elevated CO2 were number of pods, number of seeds and test weight,
with these items exhibiting increases of 97.9 percent, 119.5 percent, and 7.2 percent, respectively. In
addition, they found there was a significant positive increase of harvest index at elevated CO2 with
an increment of 30.7% over ambient values, which they say was due to the crops improved pod set
and seed yield under enhanced CO2 concentration.
 CO2 Good - Rice
CO2 increases rice growth

Idso et al. 11
Craig D. Idso is the founder, former president and current
chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Robert M. Carter is a
palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist and
adjunct professorial research fellow in earth sciences at
James Cook University. Fred Singer is a physicist and
emeritus professor of environmental science at the
University of Virginia. Susan Crockford has a Ph.D. and in
the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Victoria. Joseph DAleo is the Executive Director of ICECAP
Co-Chief Meteorologist at WeatherBell Analytics and
Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Indur
Goklany has a Ph. D., an Independent Scholar and the
founder and co-editor of Electronic Journal of Sustainable
Development. Sherwood Idso is the president of the
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change. Madhav Khandekarhas a Ph.D and is an Editorial
Board Member of natural Hazards and an Expert Reviewer
IPCC AR4 Climate Change assessment. Anthony Lupo has
a Ph. D and is in the Department of Soil, Environmental,
and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Missouri-
Columbia. Willie Soon has a Ph. D and is an Independent
Scientist. Mitch Taylor has a Ph.D. and is in the
Department of Geography at Lakehead University. 2011.
Climate Change Reconsidered 2011 Interim Report
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterim
report.pdf)
These multiple positive findings, according to the scientists from Indias Central Research Institute for
Dryland Agriculture, illustrate the importance of pigeon peas for sustained food with nutritional
security under a climate change scenario. In much the same vein, Yang et al. (2009) declared, rice
is unequivocally one of the most important food crops that feed the largest proportion of the worlds
population, that the demand for rice production will continue to increase in the coming decades,
especially in the major rice-consuming countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and that
accurate predictions of rice yield and of the ability of rice crops to adapt to high CO2 environments
are therefore crucial for understanding the impact of climate change on the future food supply. In fact,
they forcefully stateand rightly that there is a pressing need to identify genotypes which could
optimize harvestable yield as atmospheric CO2 increases.Climate Change Reconsidered 2011
Interim Report 200 They set out to do that in a standard paddy culture free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE)
experiment conducted at Yangzhou, Jiangsu, China over the period 20042006. The team of eight
 researchers grew a two-line inter-subspecific hybrid rice variety (Liangyoupeijiu) at ambient and
elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 376 and 568 ppm, respectively, at two levels of field
nitrogen (N) application: low N (12.5 g N m -2 ) and high N (25 g N m -2 ), measuring numerous
aspects of crop growth, development, and final yield production in the process. The Chinese scientists
found the 51 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration employed in their study increased the
final grain yield of the low N rice crop by 28 percent and that of the high N rice crop by 32 percent. As
a result, and compared with the two prior rice FACE experiments (Kim et al., 2003; Yang et al.,
2006), they state, hybrid rice appears to profit much more from CO2 enrichment than inbred rice
cultivars (c. +13 percent). Yang et al. describe Liangyoupeijiu as one of the most popular super
hybrid rice varieties in China (Peng et al., 2004), and it appears it will become increasingly super as
the airs CO2 content continues to rise, helping China to lead the way in future food production.

Fossil fuels help environment

Idso et. al 11
(Craig, Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, CO2 Magazine, Robert Carter, paleontologist,
stratiagrapher, geologist, research fellow at James Cook
Univ., Fred Singer, Environmental Science @ UVA, Susan
Crockford, PhD Anthropology @ Victoria, Joseph D'Aleo,
Executive Director of ICECAP, Co-Chief Meteorologist,
Indur Goklany, founded the Electronic Journal of
Sustainable Development, Sherwood Idso, president of
the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, Madhav Khandekarhas, PhD, Editorial Board
Member of natural hazards, AR4 Climate Assessment,
Anthony Lupo, PhD, Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric
Sciences at Mizzou - Columbia, Willie Soon, PhD, Mitch
Taylor, Geography @ Lakehead Univ., "Climate Change
Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report," NIPCC Rport
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterim
report.pdf)
What, then, can we do to defuse the ticking timebomb of this looming food and water crisis? One
option is to do nothing: dont mess with the normal, unforced evolution of civilizations means of
acquiring energy. This is because on top of everything else we may try to do to conserve both land and
freshwater resources, we will still fall short of what is needed to be achieved unless the airs CO2
content rises significantly and thereby boosts the water use efficiency of Earths crop plants and that
of the plants that provide food and habitat for what could be called Climate Change Reconsidered
2011 Interim Report 268 wild nature, enabling both sets of plants to produce more biomass per unit
of water used. To ensure this happens, we will need all of the CO2 that will be produced by the burning
of fossil fuels, until other forms of energy truly become more cost-efficient than coal, gas, and oil. In
fact, these other energy sources will have to become much more cost-efficient before fossil fuels are
phased out, because the positive externality of the CO2-induced increase in plant water use efficiency
provided by the steady rise in the atmospheres CO2 concentration due to the burning of fossil fuels
will be providing a most important service in helping us feed and sustain our own species without
totally decimating what yet remains of wild nature
 CO2 Good - Trees
Increased tree growth from CO2 releases carbon from the
soil

Science Daily 11
(8/15/11, Increased Tropical Forest Growth Could Release
Carbon from the Soil Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110814141
445.htm)
A new study shows that as climate change enhances tree growth in tropical forests, the resulting
increase in litterfall could stimulate soil micro-organisms leading to a release of stored soil carbon. The
research was led by scientists from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the University of
Cambridge, UK. The results are published online in the journal Nature Climate Change. The researchers
used results from a six-year experiment in a rainforest at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in
Panama, Central America, to study how increases in litterfall -- dead plant material such as leaves, bark
and twigs which fall to the ground -- might affect carbon storage in the soil. Their results show that
extra litterfall triggers an effect called 'priming' where fresh carbon from plant litter provides much-
needed energy to micro-organisms, which then stimulates the decomposition of carbon stored in the
soil. Lead author Dr Emma Sayer from the UK's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology said, "Most estimates
of the carbon sequestration capacity of tropical forests are based on measurements of tree growth. Our
study demonstrates that interactions between plants and soil can have a massive impact on carbon
cycling. Models of climate change must take these feedbacks into account to predict future atmospheric
carbon dioxide levels." The study concludes that a large proportion of the carbon sequestered by greater
tree growth in tropical forests could be lost from the soil. The researchers estimate that a 30% increase
in litterfall could release about 0.6 tonnes of carbon per hectare from lowland tropical forest soils each
year. This amount of carbon is greater than estimates of the climate-induced increase in forest biomass
carbon in Amazonia over recent decades. Given the vast land surface area covered by tropical forests
and the large amount of carbon stored in the soil, this could affect the global carbon balance. Tropical
forests play an essential role in regulating the global carbon balance. Human activities have caused
carbon dioxide levels to rise but it was thought that trees would respond to this by increasing their
growth and taking up larger amounts of carbon. However, enhanced tree growth leads to more dead
plant matter, especially leaf litter, returning to the forest floor and it is unclear what effect this has on
the carbon cycle. Dr Sayer added, "Soils are thought to be a long-term store for carbon but we have
shown that these stores could be diminished if elevated carbon dioxide levels and nitrogen deposition
boost plant growth." Co-author Dr Edmund Tanner, from the University of Cambridge, said, "This
priming effect essentially means that older, relatively stable soil carbon is being replaced by fresh
carbon from dead plant matter, which is easily decomposed. We still don't know what consequences this
will have for carbon cycling in the long term."
 Aerosols Check
Aerosols prevent warming

Science Daily 12
(Scientific news source) 2012 (Geoengineering for
Global Warming: Increasing Aerosols in Atmosphere
Would Make Sky Whiter, Science News, May 31st 2012,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120531112
614.htm)
ScienceDaily (May 31, 2012) One idea for fighting global warming is to increase the amount of
aerosols in the atmosphere, scattering incoming solar energy away from Earth's surface. But scientists
theorize that this solar geoengineering could have a side effect of whitening the sky during the day. New
research from Carnegie's Ben Kravitz and Ken Caldeira indicates that blocking 2% of the sun's light
would make the sky three-to-five times brighter, as well as whiter. Their work is published June 1st in
Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. Carbon dioxide
emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing
Earth to get hotter and hotter. Large volcanic eruptions cool the planet by creating lots of small particles
in the stratosphere, but the particles fall out within a couple of years, and the planet heats back up. The
idea behind solar geoengineering is to constantly replenish a layer of small particles in the stratosphere,
mimicking this volcanic aftermath and scattering sunlight back to space.
 Politics Link (?)
Warming policies are massively unpopular - GOP
obstructionism

Idso et al. '11

Craig D. Idso is the founder, former president and current
chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Robert M. Carter is a
palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist and
adjunct professorial research fellow in earth sciences at
James Cook University. Fred Singer is a physicist and
emeritus professor of environmental science at the
University of Virginia. Susan Crockford has a Ph.D. and in
the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Victoria. Joseph DAleo is the Executive Director of ICECAP
Co-Chief Meteorologist at WeatherBell Analytics and
Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Indur
Goklany has a Ph. D., an Independent Scholar and the
founder and co-editor of Electronic Journal of Sustainable
Development. Sherwood Idso is the president of the
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change. Madhav Khandekarhas a Ph.D and is an Editorial
Board Member of natural Hazards and an Expert Reviewer
IPCC AR4 Climate Change assessment. Anthony Lupo has
a Ph. D and is in the Department of Soil, Environmental,
and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Missouri-
Columbia. Willie Soon has a Ph. D and is an Independent
Scientist. Mitch Taylor has a Ph.D. and is in the
Department of Geography at Lakehead University. 2011.
Climate Change Reconsidered 2011 Interim Report
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterim
report.pdf)
Political leaders in European nations continue to mouth support for climate alarmism, but that support
appears to be crumbling in the face of a financial crisis, the high price and small impact of renewable
energy sources, and the refusal by the United States, China, and India to participate in an emissions
control regime. Japan, Canada, and Russia are abandoning negotiations for a future Kyoto Protocol,
while there is still uncertainty in Australia. But one thing is certain: The Kyoto Protocol is dead. At
national and state levels in the United States, there have been major changes since 2009. The United
States has never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, but there have been unilateral efforts to impose similar
mandates. Those efforts peaked in 2009 when a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed
a cap-and-trade bill. The November 2009 elections, however, put an end to Democratic control of the
House, and more. Republicans gained more seats in the House than in any election since 1938, leaving
Democrats with the partys fewest seats in the House since 1946. Even more important in terms of its
impact on climate change policy were Republican gains at the state level. A record number of
freshmen state legislators1,765 out of 7,300were elected. Republicans replaced Democrats in
eight governors mansions and at least 675 seats in state legislatures. The number of Republican
governors rose from 22 to 29, and the number of states with Republican majorities in both houses rose
from 14 to 26. The political realignment in the United States, combined with the slowest economic
recovery among the worlds developed countries, means there is little chance of passing cap-and-trade
legislation or a treaty for the coming two years, and probably longer. The White House and
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seek to impose equivalent restrictions on the economy by the
Clean Air Act, but EPAs endangerment finding, necessary if the agency is to proceed in its
regulatory efforts, is being challenged in the courts on the grounds that it is based on faulty IPCC
science. Appeals are likely to continue into 2012. Meanwhile, the Republican majority in the House is
doing what it can to restrict appropriations to EPA that would be used to implement greenhouse gas
regulations.
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x Duffield, Ineffective states, 9.
xi Laurie Garrett, HIV and National Security: Where are the Links? Council on Foreign Relations, 2005: 41.
xii Michael C. Williams, Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics, International
Studies Quarter 47 (2003): 511-531.

xiii Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
xiv Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude. War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Penguin
Books, 2004).
xv Williams, Words, Images, Enemies, 514.
xvi Marco A. Vieira, The Securitization of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic as a Norm: A Contributionto Constructivist
Scholarship on the Emergence and Diffusion of International Norms, Brazilian Political Science Review 1, no. 2
(2007): 137-181.

xvii Prins (2004) cited in Vieira, Securitization of the HIV/AIDS, 149-150.

xviiiAndrew Price-Smith, The Health of Nations. Infectious Disease, Environmental Change and Their Effects
on National Security and Development (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
xix Peterson, Epidemic Disease and National Security; Stefan Elbe, Diseases, AIDS and other pandemics, in
Disasters, Diseases, Disruptions: a new D-drive for the EU, ed. Antonio Missiroli (Paris: Institute for Security
Studies, 2003).
xx Garrett, HIV and National Security, 41.
xxi Princeton N. Lyman and J. Stephen Morrison, More than Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S. Approach
toward Africa, Council on Foreign Relations, 2006.
xxii Charlene D. Jefferson, The Bush African Policy: Fighting the Global War on Terrorism, U.S. Army War
College, 2006: 6-7.

xxiii Jennifer Brower and Peter Chalk, The Global Threat of New and Reemerging Infectious Diseases:
Reconciling U.S. National Security and Public Health Policy, Rand, 2003.

xxiv Brower and Chalk, Global Threat, 26-28 (my emphasis).

xxv Rachel Bray, Predicting the social consequences of orphanhood in South Africa, University of Cape Town,
2003; Tony Barnett and Gwin Prins, HIV/AIDS and security: fact, fiction and evidence a report to UNAIDS,
International Affairs 82, no. 2 (2006): 931-952; Colin McInnes, HIV/AIDS and Security, International Affairs
82, no. 2 (2006): 315-326.
xxvi David Fidler, Constitutional Outlines of Public Healths New World Order, Temple Law Review 77
(2004).

xxvii David Fidler, International Law and Infectious Diseases (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
xxviii Fidler, Constitutional Outlines.
xxix David Fidler and Lawrence O. Gostin, The New International Health Regulations: An Historic
Development for International Law and Public Health, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 85 (2006): 92.
xxx World Health Organization, International Health Regulations (2005): Areas of work for implementation,
2007.

xxxi Daniel W. Drezner, Should celebrities set the global agenda? Los Angeles Times, December 30,
2007, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-
drezner30dec30,1,555704.story.
xxxii Richard Holbrooke, The Age of Aids, Frontline, May 30, 2006,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/interviews/holbrooke.html.
xxxiii For its obvious relevance and quantity/quality of historic research available, my focus is on the
British Empire and its colonies.
xxxiv Carl von Clausewitz, On War (London: Trbner, 1873).
xxxv Michel Foucault, Preciso Defender a Sociedade! [Society must be defended!] (Lisbon: Livros do
Brasil, 2006).
xxxvi Foucault, Preciso Defender, 287.
xxxvii Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
xxxviii Foucault (1984) cited in Patrick E. Carroll, Medical Police and the History of Public Health, Medical
History 46 (2002): 309.
xxxix Stefan Elbe, AIDS, Security, Biopolitics, International Relations 19, no. 4 (2005): 403-419.

xl Michel Foucault, Bio-Power, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984),
258.
xli Michel Foucault, The Confessions of the Flesh, in Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other
Writings. 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 184.
xlii Thomas Lemke, The Birth of Bio-Politics Michel Foucaults Lecture at the Collge de France on Neo-
Liberal Governamentality, Economy & Society 30, no. 2 (2001): 190-207.
xliii Thomas Lemke, Foucault, Governamentality, and Critique, Paper presented at Rethinking Marxism
Conference, Amherst, Massachusetts , September 21-24, 2000: 5.
xliv Lemke, Foucault, Governamentality, and Ciritque, 13.
xlv Carroll, Medical Police, 461-481.
xlvi Carroll, Medical Police, 465.
xlvii Carroll, Medical Police, 465.
xlviii Alison Bashford, Epidemic and governamentality: smallpox in Sydney, 1881, Critical Public
Health 9, no. 4 (1999): 301-316.
xlix Ludmilla Jordanova (1981) cited in Carroll, Medical Police, 468.
l Carroll, Medical Police, 469.
li Robert W. Cox, Global Perestroika, in The global governance reader, ed. Rorden Wilkinson (London and
New York: Routledge, 2005).
lii Kenneth N. Waltz, Teoria de Relaes Internacionais [Theory of International Relations] (Lisboa:
Gradiva, 2002).
liii Christopher J. Bickerton, State-building. Exporting state failure, in Politics Without Sovereignty. A critique
of contemporary international relations, ed. Christopher J. Bickerton, Cunliffe and Alexander Gourevitch
(London: University College London Press, 2007).
liv Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations. Order and Chaos in the Twenty First Century. (London: Atlantic
Books, 2004).
lv Alison Bashford, Global biopolitics and the history of world health, History of Human Sciences 19, no. 67
(2006): 67-88.
lvi Lise Wilkinson and Helen Power, The London and Liverpool Schools of Tropical Medicine 1898-
1998, British Medical Bulletin 54, no. 2 (1998): 281-292.
lvii David Arnold, The place of the tropics in Western since 1750, Tropical Medicine and International
Health 2, no. 4 (1997): 303-313.

lviii Alexander Cameron-Smith, Strange Bodies and Familiar Spaces: W. J. R. Simpson and the threat of disease
in Calcutta and the tropical city, 1880 1910, University of Sydney, 2007: 16.
lix Cameron-Smith, Strange Bodies and Familiar Spaces, 19.
lx Jama Mohamed, Epidemics and Public Health in Late Colonial Somaliland, 1999,
http://storm.prohosting.com/~mbali/doc147.htm.

lxi Jeremy Youde, South Africa, AIDS, and the Development of a Counter-Epistemic Community, Paper
prepared for presentation at the 2005 International Studies Association Conference, Honolulu, HI, March 1-5,
2005