OFF
To be queer is to experience captivity and destruction. Violence is protected and
condoned by systems of law, as heteronorms allow these bodies to be kicked and
killed on the street. Queer inferiority produces a fleshy and discursive body to be
policed, disciplined, and exterminated by straight supremacy.
Lamble 11; S. Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and
Action in “Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison-Industrial Complex” ed. Eric Stanley and Dean Spade, Pp 235-236
2. Queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming people, particularly those from low-income backgrounds and communities of color, are
directly targeted by criminalization, punishment, and imprisonment. We do not know exactly how
many queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people are currently incarcerated. This is partly because
most governments do not collect information on the sexual and gender identity of prisoners and
partly because prisoners are not always safe to disclose their gender or sexual identities. However, we know
that queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming people in Canada, the United States, and Britain are frequently overpoliced, over-criminalized, and over-represented in the prison system.17 Levels of harassment,
targeting, and arrest are high, particularly for young queer and trans people, those from low-income
communities, people with learning disabilities and mental health issues, and people of color. Trans
community organizers in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, report that nearly half of the 20,000
transgender people in the region have been in prison or jail.18 Queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming people
are funneled into the criminal system for many reasons but primarily due to systemic oppression .
Because trans, queer, and gender-variant people experience widespread discrimination, harassment,
and violence, we are at greater risk of social and economic marginalization. This translates into higher risks of
imprisonment. We know that queer and trans youth, for example, are more likely to be homeless, unemployed,
bullied at school, harassed on the street, estranged from family, and targeted by sexual violence—
factors that greatly increase the risks of criminalization and imprisonment especially for queer and
trans people of color.19 Trans people in particular, and those who are visibly gender-non-conforming, are routinely
harassed by law enforcement and security officials for undertaking basic daily activities like using the
toilet, accessing public services, or walking down the street.20 Groups like FIERCE! have shown how the “school-toprison-pipeline” disproportionately affects queer and trans youth.21 Whether dropping out of school because of severe
harassment and discrimination, feeling alienated from education curriculum, experiencing suicidal
thoughts, or turning to criminalized coping mechanisms like drug and alcohol use, queer and trans
youth often have less chances for success in school.22 “Zero tolerance” policies, heightened
surveillance, and increased police presence in schools further contribute to criminalization and
dropout rates, particularly for queer and trans youth of color. “Quality of life” ordinances, such as “anti-social
behavior orders” and “safe streets acts,” are also routinely used to remove queer and trans youth
from public spaces and criminalize their social activities.23 Coupled with problems at home, many queer and
trans youth find themselves homeless and unemployed.24 Once on the street, queer and trans youth
have trouble accessing services and supports to get their basic needs met. Many homeless shelters
and social services, for example, are not safe places for trans people (sometimes banning trans people
outright), and problems with gender categories on identity documents can restrict welfare access.25
Without income, housing, family, or community support, survival often means working in criminalized
economies like drug and sex trade.
The 1AC represents the “normative homo” ideal. They push our desires and activities
into the hands of the state through normalizing laws, scripting how we interact with
institutions. This embracement of law erases forms of sexuality deemed irrelevant to
their attempt to work through institutions to provide “fairness” for all.
Yount 9; Porscha Yount. “Denying Queer Realities: Scripting the Normative Homo.” <APY>
Who is the Normative Homo? By
each other, these
scripting the way individuals are supposed to interact with institutions and with
organizations are scripting a normative homo ideal that they hope will be easily granted
legitimacy by the dominant culture. The normative homo does not challenge the status quo ; instead,
he or she seeks to be included in mainstream culture regardless of his or her sexual identity. The
normative homo believes that social change can be achieved through institutions and that policies
provide him or her with security, safety, and protection. The normative homo believes that marriage is the only
solution to the problems LGBT people face, and that with the legalization of same-sex marriage will come an end to
discrimination against and stigma attached to LGBT people. The normative homo believes that justice
is achieved through the court system, that fairness is when policies apply to everyone equally, and that during times of war it is
unpatriotic to question the legitimacy of military violence. The normative homo also believes that gender and sexual identities are authentic
and consistent. Because the normative homo ascribes to these beliefs and ideals, he or she is located within the inner boundary drawn
between easily legitimated identities and problematic identities. The normative homo is not bisexual or transgender because he or she would
never challenge the gender binary or the idea that identity is authentic and immutable. The normative homo is not a butch lesbian or an
effeminate gay man because butch lesbians and effeminate gay men break gender stereotypes and present an image of gay and lesbian identity
that is unpalatable to mainstream culture unless presented in popular culture as a comedic interlude. The
normative homo is the
product of multiple exclusions—he or she is what is left when everyone else has been shoved aside.
Much like the final construction of the lesbian feminist subculture, the normative homo is part of a purified gay and lesbian community (Nataf
2006). The normative homo is what is left—a
gender-conforming gay or lesbian individual who does not seek to
challenge normative frames. CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSIONS The organizations included in this study repeatedly refused
to take opportunities to challenge the status quo and often followed potentially non-normative frames by
reinforcing normative frameworks. They all argued that their efforts to achieve social change would
succeed if they can take the lead in working through existing institutions to make small changes that
will trickle down to the masses. They also argued that marriage is not just a solution to problems faced by LGBT individuals, but
that only marriage will fix our problems. Like other social movements,
they invoke higher causes to justify their visions of
the future and consequently reinforce narrowly defined normative ideas about justice, fairness, and
patriotism.
Don’t act surprised – the US has always had laws that arrange people to produce
different levels of exploitation. Violence is not the result of a few bad ideas but the
result of bad actors.
Spade 11; Dean “NORMAL LIFE: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law” <APY>
Social movements engaged in resistance have given us a very¶ different portrayal of the United States than
what is taught in most elementary school classrooms and textbooks. The patriotic¶ narrative delivered at
school tells us a few key lies about US law¶ and politics: that the United States is a democracy in which
law¶ and policy derive from what a majority of people think is best, that¶ the U nited S tates used to
be racist and sexist but is now fair and neutral thanks to changes in the law, and that if particular
groups¶ experience harm, they can appeal to the law for protection. Social¶ movements have challenged this
narrative, identifying the United¶ States as a settler colony and a racial project, founded and built¶ through genocide and enslavement.3 !ey
have shown that the
U nited S tates has always had laws that arrange people through¶ categories of
indigeneity, race, gender, ability, and national origin¶ to produce populations with different levels of
vulnerability to economic exploitation, violence, and poverty. These counter¶ narratives have
challenged the notion that violence is a result of private individuals with bad ideas and that the state
is where we¶ should look for protection from such violence. Conversely, resistant¶ political theorists and social
movements have helped us understand¶ the concept of “state violence,” which has been essential¶ for exposing the central harms faced by
native people, women,¶ people of color, people with disabilities, and immigrants. !ey¶ have exposed that
state programs and law
enforcement are not the arbiters of justice , protection, and safety but are instead sponsors and sites
of violence . Additionally, this work has developed¶ the understanding that power is decentralized and that certain¶ practices, ways of
knowing, norms, and technologies of power¶ are distributed in myriad ways rather than only from a single person¶ or institution. It
has
cautioned us against an overly narrow,¶ simplified vision of power that sees power as a possession
primarily¶ held by government offcials.4 This perspective eliminates the¶ false notion that we could win
the change people need simply by¶ using the electoral process to vote in certain representatives or
pass certain laws. It helps us investigate how the norms that produce¶ conditions of disparity and violence emerge from multiple,¶
interwoven locations, and recognize possibilities for resistance as¶ similarly dispersed.
This ontological captivity within an anti-queer frame transforms queer life into a life
vulnerable to extermination. The queer body becomes a site to be destroyed not just
in the moment, but a concept that must be assimilated under the “common sense”
morality of straight supremacy.
Eric Stanley 11. “Near Life, Queer Death Overkill and Ontological Capture.” ‘Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison
Industrial Complex.’ Pgs. 1-9 <APY>
“Dirty faggot!” Or simply, “Look,
a Gay!” These words launch a bottle from a passing car window, the target my awaiting body. In
other moments they articulate the sterilizing glares and violent fantasies that desire, and threaten to enact,
my corporal undoing. Besieged, I feel in the fleshiness of the everyday like a kind of near life or a death-inwaiting. Catastrophically, this imminent threat constitutes for the queer that which is the sign of vitality itself .
What then becomes of the possibility of queer life, if queerness is produced always and only through the
negativity of forced death and at the threshold of obliteration? Or as Achille Mbembe has provocatively asked, in
the making of a kind of corporality that is constituted in the social as empty of meaning beyond the
anonymity of bone, “But what does it mean to do violence to what is nothing? ”' In another time and place, “‘Dirty
nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’ ” (“Sale négre! ou simplement: Tiens, un négre! ”) opened Frantz Fanon’s chapter 5 of Black Skin, White
Masks, “The Lived Experience of the Black” (“L’expérience vécue du Noir”), infamously mistranslated as “The Fact of Blackness.” I start with
“Dirty faggot!” against a logic of flattened substitution and toward a political commitment to non-mimetic friction. After all, the racialized
phenomenology of blackness under colonization that Fanon illustrates may be productive to read against and with a continuum of antiqueer
violence in the United States. The scopic and the work of the visual must figure with such a reading of race, gender, and sexuality. It
is
argued, and rightfully so, that the instability of queerness obscures it from the epidermalization that
anchors (most) bodies of color in the fields of the visual. When thinking about the difference between anti-Semitism and
racism, which for Fanon was a question of the visuality of oppression, he similarly suggests, “the Jew can be unknown in his
Jewishness.”’ Here it may be useful to reread Fanon through an understanding of passing and the visual that reminds us that Jews can
sometimes not be unknown in their Jewishness. Similarly I ask why antiqueer violence, more often than not, is correctly levied against queers.
In other words,
the productive discourse that wishes to suggest that queer bodies are no different might
miss moments of signification where queer bodies do in fact signify differently. This is not to suggest
that there is an always locatable, transhistorical queer body, but the fiercely flexible semiotics of queerness
might help us build a way of knowing antiqueer violence that can provisionally withstand the weight
of generality.4 Indeed, not all who might identify under the name queer experience the same
relationship to violence. For sure, the overwhelming numbers of trans/queer people who are
murdered in the United States are of color.’ Similarly, trans/gender nonconforming people, people
living with HIV/ AIDS and/or other ability issues, undocumented and imprisoned trans/ queer people,
sex workers, and working-class queers, among others, experience a disproportionate amount of
structural violence. In turn, this structural violence more often than not predisposes them to a greater
amount of interpersonal violence. Yet many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) folks in the United
States who have access to normative power may in their daily lives know very little about either
structural or personal violence. The long history and magnified present of gay assimilation illustrates
these varying degrees of possibility and power available to some at the expense of others.
am marking queer
In contrast, I
as the horizon where identity crumbles and vitality is worked otherwise. To this end,
queer might be a productive placeholder to name a nonidentity where force is made to live . This is not to
suggest that the negativity of queer and methodologies of violence define the end of queer worlding or that the parameters of opposition are
sedimented as such.‘ On the contrary, the
very fact that queers do endure is evidence, as Fred Moten has beautifully argued
about the history of blackness in relation to slavery, that “objects can and do resist.”7 I start here, in reference to Fanon’s text,
because he continues to offer us among the most compelling analyses of structural abjection, (non)recognition, and psychic/corporal violence.
“Look, a Negro!” violently freezes Fanon in a timeless place as a black object, overdetermined from without, as a signifier with no meaning of its
own making. In a similar way, the “dirty faggot” of my opening places queerness in the anonymity of history and shocks it into the embodied
practice of feeling queer in a particular place, body, and time. This meditation will attempt to understand how the queer approximates the
cutting violence that marks the edges of subjectivity itself. Race
and gender figure the contours of my thinking on the work of
the gathering up of queer remains. Here the force of violence that interests me is not
introduced after the formation of something that might be called queer. I am using the term queer to
precisely index the col- lision of difference and violence. In other words, queer is being summoned to labor
as the moment when bodies, non-normative sexuality/genders, and force materialize the
violence in
im/possibility of subjectivity. Against an identity that assumes a prior unity, queer disrupts this
coherence and also might function as a collective of negativity, void of a subject but named as object,
retroactively visible through the hope of a radical politics to come.
This is a process of overkill, where the individual is set in to symbolize the
extermination of the whole. This violence goes beyond death, allowing the deletion of
the idea of queerness. The first impact question of this debate is: “What does it mean
to do violence to what is nothing?”
Stanley 11; Eric A Stanley (PhD History of Consciousness @ UC Santa Cruz; visiting faculty in Critical Studies @ San Francisco Art Institute;
director of Homotopia and Criminal Queers, coeditor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex; former
homeless youth in Richmond VA.). "Near Life, Queer Death Overkill and Ontological Capture."Social Text 29.2 107 (2011): 1-19
Overkill is a term used to indicate such excessive violence that it pushes a body beyond death .
Overkill is often determined by the postmortem removal of body parts, as with the partial
decapitation in the case of Lauryn Paige and the dissection of Rashawn Brazell. The temporality of
violence, the biological time when the heart stops pushing and pulling blood, yet the killing is not
finished, suggests the aim is not simply the end of a specific life, but the ending of all queer life . This
is the time of queer death , when the utility of violence gives way to the pleasure in the other’s
mortality . If queers, along with others, approximate nothing, then the task of ending, of killing, that which
is nothing must go beyond normative times of life and death. In other words, if Lauryn was dead after the
first few stab wounds to the throat, then what do the remaining fifty wounds signify? The legal
theory that is offered to nullify the practice of overkill often functions under the name of the trans- or
gay- panic defense. Both of these defense strategies argue that the murderer became so enraged after the
“discovery” of either genitalia or someone’s sexuality they were forced to protect themselves from
the threat of queerness. Estanislao Martinez of Fresno, California, used the trans- panic defense and received a four- year prison
sentence after admittedly stabbing J. Robles, a Latina transwoman, at least twenty times with a pair of scissors. Importantly, this defense
is often used, as in the cases of Robles and Paige, after the murderer has engaged in some kind of sex with the
victim. The logic of the trans- panic defense as an explanation for overkill, in its gory semiotics, offers
us a way of understanding queers as the nothing
of Mbembe’s query. Overkill
names the technologies
necessary to do away with that which is already gone. Queers then are the specters of life whose
threat is so unimaginable that one is “forced,” not simply to murder, but to push them backward out
of time, out of History, and into that which comes before .27 In thinking the overkill of Paige and Brazell, I return to
Mbembe’s query,
“But what does it mean to do violence to what is nothing?” 28 This question in its elegant
brutality repeats with each case I offer. By resituating this question in the positive, the “something” that
is more often than not translated as the human is made to appear. Of interest here, the category of the
human assumes generality, yet can only be activated through the specificity of historical and
politically located intersections. To this end, the human, the “something” of this query, within the context of the liberal
democracy, names rights- bearing subjects, or those who can stand as subjects before the law. The
human, then, makes the nothing not only possible but necessary. Following this logic, the work of
death, of the death that is already nothing, not quite human, binds the categorical (mis)recognition of
humanity. The human, then, resides in the space of life and under the domain of rights, whereas the
queer inhabits the place of compromised personhood and the zone of death . As perpetual and axiomatic threat
to the human,
the queer is the negated double of the subject of liberal democracy . Understanding the
nothing as the unavoidable shadow of the human serves to counter the arguments that suggest
overkill and antiqueer violence at large are a pathological break and that the severe nature of these
killings signals something extreme. In contrast, overkill is precisely not outside of, but is that which constitutes
liberal democracy as such. Overkill then is the proper expression to the riddle of the queer
nothingness. Put another way, the spectacular material- semiotics of overkill should not be read as (only)
individual pathology; these vicious acts must indict the very social worlds of which they are
ambassadors. Overkill is what it means, what it must mean , to do violence to what is nothing.
The affirmative attempts to stabilize a world that is anti-queer – backing the laws and
normative standards of safety that allow the “good white gays and lesbians” to be a
part of a larger power structure of oppression. Our strategy is to be in total conflict
with normalcy.
The Mary Nardini Gang 9; a group of criminalized queers; criminal queers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin “toward the queerest
insurrection,” https://archive.org/details/TowardTheQueerestInsurrection
In the discourse of queer, we are talking about a space of struggle against this totality - against normalcy. By
“queer”, we mean “social war". And when we speak of queer as a conflict with all domination, we mean it. V See,
we've always been the other, the alien, the criminal. The story of queers in this civilization has always been the
narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic interior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbecile. We've
been excluded at the border, from labor, from familial ties. We've been forced into concentration
camps, into sex slavery, into prisons. The normal, the straight, the american family has always constructed
itself in opposition to the queer. Straight is not queer. White is not of color. Healthy does not have HIV. Man is not woman. The
discourses of heterosexuality, whiteness and capitalism reproduce them- selves into a model of
power. For the rest of us, there is death . In his work, Jean Genet asserts that the life of a queer is one of exile that all of the totality of this world is constructed to marginalize and exploit us. He posits the queer as the criminal. He
glorifies homosexuality2 and criminality as the most beautiful and lovely forms of conflict with the bourgeois world. He writes of the secret
worlds of rebellion and joy inhabited by criminals and queers. Quoth Genet, “Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not
aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was Irrelevant: the stars on a general’s sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the
style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a
meaning: my exile.” VI A
fag is bashed because his gender presentation is far too femme. A poor transman
can’t afford his life-saving hormones. A sex worker is murdered by their client. A genderqueer persyn
is raped because ze just needed to be “fucked straight”. Four black lesbians are sent to prison for
daring to defend themselves against a straight-male attacker.1 Cops beat us on the streets and our
bodies are being destroyed by pharmaceutical companies because we can’t give them a dime. Queers
experience, directly with our bodies, the violence and domination of this world. Class, Race, Gender,
Sexuality, Ability; while often these interrelated and overlapping categories of oppression are lost to
abstraction, queers are forced to physically understand each. We’ve had our bodies and desires stolen
from us, mutilated and sold back to us as a model of living we can never embody Foucault says that “power
must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere
in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the processes which, through ceaseless struggles and
confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain
or system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which
they take effect, whose
general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in
the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.” We experience the complexity of
domination and social control amplified through heterosexuality. When police kill us, we want them
dead in turn. When prisons entrap our bodies and rape us because our genders aren’t similarly
contained, of course we want fire to them all. When borders are erected to construct a national
identity absent of people of color and queers, we see only one solution: every nation and border
reduced to rubble. VII The perspective of queers within the heteronormative world is a lens through which we can critique
and attack the apparatus of capitalism. We can analyze the ways in which Medicine, the Prison System, the
Church, the State, Marriage, the Media, Borders, the Military and Police are used to control and
destroy us. More importantly, we can use these cases to articulate a cohesive criticism of every way that we are alienated and dominated.
Queer is a position from which to attack the normative - more, a position from which to understand and
attack the ways in which normal is reproduced and reiterated. In destabilizing and problematizing normalcy, we can
destabilize and become a problem for the Totality. The history of organized queers was borne out of this position. The
most marginalized - transfolk, people of color, sex workers - have always been the catalysts for riotous explosions of queer resistance. These
explosions have been coupled with a radical analysis wholeheartedly asserting that the liberation
for queer people is
intrinsically tied to the annihilation of capitalism and the state. It is no wonder, then, that the first people to publicly speak
of sexual liberation in this country were anarchists, or that those in the last century who struggled for queer liberation also simultaneously
struggled against capitalism, racism and patriarchy and empire. This is our history.
There is no one central source of power – power is produced through particular
practices and knowledge – only challenging the regimes of power can contest racial
and gendered violence.
Spade 11; Dean “NORMAL LIFE: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law” <APY>
This kind of analysis helps us understand that
there is not one source of power , no one person at the top
dominating everyone¶ below. Rather, there are regimes of practices and knowledge¶ that coalesce in
conditions and arrangements that affect everyone and that make certain populations highly vulnerable to
imprisonment.¶ Such an analysis also suggests that there is much work to be done to dismantle the trend of
racialized-gendered mass imprisonment—¶ in many locations, not just in legislatures , courts , or police
precincts.
Understanding how the forces producing imprisonment¶ and criminalization operate at multiple sites and registers¶ ranging
from laws and policies to education, health care, social¶ service, media, and even our own self-conceptions helps us both¶ account for the
enormity of the signi5cance of imprisonment and¶ understand that addressing
it is not simply a matter of appealing¶ to one
central source of power or decision-making . Power is not a matter of one dominant individual or
institution, but instead¶ manifests in interconnected, contradictory sites where regimes of¶ knowledge
and practice circulate and take hold. This way of understanding the dispersion of power helps us¶ realize that power is not
simply about certain individuals being targeted for death or exclusion by a ruler, but instead about
the creation of norms that distribute vulnerability and security. When¶ we think about power this way,
we undertake a different kind of¶ examination of conditions that concern us, asking different
questions . Mitchell Dean describes how this kind of analysis attends to¶ the routines of bureaucracy; the
technologies of notation,¶ recording, compiling, presenting and transporting of information, the
theories, programmes, knowledge
and expertise¶ that compose a field to be governed and invest it¶ with purposes and objectives; the
ways of seeing and representing¶ embedded in practices of government; and the¶ different agencies with various
capacities that the practices¶ of government require, elicit, form and reform. To examine¶ regimes of government is to conduct analysis in the
plural:¶ there is already a plurality of regimes of practices in a given¶ territory, each composed from a multiplicity of in principle¶ unlimited and
heterogeneous elements bound together by¶ a variety of relations and capable of polymorphous connections¶ with one another. Regimes of
practices can be identi-¶ 5ed whenever there exists a relatively stable 5eld of correlation¶ of visibilities, mentalities, technologies and
agencies,¶ such that they constitute a kind of taken-for-granted point¶ of reference for any form of problematization.6
War on Drugs ADV
Apocalyptic predictions make serial policy failure and rushing into things inevitable
Kurasawa 4 – Professor of Sociology, York University of Toronto, Fuyuki, “Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the
Work of Foresight”, Constellations Volume 11, No 4, http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Kurasawa%20Articles/Constellations%20Article.pdf
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 substantively
‘filled in,’ the argument is vulnerable to misappropriation since farsightedness 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 arrive at
a socially self-instituting future. Foremost among
thepossible distortions of farsightedness is alarmism, the
manufacturing ofunwarranted and unfounded doomsday scenarios. State and market institutionsmay
seek to produce a culture of fear by deliberately stretching interpretations of realitybeyond 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
dystopiascan operate as Trojan horses advancing political agendasor commercial interests that would
otherwise be susceptible to public scrutiny and opposition. Instances of this kind of manipulation of the
dystopian imaginary are plentiful: the 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. If fear-mongering is a misappropriation of preventive foresight, resignation about the future represents a problematic
outgrowth of the popular acknowledgment of global perils. Some believe that the world to come is so uncertain and dangerous that we
should not attempt to modify the course of history; the future will look after itself for better or worse, regardless of what we do or wish.
One version of this argument consists in a complacent optimism perceiving the future as fated to be better than either the past or the
present. Frequently accompanying it is a self-deluding denial of what is plausible (‘the world will not be so bad after all’), or a naively
Panglossian pragmatism (‘things will work themselves out in spite of everything, because humankind always finds ways to survive’).37
Much more common, however, isthe opposite reaction, a fatalistic pessimism reconciled to the idea that
the future will be necessarily worse than what preceded it. This is sustained by a tragic chronological
framework according to which humanity is doomed to decay, or a cyclical one of the endless repetition
of the mistakes of the past. On top of their dubious assessments of what is to come, alarmismand
resignation would, if widely accepted, undermine a viable practice of farsightedness. Indeed, both of
them encourage public disengagement from deliberation about scenarios for the future, a process that
appears to be dangerous, pointless, or unnecessary. The resulting ‘depublicization’ of debate leaves
dominant groups and institutions(the state, the market, techno-science) in charge of sorting out the
future for the rest of us, thus effectively producing a heteronomous social order. How, then, can we support a
democratic process of prevention from below? The answer, I think, lies in cultivating the public capacity for critical judgment and
deliberation, so that participants in global civil society subject all claims about potential catastrophes to examination, evaluation, and
contestation. Two normative concepts are particularly well suited to grounding these tasks: the precautionary principle and global justice.
This worst case storytelling causes social innaction and serial policy failure—
extinction.
Furedi 10 – Professor of sociology at the University of Kent, Frank, “This shutdown is about more than volcanic ash”, Spiked, 4/19,
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8607/
Whatever the risks posed by the eruption of a volcano in Iceland, it seems clear that the shutting down of much of Europe’s air space is not
just about the threat posed by clouds of ash to flying passengers. We live
in an era where problems of uncertainty
andrisk are continually amplified, and where our fearful imaginations can make these problems seem
likeexistential threats. Consequently, unexpected natural events are rarely treated simply as unexpected natural events –
instead they are swiftly dramatised and transformed into ‘threats to human survival’. This becomes most clear in
the tendency to dramatise the forecasting of the weather. Once upon a time, weather forecasts were those boring moments on the radio or
TV when most of us got up to make a snack. However, with the invention of concepts such as ‘extreme weather’, routine events like storms,
smog or unexpected snowfall have become compellingly entertaining. Ours is a world where a relatively ordinary technical problem like the
so-called Millennium Bug can be interpreted as a threat of apocalyptic proportions – and where a flu epidemic is turned by officials into a
kind of plot line from a Hollywood disaster flick. When the World Health Organisation can warn that the entire human species is threatened
by swine flu, it’s
pretty clear that cultural prejudice rather than sober risk assessment influences much of
official thinking today. I am not a natural scientist, and I claim no authority to say anything of value about the risks posed by volcanic
ash clouds to flying aircraft. However, as a sociologist interested in the process of decision-making, it is evident to me that the reluctance to
lift the ban on air traffic in Europe is motivated by worst-case thinking rather than rigorous risk assessment. Risk
assessment is
based on an attempt to calculatethe probability of different outcomes. Worst-case thinking –these days
known as ‘precautionary thinking’ – is based on an act of imagination. It imagines the worstcasescenario and then takes action on that basis. In the case of the Icelandic volcano, fears that particles
in the ash cloud could cause aeroplane engines to shut down automatically mutated into a conclusion
that this wouldhappen. So it seems to me to be the fantasy of the worst-case scenario rather than risk assessment that underpins
the current official ban on air traffic. Many individuals associated with the air-travel industry are perturbed by what they perceive to be a
one-dimensional overreaction. Ulrich Schulte-Strathaus, secretary-general of the Association of European Airlines, observed that
‘verification flights undertaken by several of our airlines have revealed no irregularities at all’. He believes that ‘this confirms our
requirement that other options should be deployed to determine genuine risk’. Giovanni Bisignani, director-general of the International Air
Transport Association, describes the ban as a ‘European embarrassment’ and a ‘European mess’. Also, individuals associated with Europe’s
air-control authorities have conceded that they have been interpreting international guidelines ‘more rigorously’ than, say, their American
counterparts. British forecasters claimed the volcanic ash cloud could hit the eastern Canadian coast. Whatever the risks of flying in the
wake of the volcano, it seems clear that it is not evidence but speculation that is fuelling the current flight ban. The
reluctance
actually to weigh up the evidence and act on the basis of probabilities is motivated by fear of making a
wrong decision. Of course when lives are at stake it is essential to weigh up the evidence carefully – but at the end of the day, our
leaders have a responsibility to make decisions and live with the consequences. The slowness with which EU ministers
responded to this crisis indicates that worst-case thinking discourages responsible decision-making. Yet
as Giovanni Bisignani said, the decision to close airspace ‘has to be based on facts and supported by risk
assessment’, not on the politics of decision-avoidance. Tragically, this failure of nerve in relation to the
volcanic ash is the inevitable outcome of the institutionalisation of worst-case policymaking. This approach,
based on the unprecedented sensitivity of contemporary Western society to uncertainty and unknown dangers, has led to a radically new
way of perceiving and managing risks. As a result, the traditional association of risk with probabilities is now under fire from a growing body
of opinion, which claims that humanity lacks the knowledge to calculate risks in any meaningful way. Sadly, critics of traditional probabilistic
risk-assessments have more faith in speculative computer models than they do in science’s capacity to use knowledge to transform
The emergence of a speculative approach towards risk is paralleled by the
growing influence of ‘possibilistic thinking’ rather than probabilistic thinking, which actively invites
speculation about what could possibly go wrong. In today’s culture of fear, frequently ‘what could
possibly go wrong’ is confused with ‘what is likely to happen’.Numerous critics of old forms of probabilistic thinking call
for a radical break with past practices on the grounds that we simply lack the information to calculate probabilities. This rejection of
probabilities is motivated by a belief that the dangers we face are just too overwhelming and
catastrophic – the Millennium Bug, international terrorism, swine flu, climate change, etc – and we
simply cannot wait untilwe have all the information before we calculate their possible destructive
effects. ‘Shut it down!’ is the default response. In any case, it is argued, since so many of the threats are
‘unknown’ there is little information on which a realistic calculation of probabilities can be made. One of
the many regrettable consequences of this outlook is that policies designed to deal with threats are
increasingly based on feelings and intuition rather than on evidence or facts. Worst-case thinking
encourages society to adopt fear asof one of the key principles around which the public, the
government and various institutions should organize their lives. It institutionalises insecurity and fosters
a mood of confusion and powerlessness. Through popularising the belief that worst cases are normal, it
also encourages people to feel defenceless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats. In all but
name, it is an invitation to social paralysis. The eruption of a volcano in Iceland poses technical problems, for which
uncertainties into calculable risks.
responsible decision-makers should swiftly come up with sensible solutions. But instead, Europe has decided to turn a problem into a
drama. In
50 years’ time, historians will be writing about our society’s reluctanceto act when practical
problems arose. It is no doubt difficult to face up to a natural disaster – but in this case it is the all-too-apparent manmade
disaster brought on by indecision and a reluctance to engage with uncertainty that represents the real
threat to our future.
No Mexico collapse- social programs, econ innovation, and democracy
Rieff ’11 (3/17; David- Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute, Fellow at the New York Institute for
the Humanities, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and more!)“The Struggle for Mexico”
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/world/magazine/85337/mexico-calderon-clinton-obama-drugcartels(xo1)
In contrast, while Mexicans are profoundly divided about how to respond to the cartels, no one I have
spoken with has ever suggested there is credible evidence that any of the cartel leaders have Escobarlike ambitions—or any national political agenda. This emphatically does not mean that what the drug
lords want is not terrible enough. How else can one describe their demand that the Mexican state give
them a free hand to run their domestic production and cross-border smuggling operations, as well as to
go after their real and supposed enemies, and, indeed, anyone who gets in their way or who is just in
the wrong place at the wrong time, with complete impunity? To do this, the cartels have not just bribed
enormous numbers of policemen and local officials, but, in at least one case, helped elect someone to
the Mexican Congress. Still, to say that the cartels represent a fundamental challenge to the Mexican
government as a whole—a rebellion on the scale of what took place in Colombia or what is taking place
now in Pakistan—would be hyperbole.¶ Indeed, the Mexican state is in important ways both stronger
and more successful than many Americans seem to realize. In the area of public health, and, more
broadly, in poverty reduction, Mexico has far more to teach than to learn. The country is generally
thought to have handled the H1N1 panic better than many rich countries. And the Mexican
government’s social-assistance program, now known as Oportunidades—which skillfully and creatively
uses a range of assistance, from conditional cash transfers to health and nutritional support—has been
enormously effective in changing the status of Mexican women (who are the program’s recipients),
improving the health of children, and lifting large numbers of people out of poverty. Oportunidades’s
global reputation is such that Michael Bloomberg gave the okay for an Oportunidades pilot program in
New York City. The Ministry of Social Development (SEDESOL in its Spanish acronym) is a model of what
such an agency should be, and development experts around the world speak of it with a respect
sometimes bordering on awe. Significantly, the corruption that bedevils Mexican law enforcement has
no equivalent whatsoever in the social sphere, and, despite the drug crisis, SEDESOL goes from strength
to strength.¶ On the economic side, while Mexico remains heavily dependent on the remittances of the
millions of immigrants now working, legally or illegally, in the United States, the country also has a rising
middle class. It is common to associate the Mexican economy with Pemex, the state oil company, which
the government has tended to loot—in the process, depleting oil revenue that should have been put to
work on modernization of drilling infrastructure, particularly offshore, which, if Mexico is to continue as
a major petroleum exporter, is where it must hunt for new resources. (The contrast with the much
better-run, state-controlled Brazilian oil giant, Petrobras, or Malaysia’s Petronas, is painful.) But,
increasingly, there is also the Mexico of Homex, a company started in Sinaloa in 1989. Homex is now
one of the leading global firms involved in the building of low- and middleincome housing, with large
operations in Brazil and India as well as in 20 Mexican states. And yet, the only thing most non-Mexicans
who are drawn to the failed-state hypothesis seem to know about Sinaloa is that it gave its name to a
powerful drug cartel.¶ If one takes the long view, the clash between the Mexico of Pemex and the
Mexico of Homex may be as important as the war between the cartels and the government. And, unless
the Mexican economy implodes, which is highly unlikely, there is an excellent chance that the Mexico
of Homex will prevail. In any case, it is a contest in which the narco-traffickers—even narco-traffickers
operating right alongside the Homexes of Mexico—do not now have, and will never have, a say.¶ Most
important of all, Mexican democracy, deformed for so long during the decades of rule by the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is now strong. This is actually quite remarkable, because what is
too often forgotten is just how young a democracy it is. The great Mexican historian (and frequent New
Republic contributor) Enrique Krauze characterized PRI rule as “a collective monarchy with the electoral
forms of a republic.” That monarchy disappeared in 2000 when the opposition National Action Party
(PAN), led by Vicente Fox, swept into office. (Calderón, his successor, is also a member of the PAN.) In
this, a strong analogy can be made to France, where, from the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958 to
the election of the Socialist François Mitterrand in 1981, it seemed somehow inconceivable that the
country would ever have a president who was not from the right. Ever since Mitterrand, though, neither
the French right nor the French left has been under the illusion that the Fifth Republic somehow
“belongs” to them.¶ History suggests that, while democratic states can go through terrible periods and
face daunting crises—both of which, unhappily, look to be in the cards for Mexico— they almost never
become failed states. This is what makes the Joint Forces Command’s linking of Pakistan and Mexico so
unconvincing. If Pakistan becomes a failed state—and, while not likely, unhappily, the possibility can’t
be excluded—it will not only be because of the threat posed by the Pakistani Taliban, the other jihadi
formations, and some separatist groups, but because Pakistani democracy is a sham
Sinola Cartel winning the War - no violence escalation.
Global Post 13
(“How the Sinaloa cartel won Mexico’s drug war”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/mexico/130227/sinaloa-cartel-mexicodrug-war-US-global-economy-conflict-zones) RJT
BADIRAGUATO, Mexico — Neat,
freshly painted buildings and a renovated church line the central square.
Shiny SUVs rest curbside. Some lack license plates, as if the law doesn’t apply. Mansions crown the surrounding hills.¶ Badiraguato, a
town of 7,000 in Sinaloa state, shouldn’t have such wealth. It’s among the poorest municipalities in Mexico. But you’re better off not asking
questions here.¶ This is a secretive place, hot and quiet in the Sierra Madre foothills. There’s
an army barracks, but soldiers
mostly stay inside.¶ It’s the heart of drug country, home to Mexico's most powerful criminal syndicate:
the Sinaloa cartel, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.¶ For well over a century, local farmers have the harvested
marijuana and opium in the rugged mountains surrounding Badiraguato. Since the 1980s, Sinaloa cartel has acted as their
Wal-Mart, transporting the mind-bending cargo north with quasi-corporate efficiency, and distributing it to a narcoticscraving United States market.¶ Ever since former President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of soldiers and federal police to combat
organized crime in 2006, the country has been ravaged by violence. An estimated 70,000 people have been killed in often brutal territorial
warfare.¶ Yes, there have been victories for the government: In March 2009 the attorney general’s office published a most-wanted list of 37
high profile drug lords. As of February 2013, two-thirds of them are either dead or in custody. By now, the
majority of the seven
major drug trafficking cartels battling for dominance have been crippled. Most have partially or completely fractured into
smaller groups. Even the infamous Los
Zetas, whose leader Heriberto Lazcano was killed last fall, have recently suffered severe
blows.¶ Only the Sinaloa cartel seems to have survived the onslaught relatively intact.¶ In fact, some critics of the government even claim
Sinaloa has “won” the drug war.¶ El Chapo is still at large, after his spectacular escape from prison in . In mid-February Guatemalan authorities
investigated rumors that he had been gunned down, but the president’s spokesman later told GlobalPost they found no evidence of this. His
inner circle cronies Juan Jose Esparragoza and Ismael Zambada also still operate freely.¶ And while they succesfully evade capture, the
cartel has made substantial territorial advances, and has amassed extravagant wealth.¶ “El Chapo is going to
get stronger if he is not arrested in the next year and a half,” a senior official of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told Forbes in a
June 2011 interview.¶ Since then, the Sinaloa cartel ousted its rivals in the lucrative smuggling corridors of Tijuana and Ciudad
Juarez. El Chapo himself is now the most wanted man on the globe, with US authorities offering a $5 million reward for any information leading
to his capture.¶ In a business as opaque as the drug trade, it’s hard to get reliable figures on the size of a crime group’s territory, the breadth of
its wealth or the extent of its market share. Court documents, arrests and drug seizures, however, paint a picture of the Sinaloa cartel as a
multinational, highly flexible organization, quick to adapt to new circumstances and showing a resilience unlike any of its rivals.¶ Compared to
its humble beginnings in the 1980s, when it controlled only a single Pacific trafficking route into Arizona, the cartel’s territorial expansion has
been staggering. Key areas it now controls include most of Mexico’s Pacific coast states and parts of central Mexico.¶ Even more impressive is
its global reach. Sinaloa operatives have been arrested from Egypt to Argentina and from Europe to Malaysia. Properties attributed to El Chapo
Guzman have been seized in Europe and South America. US law enforcement reports that the group is now present in all major American cities.
Recent US court documents involving the case of Vicente Zambada-Niebla, Mayo Zambada's son, even suggest the Sinaloa cartel now controls
the cocaine trade in Australia.¶ Earlier this month, Chicago named El Chapo Guzman public enemy No. 1, the first to receive that title since the
city’s legendary crime boss, Al Capone.¶ Sinaloa's share in the drug market is titanic. Even by the most sober estimates, Mexican drug trafficking
amounts to over $6 billion per year, with El Chapo's Sinaloa cartel controlling an estimated half of that market, raking in billions each year.¶ No
wonder Forbes has listed El Chapo Guzman on its annual list of billionaires since 2009.¶ “The Sinaloa cartel certainly has the upper hand now,”
says Javier Valdez, co-founder of Rio Doce, a Sinaloa-based weekly magazine covering the drug war. “It’s the only cartel that has grown over the
years, extending its reach into Europe, Africa and South America, while all others have lost.Ӧ Some
have accused the Calderon
administration of collusion with El Chapo, claiming the government struck a deal by taking out its
rivals. And last October, leaked emails from security analysis firm STRATFOR suggested that even the
US government facilitated them.¶ Accusations of government collusion, however, are rejected by Malcolm Beith, a BritishAmerican journalist and author of "The Last Narco," a book about El Chapo Guzman. “Since 2009, the Sinaloa cartel has been hit very hard too,
completely obliterating those criticisms,” he contends.¶ Beith points out that Sinaloa's survival and recalcitrant power should instead be
attributed to the way it operates.¶ “ There
is a level-headedness about the leadership that the other groups
lack ,” he says. “To the authorities, first priority always has to be quelling violence. When other groups throw grenades into a crowd of
innocents or behead[s] people, it's obvious what needs to be done. Sinaloa has perpetrated its share of violence, but by
and large it
did not cause disruption to the general well-being of the population."¶ The Sinaloa cartel’s relatively low profile in
terms of violence is partly due to its relatively long history — it’s been around for 25 years. In Sinaloa itself the goup is deeply rooted in society.
Not only do its senior leaders hail from the region, but
the cartel reputedly funds hospitals and schools, thus winning
support from locals who aid the "capos" in their never-ending struggle to escape arrest.¶ El Chapo and his
cronies have also
perfected the strategy of “bribe over bullet,” preferring to corrupt authorities rather
than fighting them
into submission. Government officials on all levels in Mexico have been accused of being on Sinaloa’s take, as have
some of their US counterparts.¶ “El Chapo has an apparent ability to [allegedly] corrupt and infiltrate elements of law enforcement on both
sides of the border and seemingly play the authorities' every move to his advantage,” Beith says. “When the Mexican army moved into Juarez,
so did El Chapo, seizing an opportunity. When the authorities took down the Arellano-Felix cartel, El Chapo was already poised to take
Tijuana.Ӧ All things considered, El Chapo Guzman and his Sinaloa cartel seem to have been profiting rather than suffering from the drug war,
Javier Valdez argues. “The
drug war has helped them stay on top. While they continue to keep the heat away from their home
turf, their rivals have been weakened.Ӧ The most recent National Drug Threat Assessment of the Justice Department (2011)
suggests the same, by stating that overall drug availability in the US is increasing, as are production of marijuana, heroin and synthetic drugs
such as methamphetamine. Those are all businesses in which El Chapo Guzman and his Sinaloa cartel have a large stake.¶ “The organization is
particularly dominant because it is one of the few that can obtain multi-ton quantities of cocaine from South America, as well as produce large
quantities of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine,” the report claims.¶ Felipe Calderen left office in December. His succesor Enrique Peña
Nieto promises to cut the murder rate in half in the next six years, but most Mexicans doubt he is able to; during his first two months in office
at least 1,500 people are estimated to have died in gangland violence.¶ All the while El Chapo Guzman continues to make a mockery of the drug
war with every day he remains at large. His Sinaloa
cartel has been around longer than any other crime group in Mexico,
and it may
just outlast everybody else.
Winning in Mexico. Enhanced intelligence, collaboration with U.S, confiscations,
decrim, and social agencies solving now.
PoirÉ 2011 (Alejandro, “By working with Mexican civil society and reforming the police
force, we are scoring major victories.” http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/2989)
RJT
Can Mexico win the war against drugs? Yes¶ Success in Mexico's fight against drugs can’t be measured
like a game of baseball, in which you simply add up the score at the end of nine innings. It’s a war with
many fronts, and it requires a much different perspective. Drug trafficking is only one element of the
larger problem: the reach of organized crime into every facet of our national life and economy.¶ Mexico
has chalked up major victories—and will continue to do so, thanks to its multi-track approach that
focuses not just on eliminating drug trafficking, but on building stronger law enforcement institutions
and reinforcing our social fabric.¶ That would not have been possible without the engagement of both
government and civil society. Thanks to the leadership of President Felipe Calderón and the work of
groups such as Asociación Alto al Secuestro, led by Isabel Miranda de Wallace, and México SOS, headed
by Alejandro Martí, we have come a long way.¶ In recent decades, the drug traffickers’ criminal business
model has changed, and Mexico is bearing the brunt. Before, the primary goal of drug traffickers was
securing an uninterrupted flow of drugs into the United States. But the sealing of cocaine trafficking
routes through the Caribbean, the increased security on the U.S. border after 9/11, the mismanagement
of Mexico’s economy from the 1970s through the 1990s, and the lack of professionalization in municipal
and state police departments—among other factors—have led drug traffickers to seek control of a large
variety of unlawful activities as a means of enhancing their earnings and competitive position in the
criminal market. The end of the Assault Weapons Ban in the U.S. in 2004 has made this change all the
more threatening to Mexico’s security.¶ Addressing this escalation of crime and insecurity required not
only a plan for domestic action, but also recognition of the transnational dimension of the problem. That
recognition has been the key to our comprehensive, multifaceted approach.¶ The National Security
Strategy, launched in 2006, rests on three main tenets: severely weakening criminal organizations;
massively and effectively reconstructing law enforcement institutions and the legal system; and
repairing the social fabric through, among other things, enhancing crime prevention policies.¶ To date,
there have been significant achievements.¶ Our enhanced intelligence capabilities and close
collaboration with U.S. agencies have allowed us to arrest or kill 21 of the 37 most-wanted leaders of
major criminal organizations. Moreover, Mexican authorities have seized over 9,500 tons of drugs that
will never reach U.S. or Mexican children, and captured more than 122,000 weapons since 2006—
most of which were bought in the United States.¶ At the same time, the professional caliber of
Mexico’s Federal Police force has improved significantly through strict recruitment, vetting and
extensive training—even as the force has grown nearly sixfold to 35,000 federal policemen. But it is not
just a question of numbers; police intelligence capabilities have been reinforced by the recruitment of
an additional 7,000 federal law enforcement intelligence personnel from top-level universities.¶ A
new judicial framework is in place, thanks to the introduction of legal reforms designed to strengthen
due process guarantees, provide fuller protection to victims and increase the efficiency and
transparency of trials. Much of this has been the result of the introduction of oral procedures in the
federal court system, which is expected to be fully implemented in 2016.¶ We have also achieved
significant success in dismantling criminal financial networks. Authorities have confiscated a record
amount of cash from the drug cartels—although more can still be done—and special investigative units
are spearheading a national effort to combat money laundering. Currently, Congress is working on
passing a bill aimed at increasing the capacity of the federal government to investigate and prosecute
money launderers.¶ To improve Mexico’s social fabric, we have focused on the economic and social
roots of crime and addiction since Calderón took office. We consider drug addiction to be a public
health problem. Accordingly, national legislation has decriminalized personal consumption of drugs,
while directing drug users to proper medical help.¶ Also, public spending devoted to
addiction/prevention programs has more than doubled during the first five years of Calderón’s
administration. Mexico now boasts the largest network in Latin America of centers for prevention and
early treatment of addiction, with more than 330 units distributed throughout the country providing
counseling, medical treatment and referrals to over 2 million people every year.¶ We have recovered
thousands of public places—including parks, civic plazas and sports fields—through the improvement of
infrastructure, recreational activities, citizen participation, and more effective security measures. This
shared responsibility between federal and local authorities and community members provides people
with safe places to gather and forge stronger social ties. We have also implemented the Safe School
Program, where over 35,000 elementary and middle schools provide some 9 million young kids with a
violence-free and addiction-free environment.¶ Mexico sits between the largest consumer of drugs to
the north, and the largest producers of many of these drugs to the south. That gives us a special
challenge. But all countries in the region need to coordinate their drug and crime interdiction programs
if we are ever going to break the power of transnational criminal networks. The spread of these
networks threatens not just Mexico but all of us in the region. Final success in the war against drugs can
only be achieved when we tackle together the conditions that allow these networks to operate with
impunity.
Fed ADV
Whether or not climate change is factually catastrophic is irrelevant - the framing of
the issue outweighs its scientific validity and directly influences the effectiveness of
challenges to climate change
Martin and Hodder 2009 (Brian Martin is a Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong
Australia. Patrick Hodder is a Tutor and PhD candidate at the Bega Education Centre of the University of
Wollongong. "Climate crisis? The politics of emergency framing"; Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.
44, No. 36, pp. 53-60)
Should climate change be considered an emergency? Our aim here is to present some cautionary
comments. Most discussion has approached the issue in terms of whether climate
change really is an emergency. For example, does the evidence show that warming is
proceeding faster than previously thought? Is there a tipping point beyond which
climate change is irreversible? How soon and how drastically must carbon emissions be reduced?
This way of thinking seems to be concerned with scientific matters, but actually it builds in social
assumptions. Many of those who talk of a climate crisis or emergency assume that
evidence about climate processes means that addressing climate change is the most
urgent social issue, that the solution is policy change at the top, and that thinking of the
issue as an emergency is an effective way of bringing about change. It is not the use of
the word "emergency" that is necessarily significant here but rather the assumptions
that so commonly go along with the word. We think these assumptions need to be
brought out into the open and discussed. Let us be clear. We believe climate change is a
vitally important issue. We believe action should be taken, the sooner and the more
effective the better, to prevent the adverse consequences of global warming. Calling
climate change an emergency might be a good approach - but on the other hand it
might not be, indeed it might be counterproductive. We think both the advantages and
disadvantages of emergency framing should be discussed. The emergency frame implicitly
prioritises climate change above other issues. On the other hand, some critics, like Lomborg
(2006), argue that other issues should have higher priority. We think it can be a mistake
to prioritise one issue over others, because this may encourage competition between activists
rather than cooperation. There are plenty of issues of vital importance in which millions of
lives are at stake, among them nuclear war, global poverty, HIV, inequality - and
smoking, which could kill one billion people this century (Proctor 2001). It is natural to
expect campaigners on other vitally important issues - such as torture, sexual slavery
and genocide - to remain committed to their concerns. Rather than prioritise climate change
as more urgent, it may be more effective for climate change activists to work with other social justice
campaigners to find ways to help each other - indeed, some are doing this already. Emergency
framing can be used to sideline dissent within the climate change movement itself. For example, those
who advocate highly ambitious targets for CO2reduction may seek the high ground, presenting their
position as the only option for humanity and stigmatising others as selling out. Internal democracy,
divergent approaches and openness to new viewpoints can be dismissed as unaffordable luxuries when
the future is at stake. Our view, instead, is that because climate change is such an
important issue, maintaining democracy, diversity and dialogue within the movement is
even more vital.
Their technological enframing makes eco disaster strategically even more dangerous
and crowds out more pressing environmental movements
Crist ‘7 – Ass. Prof. Sci & Tech in Society @ VT (Eileen, Telos 141, Winter, Beyond the Climate Crisis)
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 planet’s ecological
predicament as a whole, by virtue of claiming the limelight 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 sun’s 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.”16 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.”17 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.”18 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 planet’s predicament. Just as the risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long
underappreciated climate crisis, so it would be naïve not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely unforeseeable) 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 consumption, 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.19 But questioning this civilization is by and large sidestepped in climate-change discourse, with its single-minded quest for a globalwarming techno-fix.20 Instead of confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the climate crisis—among numerous other
catastrophes—climate-change literature often focuses on how global warming is endangering the culprit, and agonizes over what technological
means can save it from impending tipping points.21 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
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 disruption, incessant development, and so on, are made to
appear secondary and more forgiving by comparison with “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with
the climate system. In what follows, I will focus specifically on how climate-change discourse encourages the continued marginalization
environmental and political agenda today that
of the biodiversity crisis—a 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 biodiversity, 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 losses—indeed, 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 climate quandary will not put an end to—will barely address—the ongoing destruction of life on Earth.
No warming – historical data disproves the climate change hypothesis and statistical
analysis disproves the predictive capability of climate models – you can’t beat this
card
Fyfe et al 13 [John, Research Scientist with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling, with Nathan Gillett, Research Scientist with the
Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling, and Francis Zwiers, Literally wrote the book on Climate Statistics, Director of the Pacific Climate Impacts
Consortium and Adjunct Professor in the Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Victoria, September, “Overestimated Global
Warming Over the Past 20 Years,” Nature, Vol. 3, p. 767-9] AG
Global mean surface temperature over the past 20 years (1993–2012) rose at a rate of 0.14 ± 0.06 °C per
decade (95% confidence interval)1. This rate of warming is significantly slower than that simulated by
climate
models
participating in Phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). To illustrate this, we
the
considered
trends in global mean surface temperature computed from 117 simulations of the climate by 37 CMIP5
models (see Supplementary Information). These
models generally simulate natural variability — including that associated
with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and explosive volcanic eruptions — as well as estimate the combined response of
climate to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, aerosol abundance (of sulphate, black carbon and organic
carbon, for example), ozone concentrations (tropospheric and stratospheric), land use (for example, deforestation) and solar
variability. By averaging simulated temperatures only at locations where corresponding observations exist, we find an
average simulated rise in global mean surface temperature of 0.30 ± 0.02 °C per decade (using 95% confidence
intervals on the model average). The
observed rate of warming given above is less than half of this simulated rate ,
and only a few simulations provide warming trends within the range of observational uncertainty (Fig. 1a).
The inconsistency between observed and simulated global warming is even more striking for temperature trends
computed over the past fifteen years (1998–2012). For this period, the observed trend of 0.05 ± 0.08 °C per decade
is more than four times smaller than the average simulated trend of 0.21 ± 0.03 °C per decade (Fig. 1b). It is worth noting
that the
observed trend over this period — not significantly different from zero — suggests a temporary ‘hiatus’ in
global warming
2–4. The divergence between observed and CMIP5- simulated global warming begins in the early 1990s, as can be seen
when comparing observed and simulated running trends from 1970–2012 (Fig. 2a and 2b for 20-year and 15-year running trends, respectively).
The evidence, therefore, indicates
CMIP5 prescribed forcings) do
that the current generation of climate models (when run as a group, with the
not reproduce the observed global warming over the past 20 years, or the
slowdown in global warming over the past fifteen years. This interpretation is supported by statistical
tests
of the null hypothesis that the observed and model mean trends are equal, assuming that either: (1) the models are exchangeable with
each other (that is, the ‘truth plus error’ view); or (2) the models are exchangeable with each other and with the observations (see
Supplementary Information). Differences between observed and simulated 20-year trends have p values (Supplementary Information) that
drop to close to zero by 1993–2012 under assumption (1) and to 0.04 under assumption (2) (Fig. 2c). Here we note that the smaller the p value
is, the stronger the evidence against the null hypothesis. On this basis, the rarity of the 1993–2012 trend difference under assumption (1) is
obvious. Under assumption (2), this implies that such an inconsistency is only expected to occur by chance once in 500 years, if 20-year periods
are considered statistically independent. Similar results apply to trends for 1998–2012 (Fig. 2d). In conclusion, we reject the null hypothesis that
the observed and model mean trends are equal at the 10% level. One
possible explanation for the discrepancy is that forced
and internal variation might combine differently in observations than in models. For example, the forced
trends in models are modulated
coincide with
warming that
the
up and down by
observed sequence
simulated sequences of ENSO events, which are not expected to
of such events. For
this reason the moderating influence on global
arises from the decay of the 1998 El Niño event does not occur in the models at that time. Thus we
employ here an established technique to estimate the impact of ENSO on global mean temperature, and to incorporate the
effects of dynamically induced atmospheric variability and major explosive volcanic eruptions 5,6. Although these three
natural variations
account for some differences between simulated and observed global warming, these differences do
not substantively change our conclusion that observed and simulated global warming are not in
agreement over the past two decades (Fig. 3). Another source of internal climate variability that may contribute to the
inconsistency is the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation7 (AMO). However, this is difficult to assess as the observed and simulated
variations in global temperature that are associated with the AMO seem to be dominated by a large and concurrent signal of presumed
anthropogenic origin (Supplementary Fig. S1). It is worth noting that in any case the
AMO has not driven cooling over the
past 20 years. Another possible driver of the difference between observed and simulated global warming is increasing stratospheric
aerosol concentrations. Results
from several independent datasets show that stratospheric aerosol
abundance has increased
since the late 1990s, owing to a series of comparatively small tropical volcanic eruptions8 . Although
none of the CMIP5 simulations take this into account, two independent sets of model simulations
estimate that increasing stratospheric aerosols have had a surface cooling impact of about 0.07 °C per
decade
since 1998,9. If the CMIP5 models had accounted for increasing stratospheric aerosol, and had responded with the same surface
cooling impact, the simulations and observations would be in closer agreement. Other
factors that contribute to the
discrepancy could include a missing decrease in stratospheric water vapour 10 (whose processes are not well
represented in current climate models),
errors in aerosol forcing
in the CMIP5 models, a
bias in the
prescribed
solar
irradiance trend , the possibility that the transient climate sensitivity of the CMIP5 models could be on average
too high 11,12 or a possible unusual episode
of internal climate variability not
considered above 13,14. Ultimately the
causes of this inconsistency will only be understood after careful comparison of simulated internal climate variability and climate model
forcings with observations from the past two decades, and by waiting to see how global temperature responds over the coming decades.
No escalation from friction to war
Jervis 11 (Robert, 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 steep rise in nationalism. More
likely would be a worsening of the current economic
difficulties, which could itself produce greater nationalism, undermine democracy, and bring back old-fashioned beggar-thy-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
economic liberalism
even if
the more extreme
versions of free trade and
become discredited, it is hard to see how without building on a pre-existing 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
turn without
conflict, it will
anyone suggesting that
force
not make war thinkable .
we have seen such a sharp
of arms is the solution shows that even if bad
economic
down-
times bring about greater economic