Technostrategic Discourse Neg
Technostrategic Discourse Neg ....................................................................................................... 1
WoT Good.................................................................................................................................... 2
Civilians Link ............................................................................................................................ 3
Critique Link ............................................................................................................................. 5
Security Key ............................................................................................................................. 6
Must Win ................................................................................................................................. 8
Drones/Tech Good .................................................................................................................... 12
Risk Assessment Key .............................................................................................................. 13
Tech/Speed Good .................................................................................................................. 16
Tech Good / Can be Reformed .............................................................................................. 17
Technostrategic Discourse Good ........................................................................................... 23
Technostrategic Discourse K2 Heg ........................................................................................ 24
Technostrategic Discourse K2 Military .................................................................................. 25
Quantitative Methods Solve Feminism ................................................................................. 26
Heg / WOT Good ................................................................................................................... 31
Link Turn .................................................................................................................................... 32
Authenticity ........................................................................................................................... 33
No Internal Link ..................................................................................................................... 35
Impact Defense.......................................................................................................................... 37
State Good ............................................................................................................................. 38
Science Good ......................................................................................................................... 39
Realism Solves Feminism ....................................................................................................... 42
Nukes K2 Solve ...................................................................................................................... 44
Solvency ..................................................................................................................................... 45
Subjectivity Focus Fails .......................................................................................................... 46
Discourse Focus Fails ............................................................................................................. 48
Must Be Policy Relevant ........................................................................................................ 55
WoT Good
Civilians Link
The focus on civilian casualties and the constructed nature of war makes
fighting the War on Terror impossible. Painting the Middle East as victims
causes terrorism—makes them unable to be responsible for their actions.
HANSON 4 (Victor Davis, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html “The Fruits of Appeasment” 2004)
So at precisely the time of these increasingly frequent terrorist attacks, the silly gospel of
multiculturalism insisted that Westerners have neither earned the right to censure others, nor
do they possess the intellectual tools to make judgments about the relative value of different
cultures. And if the initial wave of multiculturalist relativism among the elites—coupled with the ageold romantic forbearance for Third World roguery—explained tolerance for early unpunished attacks on
Americans, its spread to our popular culture only encouraged more.¶ This nonjudgmentalism—
essentially a form of nihilism—deemed everything from Sudanese female circumcision to honor killings
on the West Bank merely “different” rather than odious. Anyone who has taught freshmen at a state
university can sense the fuzzy thinking of our undergraduates: most come to us prepped in high schools not to make “value
judgments” about “other” peoples who are often “victims” of American “oppression.” Thus, before female-hating psychopath
Mohamed Atta
piloted a jet into the World Trade Center, neither Western intellectuals nor their
students would have taken him to task for what he said or condemned him as hypocritical for
his parasitical existence on Western society. Instead, without logic but with plenty of romance, they would
more likely have excused him as a victim of globalization or of the biases of American foreign
policy . They would have deconstructed Atta’s promotion of anti-Semitic, misogynist, Western-hating thought, as well as his
conspiracies with Third World criminals, as anything but a danger and a pathology to be remedied by deportation or incarceration.¶
It was not for nothing that on November 17, 1979—less than two weeks after the militants stormed the American embassy in
Teheran—the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the release of 13 female and black hostages, singling them out as part of the brotherhood
of those oppressed by the United States and cloaking his ongoing slaughter of Iranian opponents and attacks on United States
sovereignty in a self-righteous anti-Americanism. Twenty-five years later, during the anti-war protests of last spring, a group called
“Act Now to Stop War and End Racism” sang the same foolish chorus in its call for demonstrations: “Members of the Muslim
Community, Antiwar Activists, Latin-American Solidarity Groups and People From All Over the United States Unite to Say: ‘We Are All
Palestinians!’ ”¶ The new cult of romantic victimhood became gospel in most Middle East departments in American universities.
Except for the courageous Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Fouad Ajami, few scholars offered any analysis that might confirm more
astute Americans in their vague sense that in the Middle East, political autocracy, statism, tribalism, anti-intellectualism, and gender
apartheid accounted for poverty and failure. And if few wished to take on Islamofascism in the 1990s—indeed, Steven Emerson’s
chilling 1994 documentary Jihad in America set off a storm of protest from U.S. Muslim-rights groups and prompted death threats to
the producer—almost no one but Samuel Huntington dared even to broach the taboo subject that there might be elements within
doctrinaire Islam itself that could easily lead to intolerance and violence and were therefore at the root of any “clash of
civilizations.Ӧ Instead, most experts explained why violent fanatics might have some half-legitimate grievance behind their deadly
harvest each year of a few Americans in the wrong place at the wrong time. These experts
cautioned that, instead of
bombing and shooting killers abroad who otherwise would eventually reach us at home,
Americans should take care not to disturb Iranian terrorists during Ramadan—rather than to
remember that Muslims attacked Israel precisely during that holy period. Instead of condemning
Wahhabis for the fascists that they were, we were instead apprised that such holy men of the desert and tent provided a rapidly
changing and often Western-corrupted Saudi Arabia with a vital tether to the stability of its romantic nomadic past. Rather than
recognizing that Yasser Arafat’s Tunisia-based Fatah organization was a crime syndicate, expert
opinion persuaded us to
empower it as an indigenous liberation movement on the West Bank—only to destroy nearly
two decades’ worth of steady Palestinian economic improvement.¶ Neither oil-concerned Republicans
nor multicultural Democrats were ready to expose the corrupt American relationship with Saudi Arabia. No country is more culpable
than that kingdom in funding extremist madrassas and subsidizing terror, or more antithetical to liberal American values from free
speech to religious tolerance. But Saudi propagandists learned from the Palestinians the value of constructing their own victimhood
as a long-oppressed colonial people. Call a Saudi fundamentalist mullah a fascist, and you can be sure you’ll be tarred as an
Islamophobe.¶ Even
when Middle Easterners regularly blew us up, the Clinton administration,
unwilling to challenge the new myth of Muslim victimhood, transformed Middle Eastern
terrorists bent on destroying America into wayward individual criminals who did not spring
from a pathological culture. Thus, Clinton treated the first World Trade Center bombing as only a criminal justice
matter—which of course allowed the United States to avoid confronting the issue and taking on the messy and increasingly
unpopular business the Bush administration has been engaged in since September 11. Clinton dispatched FBI agents, not soldiers, to
Yemen and Saudi Arabia after the attacks on the USS Cole and the Khobar Towers. Yasser Arafat, responsible in the 1970s for the
murder of a U.S. diplomat in the Sudan, turned out to be the most frequent foreign visitor to the Clinton Oval Office. ¶ If the
Clintonian brand of appeasement reflected both a deep-seated tolerance for Middle Eastern extremism and a reluctance to wake
comfortable Americans up to the danger of a looming war, he was not the only one naive about the threat of Islamic fascism.
Especially culpable was the Democratic Party at large, whose post-Vietnam foreign policy could not sanction the use of American
armed force to protect national interests but only to accomplish purely humanitarian ends as in the interventions in Haiti, Somalia,
and Bosnia.¶
Critique Link
Academics can’t understand the experiences of war officers—assumptions
about them are dehumanizing and misunderstand war.
Muqawama 13 (Abu Muqawama, Center for a New American Security "Nature's Not In It: A Special In
Memoriam," 5/26/13 http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2013/05/natures-not-it-specialmemoriam.html)
The embedded hypothesis of such philosophy is that greater humanity--embodied in risk, emotion,
and "old-fashioned" soldiery--reduces atrocity. But in what universe does does a 19-year old rifleman who took
to war directly from high school prom, who has just seen his friend lose his limbs a week before in a IED attack, somehow become an
a priori better choice than a Air Force officer sitting in a Creech Air Force Base trailer? The
great error in the prizing of
passions and culture over the machine lies in the idea that passion points inherently in the
"right" direction. In other words, Carol Cohn identifies "moral urgency" with her own left-feminist political positions.¶ There
were plenty of men who could have had their fingers on the red button who had a different "moral urgency" than Carol Cohn. The
romantic John F. Kennedy and his cadre of intellectuals were willing to "pay any price" and "bear any burden" to fight Communism in
Southeast Asia. 50,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese paid the "price" and bore the "burden." Barry Goldwater thought that
"extremism in the defense of liberty" was no vice and accordingly suggested using tactical nuclear weapons to break the Indochinese
deadlock. And this is without bringing up the frenzy of killing by machete in many post-90s conflicts and the European religious wars
they resemble.¶ The
business of war is serious. it requires compassion, certainly. But it also requires a
deductive mindset that is willing to "think the unthinkable" in order to prevent far greater
horrors. Emotion in war is highly complex and binning the world of violence into either those
with "moral urgency" and Spocks is analytically useless. Finally , outsiders often mistake coping
mechanisms for inhumanity. Anyone familiar with the medical and emergency services
community's black humor would instantly relate to the casual banter of the Army pilots recorded
in the "Collateral Murder" WikiLeaks video. In the eyes of those who have never conversed with veterans,
read war literature, or experienced highly stressful life and death situations, such banter was
proof of their inhumanity.¶ Cohn is not unique. Humanist intellectuals commonly project their own
morals and definitions of humanity as if they are unimpeachable truths. Teju Cole expresses disbelief
that President Obama could read the same books he does and yet still make drone kill lists. But aesthetic taste does not
translate into shared policy preference. Hence Cole's cognitive dissonance that a center-liberal American president
like Obama could read Whitman and not agree with a left-leaning Nigerian novelist that drones are "ominous, discomfiting, illegal,
and immoral."¶ Cole could drag his cursor over to the blog of conservative film critic Sonny Bunch, who may share many aesthetic
opinions with his liberal counterparts but nonetheless writes for the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon. Why? Well, it might just
be that Bunch could have some strong beliefs about politics and policy that diverge from that of a Teju Cole! Perhaps a President
that spoke on the campaign trail about going after militants in Pakistan might also have similarly divergent preferences?¶
Security Key
Promotion of security is an ethical responsibility of government. Total security
is impossible but limited security avoids a hell on earth.
Elshtain ‘3 (Jean Bethke, Prof. Social and Pol. Ethics – U. Chicago, “Just War Against Terror:
The Burden of American Power in a Violent World”, p. 46-48)
IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH of September 11, I said to a friend, "Now we are reminded of
what governments are for." The primary responsibility of government is to provide basic
security—ordinary civic peace. St. Augustine calls this form of earthly peace tranquillitas
ordinis. This is not the perfect peace promised to believers in the Kingdom of God, the one in
which the lion lies down with the lamb. On this earth, if the lion lies down with the lamb, the
lamb must be replaced frequently, as Martin Luther opined with his characteristic mordant wit.
1 Portions of the U.S. Constitution refer specifically to security and public safety. "To ensure
domestic tranquillity" was central to what the new order being created after the American
Revolution was all about. None of the goods that human beings cherish, including the free
exercise of religion, can flourish without a measure of civic peace and security. What good or
goods do I have in mind? Mothers and fathers raising their children; men and women going to
work; citizens of a great city making their way on streets and subways; ordinary people flying
to California to visit the grandchildren or to transact business with colleagues— all of these
actions are simple but profound goods made possible by civic peace. They include the faithful
attending their churches, synagogues, and mosques without fear, and citizens—men and
women, young and old, black, brown, and white—lining up to vote on Election Day. This civic
peace is not the kingdom promised by scripture that awaits the end time. The vision of beating
swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, of creating a world in which "nation
shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore," is connected with
certain conditions that will always elude us. That vision presupposes that all persons are
under one law. But our condition of pluralism and religious diversity alone precludes the rule
of one law. Moreover, our condition of fallibility and imperfection precludes a world in which
discontents never erupt. That said, the civic peace that violence disrupts does offer
intimations of the peaceable kingdom. If we live from day to day in fear of deadly attack, the
goods we cherish become elusive. Human beings are fragile creatures. We cannot reveal the
fullness of our being, including our deep sociality, if airplanes are flying into buildings or snipers
are shooting at us randomly or deadly spores are being sent through the mail. As we have
learned so shockingly, we can neither take this civic peace for granted nor shake off our
responsibility to respect and promote the norms and rules that sustain civic peace. We know
what happens to people who live in pervasive fear. The condition of fearfulness leads to
severe isolation as the desire to protect oneself and one's family becomes overwhelming. It
encourages harsh measures because, as the political theorist Thomas Hobbes wrote in his 1651
work Leviathan, if we live in constant fear of violent death we are likely to seek guarantees to
prevent such. Chapter 13 of Hobbes's great work is justly renowned for its vivid depiction of the
horrors of a "state of nature," Hobbes's description of a world in which there is no ordered civic
peace of any kind. In that horrible circumstance, all persons have the strength to kill each other,
"either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others." The overriding emotion in this
nightmarish world is overwhelming, paralyzing fear, for every man has become an enemy to
every other and men live without other security, that what their own strength, and their own
invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because
the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use
of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of
moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the
Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall
feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and
short. 2 This is Hobbes's famous, or infamous, war of all against all.
Must Win
Appeasement causes holocausts
HANSON 4 (Victor Davis, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html “The Fruits of Appeasment” 2004)
The twentieth century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic
consequences of placating tyrants. British and French restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss,
the absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitler’s
contempt for their weakness. Fifty
million dead, the Holocaust, and the near destruction of European
civilization were the wages of “appeasement”—a term that early-1930s liberals proudly
embraced as far more enlightened than the old idea of “deterrence” and “military readiness.”¶
So too did Western excuses for the Russians’ violation of guarantees of free elections in postwar Eastern Europe, China, and
Southeast Asia only embolden the Soviet Union. What eventually contained Stalinism was the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and nuclear
deterrence—not the United Nations—and what destroyed its legacy was Ronald Reagan’s assertiveness, not Jimmy Carter’s
accommodation or Richard Nixon’s détente.¶ As long ago as the fourth century b.c.,
Demosthenes warned how
complacency and self-delusion among an affluent and free Athenian people allowed a
Macedonian thug like Philip II to end some four centuries of Greek liberty—and in a mere 20 years of
creeping aggrandizement down the Greek peninsula. Thereafter, these historical lessons should have been clear to citizens of any
liberal society: we
must neither presume that comfort and security are our birthrights and are
guaranteed without constant sacrifice and vigilance, nor expect that peoples outside the
purview of bourgeois liberalism share our commitment to reason, tolerance, and enlightened
self-interest.¶ Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end up, in
the terrible arithmetic of war, saving more lives than they cost. All this can be a hard lesson to relearn each generation, especially
now that we contend with the sirens of the mall, Oprah, and latte. Our
affluence and leisure are as antithetical to
the use of force as rural life and relative poverty once were catalysts for muscular action. The
age-old lure of appeasement—perhaps they will cease with this latest concession, perhaps we provoked our enemies, perhaps
demonstrations of our future good intentions will win their approval—was never more evident than in the recent Spanish elections,
when an affluent European electorate, reeling from the horrific terrorist attack of 3/11, swept from power the pro-U.S. center-right
government on the grounds that the mass murders were more the fault of the United States for dragging Spain into the effort to
remove fascists and implant democracy in Iraq than of the primordial al-Qaidist culprits, who long ago promised the Western and
Christian Iberians ruin for the Crusades and the Reconquista.
Hesitation to punish aggressors causes more aggression—infinite loop
HANSON 4 (Victor Davis, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html “The Fruits of Appeasment” 2004)
What went wrong with the West—and with the United States in particular—when not just the classical but
especially the recent antecedents to September 11, from the Iranian hostage-taking to the
attack on the USS Cole, were so clear? Though Americans in an election year, legitimately concerned about our war
dead, may now be divided over the Iraqi occupation, polls nevertheless show a surprising consensus that the many precursors to the
World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were acts of war, not police matters. Roll the tape backward from the USS Cole in 2000,
through the bombing of the Khobar Towers and the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the first World Trade Center bombing in
1993, the destruction of the American embassy and annex in Beirut in 1983, the mass murder of 241 U.S. Marine peacekeepers
asleep in their Lebanese barracks that same year, and assorted kidnappings and gruesome murders of American citizens and
diplomats (including TWA Flight 800, Pan Am 103, William R. Higgins, Leon Klinghoffer, Robert Dean Stethem, and CIA operative
William Francis Buckley), until we arrive at the Iranian hostage-taking of November 1979: that debacle is where we first saw the
strange brew of Islamic fascism, autocracy, and Middle East state terrorism—and failed to grasp its menace, condemn it, and go to
war against it.¶ That lapse, worth meditating upon in this 25th anniversary year of Khomeinism, then set the precedent that such
aggression against the United States was better adjudicated as a matter of law than settled by war. Criminals
were to be
understood, not punished; and we, not our enemies, were at fault for our past behavior.
Whether Carter’s impotence sprang from his deep-seated moral distrust of using American power unilaterally or from real remorse
over past American actions in the cold war or even from his innate pessimism about the military capability of the United States
mattered little to the hostage takers in Teheran, who for some 444 days humiliated the United States through a variety of public
demands for changes in U.S. foreign policy, the return of the exiled Shah, and reparations.¶ But if we know how we failed to respond
in the last three decades, do we yet grasp why we were so afraid to act decisively at these earlier junctures, which might have
stopped the chain of events that would lead to the al-Qaida terrorist acts of September 11? Our
failure was never due to
a lack of the necessary wealth or military resources, but rather to a deeply ingrained
assumption that we should not retaliate—a hesitancy al-Qaida perceives and plays upon.
Appeasement of the Middle East lets them take advantage of us—causes
violence
HANSON 4 (Victor Davis, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html “The Fruits of Appeasment” 2004)
Along that sad succession of provocations, we can look back and see particularly critical turning points that reflected this nowinstitutionalized state policy of worrying more about what the enemy was going to do to us than we to him, to paraphrase Grant’s
dictum: not hammering back after the murder of the marines in Lebanon for fear of ending up like the Israelis in a Lebanese
quagmire; not going to Baghdad in 1991 because of paranoia that the “coalition” would collapse and we would polarize the Arabs;
pulling abruptly out of Somalia once pictures of American bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu were broadcast around
the world; or turning down offers in 1995 from Sudan to place Usama bin Ladin into our custody, for fear that U.S. diplomats or
citizens might be murdered abroad.¶ Throughout
this tragic quarter-century of appeasement, our
response usually consisted of a stern lecture by a Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or Bill Clinton
about “never giving in to terrorist blackmail” and “not negotiating with terrorists.” Even Ronald Reagan’s saberrattling “You can run but not hide” did not preclude trading arms to the Iranian terrorists or abruptly abandoning Lebanon after the
horrific Hezbollah attack.¶ Sometimes
a half-baked failed rescue mission, or a battleship salvo, cruise
missile, or air strike followed—but always accompanied by a weeklong debate by
conservatives over “exit strategies” and “mission creep,” while liberals fretted about
“consultations with our allies and the United Nations.” And remember: these pathetic military
responses were the hawkish actions that earned us the resignation of a furious Cyrus Vance, the
abrogation of overflight rights by concerned “allies” such as France, and a national debate about what we did to
cause such animosity in the first place.¶ Our enemies and Middle Eastern “friends” alike sneered at our selfflagellation. In 1991, at great risk, the United States freed Kuwait from Iraq and ended its status as the 19th satrapy of Saddam
Hussein—only to watch the restored kingdom ethnically cleanse over a third of a million Palestinians. But after the murder of 3,000
Americans in 2001, Kuwaitis, in a February 2002 Gallup poll (and while they lobbied OPEC to reduce output and jack up prices),
revealed an overwhelming distaste for Americans—indeed the highest levels of anti-Americanism in the Arab world. And these
ethnic cleansers of Palestinians cited America’s purportedly unfair treatment of the Palestinians (recipients of accumulated billions
in American aid) as a prime cause of their dislike of us.¶ In
the face of such visceral anti-Americanism, the
problem may not be real differences over the West Bank, much less that “we are not getting
the message out”; rather, in the decade since 1991 the Middle East saw us as a great power that
neither could nor would use its strength to advance its ideas—that lacked even the intellectual confidence
to argue for our civilization before the likes of a tenth-century monarchy. The autocratic Arab world neither
respects nor fears a democratic United States, because it rightly senses that we often talk in
principled terms but rarely are willing to invest the time, blood, and treasure to match such
rhetoric with concrete action. That’s why it is crucial for us to stay in Iraq to finish the reconstruction and cement the
achievement of our three-week victory over Saddam.
Collective indifference towards danger causes attacks
HANSON 4 (Victor Davis, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html “The Fruits of Appeasment” 2004)
Instead, the
primary cause for our surprising indifference to the events leading up to September 11
lies within ourselves. Westerners always have had a propensity for complacency because of
our wealth and freedom; and Americans in particular have enjoyed a comfortable isolation in being separated from the
rest of the world by two oceans. Yet during the last four presidential administrations, laxity about
danger on the horizon seems to have become more ingrained than in the days when a more robust United
States sought to thwart communist intrusion into Arabia, Asia, and Africa.¶ Americans never viewed terrorist outlaw states with the
suspicion they once had toward Soviet communism; they put little pressure on their leaders to crack down on Middle Eastern
autocracy and theocracy as a threat to security. At
first this indifference was understandable, given the
stealthy nature of our enemies and the post–cold war relief that, having toppled the Soviet Union and
freed millions in Eastern Europe, we might be at the end of history. Even the bloodcurdling anti-American shouts from
the Beirut street did not seem as scary as a procession of intercontinental missiles and tanks on an average May Day parade in
Moscow.¶ Hezbollah, al-Qaida, and the PLO were more like fleas on a sleeping dog: bothersome rather than lethal; to be flicked
away occasionally rather than systematically eradicated. Few paid attention to Usama bin Ladin’s infamous February 1998 fatwa:
“The rule to kill Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is a sacred duty for any Muslim.” Those who noticed thought it
just impotent craziness, akin to Sartre’s fatuous quip during the Vietnam War that he wished for a nuclear strike against the United
States to end its imperial aspirations. No
one thought that a raving maniac in an Afghan cave could kill
more Americans in a single day than the planes of the Japanese imperial fleet off Pearl
Harbor.¶ But still, how did things as odious to liberal sensibilities as Pan-Arabism, Islamic fundamentalism, and Middle Eastern
dictatorship—which squashed dissent, mocked religious tolerance, and treated women as chattel—become reinvented into
“alternate discourses” deserving a sympathetic pass from the righteous anger of the United States when Americans were murdered
overseas? Was it that spokesmen for terrorist regimes mimicked the American Left—in everything from dress, vocabulary, and
appearances on the lecture circuit—and so packaged their extremism in a manner palatable to Americans? Why, after all, were
Americans patient with remonstrations from University of Virginia alumna Hanan Ashrawi, rather than asking precisely how such a
wealthy Christian PLO apparatchik really felt about the Palestinian Authority’s endemic corruption, the spendthrift Parisian Mrs.
Arafat, the terrorists around Arafat himself, the spate of “honor killings” of women in the West Bank, the censorship of the
Palestinian press, suicide murdering by Arafat affiliates, and the lynching of suspects by Palestinian police?¶ Rather than springing
from realpolitik, sloth, or fear of oil cutoffs, much
of our appeasement of Middle Eastern terrorists derived
from a new sort of anti-Americanism that thrived in the growing therapeutic society of the
1980s and 1990s. Though the abrupt collapse of communism was a dilemma for the Left, it opened as many doors as it shut. To
be sure, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, few Marxists could argue for a state-controlled economy or mouth the old romance about a
workers’ paradise—not with scenes of East German families crammed into smoking clunkers lumbering over potholed roads, like
American pioneers of old on their way west. But if the creed of the socialist republics was impossible to take seriously in either
economic or political terms, such a collapse of doctrinaire statism did not discredit the gospel of forced egalitarianism and
resentment against prosperous capitalists. Far from it.¶ If Marx receded from economics departments, his spirit reemerged among
our intelligentsia in the novel guises of post-structuralism, new historicism, multiculturalism, and all the other dogmas whose
fundamental tenet was that white male capitalists had systematically oppressed women, minorities, and Third World people in
countless insidious ways. The font of that collective oppression, both at home and abroad, was the rich, corporate, Republican, and
white United States.¶ The fall of the Soviet Union enhanced these newer post-colonial and liberation fields of study by immunizing
their promulgators from charges of fellow-traveling or being dupes of Russian expansionism. Communism’s demise likewise freed
these trendy ideologies from having to offer some wooden, unworkable Marxist alternative to the West; thus they could happily
remain entirely critical, sarcastic, and cynical without any obligation to suggest something better, as witness the nihilist signs at
recent protest marches proclaiming: “I Love Iraq, Bomb Texas.”¶ From writers like Arundhati Roy and Michel Foucault (who anointed
Khomeini “a kind of mystic saint” who would usher in a new “political spirituality” that would “transfigure” the world) and from old
standbys like Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre (“to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an
oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time”), there
filtered down a vague notion that the United
States and the West in general were responsible for Third World misery in ways that
transcended the dull old class struggle. Endemic racism and the legacy of colonialism, the
oppressive multinational corporation and the humiliation and erosion of indigenous culture
brought on by globalization and a smug, self-important cultural condescension—all this and more
explained poverty and despair, whether in Damascus, Teheran, or Beirut.¶ There was victim status for everybody,
from gender, race, and class at home to colonialism, imperialism, and hegemony abroad. Anyone
could play in these “area studies” that cobbled together the barrio, the West Bank, and the “freedom fighter” into some sloppy
global union of the oppressed—a far hipper enterprise than rehashing Das Kapital or listening to a six-hour harangue from Fidel.¶ Of
course, pampered
Western intellectuals since Diderot have always dreamed up a “noble
savage,” who lived in harmony with nature precisely because of his distance from the
corruption of Western civilization. But now this fuzzy romanticism had an updated, political
edge: the bearded killer and wild-eyed savage were not merely better than we because they
lived apart in a pre-modern landscape. No: they had a right to strike back and kill modernizing
Westerners who had intruded into and disrupted their better world—whether Jews on Temple Mount,
women in Westernized dress in Teheran, Christian missionaries in Kabul, capitalist profiteers in Islamabad, whiskey-drinking oilmen
in Riyadh, or miniskirted tourists in Cairo.¶ An Ayatollah Khomeini who turned back the clock on female emancipation in Iran, who
murdered non-Muslims, and who refashioned Iranian state policy to hunt down, torture, and kill liberals nevertheless seemed to
liberal Western eyes as preferable to the Shah—a Western-supported anti-communist, after all, who was engaged in the messy,
often corrupt task of bringing Iran from the tenth to the twentieth century, down the arduous, dangerous path that, as in Taiwan or
South Korea, might eventually lead to a consensual, capitalist society like our own.¶ Yet in the new world of utopian multiculturalism
and knee-jerk anti-Americanism, in which a Noam Chomsky could proclaim Khomeini’s gulag to be “independent nationalism,”
reasoned argument was futile. Indeed, how could critical debate arise for those “committed to social change,” when no universal
standards were to be applied to those outside the West? Thanks
to the doctrine of cultural relativism,
“oppressed” peoples either could not be judged by our biased and “constructed” values (“false
universals,” in Edward Said’s infamous term) or were seen as more pristine than ourselves, uncorrupted by
the evils of Western capitalism.¶ Who were we to gainsay Khomeini’s butchery and oppression? We had no way of
understanding the nuances of his new liberationist and “nationalist” Islam. Now back in the hands of indigenous peoples, Iran might
offer the world an alternate path, a different “discourse” about how to organize a society that emphasized native values (of some
sort) over mere profit.
Our romanticization the third world allows aggression to go unpunished
HANSON 4 (Victor Davis, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html “The Fruits of Appeasment” 2004)
Military historians might argue that, given the enormity of our task in Iraq—liberating 26 million from a
tyrant and implanting democracy in the region—the tragic loss of more than 500 Americans in a year’s war
and peace was a remarkable sign of our care and expertise in minimizing deaths. Diplomats might
argue that our past efforts at humanitarian reconstruction, with some idealistic commitment to consensual government, have a far
better track record in Germany, Japan, Korea, Panama, and Serbia than our strategy of exiting Germany after World War I, of leaving
Iraq to Saddam after 1991, of abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban once the Russians were stopped, of skipping out from Haiti or
of fleeing Somalia. Realist students of arms control might argue that the recent confessions of Pakistan’s nuclear roguery, the
surrender of the Libyan arsenal, and the invitation of the UN inspectors into Iran were the dividends of resolute American action in
Iraq. Colonel Khadafy surely came clean not because of Jimmy Carter’s peace missions, UN resolutions, or EU diplomats.¶ But
don’t expect any sober discussion of these contentions from the Left. Their gloom and doom
about Iraq arises precisely from the anti-Americanism and romanticization of the Third World
that once led to our appeasement and now seeks its return. When John Kerry talks of mysterious prominent
Europeans he has met (but whose names he will not divulge) who, he says, pray for his election in hopes of ending George Bush’s
Iraqi nightmare, perhaps he has in mind people like the Chamberlainesque European Commission president Romano Prodi, who said
in the wake of the recent mass murder in Spain: “Clearly, the conflict with the terrorists is not resolved with force alone.” Perhaps he
has in mind, also, the Spanish electorate, which believes it can find security from al-Qaida terrorism by refuting all its past support
for America’s role in the Middle East. But
of course if the terrorists understand that, in lieu of resolve,
they will find such appeasement a mere 48 hours after a terrorist attack, then all previously
resolute Western democracies—Italy, Poland, Britain, and the United States—should expect the terrorists to
murder their citizens on the election eve in hopes of achieving just such a Spanish-style
capitulation.¶
Drones/Tech Good
Risk Assessment Key
Drone usage is an ethical obligation—unnecessary risk is immoral
Strawser 10 (STRAWSER, B. (2010). Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles.
Journal Of Military Ethics, 9(4), 342-368. doi:10.1080/15027570.2010.536403)
I contend that in certain contexts UAV
employment is not only ethically¶ permissible, but is, in fact,
ethically obligatory. The basis for this claim rests¶ upon what I call the principle of unnecessary risk (PUR).
PUR proceeds as¶ follows: If X gives Y an order to accomplish good goal G, then X has an¶ obligation,
other things being equal, to chose a means to accomplish G that¶ does not violate the
demands of justice, make the world worse, or expose Y to¶ potentially lethal risk unless
incurring such risk aids in the accomplishment of¶ G in some way that cannot be gained via
less risky means. That is, it is wrong to¶ command someone to take ununnecessary potentially lethal risks in an effort to¶
carry out a just action for some good; any potentially lethal risk incurred must¶ be justified by some
strong countervailing reason. In the absence of such a¶ reason, ordering someone to incur potentially lethal risk is
morally impermissible. Importantly, PUR is a demand not to order someone to take unnecessary¶ riskon
par with alternative means to accomplish some goal G. This is what the¶ other things being equal clause is
meant to capture. That is, in some cases, the¶ only possible way to accomplish G will be to order Y to
undertake a particular¶ means which exposes Y to potentially lethal risk. In such cases, PUR is not¶
directly applicable; whether or not the order is justified must be determined on¶ other grounds. PUR simply demands that nomore
risk than is required for the¶ accomplishment of G (no unnecessary risk) is ordered by X to be incurred by Y accomplishment of G (no
unnecessary risk) is ordered by X to be incurred by Y.¶ I take PUR to be uncontroversial. In fact, it is possible that an even¶ stronger
form of PUR could be developed that morally bars not only¶ potentially lethal risk, but any risk of bodily harm whatsoever. Further,
there¶ may be a reflexive form of PUR available that could entail self-regarding¶ duties not to incur potentially lethal risk
unnecessarily. But some may¶ complain that an individual has the moral permission to incur lethal risk in¶ carrying out act X in
pursuit of good A even if the risk in no way aids the¶ accomplishment of A (or some other good B) nor is demanded by justice. To¶
avoid such controversy, I employ here the more modest form of PUR as I¶ have developed it. So even if some wish to contend that it
is morally¶ permissible for an individual to take unnecessary potentially lethal risks upon¶ his or herself in accomplishing some good,
it still seems that PUR holds with¶ no problems, focused as it is upon commanding others to action.6¶ That is, if¶ some argue that
there are no moral prohibitions against recklessly endangering one’s own life for no good reason, certainly morality
demands that there is¶ a strong moral prohibition against unnecessarily endangering
another’s life.7¶
Aff needs to offer justification why pilots should risk lives when drones could be
used—morality demands it
Strawser 10 (STRAWSER, B. (2010). Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles.
Journal Of Military Ethics, 9(4), 342-368. doi:10.1080/15027570.2010.536403)
To put the position another way still: ordering
a warfighter to take on risk in¶ any activity must be
justified. If a given action can be equally well accomplished¶ via two different methods, one of
which incurs less risk for the warfighter’s¶ personal safety than the other, then a justification
must be given for why this¶ safer method is not used. If there is no good reason not to use it, then we are¶
obligated to employ the safer method. For all cases of ordering a warfighter to¶ undertake any given risky action, there should be a
reason that demonstrates¶ why the risk is necessary for the accomplishment of the given objective. If one¶ grants that removing a
pilot from the theater of combat by using a UAV instead¶ of an inhabitedweapon platform greatly reduces the risk to that pilot, then
there¶ should be a presumption for using a UAV (or any remote weapon) whenever it is¶ possible to do so in a way that does not
compromise the capability of a given¶ warrior to behave justly. The
burden of proof, then, is on those who argue
that¶ we should not employ UAVs or similar remote technology. Such a position¶ needs to
justify why we should have pilots take on such risk. As mentioned¶ above, there are a variety of objections
usually offered as to why UAV¶ employment is ethically suspicious. I shall now review each of these in turn¶ and show why they fail
to overcome the claim that UAVs are, in principle,¶ ethically obligatory.
Psychological harm of drones pilots is lower than traditional fighters
Strawser 10 (STRAWSER, B. (2010). Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles.
Journal Of Military Ethics, 9(4), 342-368. doi:10.1080/15027570.2010.536403)
The argument that the ethical justification for UAVs is threatened if UAV¶ operators are more
likely to behave unjustly in their combat actions due to¶ this cognitive dissonance is unsound.
First, it can be argued that the¶ temptation for the warfighter to commit jus in bello violations would
actually¶ lessen, perhaps significantly so, once the warfighter is not at risk. The remote¶ pilot can take
more time in evaluating a target before firing to ensure that¶ target is an enemy combatant
than they would be able to otherwise; for in¶ the worst case scenario a machine is lost, not a human pilot. Returning
to the¶ bomb squad analogy, in using a robot the EOD technicians do not experience¶ the same level of stress because there is no
danger to themselves; thus, they¶ are not as nervous and, presumably, more successful. The same could hold¶ true for UAV pilots
making judicious decisions in combat. Once fear for their¶ own safety is not a pressing concern, one would assume the operator
would¶ be more capable, not less, of behaving justly.¶ But perhaps this is not the case. Maybe
the distance and disjunct
of this¶ level of remote weaponry does create a significant and genuinely new kind of¶ stress
on warfighters that might compromise their abilities to behave justly.¶ There is significant empirical
work here yet to be done. But even if we grant¶ that displaced combat harms UAV pilots’ abilities, first
note that there are¶ means of overcoming this problem and, second, that this issue is not a
knock¶ against the ethical justification of UAVs themselves. If necessary we could,¶ for example, move all
UAV operators much closer to the theater of combat;¶ forcing them to live in a deployed environment, along the same time-zone
as¶ the combat, and under more standard battlefield conditions and stresses.25¶ Further, note that all UAV action has the ability to
be recorded and¶ monitored. By default since it is remotely controlled, whatever
data feed a¶ UAV pilot received
can easily be overseen by many others simultaneously and¶ later for review and critique. This
added level of accountability could be used¶ to get, if necessary, further added layers of scrutiny
over lethal decisionmaking even demanding more than one officer agree to a kill, for
example.¶ Indeed, an entire team of officers and human rights lawyers could oversee¶ every
single lethal decision made by a UAV, if desired or deemed necessary.¶ The point is that there are a variety of
ways to overcome any concerns that the¶ pilots of UAVs would be somehow less judicious on
average than inhabited¶ weapon systems would be. All of this argues against this cognitive dissonance¶
problem as being somehow insurmountable, much less negating the ethical¶ obligation for UAV use in principle. Moreover, even
if there is some psychological harm done to UAV pilots that we cannot overcome, it certainly ¶
seems that such harm would be less damaging than the expected harm that¶ could come
about via inhabited flights.
Targeted killing is morally permissible—drones aren’t unique.
Strawser 10 (STRAWSER, B. (2010). Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles.
Journal Of Military Ethics, 9(4), 342-368. doi:10.1080/15027570.2010.536403)
Although I will not argue for the position here, I wholeheartedly share the¶ ethical concerns over assassinations.27 I
further share the underlying concerns¶ regarding a non-military government agency carrying out independent lethal¶ operations in a
foreign theater. But none of these concerns are
restricted in¶ any significant way to remotely controlled
weapon systems. The CIA could be¶ carrying out these same missions with a trained sniper or an inhabited¶ aircraft. It is this
particular policy that is of proper ethical concern here, not¶ UAV technology or use in general.¶ Some might argue, however, that
the UAV makes targeted killing of this¶ sort particularly pernicious because, first, an aerial vehicle flying over¶ airspace is in some
principled way different than sending in a ground special¶ forces unit. Second, the objection claims that the battle for the ‘hearts
and¶ minds’ of local nationals in a given theater is significantly worsened by what¶ they view as ignoble warfare; UAVs are thought
to be ‘cowardly.’ And, third,¶ the objection continues, there are some ways in which UAV technology makes¶ such policies easier to
execute because of the abilities unique to current UAV¶ platforms.¶ As to the first concern, this is admittedly an interesting case that
could¶ appear to be peculiar to UAVs. Namely, if a nation-state sends a UAV over¶ another sovereign nation-state’s airspace they
have not sent an actual person¶ or agent over the airspace. This could perhaps leave room for a contrived¶ argument that because
no actual person crossed a border no infringement of¶ national sovereignty occurred. Although intrigued by this distinction for UAV¶
weaponry, I do not find it persuasive. For a UAV strike in terms of¶ sovereignty issues is analogous to a long-distance artillery shell
fired across¶ the border or other forms of attack that do not involve an agent crossing an¶ actually geographic border such as cyber-
warfare.28 In such cases, yes, no¶ actual person violated the territorial integrity of the sovereign state in¶ question, but, of course,
all nations would still (rightly) view such acts as a¶ direct violation of their sovereignty. So, contra the worry, UAVs
do not
create¶ a special class of weapons that can escape traditional just-war theory scrutiny¶ or
respect for territorial integrity and national sovereignty through an odd¶ loophole.¶ As for the
second concern, two points are in order. First, I would argue that¶ it is at least possible that if UAVs are used in line with the rules of
warfare,¶ and civilian causalities are not increased (and perhaps even lessened) due to¶ their usage, then there might be no greater
resistance from a local populace¶ than would be encountered for more conventional weapons. There is some¶ empirical evidence
(albeit limited) to back up this possibility (Plaw 2010).¶ Further, the possibility has some intuitive plausibility when we note that the
majority of hostile responses to UAVs by local populaces have come, as usual,¶ when they have inadvertently hit civilian targets but
we have seen this same¶ response in other conflicts when similar strikes were delivered from (say) a¶ B-52 bomber flying at altitude
dropping munitions. Again, this seems to point¶ to the possibility that the particular platform dropping the bomb (inhabited¶ or
uninhabited) is not what generates a hostile response from the people¶ below, but whether the attack was justified and hits
legitimate targets.¶ But perhaps this response fails. There is, admittedly, some strong empirical¶ evidence suggesting just the
opposite: that local populaces’ particular¶ resistance to UAVs is precisely due to the fact that they are uninhabited.¶ But so be it. For
even if the first response fails, recall that my argument for the¶
ethical justification of UAVs requires that there
be no reduction in just¶ warfighting capability. So even if it does turn out that in a given
theater of¶ operation UAVs do, in fact, cause significantly greater resistance from the¶ local populace as compared to
the resistance that similar inhabited vehicles¶ would generate (perhaps because the population thinks they are cowardly or¶ some
similar response), then they should not be used on OP grounds. Such a¶ limitation would clearly fall under the ‘significant loss of
capability’ clause of¶ OP. And, of course, this is an empirical question, not an in-principle objection¶ to UAVs.29¶ The third concern
that UAV technology makes such actions easier to carry¶ out similarly does not offer a principled objection to the moral obligation
to¶ use UAVs.30 It is true that the extended ability of platforms such as the¶ Predator to ‘hover’ and stay in a localized area for long
hours, even days, and¶ observe targets, is a clear combat advantage. Many inhabited aircraft do not¶ have such capacities. And,
further, some of the remote areas where such strikes¶ are carried out by UAVs are such that they would be inaccessible to similar¶
inhabited weapon platforms. But these facts about the superior capabilities of¶ UAVs do not count against OP. Just as the advent of
airpower brought with it¶ many new and often superior ways warfighters could engage in combat (both¶ justified and not), such
advantages do not imply anything inherently wrong¶ with airpower as airpower. Further, the mere existence of such advantages¶
does not force policymakers to misuse these capabilities. Certainly, it would be¶ impossible to drop bombs on innocent civilians if
planes did not exist. But that¶ some drop bombs on innocent civilians does not make airplanes morally¶ suspicious, but rather those
who so use them to drop bombs. The same holds¶ true for the new capabilities brought about by UAVs.¶ Thus, there
is
nothing peculiar to UAVs in regards to the ethical concerns¶ over their present use in targeted
killings around the globe. It is the morality¶ of the United States’recent policy of targeted
killings we must debate here;¶ not the ethical justification of UAVs.
Tech/Speed Good
Totalizing alternative ignores positive benefits of speed and technology
Connolly 2000“Speed, Concentric Cultures, and Cosmopolitanism” Author(s): William E.
Connolly. (Eisenhower Professor, Johns Hopkins University Political Theory, International
Relations B.A., University of Michigan, Flint Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Recent
Courses and Research Interests: Capitalism and Christianity Perception, The Media, Politics
Nietzsche and His Interlocutors) Reviewed work(s):Source: Political Theory, Vol. 28, No. 5 (Oct.,
2000), pp. 596-618Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/192290 .
But what if the compression of distance through speed has effects Virilio records while some of
those effects also improve the prospects for democratic pluralizationw within the state and a
cosmopolitanism across states that speaks affirmatively to issues of ecology, peace, indigenous
minorities, the legitinmation of new identities and rights, and the protection of old rights? Then
acceleration would carry positive possibilities as well as dangers. And a single-minded attack on
its dangers would forfeit access to its positive possibilities. Thus, to summarize for now a few
contentions: First, the contemporary accentuation of tempo in interterritorial
communications, entertainment, tourism, trade, and population migration exposes numerous
settled constituencies to the historical basis of what they are and the comparative
contestability of faiths and identities they have taken to be universal or incontestable. Second,
the acceleration of accident and surprise, listed by Virilio as effects of speed, can also function
over time to disrupt closed models of nature, truth, and morality into which people so readily
become encapsulated, doing so in ways that support new paradigms of natural science and
careful reconsideration of the injuries to difference supported by dogmatic conceptions. Third,
Virilio's identification of the territorial nation as repository of democratic unity and of slowness
as the temporal condition of national deliberation depreciates the value of a more expansive
practice of pluralism that speaks generously to the multidimensional diversity of life already
operative o n most territories today. Speed can be dangerous. At a certain point of acceleration,
it jeopardizes freedom and shortens the time in which to engage ecological issues. But the crawl
of slow time contains injuries, dangers, and repressive tendencies too. It may be wise
therefore to explore speed as an ambiguous medium that contains some positive possibilities.
The positive possibilities are lost to those who experience its effects only through nostalgia for a
pristine time governed by the compass of the centered nation, the security of stable truth, the
idea of nature as a purposive organism or a set of timeless laws, and the stolidity of thick
universals. Today, ironically, the most virulent attempts to slow things down take the form of
national and religious fundamentalisms that deploy media sound bites and military campaigns
of ethnic cleansing to reinstate a slow, centered world. Indeed, the ambiguity of speed finds its
most salient manifestation in the paradoxical contest taking place before our eyes between the
pluralization and the fundamentalizationo f public cultures.T he politics to pluralize culture along
several dimensions and the politics to fundamentalize hegemonic identities form two
contending responses to late-modem speed. Each propensity intensifies under the same
temporal conditions. As this contest proceeds, it also becomes clear why democratic pluralists
must embrace the positive potentialities of speed while working to attenuate its most
dangerous effects
Tech Good / Can be Reformed
Rejection of tech makes the impact worse – checks aren't established
Lomas 8
[Natasha, interviewing Ray Kurzweil, Ph.D from MIT, internationally renown inventor,
"Q&A: Kurzweil on tech as a double-edged sword," 11/19/8, http://news.cnet.com/830111386_3-10102273-76.html]
In my view, relinquishing these technologies is a bad idea for three reasons: one it would
deprive us of these proponed benefits and there's still a lot of suffering in the world that we
need to overcome. Secondly it would require totalitarian government to implement a ban.
And thirdly it wouldn't work, and I think that's really the key point--we'd just drive these
technologies underground where they would be even more dangerous, more out of control.
So my view is the correct response is twofold: one, ethical standards to prevent accidental
problems by responsible practitioners...and secondly developing a rapid response system that
can deal with people who don't follow the guidelines, who are trying to be destructive like
terrorists. The good news is we now have the tools to do that. We can now sequence a
biological virus in one day.
Debating about our technology allows us to change it and avoid the impact of
the K
Katz et al 3
[Eric, professor of philosophy and director of the Science, Technology, and Society
Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Andrew Light, assistant professor of
environmental philosophy and director of the Environmental Conservation Education Program
at New York University, William Thompson, professor emeritus of philosophy at SUNY College,
"Controlling Technology," 2003, Prometheus Books, Page 403]//SH
One approach to this question is to suggest that the public needs to be more involved with
technology not merely as thoughtful consumers but as active participants in its design. We can
find an example of this approach in the work of Andrew Feenberg. As he argues, most notably in
his recent book Alternative Modernity: the Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory, the
advantage of technical politics, of greater public participation in the design of technological
objects and technologically mediated services such as health care, is to open up this process to
the consideration of a wider sphere of values than if the design process were to be left up to
bureaucrats and professionals, whose main concern is with preserving efficiency. Democratic
values such as personal autonomy and individual agency are part of this wider sphere. For
Feenberg, the route of technological reform and the preservation of democracy thus runs
directly through the intervention of nonprofessionals in the early stages of the development
of technology
Even if tech is dangerous, it's the only way to prevent extinction
Bostrom 2
[Nick, Professor, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University, "Existential Risks Analyzing
Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards," 2002,
http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html]
In combination, these indirect arguments add important constraints to those we can glean
from the direct consideration of various technological risks, although there is not room here
to elaborate on the details. But the balance of evidence is such that it would appear
unreasonable not to assign a substantial probability to the hypothesis that an existential
disaster will do us in. My subjective opinion is that setting this probability lower than 25%
would be misguided, and the best estimate may be considerably higher. But even if the
probability were much smaller (say, ~1%) the subject matter would still merit very serious
attention because of how much is at stake. In general, the greatest existential risks on the
time-scale of a couple of centuries or less appear to be those that derive from the activities of
advanced technological civilizations. We see this by looking at the various existential risks we
have listed. In each of the four categories, the top risks are engendered by our activities. The
only significant existential risks for which this isn’t true are “simulation gets shut down”
(although on some versions of this hypothesis the shutdown would be prompted by our
activities [27]); the catch-all hypotheses (which include both types of scenarios); asteroid or
comet impact (which is a very low probability risk); and getting killed by an extraterrestrial
civilization (which would be highly unlikely in the near future).[19] It may not be surprising that
existential risks created by modern civilization get the lion’s share of the probability. After all,
we are now doing some things that have never been done on Earth before, and we are
developing capacities to do many more such things. If non-anthropogenic factors have failed to
annihilate the human species for hundreds of thousands of years, it could seem unlikely that
such factors will strike us down in the next century or two. By contrast, we have no reason
whatever not to think that the products of advanced civilization will be our bane. We shouldn’t
be too quick to dismiss the existential risks that aren’t human-generated as insignificant,
however. It’s true that our species has survived for a long time in spite of whatever such risks
are present. But there may be an observation selection effect in play here. The question to ask
is, on the theory that natural disasters sterilize Earth-like planets with a high frequency, what
should we expect to observe? Clearly not that we are living on a sterilized planet. But maybe
that we should be more primitive humans than we are? In order to answer this question, we
need a solution to the problem of the reference class in observer selection theory [76]. Yet that
is a part of the methodology that doesn’t yet exist. So at the moment we can state that the most
serious existential risks are generated by advanced human civilization, but we base this
assertion on direct considerations. Whether there is additional support for it based on indirect
considerations is an open question. We should not blame civilization or technology for
imposing big existential risks. Because of the way we have defined existential risks, a failure to
develop technological civilization would imply that we had fallen victims of an existential
disaster (namely a crunch, “technological arrest”). Without technology, our chances of avoiding
existential risks would therefore be nil. With technology, we have some chance, although the
greatest risks now turn out to be those generated by technology itself.
Benefits outweigh the costs – we can prevent misuse
Bostrom 3
[Nick, Professor, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University, "The Transhumanist FAQ,"
2003, http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/FAQv21.pdf]
The position that we ought to relinquish research into robotics, genetic engineering, and
nanotechnology has been advocated in an article by Bill Joy (2000). Joy argued that some of the
future applications of these technologies are so dangerous that research in those fields should
be stopped now. Partly because of Joy’s previously technophiliac credentials (he was a software
designer and a cofounder of Sun Microsystems), his article, which appeared in Wired magazine,
attracted a great deal of attention. Many of the responses to Joy’ s article pointed out that there
is no realistic prospect of a worldwide ban on these technologies; that they have enormous
potential benefits that we would not want to forgo; that the poorest people may have a
higher tolerance for risk in developments that could improve their condition; and that a ban
may actually increase the dangers rather than reduce them, both by delaying the
development of protective applications of these technologies, and by weakening the position
of those who choose to comply with the ban relative to less scrupulous groups who defy it. A
more promising alternative than a blanket ban is differential technological development, in
which we would seek to influence the sequence in which technologies developed. On this
approach, we would strive to retard the development of harmful technologies and their
applications, while accelerating the development of beneficial technologies, especially those
that offer protection against the harmful ones. For technologies that have decisive military
applications, unless they can be verifiably banned, we may seek to ensure that they are
developed at a faster pace in countries we regard as responsible than in those that we see as
potential enemies. (Whether a ban is verifiable and enforceable can change over time as a
result of developments in the international system or in surveillance technology.) 26 In the case
of nanotechnology, the desirable sequence of development is that nanotech immune systems
and other defensive measures be deployed before offensive capabilities become available to
many independent powers. Once a technology is shared by many, it becomes extremely hard
to prevent further proliferation. In the case of biotechnology, we should seek to promote
research into vaccines, anti-viral drugs, protective gear, sensors, and diagnostics, and to delay
as long as possible the development and proliferation of biological warfare agents and the
means of their weaponization. For artificial intelligence, a serious risk will emerge only when
capabilities approach or surpass those of humans. At that point one should seek to promote
the development of friendly AI and to prevent unfriendly or unreliable AI systems.
Superintelligence is an example of a technology that seems especially worth promoting
because it can help reduce a broad range of threats. Superintelligent systems could advise us
on policy and make the progress curve for nanotechnology steeper, thus shortening the
period of vulnerability between the development of dangerous nanoreplicators and the
deployment of effective defenses. If we have a choice, it seems preferable that
superintelligence be developed before advanced nanotechnology, as superintelligence could
help reduce the risks of nanotechnology but not vice versa. Other technologies that have wide
risk-reducing uses include intelligence augmentation, information technology, and surveillance.
These can make us smarter individually and collectively or make enforcement of necessary
regulation more feasible. A strong prima facie case therefore exists for pursuing these
technologies as vigorously as possible. Needless to say, we should also promote nontechnological developments that are beneficial in almost all scenarios, such as peace and
international cooperation. In confronting the hydra of existential, limited, and endurable risks
glaring at us from the future, it is unlikely that any one silver bullet will provide adequate
protection. Instead, an arsenal of countermeasures will be needed so that we can address the
various risks on multiple levels. The first step to tackling a risk is to recognize its existence.
More research is needed, and existential risks in particular should be singled out for attention
because of their seriousness and because of the special nature of the challenges they pose.
Surprisingly little work has been done in this area (but see e.g. Leslie (1996), Bostrom (2002),
and Rees (2003) for some preliminary explorations). The strategic dimensions of our choices
must be taken into account, given that some of the technologies in questions have important
military ramifications. In addition to scholarly studies of the threats and their possible
countermeasures, public awareness must be raised to enable a more informed debate of our
long-term options. Some of the lesser existential risks, such as an apocalyptic asteroid impact or
the highly speculative scenario involving something like the upsetting of a metastable vacuum
state in some future particle accelerator experiment, could be substantially reduced at relatively
small expense. Programs to accomplish this – e.g. an early detection system for dangerous nearearth objects on potential collation course with Earth, or the 27 commissioning of advance peer
review of planned high-energy physics experiments – are probably cost-effective. However,
these lesser risks must not deflect attention from the more serious concern raised by more
probable existential disasters [see “Aren’ t these future technologies very risky? Could they even
cause our extinction?” ]. In light of how superabundant the human benefits of technology can
ultimately be, it matters less that we obtain all of these benefits in their precisely most
optimal form, and more that we obtain them at all. For many practical purposes, it makes
sense to adopt the rule of thumb that we should act so as to maximize the probability of an
acceptable outcome, one in which we attain some (reasonably broad) realization of our
potential; or, to put it in negative terms, that we should act so as to minimize net existential
risk.
No way to question technology – all spheres of human perception are already
implicated by technology
Drake 97
[Michael, Ph.D, teachs political and historical sociology, social and political theory at the
University of Hull, " The Question of Military Technology: Apocalyptics or Politics?," 1/30/97,
http://nideffer.net/proj/_SPEED_/1.4/articles/drake.html]
In contrast, Virilio questions technology in the Heideggerian sense, and through this coming to
its inherent association with the military project. In a sense, then, Virilio seeks to work through
the problem of how to question technology as to what is becoming revealed in a
technologisation which simultaneously constitutes the militarisation of the world. The great
problem of this programme is, as Jean-Luc Nancy has recently noted in his reflection on the Gulf
War, that of how we can locate and occupy the space from which such a questioning could be
undertaken (NANCY 1994). If 'military' is indistinguishable from 'civilian' technology in the
sense that with technologisation and total war all resources are incorporable in the military
project, then it is not possible to question military technology in particular, nor to adopt the
position of 'civillian' to do so. The ploughshare is as much a military technology as the sword, as
the past millenium of Western colonisation illustrates. The problem is not merely one of
distinguishing a civilian from a military perspective, however, but of distinguishing a position
which is not already implicated in technologisation and hence incorporable in military
systems.
Tech is net good – there are checks
USA Today 11[News source, interviewing Ray Kurzweil, Ph.D from MIT, internationally renown
inventor, "A.I. expert Ray Kurzweil picks computer in 'Jeopardy' match," 2/8/11,
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-02-09-kurzweil09_ST_N.htm]//SH
A: Technology has always been a double-edged sword — ever since fire, which cooked our food
and kept us warm but also was used as a weapon of destruction. In my mind, the right answer is
to create a rapid-response system. We do that with software viruses. We don't just sit back
and say no one would ever write a destructive software virus. It happens every day. But we
have technology, along with humans, that actually helps defend us. Q: Is it worth the risk? A: I
would say overall we benefit more than we're harmed. Read Thomas Hobbes about what
human life was like a few centuries ago. It was short, brutish, disaster-prone, disease-filled.
We've come a long way.
Tech is good and the benefits outweigh – we can stop misuse
Academy of Achievement 2k [non-profit organization that aims to bring high profile, successful
people from various fields, interviewing Ray Kurzweil, Ph.D from MIT and internationally renown
inventor, "Ray Kurzweil Interview," 6/17/00,
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/kur1int-6]
I think we have no choice but to proceed. I mean, there have been calls recently -- and there
have, actually, ever since the Luddite movement emerged in the English textile industry two
centuries ago -- calls for relinquishing technology that is just too dangerous. I think we have no
choice, because there's a great economic imperative to move forward, and it's a road paved
with gold, and we have received tremendous benefit from technology. Short of creating a
totalitarian system that would ban any form of economic incentive, we're going to be
advancing technology. I think the right way to deal with it is to be very concerned with the
ethical dimension and with the application of technology, and I think it's not something that's
done in one field of technology ethics. I think it's something that everybody, and not just the
technologist, needs to be actively concerned with, because we have the power to actually create
our future world, very literally, including really redesigning our bodies and brains and our
experiences at very profound levels. So it's something that everybody needs to understand,
and contribute to that dialogue so that we do advance our human values. Not that we have a
consensus on what those are, but I think there is, at least at some levels, emerging consensus
on what human values are.
Giving up on tech is worse – magnifies the harms
Kurzweil 4 [PCWorld - global computer magazine, interviewing Ray Kurzweil, Ph.D from MIT and
internationally renown inventor, "Three Minutes With Ray Kurzweil," 11/1/4,
http://www.pcworld.com/article/118375/three_minutes_with_ray_kurzweil.html]
You don't have to look further than the 20th century to see the deeply intertwined promise and
peril of technology. We had over 100 million people die in 20th-century wars made possible by
technology. On the other hand, how many would really want to go back one or two centuries
to the labor-filled, disease- and disaster-prone lives that people lived? Human life expectancy
was 37 years in 1800. The 21st-century technologies have the potential to overcome
problems that humanity has struggled with for eons. As mentioned, biotechnology and
nanotechnology have the potential to overcome disease and to vastly extend human health and
longevity. Nanotechnology can also produce radical wealth creation in that we will be able to
manufacture essentially any physical product from inexpensive raw materials costing pennies
per pound. There are many other profound benefits to come. But these technologies are also
introducing new perils. The capability exists right now in a routine college biotechnology
laboratory to create a bioengineered virus that could spread easily and stealthily--that is, have
a long incubation period so it spreads far and wide before being detected--and could be deadly.
Self-replicating nanobots would essentially be a nonbiological cancer that could threaten the
biomass. As for strong AI, artificial intelligence at human levels and beyond, this could be the
most daunting challenge of all if it does not remain "friendly." [For more on Kurzweil and AI,
see KurzweilAI.net.] But relinquishing these future technologies is not the answer. That would
eliminate the benefits while actually making the dangers worse by driving development
underground, where responsible practitioners would not have ready access to the tools
needed to develop the defensive technologies. Broad relinquishment would also be
impossible except in a worldwide totalitarian system. We've actually done well with the test
case of software viruses. Although they remain a problem, and always will be a problem, the
technological "immune system" that has developed in response has managed to keep pace. If
we do as well with biological viruses, self-replicating nanotechnology, and other future
dangers, we will be able to keep a step or two ahead of the perils.
Technostrategic Discourse Good
Distancing language is a coping mechanism—psychology and history prove
Muqawama 13 (Abu Muqawama, Center for a New American Security "Nature's Not In It: A Special In
Memoriam," 5/26/13 http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2013/05/natures-not-it-specialmemoriam.html)
According to the field of psychology called Terror Management Theory, humans face a basic (and
severe) psychological struggle in both grasping their own mortality and still managing to live
productive lives. Kahn and Brodie looked into the abyss, visualizing a set of mushroom clouds that would likely not only end
their own lives, but annihilate everything and everyone they cared about. So the Dr. Strangeloves, unlike movie directors who
mocked them, paced the halls of power, using scientific and rational knowledge to either avert Armageddon or think about how we
could pick up the pieces afterwards.¶ Perhaps the most obscene thing about the 1960s protestors' charge that a Brodie or Marshall =
Eichmann is their inability to grasp the basic difference between a sociotechnical system structured by a hateful, genocidal ideology
and one structured by men who sought to prevent nuclear annihilation. Were
nuclear strategists' coping
mechanisms and mannerisms socially inappropriate? Sure. But so are those of most doctors,
medics, and homicide detectives. Were their ideas sometimes dangerously unworkable? Definitely. But they definitely
did not deserve the abuse that the Kubricks of the world gave them.¶ This Memorial Day Weekend, let's cast aside the antitechnological bias of artists and philosophers and extend our appreciation to the aviator in all
branches of the military. Let's cast aside stereotypes of Cold War Strangeloves and celebrate the American and Soviet
strategists who refused to sugarcoat the truth and assumed the mortal burden of playing a deadly game that would decide
humanity's fate. And let's even celebrate the drone
pilots who have kept Americans on the ground safe
and disrupted terrorist plots against the United States and Europe. They took on a burden
too.¶ To do so does not imply any larger acceptance of the numerous and disturbing flaws of both the Cold War and the Global
War on Terror. It does not mean placing the aviator above the infantry. It is to recognize a common
humanity pulsing within the machine as it streaks over a future warzone. It also means respecting the
awesome burden and contribution of very intelligent men at the helm of a Single Integrated Operational Plan.¶ And finally, it
means ceasing the obsessive effort to dehumanize the men and women who fly drones, to
stop asking moronic questions like "what do drone operators feel when they shut off the
drone technology at the end of their days?"
Technostrategic Discourse K2 Heg
Gendered techno-strategic language is key to secure Heg or provide the illusion
of Heg
Cohn ’08 (Carol, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights at UMass
Boston, “Language in the Security Discourse: International Security, Language, and Gender,”
Language and Power: The Implications of Language for Peace and Development, Book editors:
Birgit Brock-Utne, Gunnar Garbo, pgs. 33-December)
If nuclear ownership is constructed as the mark of manhood- the modern, developed,
powerful, and technologically competent man - then nuclear develop a symbolic meaning
quite independent of their militaristic value; they become the desired object of political
leaders who wish to prove their own, and sometimes their country’s, status. They want to be a
member of the nuclear club, the men’s club, and the hegemonically masculine men’s club. Although some might on first hearing
think that it is only a feminist who could possibly make this interpretation, the symbolic meaning and importance of nuclear
weapons is actually taken for granted in both mass media reportage and political discourse. A good example comes from 2006
article in Newsweek Magazine about how North Korea changed the nuclear club’s rules and how the US failed to stop it. There are
some insiders who are part of this exclusionary club. That
nuclear club has rules, i.e., it is governed by
rationality, a key marker in hegemonic masculinity. On the other side, we have North Korea to
whom the words “weird,” and “scary,” “isolated,” “bankrupt,” all seem to attach – words
which make it anything but hegemonically masculine…The US has a key role in this. When a
country which has the most powerful conventional military in the world (with a military budget the size
of the next 45 highest spending countries combined (Travis and Hellman 2008), acts as though its security is not
guaranteed except by having nuclear weapons, it is creating a context in which nuclear
weapons become the ultimate necessity for, and symbol of, state security. And when the US,
or any other nuclear power, works hard to assure that other states don’t obtain nuclear
weapons become the ultimate arbiter of international political power. Finally, when they cast
the justification for that limitation is such gendered terms, it becomes certain that the denial
of the rights to have nuclear weapons is seen as the denial of manhood – which, in turn, makes them
appear all the more desirable, even, in some cases, indispensible.
Technostrategic Discourse K2 Military
UAVs are Shaping Military Action Around the World in S.Q. – Not Exclusive to
U.S.
Carter 12 (Keith L. Carter. Thesis: “Technology Strategy Integration”, Navel Postgraduate
School. June 2012 www.hsdl.org/?view&did=719060)
Another example of “the good” is the innovation that has taken place in the development and
employment of drones. Like the helicopter in Vietnam the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs),
may well emerge as the iconic technology of the “Global War on Terrorism.” UAVs may also
only be the tip of the iceberg in a larger robotic revolution. The robot industry has made
tremendous strides in improving robotics technology during the GWOT, and that has translated
into increased demand UAVs and robotics represents the leading edge of technology. However,
it would be wrong to assume that the U.S. has monopoly on the technology. China has a welldeveloped robotics industry, and a keen interest in developing technological solutions to
countering perceived American advantages. The potential for diffusion is virtually unlimited,
and the variations of the theme virtually limitless, in one case Hezbollah used a combination
UAV and Improvised Explosive Device (IED) against Israel.
The Continued Use of Technostrategy is Key to U.S. Military Action
Carter 12 (Keith L. Carter. Thesis: “Technology Strategy Integration”, Navel Postgraduate
School. June 2012 www.hsdl.org/?view&did=719060)
The U.S. military’s dominance of the industrial age techno-strategic paradigm of warfare that
emerged fully integrated at the conclusion of the Second World War, and was then
significantly enhanced by the development of informational age technology, has forced our
enemies to look to strategies that offset our advantages. While it is true that our adversaries
have proved to be the more adaptive to emerging networked organizational forms, there is no
reason to conclude that innovations in information technology cannot be techno-strategically
integrated into a reoriented U.S. military. The major difference between the U.S. technostrategic approaches to integrating information age technology is that it was overlaid on top
of the existing organizational preferences, whereas elsewhere it enabled new or reimagined
forms of warfare. Looking at the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may provide an
indication of how far the U.S. military has come and what remains to be done.
Quantitative Methods Solve Feminism
The exclusion of quantitative methodology creates new and counter-productive
hierarchies of knowledge and power within the feminist IR field.
Caprioli 2004. (Mary, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of International
Studies Program at University of Minnesota-Duluth, “Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative
Methodology: A Critical Analysis,” International Studies Review, Vol 6:2, June, http://www.
jstor.org/stable/3699593.)
Even though feminist quantitative IR research focuses on issues of social justice,¶ particularly
as it relates to women, such research is not considered by many feminists to be part of
feminist IR scholarship. Indeed, many feminists (see, for example, Peterson 1992, 2002;
Sylvester 1994; Kinsella 2003; Steans 2003) appear to reject feminist empiricist IR scholarship
predominantly because of the methodology it uses. These feminists will be referred to in this
essay as conventional feminists.¶ It is difficult to trace the history of exclusion of feminist IR
empiricists. Empiricism is not inconsistent with feminist inquiry. It can support an activist
agenda in its commitment to freedom, equality, and self-government (Dietz 1985), and it can
facilitate the rejection of hierarchical domination, the use of military force, and other forms of
exploitation (Brock-Utne 1985). Despite these commonalities, feminist scholarship at some
point became defined on the basis of two characteristics: "an emphasis on women and a
critical/interpretive epistemology" (Carpenter 2002:ftn. 1; emphasis added). In turn, feminist
quantitative IR research (for example, Ben- eria and Blank 1989; McGlen and Sarkees 1993;
Caprioli 2000, 2003; Caprioli and Boyer 2001; Regan and Paskeviciute 2003) has been devalued
in comparison as "scholarship that utilizes gender in analysis while lacking one or both other
components of feminist theory" (Carpenter 2002:ftn. 1).¶ Ironically, by excluding quantitative
feminist IR scholarship, conventional feminists are creating hierarchies within a field that is
focused on rejecting and deconstructing hierarchies. Moreover, the rejection of such research
seems to be accentuated within the subfield of feminist IR scholars. Perhaps the heightened
antipathy toward feminist quantitative research has arisen because quantitative methodology
has gained such wide support within the general field of international relations. The subfield
of feminist IR scholarship might be considered the last safe haven within international
relations for qualitative work. This rejection is not the case for feminist Americanists, who are
permitted greater flexibility in their choice of valid research tools. This flexibility does not
preclude feminist Americanists from using quantitative methods (see, for example, Welch and
Comer 1975, 2001; Welch and Hibbing 1992; Thomas 1994). Indeed, Sue Thomas was praised
for measuring the impact of gender on behavior in national legislatures.¶ So as one who has
been implicitly labeled insufficiently feminist, by definition, for using quantitative
methodology in the promotion of gender equality and social justice, the present author has
written this narrative to justify the use of quantitativemethodology in the pursuit of feminist
IR goals. Toward that end, this essay first highlights some broad feminist contributions to
political science and to interna- tional relations. It then explores some critical errors that
conventional feminist IR scholars seem to be making. Finally, it attempts to bridge the gap
between feminism and international relations.
A conventional feminist IR perspective precludes possible research and
solutions that could allow for significant advancements on their project, as
proven by other nontraditional IR subfields. Even letting go of the antipathy
toward state-centrism and policy options has shown to be successful.
Caprioli 2004. (Mary, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of International
Studies Program at University of Minnesota-Duluth, “Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative
Methodology: A Critical Analysis,” International Studies Review, Vol 6:2, June, http://www.
jstor.org/stable/3699593.)
Conventional feminist IR scholars misrepresent the field of international relations in arguing
that IR scholarship as popularly accepted excludes alternative explanations of state behavior,
including feminist inquiry, that go beyond structural, state-focused models. Feminist IR
theorists, among others, critique the IR field for its state-centric approach and argue that "a
world of states situated in an anarchical international system leaves little room for analyses of
social relations, including gender relations" (Tickner 2001:146). As a result, they appear to set
up a straw man by refusing to recognize the variety within "conventional" IR research. Indeed,
as Jack Levy (2000) has observed, a significant shift to societal-level variables has occurred,
partly in response to the decline in the systemic imperatives of the bipolar era. Certainly the
democratic peace literature, particularly its normative explanation (Maoz and Russett 1993;
Dixon 1994), among other lines of inquiry, recognizes the role of social relations in explaining
state behavior.¶ The normative explanation for the democratic peace thesis emphasizes the societal level values of human rights, support for the rule of law, and peaceful conflict resolution in
explaining the likelihood of interstate conflict. Furthermore, dyadic tests of the democratic
peace thesis rely "on an emerging theoretical framework¶ that may prove capable of
incorporating the strengths of the currently predominant realist or neorealist research program,
and moving beyond it" (Ray¶ 2000:311). In addition, theorizing and research in the field of
ethnonationalism has highlighted connections that domestic ethnic discrimination and violence
have with state behavior at the international level (Gurr and Harff 1994; Van Evera¶ 1997;
Caprioli and Trumbore 2003a, 2003b).¶ Contrary to the argument that conventional IR theory
excludes feminist inquiry,¶ space exists within the field of international relations for feminist
inquiry even allowing for a state-centric focus, just as room exists for scholars interested in¶
exploring the democratic peace and ethnonationalism. International relations fem- inists
make the same mistake that they accuse IR scholars of making: narrowing the¶ space for
various worldviews, thereby creating competition and a sense of exclusion among the socalled others. If the role of "feminist theory is to explain women's subordination, or the
unjustified asymmetry between women's and men's social and economic positions, and to
seek prescriptions for ending it" (Tickner 2001:11), then feminist IR scholarship ought to allow
for an explanation of how women's subordination or inequality has an impact on state
behavior, assuming a state- centric focus, while at the same time challenging the
predetermination of a struc- tural analysis. If domestic inequality does affect state behavior,
or even perpetuates the existence of states, then policy prescriptions should be sought.
Feminist IR scholars create a new language and choose not to interact with
others, and thus exclude and distance themselves from some areas of which
they discuss. The aff only creates a new technostrategic discourse.
Caprioli 2004. (Mary, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of International
Studies Program at University of Minnesota-Duluth, “Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative
Methodology: A Critical Analysis,” International Studies Review, Vol 6:2, June, http://www.
jstor.org/stable/3699593.)
Conventional feminists appear to make several errors in creating a dichotomy between what
is considered "feminist" research and what would be called quantitative research. First, by
maintaining that a dichotomy exists between methodologies, conventional IR feminists create
and perpetuate a hierarchy. Second, conventional IR feminists commit the same error they
accuse IR scholars of making by limiting the definition of legitimate scholarship based on
methodology. Third, conventional feminists routinely accept the socially constructed belief in
the superiority of quantitative methodology rather than deconstructing this notion and
accepting quantitative methodology as one of many imperfect research tools.¶ There is little
utility in constructing a divide if none exists. As Thomas Kuhn¶ (1962) argues, common measures
do exist across paradigms that provide a shared¶ basis for theory. It seems overly pessimistic to
accept Karl Popper's "Myth of Framework," which postulates that "we are prisoners caught in
the framework of our theories, our expectations, our past experiences, our language, and that
as a consequence, we cannot communicate with or judge those working in terms of a different
paradigm" (Neufeld 1995:44). Some feminists (for example, Tickner 1996, 2001; Peterson 2002;
Steans 2003) appear to embrace this "Myth of Frame- work" by accentuating the differences
between the perspectives of feminist and IR theorists based on their past experiences and
languages and criticize IR theorists for their lack of communication with feminist IR scholars.¶
Ironically, the "Myth of Framework" shares a number of assumptions with Hobbes's
description of the state of nature that feminists routinely reject. The "Myth of Framework"
assumes no middle ground - scholars are presumably entrenched in their own worldviews
without hope of compromise or the ability to understand others' worldviews. If this is the
case, scholars are doomed to discussions with like-minded individuals rather than having a
productive dialogue with those outside their own worldview. Scholars who accept the "Myth
of Framework" have essentially created a Tower of Babel in which they choose not to
understand each other's language. The acceptance of such a myth creates conflict and
establishes a hierarchy within international relations scholarship even though conventional
feminists theoretically seek to identify and eradicate conflict and hierarchy within society as a
whole.¶ The purported language difference between feminist and IR scholars appears to be
methodological. In general, feminist IR scholars are skeptical of empiricist methodologies and
"have never been satisfied with the boundary constraints of conventional IR" (Tickner 2001:2).
As noted above, conventional international relations is defined on the basis of methodology as
a commitment "to empiricism and data-based methods of testing" (Tickner 2001:149).
Ironically, some feminist IR scholars place boundary constraints on feminist IR scholarship by
limiting its definition to a critical-interpretive methodology (see Carpenter 2003:ftn. 1). Rather
than pushing methodological boundaries to expand the field and to promote inclusiveness,
conventional IR feminists appear to discriminate against quantitative research. If conventional
feminists are willing to embrace multicultural approaches to feminism, why restrict research
tools? There would seem to be a lack of consistency between rhetoric and practice. Especially
at the global level, there need not be only one way to achieve feminist goals. Hence,
conventional feminist IR scholars might benefit from participating in mainstream IR scholars'
evolving embrace of¶ methodological pluralism and epistemological opportunism (Bueno de
Mesquita 2002; Chan 2002; Fearon and Wendt 2002).
Feminist IR social scientists devalue the use of quantitative research, even plain
statistics, while purporting their own claims to be neutral. Rather, neither are
neutral but have the potential to be beneficial if used symbiotically.
Caprioli 2004. (Mary, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of International
Studies Program at University of Minnesota-Duluth, “Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative
Methodology: A Critical Analysis,” International Studies Review, Vol 6:2, June, http://www.
jstor.org/stable/3699593.)
Further undermining the false dichotomization between positivist and interpretivist
methodologies is the lack of proof that quantitative methodologies cannot challenge
established paradigms or, more important, that a critical-interpretive epistemology is
unbiased or more likely to uncover some truth that is supposedly obscured by quantitative
inquiry. Part of the rationale for the perpetuation of the dichotomy between methodologies
and for the critique of quantitative methodology as a valid type of feminist inquiry involves
confusing theory and practice. On a theoretical level, quantitative research is idealized as
value-free and objective, which of course it is not--particularly when applied to the social
sciences. Feminists opposed to quantitative methodologies imagine that other scholars
necessarily assume such scholarship to be objective (see Brown 1988). Few social scientists
using quantitative methodologies, however, would suggest that this methodology is valuefree, which is why so much emphasis is placed on defining measures. This procedure leaves
room for debate and provides space for feminist inquiry. For example, feminists might wish to
study the effect of varying definitions of democracy and of security on the democratic peace
thesis, ultimately combining methodologies to provide a more thorough understanding of the
social matrix underlying state behavior.¶ The second aspect perpetuating the dichotomy
between methodologies is in erroneously identifying statistics as having an inherently
masculine agenda. As Evelyn Hammonds and Helen Longina (1990) argue, feminists need to
present a clearly articulated critique of quantitative methodology demonstrating its inherent
masculinity. This association between statistics and masculinity is based on a line of feminist
inquiry that exposes the association of masculinity with objectivity and the scientific method
(Keller 1983:187). As a result, a certain prestige in and inherent bias toward using the scientific
method arises precisely because the world is organized hierarchically based on gender (Keller
1983:202). But this belief in the superiority of quantitative methods is socially constructed
(Keller 1983; Hughes 1995). If more women were to use the scientific method, a different
science might emerge (Keller 1983; Hooper 2001). It is unfortunate that some feminists feel
the need to justify conventional feminist epistemologies because of the apparent low status
such research has. As Sandra Harding (1987:1) has argued, no distinctive feminist methodology
exists because each methodology can contribute to feminist goals. ¶ Whether or not a
traditional or feminist IR scholar runs the same statistical analysis, the numerical results
should be identical. Although the history of statistical¶ methods might be perceived as having
had questionable motivations with its genesis rooted within a particular social, political, and
economic context, this beginning does not invalidate knowledge gained from mathematics or
render the mathematics false (Hughes 1995). The math itself is not necessarily biased. The
interpretation and the measurement used, however, are subject to debate. This fact does not
reveal a flaw in the methodology but merely indicates that data are subject to the
interpretation of the scholar who must rely on theory to guide analysis.
Heg / WOT Good
Heg good and being tough on terrorism good, Iraq proves.
PETERS 2004 (Ralph, Author and Fmr Military Officer, “The One Republic,” August 3,
http://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=719060)
Making one's enemies suffer is currently an under-valued activity.¶ Had we not forced our
collective enemies to face us in the Middle East, they could have devoted the resources
they're expending in Iraq to striking us at home. And yes, they'll strike us at home again,
eventually--this is a colossal struggle. But passivity, appeasement and cowardice only
encourage them and make it easier for them to draw strength. It is never a mistake to strike
down an enemy who has sworn to kill us--as both our Islamic and secular Middle-Eastern
enemies hope to do. Saddam Hussein was as much a part of the problem of the decayed,
morally leprous Middle East as Osama bin Laden is. The War on Terror isn't a minor affair, but a
titanic struggle with a failed civilization that includes both vicious mullahs and cynical
murderers--both those who drink the poison of hate from the fouled springs of their religion and
those who guzzle scotch behind closed doors (not infrequently one and the same).¶ If we had
not deposed Saddam Hussein's regime, nothing would have changed in the Middle East. And
change, so long delayed, is essential. Even should the Iraqi people fail to take advantage of the
unprecedented chance we have given them to build a better future, the effort was worthwhile.
On its worst day, Iraq is now a better place than it was before our soldiers crossed its
borders.¶ If we had not deposed Saddam, dictators everywhere, as well as terrorists, would
have continued to believe that the United States was all bluster, that Afghanistan was a oneoff exception, an easy score. Indeed, even the tough occupation and our continued presence
serve to prove that the Clinton era is over, that you can no longer make America run by killing its
sons and daughters.¶ We may lament every American casualty--but not one has died in vain.
Our display of strength, resolve and grit has, indeed, made America and the world safer-although this struggle will continue, in many forms, for decades to come. You cannot expect
instant success when faced with a problem that has been forming for centuries--the decline of a
once-great civilization into a static culture that is entirely parasitic, that makes not a single
positive contribution to the rest of the world. In the end, no matter what we do, it will be up to
the Arabs to right themselves--and it's far from certain that they will ever show the will or the
wherewithal to fix their broken world. In the meantime, our liberation of Iraq graphically
demonstrated the price Middle-Eastern regimes can be made to pay when they choose to
export their problems, as Saddam Hussein repeatedly tried to do.¶ It doesn't matter in the least
if the Baathist regime in Baghdad had no direct ties to al-Qaeda--both were manifestations of
the same civilizational disease, the same culture of failure, hatred, oppression and inertia.¶
There is evil in the world. And if we had not gone to Iraq, evil would still be flourishing in
Baghdad.¶ We haven't finished anything in this great struggle. But we've made an impressive
start.
Link Turn
Authenticity
The critique of drone technology fetishizes an authentic human experience
which denies the benefits of technology.
Muqawama 13 (Abu Muqawama, Center for a New American Security "Nature's Not In It: A Special In
Memoriam," 5/26/13 http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2013/05/natures-not-it-specialmemoriam.html)
Running through much common misunderstanding of drones, autonomous weapons ,and
modern warfare is a romantic fetish of the "natural" and a demonization of the machine and
those who use it. Dan Trombly and I have talked about it from the perspective of drones, cyberwarfare, and other
technological subjects.¶ But for Memorial Day weekend I won't just touch on how such romantic ideology distorts crucial
military/security topics. I also want to talk about how the quest for the authentic (and anti-technological) also denies the very
humanity of those who fight wars---or prevent them---with the aid of high technology and technoscientific rationality. The
fetish
of the "natural" and the romantic loathing of machines, science, and bureaucracy implicit in
these critiques must be dismantled. Only then can we extend our appreciation to both those
who both died (and continue) to die for us inside machines of war and those who took on the
immense psychological burden of being a "Wizard of Armageddon."¶ The best place to start is with one
of the most prominent sources of the modern hatred of the "machine"--Hannah Arendt and the so-called "Banality of Evil." Everyone
is familiar with Arendt's idea of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as glorified accountant, a bureaucrat of death.¶ A new movie on
Arendt is out in theaters. It chronicles her journey to cover the trial of Eichmann, an adventure that would cultiminate in her
controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt contributed much to the way the nature of violence is conceptualized. But much
of what was wrong and profoundly damaging to our understanding. As the linked article notes, Arendt completely misread
Eichmann. Far from being Satan's VP keeping a steady hand on Excel-charting, payroll, and accounts payable, Eichmann believed
firmly in the genocidal Nazi ideology.¶ This "banal" man uttered the phrases "I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that
five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals" and "I worked relentlessly to kindle the fire ....I was not just a
recipient of orders. Had I been that, I would have been an imbecile. I was an idealist." These were not the statements of a Dilbertesque boss sleepwalking through horror. Eichmann saw no inherent conflict between rational-scientific means of genocide and a
romantic, quasi-occult ideology. Arendt could neither detect nor understand Eichmann's complex alliance of blood-and-soil
pseudoreligion and bureaucratic-technical implementation.¶ To call Eichmannn in Jerusalem a misreading perhaps is, as Ron
Rosenbaum argues, to greatly underscore its malicious distortions in an ironically Arendtian manner. He dubs the phrase "banality of
evil" a "sophisticated form of denial" that comes very close to a "(pseudo-) intellectual version of Holocaust denial." But this book
did not deny the crime, rather it "[denied] the full criminality of the perpetrators." The psychological complexity of an Eichmann and
the way Nazi ideology shaped the very gears of the bureaucratic machine he ran was totally foreign to Arendt.¶ So why have I
started with Memorial Day and sidestepped into an arcane discussion of Holocaust historiography? Arendt tapped into a wave of
humanistic sentiment that prefigured her journalism, and she popularized the fantasy of the ice-cold bureaucratic murderer. As
wrong as she was, she crafted a compelling narrative of a sociotechnical system that diminished the humanity of the men who
operated it and killed millions. Arendt became an inspiration to the postwar revolt against Cold War center-liberal politics and
technical rationality, as the article noted:¶ The postwar generation of young Germans took Arendt’s book as inspiration to rebel
against their parents, who may not have personally killed Jews during the war but knew what was going on and did nothing. In
America, protesters invoked the “banality of evil” to rail against the outwardly decent family men who dropped bombs on North
Vietnam or sat in nuclear-missile silos, ready to push the button — seeing them as the cold war’s version of Arendt’s “desk
murderers.Ӧ Articles like Carol Cohn's "Sex and Death in the Rational World of the Defense Intellectual" bemoaned
a
world in which "technostrategic" elites "calmly discuss nuclear war... without any sense of
horror, urgency, or moral outrage." Paul N. Edward's The Closed World conjured up a hermetic world of hyperrational, inhuman Spocks sitting on top of a stack of supercomputers. Robots from 2001's HAL to the hunter-killer drones that chase
Tom Cruise in Oblivion are cold and inherently threatening to humans. The use of Asimov's fictional rules of robotics (and
particularly the citing of a rule that forbids a robot from harming a human even to protect humans) in anti-robot polemics is a
testament in and of itself to Western culture's fear of the machine. 1¶ Arendt
tapped into a historical mythology that had
idea that industrial machines made war inhuman and the
bureaucratic structures that controlled men stripped them of their humanity. As with any
popular myth, it cannot be categorically dismissed. But World War I's history (as well as the diaries of the men
already begun with World War I: the
who fought it) is at variance with the cynicism embedded within anti-war poems like "Dulce et Decorum est." Machines did not
make for World War I's slaughter---the fact that commanders needed bloody practice to use them properly did. New technologies
like indirect fire, wireless communications, tanks, and aircraft eventually helped break the deadlock.¶ But
the sheer scale of
the slaughter and the "shock of the new," as Christopher Coker argues, prompted an cultural
effort by humanists to elevate the fragile human over the machine. This was after all, a time of great
cultural upheaval and a sense that Western civilization was on the skids. Such a Rage Against the Machines
necessarily fetishizes human authenticity and denies the benfits of technology. It implicitly
posits that passions and culture is what produces humanity, and the "technostrategic" elite's
lack of "horror, urgency, or moral outrage" has robbed them of their very essence.
No Internal Link
Literature and psychological bias runs towards threat deflation- we are the
opposite of paranoid
Schweller 4 [Randall L. Schweller, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at
The Ohio State University, “Unanswered Threats A Neoclassical RealistTheory of
Underbalancing,” International Security 29.2 (2004) 159-201, Muse]
Despite the historical frequency of underbalancing, little has been written on the subject.
Indeed, Geoffrey Blainey's memorable observation that for "every thousand pages published on
the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace" could have been
made with equal veracity about overreactions to threats as opposed to underreactions to
them.92 Library shelves are filled with books on the causes and dangers of exaggerating
threats, ranging from studies of domestic politics to bureaucratic politics, to political
psychology, to organization theory. By comparison, there have been few studies at any level of
analysis or from any theoretical perspective that directly explain why states have with some, if
not equal, regularity underestimated dangers to their survival. There may be some cognitive
or normative bias at work here. Consider, for instance, that there is a commonly used word,
paranoia, for the unwarranted fear that people are, in some way, "out to get you" or are
planning to do oneharm. I suspect that just as many people are afflicted with the opposite
psychosis: the delusion that everyone loves you when, in fact, they do not even like you. Yet,
we do not have a familiar word for this phenomenon. Indeed, I am unaware of any word that
describes this pathology (hubris and overconfidence come close, but they plainly define
something other than what I have described). That noted, international relations theory does
have a frequently used phrase for the pathology of states' underestimation of threats to their
survival, the so-called Munich analogy. The term is used, however, in a disparaging way by
theorists to ridicule those who employ it. The central claim is that the naïveté associated with
Munich and the outbreak of World War II has become an overused and inappropriate analogy
because few leaders are as evil and unappeasable as Adolf Hitler. Thus, the analogy either
mistakenly causes leaders [End Page 198] to adopt hawkish and overly competitive policies or is
deliberately used by leaders to justify such policies and mislead the public. A more compelling
explanation for the paucity of studies on underreactions to threats, however, is the tendency
of theories to reflect contemporary issues as well as the desire of theorists and journals to
provide society with policy- relevant theories that may help resolve or manage urgent security
problems. Thus, born in the atomic age with its new balance of terror and an ongoing Cold War,
the field of security studies has naturally produced theories of and prescriptions for national
security that have had little to say about—and are, in fact, heavily biased against warnings
of—the dangers of underreacting to or underestimating threats. After all, the nuclear
revolution was not about overkill but, as Thomas Schelling pointed out, speed of kill and mutual
kill.93 Given the apocalyptic consequences of miscalculation, accidents, or inadvertent nuclear
war, small wonder that theorists were more concerned about overreacting to threats than
underresponding to them. At a time when all of humankind could be wiped out in less than
twenty-five minutes, theorists may be excused for stressing the benefits of caution under
conditions of uncertainty and erring on the side of inferring from ambiguous actions overly
benign assessments of the opponent's intentions. The overwhelming fear was that a crisis
"might unleash forces of an essentially military nature that overwhelm the political process and
bring on a war thatnobody wants. Many important conclusions about the risk of nuclear war,
and thus about the political meaning of nuclear forces, rest on this fundamental idea."94 Now
that the Cold War is over, we can begin to redress these biases in the literature. In that spirit, I
have offered a domestic politics model to explain why threatened states often fail to adjust in a
prudent and coherent way to dangerous changes in their strategic environment. The model fits
nicely with recent realist studies on imperial under- and overstretch. Specifically, it is consistent
with Fareed Zakaria's analysis of U.S. foreign policy from 1865 to 1889, when, he claims, the
United States had the national power and opportunity to expand but failed to do so because it
lacked sufficient state power (i.e., the state was weak relative to society).95 Zakaria claims that
the United States did [End Page 199] not take advantage of opportunities in its environment to
expand because it lacked the institutional state strength to harness resources from society that
were needed to do so. I am making a similar argument with respect to balancing rather than
expansion: incoherent, fragmented states are unwilling and unable to balance against
potentially dangerous threats because elites view the domestic risks as too high, and they are
unable to mobilize the required resources from a divided society. The arguments presented here
also suggest that elite fragmentation and disagreement within a competitive political process,
which Jack Snyder cites as an explanation for overexpansionist policies, are more likely to
produce underbalancing than overbalancing behavior among threatened incoherent states.96
This is because a balancing strategy carries certain political costs and risks with few, if any,
compensating short-term political gains, and because the strategic environment is always
somewhat uncertain. Consequently, logrolling among fragmented elites within threatened
states is more likely to generate overly cautious responses to threats than overreactions to
them. This dynamic captures the underreaction of democratic states to the rise of Nazi Germany
during the interwar period.97 In addition to elite fragmentation, I have suggested some basic
domestic-level variables that regularly intervene to thwart balance of power predictions.
Impact Defense
State Good
Rejecting the use of state power kills solvency
Hawkes 87 (Dr. Glenn. W. Hawkes, Executive Director, Parents, Teachers & Students for Social
Responsibility, [Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, “Sex, power, and nuclear language,” Sept., v43,
no.7, pg. 59-60 TBC 6/30/10)
My third concern is with Conns call for "alternative voices." I agree that we must explore
alternatives, and in the process we will no doubt create something of a new language that
will guide us on new paths. But there is a strong tendency in the peace community to
employ language that is perceived on Main Street, U.S.A., as "alternative"— and thus as
unacceptable. We have a rich tradition of exposing nukespeak for what it is, but we have
not been skillful in using the public language to our advantage. We have generally avoided
using motherhood and apple pic symbols, like the flag. We've seen those symbols abused,
and consequently have chosen not to identify with them. Meanwhile, the right wing has
successfully manipulated main-stream language to advance its agenda. Just as there is
an elitist core of men who monopolize the technostrategic discourse, there is also (to a
lesser degree. I think) in the progressive ranks a core of thinkers who tend to use
alternative language in a way that diminishes rather than enhances our power. In fact
the very idea of possessing political power is often construed as something negative
from the activist perspective of which I speak, and from which I hail. The struggle for an
alternative future is thus, at times, led by individuals and organizations with an aversion
to power politics and a disdain for the public language, a stance that most surely
guarantees failure in the political arena. There is an ironic dialectic at work here: the
pursuit of alternative futures depends in part upon our understanding and using
mainstream symbols. We must use the system to beat the system, employing
mainstream language to change mainstream patterns of thought and action. For
example, if we are to increase the prospects for a new world order, we might promote
nationalism in order to transcend nationalism. We can use any number of historical
examples from the founding of our nation: national sovereignty on this continent was
pursued in order to preserve the several states, all threatened—as nations are today—
with destruction in their condition of disunity. In other words, if we love our nation we
must promote a more viable international order to preserve it. It was Jefferson, I think,
who always claimed to be a Virginian first and foremost, even after serving as president.
He supported national sovereignty because he thought it was the best way to protect and
preserve his beloved Virginia. Let's dig out such examples and put them to work in the
public language, reinforcing concerns for defense, security, and national interest. Rather
than calling for "compelling alternative visions," we should explore "compelling
mainstream visions." Changing that one word alerts us to the importance of
communicating with the farmer, the auto mechanic, the school teacher, the person selling
insurance, and the people who live next door. One way of dealing with the
technostratcgic thinkers might be to ignore them while at the same time developing the
political clout needed to change national policy.
Science Good
The aff’s rejection of reason and “techno” science is rooted in the
postmodernisms hostility towards modernism and a feeling of betrayal. Science
and reason are still necessary to solve our problems and maintain society.
Curtler ’97 Hugh Mercer. Hugh Mercer Curtler is a retired academic who taught philosophy
and Humanities (Great Books) for 41 years in three different colleges and universities.
Rediscovering Values: Coming to Terms with Postmodernism. 1997. P. 164-165
Indeed, the rejection of reason and "techno¶ science" as it is voiced by such thinkers as Jean¶ Fran¶ ç¶ ois Lyotard
seems at times little more than resentment born of a ¶ sense of betrayal: "it is no longer possible to call
development progress" (Lyotard 1992, 78). Instead, modernism has given us Auschwitz. Therefore, we will
blame ¶ reason and science as the vehicles that have brought us to this crisis. Reason has yielded technology,
which has produced nuclear weapons, mindless diversions, and ¶ choking pollution in our cities while
enslaving the human spirit. Therefore, we reject reason. This is odd logic. Reason becomes
hypostatized and is somehow guilty of having made false promises. The fault may not lie with
our tools or methods, however, ¶ but with the manner in which we adapted them and the tasks
we demanded they perform. That is to say, the problem may lie not with our methods but with
ourselves.¶ At times, one wonders whether thinkers such as Lyotard read Dostoyevsky, Freud, or Jung, whether they know
anything about human depravity. Science is not at ¶ fault; foolish men and women (mostly men) who have expected
the impossible of methods that were designed primarily to solve problems are at fault. We
cannot ¶ blame science because we have made of it an idol. Lyotard was correct when he said that
"scientific or technical discovery was never subordinate to demands arising ¶ from human needs. It
was always driven by a dynamic independent of the things people might judge desirable,
profitable, or comfortable" (Lyotard 1992, 83). But ¶ instead of focusing attention on the "dynamic,"
he chooses to reject the entire techno¶ scientific edifice. This is reactionary. We face serious
problems, and the rejection ¶ of science and technology will lead us back to barbarism, not to nirvana.
What is required is a lesson in how to control our methods and make them serve our needs. ¶
Empiricism is the only objective method for the evaluation of truth-claims—
other methodologies are non-falsifiable and should be rejected
Benson 06 [Ophelia, editor of the website Butterflies and Wheels and deputy editor of The
Philosophers' Magazine “Why Truth Matters,” p 63-64]
The basic claim of Strange Weather is that science’s authority, status, prestige, and position at
the top of the knowledge hierarchy, and the political-cultural-rhetorical hierarchy as well, are
both arbitrary and anti-democratic. ‘How can metaphysical life theories and explanations taken
seriously by millions be ignored or excluded by a small group of powerful people called
“scientists”? This claim is not actually argued, as we have seen; it is merely asserted and
reiterated throughout via rhetoric: science and rationality, realism and truth are associated
with the police, border-patrols, authority, and other such categories. But Ross ignores the
obvious crucial facts that (1) some authority is better justified than others as are some forms
of expertise, some exercises of control or power, and so on, and (2) there is a reason for the
authority and prestige of science, a reason that goes beyond mere habits of deference. To put it
bluntly, the reason is that the right answer has more authority than the wrong one. Ross
neglects to address this rather important aspect of the question. Science and other forms of
empirical enquiry such a history and forensic investigation do have legitimate authority
because the truth-claims they make are based on evidence and are subject to change if new
evidence is discovered. Other systems of ideas that make truth-claims that are not based on
evidence, that rely instead on revelation, sacred books, dreams, visions, myths, subjective
inner experience, and the like, lack legitimate authority because over many centuries it has
gradually become understood that those are not reliable sources. They can be useful startingpoints for theory formation, as has often been pointed out. Theories can begin anywhere, even
in dreams. But when it comes to justification, more reliable evidence is required. This is quite a
large difference between science and pseudoscience, genuine enquiry and fake enquiry, but it is
one that Ross does not take into account. The implication seems to be that for the sake of a
‘more democratic culture’ it is worth deciding that the wrong answer ought to have as much
authority as the right one. And yet of course it is unlikely that Ross really believes that. Surely, if
he did, he would not have written this book- he would not be able to claim that a more
democratic culture is preferable to a less democratic one, or anything else that he claims in his
work. However playful or quasi-ironic Strange Weather may be, it does lapse into seriousness at
times, it does make claims that Ross clearly wants us to accept- because he think they are right
as opposed to wrong. The intention of Strange Weather is to correct mistaken views of science
and pseudoscience, to replace them with other, truer views. Ross cannot very well argue that
his views are wrong and therefore we should believe them. He is in fact claiming authority for
his own views, he is attempting to seek the higher part of a truth-hierarchy. The self-refuting
problem we always see in epistemic relativism is here in its most obvious form.
Rejection of science means the elites control knowledge production, destroys
technological progress
Sokal 08[Alan Sokal, Dept. of Physics at NYU and Dept. of Mathematics at University College
London, 2/27/08, “What is science and why should we care?”,
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/sense_about_science_PUBL.pdf]
Statements as clear-cut as these are, however, rare in the academic postmodernist literature.
More often one finds assertions that are ambiguous but can nevertheless be interpreted (and
quite often are interpreted) as implying what the foregoing quotations make explicit: that
science as I have defined it is an illusion, and that the purported objective knowledge
provided by science is largely or entirely a social construction. For example, Katherine Hayles,
professor of English at UCLA and former president of the Society for Literature and Science,
writes the following as part of her feminist analysis of uid mechanics: Despite their names,
conservation laws are not inevitable facts of nature but constructions that foreground some
experiences and marginalize others. . . . Almost without exception, conservation laws were
formulated, developed, and experimentally tested by men. If conservation laws represent
particular emphases and not inevitable facts, then people living in di erent kinds of bodies and
identifying with different gender constructions might well have arrived at di erent models for
[fluid] flow. (What an interesting idea: perhaps: people living in different kinds of bodies" will
learn to see beyond those masculinist laws of conservation of energy and momentum.) And
Andrew Pickering, a prominent sociologist of science, asserts the following in his otherwiseexcellent history of modern elementary-particle physics: [G]iven their extensive training in
sophisticated mathematical techniques, the preponderance of mathematics in particle
physicists' accounts of reality is no more hard to explain than the fondness of ethnic groups for
their native language. On the view advocated in this chapter, there is no obligation upon anyone
framing a view of the world to take account of what twentieth-century science has to say. But
let me not spend time beating a dead horse, as the arguments against postmodernist relativism
are by now fairly well known - rather than plugging own writings, let me suggest the superb
book by Canadian philosopher of science James Robert Brown, Who Rules in Science?: An
Opinionated Guide to the Wars. Suffice it to say that postmodernist writings systematically
confuse truth with claims of truth, fact with assertions of fact, and knowledge with
pretensions to knowledge - and then sometimes go so far as to deny that these distinctions
have any meaning. Now, it's worth noting that the postmodernist writings I have just quoted all
come from the 1980s and early 1990s. In fact, over the past decade, academic postmodernists
and social constructivists seem to have backed off the most extreme views that they previously
espoused. Perhaps I and like-minded critics of postmodernism can take some small credit for
this, by initiating a public debate that shed a harsh light of criticism on these views and forced
some strategic retreats. But most of the credit, I think, has to be awarded to George W. Bush
and his friends, who have shown just where science-bashing can lead in the real world.
Nowadays, even sociologist of science Bruno Latour, who spent several decades stressing the
so-called “social construction of scientific facts", laments the ammunition he fears he and his
colleagues have given to the Republican right-wing, helping them to deny or obscure the
scientific consensus on global warming, biological evolution and a host of other issues. 14 He
writes: While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance
of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts
hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to
make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that
there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always
prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while
dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy
hard-won evidence that could save our lives. That, of course, is exactly the point I was trying to
make back in 1996 about socialconstruction talk taken to subjectivist extremes. I hate to say I
told you so, but I did. As did, several years before me, Noam Chomsky, who recalled that in a
not-so-distant past, Left intellectuals took an active part in the lively working class culture.
Some sought to compensate for the class character of the cultural institutions through programs
of workers' education, or by writing best-selling books on mathematics, science, and other
topics for the general public. Remarkably, their left counterparts today often seek to deprive
working people of these tools of emancipation, informing us that the “project of the
Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the “illusions" of science and rationality - a
message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these
instruments for their own use.
Realism Solves Feminism
Rejecting gendered politics while still engaging in realism can still solve
Lind 5 (Michael, Executive Editor of the National Interest, “Of Arms and the Woman,” Jan
20,http://feminism.eserver.org/of-arms-and-the-woman.txt) AK
The first thing that must be said about the feminist critique of realism is that it is by no means
incompatible with realism, properly understood. In fact, realist theory can hardly be
recognized in the feminist caricature of it. Take the idea of the innate human propensity for
conflict. Although some realist thinkers such as Hans Morgenthau have confused the matter
(often under the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr) with misleading talk of "original sin," the
controlling idea of realism is that there is an ineradicable potential for conflict between human
beings--"men" in the inclusive, gender-neutral sense-- when they are organized in groups.
Realism is not about conflict between individual men, that is, males; if it were, it would be a
theory of barroom brawls or adolescent male crime. It is about conflict between rival
communities, and those communities include women and men alike.
Feminist critics of realism, then, begin by attacking a straw man, or a straw male. Even worse,
they tend to indulge in the stereotypes that they otherwise abhor: aggression is "male,"
conciliation is "female." To their credit, most feminist theorists are aware of this danger, ever
mindful of their dogma that all sexual identity is socially constructed, ever fearful that they will
hear the cry of "Essentialist!" raised against them. Thus Enloe, in an earlier book called Bananas,
Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, struggles with how to
answer what she calls "the `What about Margaret Thatcher?' taunt." Her answer is that women
like Margaret Thatcher and Jeane Kirkpatrick reinforce the patriarchy by making international
conflict look "less man-made, more people-made and thus more legitimate and harder to
reverse." Enloe applies this analysis consistently--right-wing women like Phyllis Schlafly are
pawns of the patriarchal-militarist power structure, while left-wing women like the Greenham
Common Women are disinterested proponents of the good of humanity. Still, Enloe is troubled
enough to return to the question: "some women's class aspirations and their racist fears lured
them into the role of controlling other women for the sake of imperial rule." Admit that,
however, and you are close to conceding the point about collective human behavior made by
realists. Then there is "the state." Here, too, there is nothing in realism that cannot
accommodate many feminine observations about the particular patriarchal features of
particular historic states. The realist definition of "the state" as a sovereign entity with an
existence and a strategy distinct from that of individuals is very broad, including medieval
duchies and ancient empires-- and, perhaps, female biker gangs. Realist theory holds no
preference for the modern nation-state, though a word might be spoken in its defense. Again
and again in feminist writings one encounters the claim that the modern nation- state is
inherently "gendered," as though its predecessors--feudal dynastic regimes, theocratic
empires, city-states, tribal amphictyonies--were not even more rigidly patriarchal.
Pure feminist critique fails because it assumes gender equality is the ONLY
variable in international relations, when in fact we need to work with realism
but with gender in mind
Caprioli, 04 (“Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative Methodology: A Critical Analysis” Mary
Caprioli, Dept. of Political Science, University of Tennessee. International Studies Review.
Volume 42 Issue 1 Page 193-197, March 2004. http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/0020-8833.00076.) AK
The derision with which many conventional feminists view feminist quantitative studies persists
to the detriment of both feminist and other types of IR scholarship. As Jan Jindy Pettman (2002)
has argued, however, no single feminist position exists in international relations. One of the
most common feminist critiques of feminist quantitative research is that scholars cannot
simply "add gender and stir" (Peterson 2002;Steans2003), for gender is not just one of many
variables. Yet, gender is one of many variables when we are discussing international issues,
from human rights to war. As Fred Halliday (1988) has observed, gender is not the core of
international relations or the key to understanding it. Such a position would grossly overstate
the feminist case. Gender may be an important explanatory and predictive component but it
certainly is not the only one.260 Such a critique only serves to undermine the feminist
argument against a scientific methodology for the social sciences by questioning the
scholarship of those who employ quantitative methodologies. One does not pull variables "out
of the air" to put into a model, thereby "adding and stirring." Variables are added to models if a
theoretical justification for doing so exists. Peterson (2002:158) postulates that "as long as IR
understands gender only as an empirical category (for example, how do women in the military
affect the conduct of war?), feminisms appear largely irrelevant to the discipline's primary
questions and inquiry." Yet, little evidence actually supports this contention—unless one is
arguing that gender is the only important category of analysis. If researchers cannot add
gender to an analysis, then they must necessarily use a purely female-centered analysis, even
though the utility of using a purely female- centered analysis seems equally biased. Such
research would merely be gender-centric based on women rather than men, and it would
thereby provide an equally biased account of international relations as those that are malecentric. Although one might speculate that having research done from the two opposing
worldviews might more fully explain international relations, surely an integrated approach
would offer a more comprehensive analysis of world affairs. Beyond a female-centric analysis,
some scholars (for example, Carver 2002) argue that feminist research must offer a critique of
gender as a set of power relations. Gender categories, however, do exist and have very real
implications for individuals, social relations, and international affairs. Critiquing the social
construction of gender is important, but it fails to provide new theories of international
relations or to address the implications of gender for what happens in the world. Sylvester
(2002a) has wondered aloud whether feminist research should be focused primarily on
critique, warning that feminists should avoid an exclusive focus on highlighting anomalies, for
such a focus does not add to feminist IR theories.
Nukes K2 Solve
Even if the aff wins that the discourse is problematic it won’t have any terminal
impacts because nukes prevent war.
Karaganov ’10. Sergei. Sergei Karaganov, Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on
Foreign and Defense Policy, is Dean of the School of World Economics and International Affairs at Russia’s
National Research University Higher School of Economics. “The Dangers of Nuclear Disarmament.”
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-dangers-of-nuclear-disarmament Apr 29 2010.
But nuclear arms also have a significant moral distinction: unlike other weapons, they are an
effective means of preventing the large-scale wars and mass destruction of people, property,
and cultures that have plagued humanity throughout recorded history. To reject nuclear
weapons and strive for their elimination is, no doubt, a moral aim, at least in the abstract. But it
is feasible only if humanity changes.¶ Apparently, the advocates of eliminating nuclear weapons
believe that such change is possible. I do not. Indeed, the risks of a world without nuclear
weapons – or only a minimal number of them – are tremendous.¶ Nuclear deterrence – a threat
to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people – is a concept that does not fit into traditional
morals. Yet it has worked, preventing catastrophic wars while making people more civilized
and cautious. When one pole of nuclear deterrence weakened, due to Russia’s political decline
in the 1990’s, NATO, a defensive union of democratic and peaceful states, committed
aggression against Yugoslavia. Now that Russia has restored its capability, such a move would
be unthinkable. After Yugoslavia, there was an unprovoked attack on Iraq.¶ In a nearly perfect
world, Russia and the US would not need large nuclear stockpiles. But cutting nuclear weapons
to a bare minimum in the current conditions would give a big advantage to small nuclear
powers, which will see their nuclear potential gain near-parity with larger states.¶ Moreover,
reducing nuclear weapons to a minimum might theoretically enhance the usefulness of
missile-defense systems and their destabilizing role. And even non-strategic missile-defense
systems, the deployment of which might be useful, will be questioned.¶ If stockpiles of tactical
nuclear weapons are reduced, as some US, European, and Russian experts have proposed, the
opponents of Russia’s ongoing military reform will have even more reason to object to
reconfiguring the country’s conventional armed forces away from confrontation with NATO
toward a flexible-response capability vis-à-vis other threats.¶ Similarly, if the US withdraws its
largely nominal tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, US-Europe strategic ties would
weaken. Many Europeans, above all in the new NATO member-states, would then demand
more protection from the mythical Russian Leviathan.¶ The world community seems to be losing
its strategic bearings. Instead of focusing on the real problem, namely the increasingly unstable
international order, it is trying to apply Cold War-era concepts of disarmament. At best, these
are marginally useful; more often, they are harmful in today’s circumstances.¶
Solvency
Subjectivity Focus Fails
The kritik’s focus on subjectivity and obscure language destroy the chance for
public influence or democratic change
Bronner 4
Stephen Eric, Professor of Political Science and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University,
“Reclaiming the Enlightenment” Columbia University Press p. 3-6
Such is the picture painted by Dialectic of Enlightenment.. But it should not be forgotten that
its authors were concerned with criticizing enlightenment generally, and the historical epoch
known as the Enlightenment in particular, from the standpoint of enlightenment itself: thus
the title of the work. Their masterpiece was actually “intended to prepare the way for a
positive notion of enlightenment, which will release it from entanglement in blind
domination.” 4 Later, in fact, Horkheimer and Adorno even talked about writing a sequel that
would have carried a title like “Rescuing the Enlightenment” (Rettung der Aufklaerung).5 This
reclamation project was never completed, and much time has been spent speculating about
why it wasn’t. The reason, I believe, is that the logic of their argument ultimately left them
with little positive to say. Viewing instrumental rationality as equivalent with the rationality
of domination, and this rationality with an increasingly seamless bureaucratic order, no room
existed any longer for a concrete or effective political form of opposition: Horkheimer would
thus ultimately embrace a quasi-religious “yearning for the totally other” while Adorno
became interested in a form of aesthetic resistance grounded in “negative dialectics.” Their
great work initiated a radical change in critical theory, but its metaphysical subjectivism
surrendered any systematic concern with social movements and political institutions. Neither
of them ever genuinely appreciated the democratic inheritance of the Enlightenment and
thus, not only did they render critique independent of its philosophical foundations,6 but also
of any practical interest it might serve. Horkheimer and Adorno never really grasped that, in
contrast to the system builder, the blinkered empiricist, or the fanatic, the philosophe always
evidenced a “greater interest in the things of this world, a greater confidence in man and his
works and his reason, the growing appetite of curiosity and the growing restlessness of the
unsatisfied mind—all these things form less a doctrine than a spirit.”7 Just as Montesquieu
believed it was the spirit of the laws, rather than any system of laws, that manifested the
commitment to justice, the spirit of Enlightenment projected the radical quality of that
commitment and a critique of the historical limitations with which it is always tainted.
Empiricists may deny the existence of a “spirit of the times.” Nevertheless, the various of a
given historical epoch can generate an ethos, an existential stance toward reality, or what
might even be termed a “project” uniting the diverse participants in a broader intellectual
trend or movement.8 The Enlightenment evidenced such an ethos and a peculiar stance
toward reality with respect toward its transformation. Making sense of this, however, is
impossible without recognizing what became a general stylistic commitment to clarity,
communicability, and what rhetoricians term “plain speech.” For their parts, however,
Horkheimer and Adorno believed that resistance against the incursions of the culture industry
justified the extremely difficult, if not often opaque, writing style for which they would
become famous—or, better, infamous. Their esoteric and academic style is a far cry from that
of Enlightenment intellectuals who debated first principles in public, who introduced
freelance writing, who employed satire and wit to demolish puffery and dogma, and who
were preoccupied with reaching a general public of educated readers: Lessing put the matter
in the most radical form in what became a popular saying—“Write just as you speak and it will
be beautiful”— while, in a letter written to D’Alembert in April of 1766, Voltaire noted that
“Twenty folio volumes will never make a revolution: it’s the small, portable books at thirty
sous that are dangerous. If the Gospel had cost 1,200 sesterces, the Christian religion would
never have been established.”9 Appropriating the Enlightenment for modernity calls for
reconnecting with the vernacular. This does not imply some endorsement of
antiintellectualism. Debates in highly specialized fields, especially those of the natural
sciences, obviously demand expertise and insisting that intellectuals must “reach the masses”
has always been a questionable strategy.10 The subject under discussion should define the
language in which it is discussed and the terms employed are valid insofar as they illuminate
what cannot be said in a simpler way. Horkheimer and Adorno, however, saw the matter
differently. They feared being integrated by the culture industry, avoided political
engagement, and turned freedom into the metaphysical-aesthetic preserve of the
connoisseur. They became increasingly incapable of appreciating the egalitarian impulses
generated by the Enlightenment and the ability of its advocates—Ben Franklin, Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and Rousseau—to argue clearly and with a political
purpose.11 Thus, whether or not their “critical” enterprise was “dialectically” in keeping with
the impulses of the past, its assumptions prevented them from articulating anything positive
for the present or the future. Reclaiming the Enlightenment is an attempt to provide the
sequel that Horkheimer and Adorno never wrote in a style they refused to employ. Its
chapters proceed in a roughly parallel manner and, given its interdisciplinary character, this
book also has no intention of pleasing the narrow specialist in any particular field. In contrast
to Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, what follows is not a collection of “fragments”—the
subtitle that was dropped from the first English translation—and its “positive” appropriation
rests upon a view of tradition that links theory and practice.12 Little sympathy is wasted on
meta-theory for its inability to deal with historical conflicts or even that the classic work by
Horkheimer and Adorno is different from the postmodern works it inspired13: its intention,
which was to criticize the Enlightenment from the standpoint of enlightenment itself, is not
congruent with the result. The present volume considers the actual movements with which
enlightenment ideals, as against competing ideals, were connected. It thus highlights the
assault undertaken by the philosophes against the old feudal order and the international
battle that was fought—from 1789 until 1939— 14 between liberal and socialist forces imbued
with the Enlightenment heritage and those forces of religious reaction, conservative prejudice,
and fascist irrationalism whose inspiration derived from what Isaiah Berlin initially termed the
“Counter-Enlightenment.”15 Without a sense of this battle, or what I elsewhere termed the
“great divide” of modern political life, any discussion of the Enlightenment will necessarily
take a purely academic form. Dialectic of Enlightenment never grasped what was at stake in
the conflict or interrogated its political history. Its authors never acknowledged that different
practices and ideals are appropriate to different spheres of activity or that only confusion
would result from substituting the affirmation of subjectivity, through aesthetic-philosophic
criticism, for political resistance. Horkheimer and Adorno were no less remiss than their
postmodern followers in ignoring the institutional preconditions for the free exercise of
individual capacities. Striking indeed is how those most concerned about the “loss of
subjectivity” have shown the least awareness about the practical role of genuinely democratic
as against reactionary pseudo-universalism and the institutional lessons of totalitarianism.
Discourse Focus Fails
Emphasis on language means an ignorance of concrete reality and is a refusal of
true engagement.
Taft-Kaufmann, 95. Jill (professor, Department of Speech Communication And Dramatic Arts
Central Michigan), Other Ways: Postmodernism and Performance Praxis in Southern
Communication Journal, 1930-3203, Volume 60, Issue 3, 26-27
If the lack of consistency between postmodernism's self-styled allegiance to the oppositional
and its collaboration with the existing state of academic practice were its only shortcoming, it
should be enough to prevent us from unquestioningly embracing it as a theory. More
disquieting still, however, is its postulation of the way the world around us works. Theory that
presumes to talk about culture must stand the test of reality. Or, as Andrew King states,
"culture is where we live and are sustained. Any doctrine that strikes at its root ought to be
carefully scrutinized" (personal communication, February 11, 1994). If one subjects the premise
of postmodernism to scrutiny, the consequences are both untenable and disturbing. In its
elevation of language to the primary analysis of social life and its relegation of the decentered subject to a set of language positions, postmodernism ignores the way real people
make their way in the world. While the notion of decentering does much to remedy the idea
of an essential, unchanging self, it also presents problems. According to Clarke (1991): Having
established the material quality of ideology, everything else we had hitherto thought of as
material has disappeared. There is nothing outside of ideology (or discourse). Where Althusser
was concerned with ideology as the imaginary relations of subjects to the real relations of their
existence, the connective quality of this view of ideology has been dissolved because it lays
claim to an outside, a real, an extra-discursive for which there exists no epistemological warrant
without lapsing back into the bad old ways of empiricism or metaphysics. (pp. 25-26) Clarke
explains how the same disconnection between the discursive and the extra-discursive has
been performed in semiological analysis: Where it used to contain a relation between the
signifier (the representation) and the signified (the referent), antiempiricism has taken the
formal arbitrariness of the connection between the signifier and signified and replaced it with
the abolition of the signified (there can be no real objects out there, because there is no out
there for real objects to be). To the postmodernist, then, real objects have vanished. So, too,
have real people. Smith (1988) suggests that postmodernism has canonized doubt about the
availability of the referent to the point that "the real often disappears from consideration" (p.
159). Real individuals become abstractions. Subject positions rather than subjects are the focus.
The emphasis on subject positions or construction of the discursive self engenders an
accompanying critical sense of irony which recognizes that "all conceptualizations are limited"
(Fischer, 1986, p. 224). This postmodern position evokes what Connor (1989) calls "an absolute
weightlessness in which anything is imaginatively possible because nothing really matters" (p.
227). Clarke (1991) dubs it a "playfulness that produces emotional and/or political
disinvestment: a refusal to be engaged" (p. 103). The luxury of being able to muse about what
constitutes the self is a posture in keeping with a critical venue that divorces language from
material objects and bodily subjects. The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality,"
"Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by substantial analysis of the concrete contexts
of subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire. The political sympathies of the new cultural critics,
with their ostensible concern for the lack of power experienced by marginalized people, aligns
them with the political left. Yet, despite their adversarial posture and talk of opposition, their
discourses on intertextuality and inter-referentiality isolate them from and ignore the
conditions that have produced leftist politics--conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice. In short,
as Clarke (1991) asserts, postmodern emphasis on new subjects conceals the old subjects, those
who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and transportation, as well as
to the media that depict them. Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no
vision, will, or commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip service to the oppositional is
underscored by the absence of focused collective or politically active intellectual communities.
Provoked by the academic manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo (1990) echoes Merod and
laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as little radical analysis or
activism and as much radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about Otherness:
phallocentrism or Eurocentric tropes has become a lazy academic substitute for actual
engagement with the detailed histories and contemporary realities of Western racial
minorities, white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment of the
postmodern elevation of language to the "sine qua non" of critical discussion is an even stronger
indictment against the trend. Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition in
which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations are linguistic, and, therefore, it is
through the coercion that threatens speech that we enter the "realm of terror" and society falls
apart. To this assertion, Clarke replies: I can think of few more striking indicators of the
political and intellectual impoverishment of a view of society that can only recognize the
discursive. If the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to speak, we are
appallingly ignorant of terror in its elaborate contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's
conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but its projection onto the rest of the
world would be calamitous....(pp. 2-27) The realm of the discursive is derived from the
requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather than in a world of ideas or
symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that require collective
activity for their fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on the discursive without an accompanying
analysis of how the discursive emerges from material circumstances hides the complex task of
envisioning and working towards concrete social goals (Merod, 1987).
Changing representational practices hinders understanding of policy by
overlooking questions of agency and material structures
Tuathail, 96 (Gearoid, Department of Georgraphy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Political
Geography, 15(6-7), p. 664, science direct)
While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse
and concerns of foreign-policy decision- makers are quite different, so different that they
constitute a distinctive problem- solving, theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There is a
danger that academics assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in the
practice of foreign policy and the exercise of power than they really are. This is not, however,
to minimize the obvious importance of academia as a general institutional structure among
many that sustain certain epistemic communities in particular states. In general, I do not
disagree with Dalby’s fourth point about politics and discourse except to note that his
statement-‘Precisely because reality could be represented in particular ways political
decisions could be taken, troops and material moved and war fought’-evades the important
question of agency that I noted in my review essay. The assumption that it is representations
that make action possible is inadequate by itself. Political, military and economic structures,
institutions, discursive networks and leadership are all crucial in explaining social action and
should be theorized together with representational practices. Both here and earlier, Dalby’s
reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism. In response to Dalby’s fifth point (with its three
subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is about the CPD, not the Reagan
administration. He analyzes certain CPD discourses, root the geographical reasoning practices
of the Reagan administration nor its public-policy reasoning on national security. Dalby’s book is
narrowly textual; the general contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt with.
Second, let me simply note that I find that the distinction between critical theorists and poststructuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others. Third, Dalby’s
interpretation of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced
by dissident peace researchers in Europe is highly idealist, an interpretation that ignores the
structural and ideological crises facing the Soviet elite at that time. Gorbachev’s reforms and his
new security discourse were also strongly self- interested, an ultimately futile attempt to save
the Communist Party and a discredited regime of power from disintegration. The issues raised
by Simon Dalby in his comment are important ones for all those interested in the practice of
critical geopolitics. While I agree with Dalby that questions of discourse are extremely
important ones for political geographers to engage, there is a danger of fetishizing this concern
with discourse so that we neglect the institutional and the sociological, the materialist and
the cultural, the political and the geographical contexts within which particular discursive
strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics, in other words, should not be a prisoner of
the sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies ‘poststructuralism nor convenient
reading strategies like the identity politics narrative; it needs to always be open to the
patterned mess that is human history.
The aff focuses too much on the representations of war—they will inevitably
reify the dominant discourse by ignoring the realities of the effects of war
Krishna, ’93 – Prof Poli Sci @ U of Hawaii (Summer, Sankaran, Alternatives, “The Importance
of Being Ironic: A Postcolonial View on Critical International Relations Theory”, pg. 398-399)
Yet overemphasizing the new forms of representations of the war in the media can become
politically problematic. First, a focus on the newness of "cyberwar" detracts attention from
the fact that in many ways the Gulf War was very much in the mold of previous conflicts. Far
from indicating any shift from the material to the perceptual, this conflict was about territory,
oil, and reasserting US hegemony. Second, one ought not to confuse the actual nature of the
Gulf War with the Pentagon's close orchestration of its media coverage. In this regard, quotes
such as the following leave this reviewer with a sense of disquiet: The consequence ... is that
in modern warfare, as the aim of battle shifts from territorial, economic, and material gains to
immaterial, perceptual fields the spectacle of war is displaced by the war of spectacle. (AD:
191) For several reasons (technological, political, and theoretical), the warrior has ceased to
hold any kind of possibility. Instances where the warrior seems to be present—Panama,
Liberia, Grenada, Afghanistan, even the Persian Gulf—quickly present themselves as failures,
spectacles, or exercises in nostalgia. (KN: 24) Contrasted with this supposed dematerialization
of war, territory, and the warrior, and a supposedly new era of cyberwars of sign systems, a
few enduring realities seem to need reiteration: The war in Iraq was over one of those
stubborn geopolitical facts of the present era—oil. It was preceded by a Hannibal-esque buildup lasting more than six months (in contrast to all this talk about speed). The overwhelming
percentage of the bombs used in Iraq were not "smart" bombs; in fact nearly 93 percent of
the 88,500 tons of bombs used in that war were not precision-guided but "dumb" bombs. US
bombs are estimated to have "missed" their targets about 70 percent of the time (needless to
add, a "missed target" probably means higher civilian casualties). Far from being a "clean" war
(as General Powell and others suggested during the conflict), the weapons systems used were
deliberately designed to increase human casualties and suffering. Thus, the Multiple-Launch
Rocket System; the Army Tactical Missile System; the "Adam" bombs designed to "spin out
tiny darts with razor edges; phosphorous howitzer shells that spew fragments which
penetrate enemy bodies and produce lesions"; fuel-air bombs, which "burn oxygen over a
surface of over 1 or 2 square kilometers, destroying all human life through asphyxiation or
through implosion of the lungs, leaving no chance for survival" and replicating tactical nuclear
weapons in their destructiveness—all these and more were used on the traffic jam on the
road connecting Kuwait to Iraq, where thousands of soldiers and civilians (including migrant
laborers) were trapped and became a turkey-shoot for US "technology."29 By emphasizing the
technology and speed in the Gulf War, endlessly analyzing the representation of the war itself,
without a simultaneous exposition of the "ground realities," postmodernist analyses wind up,
unwittingly, echoing the Pentagon and the White House in their claims that this was a "clean"
war with smart bombs that take out only defense installations with minimal "collateral
damage." One needs to reflesh the Gulf War dead through our postmortems instead of merely
echoing, with Virilio and others, the "disappearance" of territory or the modern warrior with
the new technologies; or the intertext connecting the war and television; or the displacement
of the spectacle of war by the war of spectacle.30 Second, the emphasis on the speed with
which the annihilation proceeded once the war began tends to obfuscate the long build-up to
the conflict and US complicity in Iraqi foreign and defense policy in prior times. Third, as the
details provided above show, if there was anything to highlight about the war, it was not so
much its manner of representation as the incredible levels of annihilation that have been
perfected. To summarize: I am not suggesting that postmodernist analysts of the war are in
agreement with the Pentagon's claims regarding a "clean" war; I am suggesting that their
preoccupation with representation, sign systems, and with the signifier over the signified,
leaves one with little sense of the annihilation visited upon the people and land of Iraq. And,
as the Vietnam War proved and Schwarzkopf well realized, without that physicalistic sense of
violence, war can be more effectively sold to a jingoistic public.
recognizing international relations is socially constructed is useless—changing
representational practices doesn’t alter the material reality of state practices or
help create better policy for the oppressed
Jarvis, 00 (Darryl, lecturer in IR at the University of Sydney, International relations and the
challenge of postmodernism, 2000, p. 128-130)
Perhaps more alarming though is the outright violence Ashley recom-mends in response to what
at best seem trite, if not imagined, injustices. Inculpating modernity, positivism, technical
rationality, or realism with violence, racism, war, and countless other crimes not only smacks of
anthropomorphism but, as demonstrated by Ashley's torturous prose and reasoning, requires a
dubious logic to malce such connections in the first place. Are we really to believe that ethereal
entities like positivism, mod-ernism, or realism emanate a "violence" that marginalizes
dissidents? Indeed, where is this violence, repression, and marginalization? As self- professed
dissidents supposedly exiled from the discipline, Ashley and Walker appear remarkably well
integrated into the academy-vocal, pub-lished, and at the center of the Third Debate and the
forefront of theo-retical research. Likewise, is Ashley seriously suggesting that, on the basis of
this largely imagined violence, global transformation (perhaps even rev-olutionary violence) is a
necessary, let alone desirable, response? Has the rationale for emancipation or the fight for
justice been reduced to such vacuous revolutionary slogans as "Down with positivism and
rationality"? The point is surely trite. Apart from members of the academy, who has heard of
positivism and who for a moment imagines that they need to be emancipated from it, or from
modernity, rationality, or realism for that matter? In an era of unprecedented change and
turmoil, of new political and military configurations, of war in the Balkans and ethnic
cleansing, is Ashley really suggesting that some of the greatest threats facing humankind or
some of the great moments of history rest on such innocu-ous and largely unknown
nonrealities like positivism and realism? These are imagined and fictitious enemies, theoretical
fabrications that represent arcane, self-serving debates superfluous to the lives of most
people and, arguably, to most issues of importance in international relations. More is the pity
that such irrational and obviously abstruse debate should so occupy us at a time of great global
turmoil. That it does and continues to do so reflects our lack of judicious criteria for evaluating
the-ory and, more importantly, the lack of attachment theorists have to the real world.
Certainly it is right and proper that we ponder the depths of our theoretical imaginations,
engage in epistemological and ontological debate, and analyze the sociology of our
lmowledge.37 But to suppose that this is the only task of international theory, let alone the
most important one, smacks of intellectual elitism and displays a certain contempt for those
who search for guidance in their daily struggles as actors in international politics. What does
Ashley's project, his deconstructive efforts, or valiant fight against positivism say to the truly
marginalized, oppressed, and des-titute? How does it help solve the plight of the poor, the
displaced refugees, the casualties of war, or the emigres of death squads? Does it in any way
speak to those whose actions and thoughts comprise the policy and practice of international
relations? On all these questions one must answer no. This is not to say, of course, that all
theory should be judged by its technical rationality and problem-solving capacity as Ashley
forcefully argues. But to suppose that problem-solving technical theory is not necessary-or is in
some way bad-is a contemptuous position that abrogates any hope of solving some of the
nightmarish realities that millions confront daily. As Holsti argues, we need ask of these
theorists and their theories the ultimate question, "So what?" To what purpose do they
deconstruct, problematize, destabilize, undermine, ridicule, and belittle modernist and
rationalist approaches? Does this get us any further, make the world any better, or enhance the
human condition? In what sense can this "debate toward [a] bottomless pit of epistemology and
metaphysics" be judged pertinent, relevant, help-ful, or cogent to anyone other than those
foolish enough to be scholasti-cally excited by abstract and recondite debate.38 Contrary to
Ashley's assertions, then, a poststructural approach fails to empower the marginalized and, in
fact, abandons them. Rather than ana-lyze the political economy of power, wealth, oppression,
production, or international relations and render an intelligible understanding of these
processes, Ashley succeeds in ostracizing those he portends to represent by delivering an
obscure and highly convoluted discourse. If Ashley wishes to chastise structural realism for its
abstractness and detachment, he must be prepared also to face similar criticism, especially
when he so adamantly intends his work to address the real life plight of those who struggle at
marginal places. If the relevance of Ashley's project is questionable, so too is its logic and
cogency. First, we might ask to what extent the postmodern "empha-sis on the textual,
constructed nature of the world" represents "an unwar-ranted extension of approaches
appropriate for literature to other areas of human practice that are more constrained by an
objective reality. "39 All theory is socially constructed and realities like the nation-state,
domestic and international politics, regimes, or transnational agencies are obviously social
fabrications. But to what extent is this observation of any real use? Just because we
acknowledge that the state is a socially fabricated entity, or that the division between
domestic and international society is arbitrar-ily inscribed does not make the reality of the state
disappear or render invisible international politics. Whether socially constructed or objectively
given, the argument over the ontological status of the state is of no particular moment. Does
this change our experience of the state or somehow diminish the political-economic-juridicalmilitary functions of the state? To recognize that states are not naturally inscribed but dynamic
entities continually in the process of being made and reimposed and are therefore culturally
dissimilar, economically different, and politically atypical, while perspicacious to our historical
and theoretical understanding of the state, in no way detracts from its reality, practices, and
consequences. Similarly, few would object to Ashley's hermeneutic interpretivist understanding
of the international sphere as an artificially inscribed demarcation. But, to paraphrase Holsti
again, so what? This does not malce its effects any less real, diminish its importance in our lives,
or excuse us from paying serious attention to it. That international politics and states would
not exist with-out subjectivities is a banal tautology. The point, surely, is to move beyond this
and study these processes. Thus, while intellectually interesting, con-structivist theory is not an
end point as Ashley seems to think, where we all throw up our hands and announce there are
no foundations and all real-ity is an arbitrary social construction. Rather, it should be a means
of rec-ognizing the structurated nature of our being and the reciprocity between subjects and
structures through history. Ashley, however, seems not to want to do this, but only to
deconstruct the state, international politics, and international theory on the basis that none of
these is objectively given but fictitious entities that arise out of modernist practices of
representa-tion. While an interesting theoretical enterprise, it is of no great conse- quence to
the study of international politics. Indeed, structuration theory has long talcen care of these
ontological dilemmas that otherwise seem to preoccupy Ashley.40
Focus on representations sanitizes powerful structures and destroys the
predictive power of IR
Stokes no date
Doug Stokes, Bristol Univ Politics Department, Gluing the Hats On: Power, Agency, and Reagan's
Office of Public Diplomacy, accessed 10/9/05>
(http://web.archive.org/web/20060221025303/http://www.aqnt98.dsl.pipex.com/hats.htm)
In her discursive practices approach, Doty argues that more poststructurally inclined questions
as to "how" foreign policy is made possible (that is, an examination of the prior conditions of
possibility) provides a more nuanced account of foreign policy formation than questions which
ask "why" (that is, why a particular decision or policy was pursued). She rightly argues that
"why" questions pre-suppose a discursive matrix, a mode of being and a background of social
practices. Furthermore, these "why" questions fail to account for "how these meanings,
subjects, and interpretative dispositions are constructed".66 However, in arguing for the
superiority of analyses of possibility conditions, she misses a crucial point and simplifies the
very nature of the "how" of foreign policy practice. Whilst it is important to analyse the
discursive conditions of possibility of policy formation, in failing to account for how various
discourses were employed and through what institutional mechanisms, how some discourses
gained ascendancy and not others, and how social actors intervene in hegemonic struggles to
maintain various discourses, Doty seriously compromises the critical potential of her analysis.
By working with a notion of power free from any institutional basis and rejecting a notion of
power that "social actors possess and use",67 she produces a narrative of foreign policy
whereby the differential role of social actors is erased from foreign policy processes and
decision making. For Doty it seems, power resides in discourses themselves and their endless
production of and play on meaning, not in the ability on the part of those who own and control
the means of social reproduction to manipulate dominant social and political discourses and
deploy them institutionally and strategically. The ability to analyse the use of discourses by
foreign policy elites for purposeful ends and their ability to deploy hegemonic discourses
within foreign policy processes is lost through a delinking of those elites and discursive
production (her "dispersed" notion of power). Furthermore, Doty assumes that the "kind of
power that works through social agents, a power that social actors posses and use" is
somehow in opposition to a "power that is productive of meanings, subject identities, their
interrelationships and a range of imaginable conduct". But these forms of power are not
mutually exclusive. Social agents can be both subject to discourse and act in instrumental
ways to effect discourse precisely through producing meanings and subject identities, and
delineating the range of policy options. Through her erasure of the link between foreign policy
processes and purposeful social agents, she ends up producing an account of hegemonic
foreign policy narratives free from any narrator.68 This is particularly problematic because the
power inherent within representational practices does not necessarily operate independently
from the power to deploy those representations. The power to represent, in turn, does not
operate independently from differential access to the principal conduits of discursive
production, sedimentation and transmission (for example, the news media).69 Thus, Doty's
account fails to provide an adequate analysis of the socially constructed interests that
constitute the discursive construction of reality. As Stuart Hall argues "there are centers that
operate directly on the formation and constitution of discourse. The media are in that business.
Political parties are in that business. When you set the terms in which the debate proceeds, that
is an exercise of symbolic power [which] circulates between constituted points of
condensation."70 The overall critical thrust of poststructurally inclined IR theorists is blunted
by both the refusal to examine or even acknowledge the limits and constraints on social
discourses and the denial of any linkage between identity representations and the interests
that may infuse these representations.
Must Be Policy Relevant
Debate should only include discussions that are policy relevant- their K self
maginalizes itself out of politics and is therefore useless
Joseph Nye, professor at Harvard University and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy
School. , BA suma cum laude Princeton, PhD Harvard, Former Chair National Intelligence
Council, Former Asst. Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, you know who he
is, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/04/12/AR2009041202260_pf.html 4-13-09
President Obama has appointed some distinguished academic economists and lawyers to his
administration, but few high-ranking political scientists have been named. In fact, the editors of
a recent poll of more than 2,700 international relations experts declared that "the walls
surrounding the ivory tower have never seemed so high." While important American scholars
such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski took high-level foreign policy positions in the
past, that path has tended to be a one-way street. Not many top-ranked scholars of
international relations are going into government, and even fewer return to contribute to
academic theory. The 2008 Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) poll, by the
Institute for Theory and Practice in International Relations, showed that of the 25 scholars rated
as producing the most interesting scholarship during the past five years, only three had ever
held policy positions (two in the U.S. government and one in the United Nations). The fault for
this growing gap lies not with the government but with the academics. Scholars are paying less
attention to questions about how their work relates to the policy world, and in many
departments a focus on policy can hurt one's career. Advancement comes faster for those who
develop mathematical models, new methodologies or theories expressed in jargon that is
unintelligible to policymakers. A survey of articles published over the lifetime of the American
Political Science Review found that about one in five dealt with policy prescription or criticism in
the first half of the century, while only a handful did so after 1967. Editor Lee Sigelman observed
in the journal's centennial issue that "if 'speaking truth to power' and contributing directly to
public dialogue about the merits and demerits of various courses of action were still
numbered among the functions of the profession, one would not have known it from leafing
through its leading journal." As citizens, academics might be considered to have an obligation
to help improve on policy ideas when they can. Moreover, such engagement can enhance and
enrich academic work, and thus the ability of academics to teach the next generation. As
former undersecretary of state David Newsom argued a decade ago, "the growing withdrawal
of university scholars behind curtains of theory and modeling would not have wider
significance if this trend did not raise questions regarding the preparation of new generations
and the future influence of the academic community on public and official perceptions of
international issues and events. Teachers plant seeds that shape the thinking of each new
generation; this is probably the academic world's most lasting contribution." Yet too often
scholars teach theory and methods that are relevant to other academics but not to the
majority of the students sitting in the classroom before them. Some academics say that while
the growing gap between theory and policy may have costs for policy, it has produced better
social science theory, and that this is more important than whether such scholarship is relevant.
Also, to some extent, the gap is an inevitable result of the growth and specialization of
knowledge. Few people can keep up with their subfields, much less all of social science. But the
danger is that academic theorizing will say more and more about less and less. Even when
academics supplement their usual trickle-down approach to policy by writing in journals,
newspapers or blogs, or by consulting for candidates or public officials, they face many
competitors for attention. More than 1,200 think tanks in the United States provide not only
ideas but also experts ready to comment or consult at a moment's notice. Some of these new
transmission belts serve as translators and additional outlets for academic ideas, but many add
a bias provided by their founders and funders. As a group, think tanks are heterogeneous in
scope, funding, ideology and location, but universities generally offer a more neutral
viewpoint. While pluralism of institutional pathways is good for democracy, the policy process
is diminished by the withdrawal of the academic community. The solutions must come via a
reappraisal within the academy itself. Departments should give greater weight to real-world
relevance and impact in hiring and promoting young scholars. Journals could place greater
weight on relevance in evaluating submissions. Studies of specific regions deserve more
attention. Universities could facilitate interest in the world by giving junior faculty members
greater incentives to participate in it. That should include greater toleration of unpopular
policy positions. One could multiply such useful suggestions, but young people should not hold
their breath waiting for them to be implemented. If anything, the trends in academic life seem
to be headed in the opposite direction.