Zsj Lab – Framework
Top Shelf
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Generic 1nc
A. Interpretation – The affirmative must advocate the resolution through an
instrumental defense of action by the United States federal government
Resolved requires a policy
Louisiana House 3-8-2005, http://house.louisiana.gov/house-glossary.htm
Resolution A legislative instrument that generally is used for making declarations, stating
policies, and making decisions where some other form is not required. A bill includes the
constitutionally required enacting clause; a resolution uses the term "resolved". Not subject
to a time limit for introduction nor to governor's veto. ( Const. Art. III, §17(B) and House Rules
8.11 , 13.1 , 6.8 , and 7.4)
United States federal government is only three branches
Black’s Law 90 (Dictionary, p. 695)
“[Government] In the U nited S tates, government consists of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in
addition to administrative agencies. In a broader sense, includes the federal government and all its agencies and bureaus, state and
county governments, and city and township governments.”
“Economic engagement” is limited to expanding economic ties
Çelik 11 – Arda Can Çelik, Master’s Degree in Politics and International Studies from Uppsala
University, Economic Sanctions and Engagement Policies, p. 11
Introduction
Economic engagement policies are strategic integration behaviour which involves with the target
state. Engagement policies differ from other tools in Economic Diplomacy. They target to
deepen the economic relations to create economic intersection, interconnectness, and mutual
dependence and finally seeks economic interdependence. This interdependence serves the sender stale to
change the political behaviour of target stale. However they cannot be counted as carrots or inducement tools, they focus on long
term strategic goals and they are not restricted with short term policy changes.(Kahler&Kastner,2006) They can be unconditional
and focus on creating greater economic benefits for both parties. Economic engagement targets to seek deeper economic linkages via
promoting institutionalized mutual trade thus mentioned interdependence creates two major concepts. Firstly it builds strong trade
partnership to avoid possible militarized and non militarized conflicts. Secondly it gives a leeway lo perceive the international
political atmosphere from the same and harmonized perspective. Kahler and Kastner define the engagement
policies as follows "It is a policy of deliberate expanding economic ties with and
adversary in order to change the behaviour of target state and improve bilateral relations
".(p523-abstact). It is an intentional economic strategy that expects bigger benefits such as long term economic gains and more
importantly; political gains. The main idea behind the engagement motivation is stated by Rosecrance (1977) in a way that " the
direct and positive linkage of interests of stales where a change in the position of one state affects the position of others in the same
direction.
B. Violation -- *fill in*
Vote Negative:
1. Predictability - The resolution proposes the question the negative is prepared to
answer – even if it’s good to talk about the 1AC, they have to prove that we could
have logically anticipated it – that’s key to Advocacy Skills because otherwise
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
affirmatives will never have to defend their position against well prepared
negative arguments.
That’s key to the aff – a predictable topic forces pre-round internal deliberation
which is the only way to convince people you’re right
Goodin and Niemeyer 03 (Robert and Simon, Australian National University, “When Does
Deliberation Begin? Internal Reflection versus Public Discussion in Deliberative Democracy”
Political Studies, Vol 50, p 627-649, WileyInterscience)
What happened in this particular case, as in any particular case, was in some respects peculiar
unto itself. The problem of the Bloomfield Track had been well known and much discussed in
the local community for a long time. Exaggerated claims and counter-claims had become
entrenched, and unreflective public opinion polarized around them. In this circumstance, the
effect of the information phase of deliberative processes was to brush away those highly
polarized attitudes, dispel the myths and symbolic posturing on both sides that had come to
dominate the debate, and liberate people to act upon their attitudes toward the protection of
rainforest itself. The key point, from the perspective of ‘democratic deliberation within’, is that
that happened in the earlier stages of deliberation – before the formal discussions
(‘deliberations’, in the discursive sense) of the jury process ever began. The simple process of
jurors seeing the site for themselves, focusing their minds on the issues and listening to what
experts had to say did virtually all the work in changing jurors’ attitudes. Talking among
themselves, as a jury, did very little of it. However, the same might happen in cases very
different from this one. Suppose that instead of highly polarized symbolic attitudes, what we
have at the outset is mass ignorance or mass apathy or non-attitudes. There again, people’s
engaging with the issue – focusing on it, acquiring information about it, thinking hard about it –
would be something that is likely to occur earlier rather than later in the deliberative process.
And more to our point, it is something that is most likely to occur within individuals themselves
or in informal interactions, well in advance of any formal, organized group discussion. There is
much in the large literature on attitudes and the mechanisms by which they change to support
that speculation.31 Consider, for example, the literature on ‘central’ versus ‘peripheral’ routes to
the formation of attitudes. Before deliberation, individuals may not have given the issue much
thought or bothered to engage in an extensive process of reflection.32 In such cases, positions
may be arrived at via peripheral routes, taking cognitive shortcuts or arriving at ‘top of the head’
conclusions or even simply following the lead of others believed to hold similar attitudes or
values (Lupia, 1994). These shorthand approaches involve the use of available cues such as
‘expertness’ or ‘attractiveness’ (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986) – not deliberation in the internalreflective sense we have described. Where peripheral shortcuts are employed, there may be
inconsistencies in logic and the formation of positions, based on partial information or
incomplete information processing. In contrast, ‘central’ routes to the development of attitudes
involve the application of more deliberate effort to the matter at hand, in a way that is more akin
to the internal-reflective deliberative ideal. Importantly for our thesis, there is nothing intrinsic
to the ‘central’ route that requires group deliberation. Research in this area stresses instead the
importance simply of ‘sufficient impetus’ for engaging in deliberation, such as when an
individual is stimulated by personal involvement in the issue.33 The same is true of ‘on-line’
versus ‘memory-based’ processes of attitude change.34 The suggestion here is that we lead our
ordinary lives largely on autopilot, doing routine things in routine ways without much thought
or reflection. When we come across something ‘new’, we update our routines – our ‘running’
beliefs and pro cedures, attitudes and evaluations – accordingly. But having updated, we then
drop the impetus for the update into deep-stored ‘memory’. A consequence of this procedure is
that, when asked in the ordinary course of events ‘what we believe’ or ‘what attitude we take’
toward something, we easily retrieve what we think but we cannot so easily retrieve the reasons
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
why. That more fully reasoned assessment – the sort of thing we have been calling internalreflective deliberation – requires us to call up reasons from stored memory rather than just
consulting our running on-line ‘summary judgments’. Crucially for our present discussion, once
again, what prompts that shift from online to more deeply reflective deliberation is not
necessarily interpersonal discussion. The impetus for fixing one’s attention on a topic, and
retrieving reasons from stored memory, might come from any of a number sources: group
discussion is only one. And again, even in the context of a group discussion, this shift from
‘online’ to ‘memory-based’ processing is likely to occur earlier rather than later in the process,
often before the formal discussion ever begins. All this is simply to say that, on a great many
models and in a great many different sorts of settings, it seems likely that elements of the prediscursive process are likely to prove crucial to the shaping and reshaping of people’s attitudes
in a citizens’ jury-style process. The initial processes of focusing attention on a topic, providing
information about it and inviting people to think hard about it is likely to provide a strong
impetus to internal-reflective deliberation, altering not just the information people have about
the issue but also the way people process that information and hence (perhaps) what they think
about the issue. What happens once people have shifted into this more internal-reflective mode
is, obviously, an open question. Maybe people would then come to an easy consensus, as they
did in their attitudes toward the Daintree rainforest.35 Or maybe people would come to
divergent conclusions; and they then may (or may not) be open to argument and counterargument, with talk actually changing minds. Our claim is not that group discussion will always
matter as little as it did in our citizens’ jury.36 Our claim is instead merely that the earliest steps
in the jury process – the sheer focusing of attention on the issue at hand and acquiring more
information about it, and the internal-reflective deliberation that that prompts – will invariably
matter more than deliberative democrats of a more discursive stripe would have us believe.
However much or little difference formal group discussions might make, on any given occasion,
the pre-discursive phases of the jury process will invariably have a considerable impact on
changing the way jurors approach an issue. From Citizens’ Juries to Ordinary Mass Politics? In a
citizens’ jury sort of setting, then, it seems that informal, pre-group deliberation – ‘deliberation
within’ – will inevitably do much of the work that deliberative democrats ordinarily want to
attribute to the more formal discursive processes. What are the preconditions for that
happening? To what extent, in that sense, can findings about citizens’ juries be extended to
other larger or less well-ordered deliberative settings? Even in citizens’ juries, deliberation will
work only if people are attentive, open and willing to change their minds as appropriate. So, too,
in mass politics. In citizens’ juries the need to participate (or the anticipation of
participating) in formally organized group discussions might be the ‘prompt’ that
evokes those attributes. But there might be many other possible ‘prompts’ that can be found
in less formally structured mass-political settings. Here are a few ways citizens’ juries (and all
cognate micro-deliberative processes)37 might be different from mass politics, and in which
lessons drawn from that experience might not therefore carry over to ordinary politics: • A
citizens’ jury concentrates people’s minds on a single issue. Ordinary politics involve many
issues at once. • A citizens’ jury is often supplied a background briefing that has been agreed by
all stakeholders (Smith and Wales, 2000, p. 58). In ordinary mass politics, there is rarely any
equivalent common ground on which debates are conducted. • A citizens’ jury separates the
process of acquiring information from that of discussing the issues. In ordinary mass politics,
those processes are invariably intertwined. • A citizens’ jury is provided with a set of experts.
They can be questioned, debated or discounted. But there is a strictly limited set of ‘competing
experts’ on the same subject. In ordinary mass politics, claims and sources of expertise often
seem virtually limitless, allowing for much greater ‘selective perception’. • Participating in
something called a ‘citizens’ jury’ evokes certain very particular norms: norms concerning the
‘impartiality’ appropriate to jurors; norms concerning the ‘common good’ orientation
appropriate to people in their capacity as citizens.38 There is a very different ethos at work in
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
ordinary mass politics, which are typically driven by flagrantly partisan appeals to sectional
interest (or utter disinterest and voter apathy). • In a citizens’ jury, we think and listen in
anticipation of the discussion phase, knowing that we soon will have to defend our
views in a discursive setting where they will be probed intensively.39 In ordinary
mass-political settings, there is no such incentive for paying attention. It is perfectly true that
citizens’ juries are ‘special’ in all those ways. But if being special in all those ways makes for a
better – more ‘reflective’, more ‘deliberative’ – political process, then those are design features
that we ought try to mimic as best we can in ordinary mass politics as well. There are various
ways that that might be done. Briefing books might be prepared by sponsors of American
presidential debates (the League of Women Voters, and such like) in consultation with the
stakeholders involved. Agreed panels of experts might be questioned on prime-time television.
Issues might be sequenced for debate and resolution, to avoid too much competition for people’s
time and attention. Variations on the Ackerman and Fishkin (2002) proposal for a ‘deliberation
day’ before every election might be generalized, with a day every few months being given over to
small meetings in local schools to discuss public issues. All that is pretty visionary, perhaps. And
(although it is clearly beyond the scope of the present paper to explore them in depth) there are
doubtless many other more-or-less visionary ways of introducing into real-world politics
analogues of the elements that induce citizens’ jurors to practice ‘democratic deliberation
within’, even before the jury discussion gets underway. Here, we have to content ourselves with
identifying those features that need to be replicated in real-world politics in order to achieve
that goal – and with the ‘possibility theorem’ that is established by the fact that (as sketched
immediately above) there is at least one possible way of doing that for each of those key features.
2. Switch Side Debate –Defending a topical affirmative is the only way to ensure
that teams must research and debate both sides of an argument and learn from
multiple perspectives about the topic. Forcing a rigid adherence to the topic
facilitates the advocacy of things you don’t necessarily believe in.
That’s key to critical thinking
Harrigan 8 (Casey, Associate Director of Debate at UGA, Master’s in Communications – Wake Forest U., “A Defense of Switch
Side Debate”, Master’s thesis at Wake Forest, Department of Communication, May, pp. 6-9)
Additionally, there are social benefits to the practice of requiring students to debate both sides of controversial issues. Dating back to
the Greek rhetorical tradition, great value has been placed on the benefit of testing each argument relative to all others in the
marketplace of ideas. Like those who argue on behalf of the efficiency-maximizing benefits of free market competition, it is believed
that arguments are most rigorously tested (and conceivably refined and improved) when
compared to all available alternatives. Even for beliefs that have seemingly been ingrained in
consensus opinion or in cases where the public at-large is unlikely to accept a particular position, it has been argued that
they should remain open for public discussion and deliberation (Mill, 1975). Along these lines, the
greatest benefit of switching sides, which goes to the heart of contemporary debate, is its
inducement of critical thinking. Defined as "reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on
deciding what to believe or do" (Ennis, 1987, p.10), critical thinking learned through debate teaches
students not just how advocate and argue, but how to decide as well. Each and every student, whether
in debate or (more likely) at some later point in life, will be placed in the position of the decision-maker. Faced
with competing options whose costs and benefits are initially unclear, critical thinking is necessary to assess all the
possible outcomes of each choice, compare their relative merits, and arrive at some final decision about
which is preferable. In some instances, such as choosing whether to eat Chinese or Indian food for dinner, the importance of
making the correct decision is minor. For many other decisions, however, the implications of choosing an imprudent course of
action are potentially grave. As Robert Crawford notes, there are "issues of unsurpassed important in the daily lives of millions upon
millions of people...being decided to a considerable extent by the power of public speaking" (2003). Although the days of the Cold
War are over, and the risk that "The next Pearl Harbor could be 'compounded by hydrogen" (Ehninger and Brockriede, 1978, p.3) is
greatly reduced, the manipulation of public support before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 points to the
continuing necessity of training a well-informed and critically-aware public (Zarefsky, 2007). In the
absence of debate-trained critical thinking, ignorant but ambitious politicians and persuasive
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
but nefarious leaders would be much more likely to draw the country, and possibly the world, into
conflicts with incalculable losses in terms of human well-being. Given the myriad threats of global
proportions that will require incisive solutions, including global warming, the spread of pandemic
diseases, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, cultivating a robust and effective
society of critical decision-makers is essential. As Louis Rene Beres writes, "with such learning, we Americans
could prepare...not as immobilized objects of false contentment, but as authentic citizens of an endangered
planet" (2003). Thus, it is not surprising that critical thinking has been called "the highest educational goal of the activity"
(Parcher, 1998). While arguing from conviction can foster limited critical thinking skills, the element of switching sides
is necessary to sharpen debate's critical edge and ensure that decisions are made in a reasoned
manner instead of being driven by ideology. Debaters trained in SSD are more likely to evaluate
both sides of an argument before arriving at a conclusion and are less likely to dismiss potential
arguments based on his or her prior beliefs (Muir 1993). In addition, debating both sides teaches
"conceptual flexibility," where decision-makers are more likely to reflect upon the beliefs that
are held before coming to a final opinion (Muir, 1993, p,290). Exposed to many arguments on each side of an issue,
debaters learn that public policy is characterized by extraordinary complexity that requires careful
consideration before action. Finally, these arguments are confirmed by preponderance of empirical
research demonstrating a link between competitive SSD and critical thinking (Allen, Berkowitz, Hunt
and Louden, 1999; Colbert, 2002, p.82).
3. Policymaking Education – debates about government policy are key to connect
theory and practice, regardless of whether we become policymakers
Esberg & Sagan 12 (Jane Esberg is special assistant to the director at New York
University's Center on International Cooperation. Scott Sagan is a professor of political science
and director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation “NEGOTIATING
NONPROLIFERATION: Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Nuclear Weapons Policy,” 2/17 The
Nonproliferation Review, 19:1, 95-108)
government or quasi-government think tank simulations often provide very similar lessons for high-level players as are
learned by students in educational simulations. Government participants learn about the
importance of understanding foreign perspectives, the need to practice internal coordination, and the necessity
to compromise and coordinate with other governments in negotiations and crises. During the Cold War, political scientist Robert Mandel noted how crisis
exercises and war games forced government officials to overcome ‘‘bureaucratic myopia,’’ moving beyond
their normal organizational roles and thinking more creatively about how others might react
in a crisis or conflict.6 The skills of imagination and the subsequent ability to predict foreign
interests and reactions remain critical for real-world foreign policy makers. For example, simulations
of the Iranian nuclear crisis*held in 2009 and 2010 at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center and at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, and involving former US senior officials
and regional experts*highlighted the dangers of misunderstanding foreign governments’
preferences and misinterpreting their subsequent behavior. In both simulations, the primary criticism of the US negotiating team
lay in a failure to predict accurately how other states, both allies and adversaries, would behave in response to
US policy initiatives.7 By university age, students often have a pre-defined view of
international affairs, and the literature on simulations in education has long emphasized how
such exercises force students to challenge their assumptions about how other
governments behave and how their own government works.8 Since simulations
became more common as a teaching tool in the late 1950s, educational literature has
expounded on their benefits, from encouraging engagement by breaking from the
typical lecture format, to improving communication skills, to promoting teamwork.9 More
broadly, simulations can deepen understanding by asking students to link fact and theory,
providing a context for facts while bringing theory into the realm of practice.10 These
These
exercises are particularly valuable in teaching international affairs for many of the same reasons they are useful for policy makers:
they force participants to ‘‘grapple with the issues arising from a world in flux.’’11
Simulations have been used successfully to teach students about such disparate topics as
European politics, the Kashmir crisis, and US response to the mass killings in Darfur.12 Role#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
playing exercises certainly encourage students to learn political and technical facts* but they
learn them in a more active style. Rather than sitting in a classroom and merely receiving knowledge, students
actively research ‘‘their’’ government’s positions and actively argue, brief, and
negotiate with others.13 Facts can change quickly; simulations teach students how to
contextualize and act on information.14
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Greatest Hits
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Cede the Political
The aff cedes power to right-wing crazy people
McClean 2001 – adjunct professor of philosophy at Molloy College in New York (David, presented at the 2001 conference of
the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, “The cultural left and the limits of social hope”, www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm)
Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist
critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of
others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their
narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness,
poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are
enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding
which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for
elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These
elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled
questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private
property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not
defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our
minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it,
"When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or
she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic
determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a
symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial
approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical
hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe
that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to
woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow
bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action."
Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left
that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members
fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than
some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as
equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the
Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And
Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous
for our social hopes, as I will explain.
Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's
social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our
country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and
Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the
American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread
of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos,
one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business
interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social
and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks
a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high
theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the
Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the
fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of
peoples?"
The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory
and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade
agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as
the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the
guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals
are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making
honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world
before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being
slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are
talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a
good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called
"managerial class."
We control external impacts – abandoning politics causes war, slavery, and
authoritarianism
Boggs, 97 (Carl Boggs, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, 1997,
“The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America,” Theory and
Society, Volume 26, Number 6, December, Springer)
The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges. Many ideological
currents scrutinized here—localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, post-modernism, Deep Ecology—intersect with and reinforce each other.
While these currents have deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s. Despite their
different outlooks and trajectories, they all share
one thing in common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to
combat and overcome alienation. [end page 773] The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is
accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social
change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent
problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go
unsolved—perhaps even unrecognized—only to fester more ominously into the future. And such problems (ecological
crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be
understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized markets, finance, and communications.
Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when
agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his
commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people
turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By
diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very
idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions.74 In the meantime, the fate of the world hangs in
the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling
and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide
the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that
corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that
gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people's lives. Far from it: the space
abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be
filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites—an already familiar dynamic in many lesser-developed countries. The
fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that
have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of
disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the
eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in
more virulent guise—or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the
state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had
vanished from civil society.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Lutz
Even if they win Limits are key – infinite political theories exist, artificial limits
are key
Lutz 2k (Donald S. Professor of Polisci at Houston, Political Theory and Partisan Politics p. 3940)
Aristotle notes in the Politics that political
theory simultaneously proceeds at three levels—discourse about the ideal,
about the best possible in the real world, and about existing political systems.4 Put another way, comprehensive political
theory must ask several different kinds of questions that are linked, yet distinguishable. In order to understand the interlocking set of
questions that political theory can ask, imagine
a continuum stretching from left to right. At the end, to the right, is an
ideal form of government, a perfectly wrought construct produced by the imagination. At the other end is the perfect
dystopia, the most perfectly wretched system that the human imagination can produce. Stretching between these two
extremes is an infinite set of possibilities, merging into one another, that describe the logical possibilities created by the
characteristics defining the end points. For example, a political system defined primarily by equality would have a perfectly
inegalitarian system described at the other end, and the possible states of being between them would vary primarily in the
extent to which they embodied equality. An ideal defined primarily by liberty would create a different set of possibilities between the
extremes. Of course, visions
of the ideal often are inevitably more complex than these single-value examples indicate, but it is
also true that in order to imagine an ideal state of affairs a kind of simplification is almost always required
since normal states of affairs invariably present themselves to human consciousness as complicated, opaque, and to a significant extent
indeterminate. A non-ironic reading of Plato's Republic leads one to conclude that the creation of these visions of the ideal characterizes
political philosophy. This is not the case. Any
person can generate a vision of the ideal. One job of political
philosophy is to ask the question "Is this ideal worth pursuing?" Before the question can be
pursued, however, the ideal state of affairs must be clarified, especially with respect to conceptual precision
and the logical relationship between the propositions that describe the ideal. This pre-theoretical
analysis raises the vision of the ideal from the mundane to a level where true philosophical analysis, and the
careful comparison with existing systems can proceed fruitfully . The process of pre-theoretical analysis, probably
because it works on clarifying ideas that most capture the human imagination, too often looks to some like the entire enterprise of political
philosophy.5 However, the value of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of the General Will, for example, lies not in its formal logical
implications, nor in its compelling hold on the imagination, but on the power and clarity it lends to an analysis and comparison of actual
political systems.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Joyner
Switch Side debate and policy simulation key to activism training
Joyner ‘99 – Professor of International Law in the Government Department at Georgetown University
(Christopher C., Spring, 199, 5 ILSA J Int'l & Comp L 377)
Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social sciences. Debates,
like other role-playing
simulations, help students understand different perspectives on a policy issue by adopting a perspective as
their own. But, unlike other simulation games, debates do not require that a student participate directly in order to realize the benefit of
the game. Instead of developing policy alternatives and experiencing the consequences of different choices in a
traditional role-playing game, debates present the alternatives and consequences in a formal, rhetorical
fashion before a judgmental audience. Having the class audience serve as jury helps each student develop a well-thought-out
opinion on the issue by providing contrasting facts and views and enabling audience members to pose challenges to each debating team.
These debates ask undergraduate students to examine the international legal implications of various United States foreign policy actions.
Their chief tasks are to assess the aims of the policy in question, determine their relevance to United States national interests, ascertain what
legal principles are involved, and conclude how the United States policy in question squares with relevant principles of international law.
Debate questions are formulated as resolutions, along the lines of: "Resolved: The United States should deny most-favored-nation status to
China on human rights grounds;" or "Resolved: The United States should resort to military force to ensure inspection of Iraq's possible
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities;" or "Resolved: The United States' invasion of Grenada in 1983 was a lawful use of
force;" or "Resolved: The United States should kill Saddam Hussein." In addressing both sides of these legal propositions, the
student debaters must consult the vast literature of international law, especially the nearly 100 professional law-schoolsponsored international law journals now being published in the United States. This literature furnishes an incredibly rich body of legal
analysis that often treats topics affecting United States foreign policy, as well as other more esoteric international legal subjects. Although
most of these journals are accessible in good law schools, they are largely unknown to the political science community specializing in
international relations, much less to the average undergraduate. By assessing the role of international law in United States foreign policymaking, students realize that United States actions do not always measure up to international legal expectations; that at times, international
legal strictures get compromised for the sake of perceived national interests, and that concepts and principles of international law, like
domestic law, can be interpreted and twisted in order to justify United States policy in various international circumstances. In this way, the
debate format gives students the benefits ascribed to simulations and other action learning techniques, in that
it makes them become actively engaged with their subjects, and not be mere passive consumers. Rather than
spectators, students become legal advocates, observing, reacting to, and structuring political and legal
perceptions to fit the merits of their case. The debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives.
First, students on each team must work together to refine a cogent argument that compellingly asserts their legal
position on a foreign policy issue confronting the United States. In this way, they gain greater insight into the
real-world legal dilemmas faced by policy makers. Second, as they work with other members of their team, they realize the
complexities of applying and implementing international law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States policy and
international legal principles, either by reworking the former or creatively reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates
forces students to become familiarized with contemporary issues on the United States foreign policy agenda
and the role that international law plays in formulating and executing these policies. 8 The debate thus becomes
an excellent vehicle for pushing students beyond stale arguments over principles into the real world of
policy analysis, political critique, and legal defense.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Roberts-Miller
Agonism is essential to critical thinking and preventing atrocity
Patricia Roberts-Miller 3 is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Texas
"Fighting Without Hatred:Hannah Ar endt ' s Agonistic Rhetoric" JAC 22.2 2003
Arendt is probably most famous for her analysis of totalitarianism (especially her The Origins of
Totalitarianism andEichmann in Jerusalem), but the recent attention has been on her criticism
of mass culture (The Human Condition). Arendt's main criticism of the current human
condition is that the common world of deliberate and joint action is fragmented into solipsistic
and unreflective behavior. In an especially lovely passage, she says that in mass society people
are all imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience, which does not cease to
be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times. The end of the common
world has come when it is seen only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in only
one perspective. (Human 58) What Arendt so beautifully describes is that isolation and
individualism are not corollaries, and may even be antithetical because obsession with one's
own self and the particularities of one's life prevents one from engaging in conscious, deliberate,
collective action. Individuality, unlike isolation, depends upon a collective with whom one
argues in order to direct the common life. Self-obsession, even (especially?) when coupled with
isolation from one' s community is far from apolitical; it has political consequences. Perhaps a
better way to put it is that it is political precisely because it aspires to be apolitical. This
fragmented world in which many people live simultaneously and even similarly but not exactly
together is what Arendt calls the "social." Arendt does not mean that group behavior is
impossible in the realm of the social, but that social behavior consists "in some way of isolated
individuals, incapable of solidarity or mutuality, who abdicate their human capacities and
responsibilities to a projected 'they' or 'it,' with disastrous consequences, both for other people
and eventually for themselves" (Pitkin 79). One can behave, butnot act. For someone like
Arendt, a German-assimilated Jew, one of the most frightening aspects of the Holocaust was the
ease with which a people who had not been extraordinarily anti-Semitic could be put to work
industriously and efficiently on the genocide of the Jews. And what was striking about the
perpetrators of the genocide, ranging from minor functionaries who facilitated the murder
transports up to major figures on trial at Nuremberg, was their constant and apparently sincere
insistence that they were not responsible. For Arendt, this was not a peculiarity of the German
people, but of the current human and heavily bureaucratic condition of twentieth-century
culture: we do not consciously choose to engage in life's activities; we drift into them, or we do
them out of a desire to conform. Even while we do them, we do not acknowledge an active,
willed choice to do them; instead, we attribute our behavior to necessity, and we perceive
ourselves as determined—determined by circumstance, by accident, by what "they" tell us to do.
We do something from within the anonymity of a mob that we would never do as an individual;
we do things for which we will not take responsibility. Yet, whether or not people acknowledge
responsibility for the consequences of their actions, those consequences exist. Refusing to accept
responsibility can even make those consequences worse, in that the people who enact the
actions in question, because they do not admit their own agency, cannot be persuaded to stop
those actions. They are simply doing their jobs. In a totalitarian system, however, everyone is
simply doing his or her job; there never seems to be anyone who can explain, defend, and
change the policies. Thus, it is, as Arendt says, rule by nobody. It is illustrative to contrast
Arendt's attitude toward discourse to Habermas'. While both are critical of modern bureaucratic
and totalitarian systems, Arendt's solution is the playful and competitive space of agonism; it is
not the rational-critical public sphere. The "actual content of political life" is "the joy and the
gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and
appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring
and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new" ("Truth" 263).
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
According to Seyla Benhabib, Arendt's public realm emphasizes the assumption of competition,
and it "represents that space of appearances in which moral and political greatness, heroism,
and preeminence are revealed, displayed, shared with others. This is a competitive space in
which one competes for recognition, precedence, and acclaim" (78). These qualities are
displayed, but not entirely for purposes of acclamation; they are not displays of one's self, but of
ideas and arguments, of one's thought. When Arendt discusses Socrates' thinking in public, she
emphasizes his performance: "He performed in the marketplace the way the flute-player
performed at a banquet. It is sheer performance, sheer activity"; nevertheless, it was thinking:
"What he actually did was to make public, in discourse, the thinking process" {Lectures 37).
Pitkin summarizes this point: "Arendt says that the heroism associated with politics is not the
mythical machismo of ancient Greece but something more like the existential leap into action
and public exposure" (175-76). Just as it is not machismo, although it does have considerable
ego involved, so it is not instrumental rationality; Arendt's discussion of the kinds of discourse
involved in public action include myths, stories, and personal narratives. Furthermore, the
competition is not ruthless; it does not imply a willingness to triumph at all costs. Instead, it
involves something like having such a passion for ideas and politics that one is willing to take
risks. One tries to articulate the best argument, propose the best policy, design the best laws,
make the best response. This is a risk in that one might lose; advancing an argument means that
one must be open to the criticisms others will make of it. The situation is agonistic not because
the participants manufacture or seek conflict, but because conflict is a necessary consequence of
difference. This attitude is reminiscent of Kenneth Burke, who did not try to find a language free
of domination but who instead theorized a way that the very tendency toward hierarchy in
language might be used against itself (for more on this argument, see Kastely). Similarly, Arendt
does not propose a public realm of neutral, rational beings who escape differences to live in the
discourse of universals; she envisions one of different people who argue with passion,
vehemence, and integrity. Continued… Eichmann perfectly exemplified what Arendt famously
called the "banality of evil" but that might be better thought of as the bureaucratization of evil
(or, as a friend once aptly put it, the evil of banality). That is, he was able to engage in mass
murder because he was able not to think about it, especially not from the perspective of the
victims, and he was able to exempt himself from personal responsibility by telling himself (and
anyone else who would listen) that he was just following orders. It was the bureaucratic system
that enabled him to do both. He was not exactly passive; he was, on the contrary, very aggressive
in trying to do his duty. He behaved with the "ruthless, competitive exploitation" and "inauthentic, self-disparaging conformism" that characterizes those who people totalitarian systems
(Pitkin 87). Arendt's theorizing of totalitarianism has been justly noted as one of her strongest
contributions to philosophy. She saw that a situation like Nazi Germany is different from the
conventional understanding of a tyranny. Pitkin writes, Totalitarianism cannot be understood,
like earlier forms of domination, as the ruthless exploitation of some people by others, whether
the motive be selfish calculation, irrational passion, or devotion to some cause. Understanding
totalitarianism's essential nature requires solving the central mystery of the holocaust—the
objectively useless and indeed dysfunctional, fanatical pursuit of a purely ideological policy, a
pointless process to which the people enacting it have fallen captive. (87) Totalitarianism is
closely connected to bureaucracy; it is oppression by rules, rather than by people who have
willfully chosen to establish certain rules. It is the triumph of the social. Critics (both friendly
and hostile) have paid considerable attention to Arendt's category of the "social," largely
because, despite spending so much time on the notion, Arendt remains vague on certain aspects
of it. Pitkin appropriately compares Arendt's concept of the social to the Blob, the type of
monster that figured in so many post-war horror movies. That Blob was "an evil monster from
outer space, entirely external to and separate from us [that] had fallen upon us intent on
debilitating, absorbing, and ultimately destroying us, gobbling up our distinct individuality and
turning us into robots that mechanically serve its purposes" (4). Pitkin is critical of this version
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
of the "social" and suggests that Arendt meant (or perhaps should have meant) something much
more complicated. The simplistic version of the social-as-Blob can itself be an instance of Blob
thinking; Pitkin's criticism is that Arendt talks at times as though the social comes from outside
of us and has fallen upon us, turning us into robots. Yet, Arendt's major criticism of the social is
that it involves seeing ourselves as victimized by something that comes from outside our own
behavior. I agree with Pitkin that Arendt's most powerful descriptions of the social (and the
other concepts similar to it, such as her discussion of totalitarianism, imperialism, Eichmann,
and parvenus) emphasize that these processes are not entirely out of our control but that they
happen to us when, and because, we keep refusing to make active choices. We create the social
through negligence. It is not the sort of force in a Sorcerer's Apprentice, which once let loose
cannot be stopped; on the contrary, it continues to exist because we structure our world to
reward social behavior. Pitkin writes, "From childhood on, in virtually all our institutions, we
reward euphemism, salesmanship, slogans, and we punish and suppress truth-telling,
originality, thoughtful-ness. So we continually cultivate ways of (not) thinking that induce the
social" (274). I want to emphasize this point, as it is important for thinking about criticisms of
some forms of the social construction of knowledge: denying our own agency is what enables the
social to thrive. To put it another way, theories of powerlessness are self-fulfilling prophecies.
Arendt grants that there are people who willed the Holocaust, but she insists that totalitarian
systems result not so much from the Hitlers or Stalins as from the bureaucrats who may or may
not agree with the established ideology but who enforce the rules for no stronger motive than a
desire to avoid trouble with their superiors (see Eichmann and Life). They do not think about
what they do. One might prevent such occurrences—or, at least, resist the modern tendency
toward totalitarianism—by thought: "critical thought is in principle anti-authoritarian"
(Lectures 38). By "thought" Arendt does not mean eremitic contemplation; in fact, she has great
contempt for what she calls "professional thinkers," refusing herself to become a philosopher or
to call her work philosophy. Young-Bruehl, Benhabib, and Pitkin have each said that Heidegger
represented just such a professional thinker for Arendt, and his embrace of Nazism epitomized
the genuine dangers such "thinking" can pose (see Arendt's "Heidegger"). "Thinking" is not
typified by the isolated contemplation of philosophers; it requires the arguments of others and
close attention to the truth. It is easy to overstate either part of that harmony. One must
consider carefully the arguments and viewpoints of others: Political thought is representative. I
form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to
my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of
representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and
hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as
though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority
but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people's
standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can
imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for
representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion. ("Truth" 241)
There are two points to emphasize in this wonderful passage. First, one does not get these
standpoints in one's mind through imagining them, but through listening to them; thus, good
thinking requires that one hear the arguments of other people. Hence, as Arendt says, "critical
thinking, while still a solitary business, does not cut itself off from' all others.'" Thinking is, in
this view, necessarily public discourse: critical thinking is possible "only where the standpoints
of all others are open to inspection" " (Lectures 43). Yet, it is not a discourse in which one
simply announces one's stance; participants are interlocutors and not just speakers; they must
listen. Unlike many current versions of public discourse, this view presumes that speech
matters. It is not asymmetric manipulation of others, nor merely an economic exchange; it must
be a world into which one enters and by which one might be changed. Second, passages like the
above make some readers think that Arendt puts too much faith in discourse and too little in
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
truth (see Habermas). But Arendt is no crude relativist; she believes in truth, and she believes
that there are facts that can be more or less distorted. She does not believe that reality is
constructed by discourse, or that truth is indistinguishable from falsehood. She insists tha^ the
truth has a different pull on us and, consequently, that it has a difficult place in the world of the
political. Facts are different from falsehood because, while they can be distorted or denied,
especially when they are inconvenient for the powerful, they also have a certain positive force
that falsehood lacks: "Truth, though powerless and always defe ated in a head-on clash with the
powers that be, possesses a strength of its own: whatever those in power may contrive, they are
unable to discover or invent a viable substitute for it. Persuasion and violence can destroy truth,
but they cannot replace it" ("Truth" 259). Facts have a strangely resilient quality partially
because a lie "tears, as it were, a hole in the fabric of factuality. As every historian knows, one
can spot a lie by noticing incongruities, holes, or the j unctures of patched-up places" ("Truth"
253). While she is sometimes discouraging about our ability to see the tears in the fabric, citing
the capacity of totalitarian governments to create the whole cloth (see "Truth" 252-54), she is
also sometimes optimistic. InEichmann in Jerusalem, she repeats the story of Anton Schmidt—a
man who saved the lives of Jews—and concludes that such stories cannot be silenced (230-32).
For facts to exert power in the common world, however, these stories must be told. Rational
truth (such as principles of mathematics) might be perceptible and demonstrable through
individual contemplation, but "factual truth, on the contrary, is always related to other people: it
concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses
and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even if it occurs
in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature" (23 8). Arendt is neither a positivist who posits
an autonomous individual who can correctly perceive truth, nor a relativist who positively
asserts the inherent relativism of all perception. Her description of how truth functions does not
fall anywhere in the three-part expeditio so prevalent in bothrhetoric and philosophy: it is not
expressivist, positivist, or social constructivist. Good thinking depends upon good public
argument, and good public argument depends upon access to facts: "Freedom of opinion is a
farce unless factual information is guaranteed" (238). The sort of thinking that Arendt
propounds takes the form of action only when it is public argument, and, as such, it is
particularly precious: "For if no other test but the experience of being active, no other measure
but the extent of sheer activity were to be applied to the various activities within the vita activa,
it might well be that thinking as such would surpass them all" (Human 325). Arendt insists that
it is "the same general rule— Do not contradict yourself (not your self but your thinking ego)—
that determines both thinking and acting" (Lectures 3 7). In place of the mildly resentful
conformism that fuels totalitarianism, Arendt proposes what Pitkin calls "a tough-minded,
open-eyed readiness to perceive and judge reality for oneself, in terms of concrete experience
and independent, critical theorizing" (274). The paradoxical nature of agonism (that it must
involve both individuality and commonality) makes it difficult to maintain, as the temptation is
great either to think one's own thoughts without reference to anyone else or to let others do
one's thinking. Arendt's Polemical Agonism As I said, agonism does have its advocates within
rhetoric—Burke, Ong, Sloane, Gage, and Jarratt, for instance—but while each of these theorists
proposes a form of conflictual argument, not one of these is as adversarial as Arendt's. Agonism
can emphasize persuasion, as does John Gage's textbook The Shape of Reason or William
Brandt et al.'s The Craft of Writing. That is, the goal of the argument is to identify the
disagreement and then construct a text that gains the assent of the audience. This is not the
same as what Gage (citing Thomas Conley) calls "asymmetrical theories of rhetoric": theories
that "presuppose an active speaker and a passive audience, a speaker whose rhetorical task is
therefore to do something to that audience" ("Reasoned" 6). Asymmetric rhetoric is not and
cannot be agonistic. Persuasive agonism still values conflict, disagreement, and equality among
interlocutors, but it has the goal of reaching agreement, as when Gage says that the process of
argument should enable one's reasons to be "understood and believed" by others (Shape 5;
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
emphasis added). Arendt's version is what one might call polemical agonism: it puts less
emphasis on gaining assent, and it is exemplified both in Arendt's own writing and in Donald
Lazere's "Ground Rules for Polemicists" and "Teaching the Political Conflicts." Both forms of
agonism (persuasive and polemical) require substantive debate at two points in a long and
recursive process. First, one engages in debate in order to invent one's argument; even silent
thinking is a "dialogue of myself with myself (Lectures 40). The difference between the two
approaches to agonism is clearest when one presents an argument to an audience assumed to be
an opposition. In persuasive agonism, one plays down conflict and moves through reasons to try
to persuade one's audience. In polemical agonism, however, one's intention is not necessarily to
prove one's case, but to make public one' s thought in order to test it. In this way,
communicability serves the same function in philosophy that replicability serves in the sciences;
it is how one tests the validity of one's thought. In persuasive agonism, success is achieved
through persuasion; in polemical agonism, success may be marked through the quality of
subsequent controversy. Arendt quotes from a letter Kant wrote on this point: You know that I
do not approach reasonable objections with the intention merely of refuting them, but that in
thinking them over I always weave them into my judgments, and afford them the opportunity of
overturning all my most cherished beliefs. I entertain the hope that by thus viewing my
judgments impartially from the standpoint of others some third view that will improve upon my
previous insight may be obtainable. {Lectures 42) Kant's use of "impartial" here is interesting:
he is not describing a stance that is free of all perspective; it is impartial only in the sense that it
is not his own view. This is the same way that Arendt uses the term; she does not advocate any
kind of positivistic rationality, but instead a "universal interdependence" ("Truth" 242). She
does not place the origin of the "disinterested pursuit of truth" in science, but at "the moment
when Homer chose to sing the deeds of the Trojans no less than those of the Achaeans, and to
praise the glory of Hector, the foe and the defeated man, no less than the glory of Achilles, the
hero of his kinfolk" ("Truth" 26263). It is useful to note that Arendt tends not to use the term
"universal," opting more often for "common," by which she means both what is shared and what
is ordinary, a usage that evades many of the problems associated with universalism while
preserving its virtues (for a brief butprovocative application of Arendt's notion of common, see
Hauser 100-03). In polemical agonism, there is a sense in which one' s main goal is not to
persuade one's readers; persuading one's readers, if this means that they fail to see errors and
flaws in one' s argument, might actually be a sort of failure. It means that one wishes to put
forward an argument that makes clear what one's stance is and why one holds it, but with the
intention of provoking critique and counterargument. Arendt describes Kant's "hope" for his
writings not that the number of people who agree with him would increase but "that the circle of
his examiners would gradually be enlarged" {Lectures 39); he wanted interlocutors, not acolytes.
This is not consensus-based argument, nor is it what is sometimes called "consociational
argument," nor is this argument as mediation or conflict resolution. Arendt (and her
commentators) use the term "fight," and they mean it. When Arendt describes the values that
are necessary in our world, she says, "They are a sense of honor, desire for fame and glory, the
spirit of fighting without hatred and 'without the spirit of revenge,' and indifference to material
advantages" {Crises 167). Pitkin summarizes Arendt's argument: "Free citizenship presupposes
the ability to fight— openly, seriously, with commitment, and about things that really matter—
without fanaticism, without seeking to exterminate one's opponents" (266). My point here is
two-fold: first, there is not a simple binary opposition between persuasive discourse and eristic
discourse, the conflictual versus the collaborative, or argument as opposed to debate. Second,
while polemical agonismrequires diversity among interlocutors, and thus seems an
extraordinarily appropriate notion, and while it may be a useful corrective to too much emphasis
on persuasion, it seems to me that polemical agonism could easily slide into the kind of
wrangling that is simply frustrating. Arendt does not describe just how one is to keep the conflict
useful. Although she rejects the notion that politics is "no more than a battlefield of partial,
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
conflicting interests, where nothing countfs] but pleasure and profit, partisanship, and the lust
for dominion," she does not say exactly how we are to know when we are engaging in the
existential leap of argument versus when we are lusting for dominion ("Truth" 263). Like other
proponents of agonism, Arendt argues that rhetoric does not lead individuals or communities to
ultimate Truth; it leads to decisions that will necessarily have to be reconsidered. Even Arendt,
who tends to express a greater faith than many agonists (such as Burke, Sloane, or Kastely) in
the ability of individuals to perceive truth, insists that self-deception is always a danger, so
public discourse is necessary as a form of testing (see especially Lectures and "Truth"). She
remarks that it is difficult to think beyond one's self-interest and that "nothing, indeed, is more
common, even among highly sophisticated people, than the blind obstinacy that becomes
manifest in lack of imagination and failure to judge" ("Truth" 242). Agonism demands that one
simultaneously trust and doubt one' s own perceptions, rely on one's own judgment and
consider the judgments of others, think for oneself and imagine how others think. The question
remains whether this is a kind of thought in which everyone can engage. Is the agonistic public
sphere (whether political, academic, or scientific) only available to the few? Benhabib puts this
criticism in the form of a question: "That is, is the 'recovery of the public space' under conditions
of modernity necessarily an elitist and antidemocratic project that can hardly be reconciled with
the demand for universal political emancipation and the universal extension of citizenship rights
that have accompanied modernity since the American and French Revolutions?" (75). This is an
especially troubling question not only because Arendt's examples of agonistic rhetoric are from
elitist cultures, but also because of comments she makes, such as this one from The Human
Condition: "As a living experience, thought has always been assumed, perhaps wrongly, to be
known only to the few. It may not be presumptuous to believe that these few have not become
fewer in our time" {Human 324). Yet, there are important positive political consequences of
agonism. Arendt' s own promotion of the agonistic sphere helps to explain how the system
could be actively moral. It is not an overstatement to say that a central theme in Arendt's work is
the evil of conformity—the fact that the modern bureaucratic state makes possible extraordinary
evil carried out by people who do not even have any ill will toward their victims. It does so by
"imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to 'normalize' its members, to make
them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement" (Human 40). It keeps
people from thinking, and it keeps them behaving. The agonistic model's celebration of
achievement and verbal skill undermines the political force of conformity, so it is a force against
the bureaucratizing of evil. If people think for themselves, they will resist dogma; if people think
of themselves as one of many, they will empathize; if people can do both, they will resist
totalitarianism. And if they talk about what they see, tell their stories, argue about their
perceptions, and listen to one another—that is, engage in rhetoric—then they are engaging in
antitotalitarian action. In post-Ramistic rhetoric, it is a convention to have a thesis, and one
might well wonder just what mine is—whether I am arguing for or against Arendt's agonism.
Arendt does not lay out a pedagogy for us to follow (although one might argue that, if she had, it
would lookmuch like the one Lazere describes in "Teaching"), so I am not claiming that greater
attention to Arendt would untangle various pedagogical problems that teachers of writing face.
Nor am I claiming that applying Arendt's views will resolve theoretical arguments that occupy
scholarly journals. I am saying, on the one hand, that Arendt's connection of argument and
thinking, as well as her perception that both serve to thwart totalitarianism, suggest that agonal
rhetoric (despite the current preference for collaborative rhetoric) is the best discourse for a
diverse and inclusive public sphere. On the other hand, Arendt's advocacy of agonal rhetoric is
troubling (and, given her own admiration for Kant, this may be intentional), especially in regard
to its potential elitism, masculinism, failure to describe just how to keep argument from
collapsing into wrangling, and apparently cheerful acceptance of hierarchy. Even with these
flaws, Arendt describes something we would do well to consider thoughtfully: a fact-based but
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
not positivist, communally grounded but not relativist, adversarial but not violent, independent
but not expressivist rhetoric.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Steinberg and Freeley
Clearly demarcated sides are key to productive decisions
Steinberg & Freeley 8 *Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on
criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, AND **David L. Steinberg , Lecturer of
Communication Studies @ U Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for
Reasoned Decision Making pp45Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict
of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is
no need for debate: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it
would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is
simply no controversy about this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is
no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate
cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or
questions to be answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad
topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact
of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do
they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not
speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring
undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to
our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights
as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and
businesses? I low are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to
maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification can!, or
enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely
you can think of
many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal
immigration. Participation in this "debate" is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is
not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and
identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively,
controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in unfocused
deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of
the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the
summer of 2007. Someone disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly
educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible
job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more
than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at
an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with."
Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to
express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for
their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding
points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise
question is posed—such as "What can be done to improve public education?"—then a more profitable area of
discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution
step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for
parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal government
should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a
school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for
debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points
of difference. To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making
by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be
clearly defined. If we merely talk about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global
warming" we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for
argument. For example, the statement "Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear argumentation. If we take
this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area:
the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose. Although we now have a general
subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized
argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website
development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context? What kind of physical force is being
compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be. "Would a mutual defense
treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain crisis?" The basis for argument
could be phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual
defense treatv with Laurania." Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better
solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative
interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over
competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be
very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus
on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
2nc
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Predictability
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Overview
Predictability - people lead their everyday lives without questioning their beliefs,
and the deliberative process of preparing to debate an argument is the best way to
change their minds and create social change – this is especially true in the context
of debate – without time to deliberate about the affirmative it will never be
persuasive because pre-round prep has to be dedicated to finding the flaws with
the aff – that’s Goodin and Niemeyer
Establishing stable limits is a pre-requisite
Shively 2000 (Ruth Lessl is assistant professor of political science at Texas A&M, “Political Theory and the Postmodern
Politics of Ambiguity,” Political Theory and Partisan Politics, Chapter 8, p181-183, Google Books)
This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest,
or the basic
accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is
in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest—that consen-sus kills debate. But this is
true only if the agreement is perfect—if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most
cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on
generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications , and so on. And this kind of
limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths;
therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence
by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is
true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray
1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not com-municating: if we cannot
agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts
as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate
it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks
euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience
simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints . Nor can one
demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless
if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and
debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an under-standing of the complaint
at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea
presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly
contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony. The point may seem
trite, as surely the ambiguists would agree that basic terms must be shared before they can be
resisted and problematized. In fact, they are often very candid about this seeming paradox in their approach: the
paradoxical or "parasitic" need of the subversive for an order to subvert. But admitting the paradox is not helpful if, as usually
happens here, its implications are ignored; or if the only implication drawn is that order or harmony is an unhappy fixture of human
life. For what the paradox should tell us is that some kinds of harmonies or orders are, in fact, good
for resistance; and some ought to be fully supported. As such, it should counsel against the kind of
careless rhetoric that lumps all orders or harmonies together as arbitrary and inhumane. Clearly
some basic accord about the terms of contest is a necessary ground for all further contest . It may be
that if the ambiguists wish to remain full-fledged ambiguists, they cannot admit to these implica-tions, for to open the door to some
agreements or reasons as good and some orders as helpful or necessary, is to open the door to some sort of rationalism. Perhaps they
might just continue to insist that this initial condition is ironic, but that the irony should not stand in the way of the real business of
subversion. Yet difficulties remain. For agreement is not simply the initial condition, but the continuing
ground, for contest. If we are to success-fully communicate our disagreements, we cannot simply
agree on basic terms and then proceed to debate without attention to further agree-ments. For
debate and contest are forms of dialogue: that is, they are activities premised on the building of
progressive agreements. Imagine, for instance, that two people are having an argument about the
issue of gun control. As noted earlier, in any argument, certain initial agreements will be needed just to begin the discussion.
At the very least, the two discussants must agree on basic terms: for example, they must have
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
some shared sense of what gun control is about; what is at issue in arguing about it; what facts
are being con-tested, and so on. They must also agree—and they do so simply by entering into
debate—that they will not use violence or threats in making their cases and that they are willing
to listen to, and to be persuaded by, good arguments. Such agreements are simply implicit in the
act of argumentation.5
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
AT: Impact Turn
Breaking down predictability is self-defeating and impossible---creativity
inevitably depends upon constraints, the attempt to wish away the structure of
predictability collapses the very structure their aff depends on---it’s better to
retain predictability and be creative within it
Armstrong 2K – Paul B. Armstrong, Professor of English and Dean of the College of Arts and
Sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Winter 2000, “The Politics of Play:
The Social Implications of Iser's Aesthetic Theory,” New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, p. 211223
Such a play-space also opposes the notion that the only alternative to the coerciveness of
consensus must be to advocate the sublime powers of rule-breaking. 8 Iser shares Lyotard's
concern that to privilege harmony and agreement in a world of heterogeneous language
games is to limit their play and to inhibit semantic innovation and the creation of new games.
Lyotard's endorsement of the "sublime"--the pursuit of the "unpresentable" by rebelling
against restrictions, defying norms, and smashing the limits of existing
paradigms--is undermined by contradictions, however, which Iser's explication of
play recognizes and addresses. The paradox of the unpresentable, as Lyotard
acknowledges, is that it can only be manifested through a game of representation.
The sublime is, consequently, in Iser's sense, an instance of doubling. If violating norms
creates new games, this crossing of boundaries depends on and carries in its
wake the conventions and structures it oversteps. The sublime may be
uncompromising, asocial, and unwilling to be bound by limits, but its pursuit of what is not
contained in any order or system makes it dependent on the forms it opposes. [End Page
220] The radical presumption of the sublime is not only terroristic in refusing to
recognize the claims of other games whose rules it declines to limit itself by. It is
also naive and self-destructive in its impossible imagining that it can do without the
others it opposes. As a structure of doubling, the sublime pursuit of the
unpresentable requires a play-space that includes other, less radical games with
which it can interact. Such conditions of exchange would be provided by the
nonconsensual reciprocity of Iserian play. Iser's notion of play offers a way of
conceptualizing power which acknowledges the necessity and force of
disciplinary constraints without seeing them as unequivocally coercive and
determining. The contradictory combination of restriction and openness in how
play deploys power is evident in Iser's analysis of "regulatory" and "aleatory" rules. Even
the regulatory rules, which set down the conditions participants submit to in order to play a
game, "permit a certain range of combinations while also establishing a code of
possible play. . . . Since these rules limit the text game without producing it, they
are regulatory but not prescriptive. They do no more than set the aleatory in motion, and the
aleatory rule differs from the regulatory in that it has no code of its own" (FI 273). Submitting
to the discipline of regulatory restrictions is both constraining and enabling because it makes
possible certain kinds of interaction that the rules cannot completely predict or prescribe in
advance. Hence the existence of aleatory rules that are not codified as part of the game itself
but are the variable customs, procedures, and practices for playing it. Expert facility with
aleatory rules marks the difference, for example, between someone who just knows
the rules of a game and another who really knows how to play it. Aleatory rules
are more flexible and open-ended and more susceptible to variation than regulatory rules,
but they too are characterized by a contradictory combination of constraint and
possibility, limitation and unpredictability, discipline and spontaneity.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Switch Side Debate
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Overview
Switch side debate is good – the topic of debate must be arguable – only this form
of debate fosters an environment where debaters can switch sides. This teaches
tolerance and condemns dogmatism and bigotry. Internal link turns their
exclusion arguments – only arguing one side promotes egotism and leads to
neglecting of other points of view. Switch side debate is the key internal link.
Finally, it’s the key internal link to critical thinking because it teaches us
conceptual flexibility and the practice of assessing outcomes. Critical thinking is
the most important portable skill because its applicable to any walk of life – that’s
Harrigan
They can criticize our form of debate on the neg, but on the aff they should
advocate for and adhere to the resolution in order to gain knowledge about the
other point of view.
Switching sides is key to effective truth-testing
Keller, et. al, 01 – Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago
(Thomas E., James K., and Tracly K., Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U.
of Chicago, professor of Social Work, and doctoral student School of Social Work, “Student
debates in policy courses: promoting policy practice skills and knowledge through active
learning,” Journal of Social Work Education, Spr/Summer 2001, EBSCOhost)
SOCIAL WORKERS HAVE a professional responsibility to shape social policy and legislation
(National Association of Social Workers, 1996). In recent decades, the concept of policy practice
has encouraged social workers to consider the ways in which their work can be advanced
through active participation in the policy arena (Jansson, 1984, 1994; Wyers, 1991). The
emergence of the policy practice framework has focused greater attention on the competencies
required for social workers to influence social policy and placed greater emphasis on preparing
social work students for policy intervention (Dear & Patti, 1981; Jansson, 1984, 1994; Mahaffey
& Hanks, 1982; McInnis-Dittrich, 1994). The curriculum standards of the Council on Social
Work Education (CSWE) require the teaching of knowledge and skills in the political process
(CSWE, 1994). With this formal expectation of policy education in schools of social work, the
best instructional methods must be employed to ensure students acquire the requisite policy
practice skills and perspectives. The authors believe that structured student debates have
great potential for promoting competence in policy practice and in-depth knowledge of
substantive topics relevant to social policy. Like other interactive assignments designed to more
closely resemble "real-world" activities, issue-oriented debates actively engage students in
course content. Debates also allow students to develop and exercise skills that may translate to
political activities, such as testifying before legislative committees. Finally, and perhaps most
importantly, debates may help to stimulate critical thinking by shaking students free from
established opinions and helping them to appreciate the complexities involved in
policy dilemmas. Relationships between Policy Practice Skills, Critical Thinking, and
Learning Policy practice encompasses social workers' "efforts to influence the development,
enactment, implementation, or assessment of social policies" (Jansson, 1994, p. 8). Effective
policy practice involves analytic activities, such as defining issues, gathering data, conducting
research, identifying and prioritizing policy options, and creating policy proposals (Jansson,
1994). It also involves persuasive activities intended to influence opinions and outcomes, such
as discussing and debating issues, organizing coalitions and task forces, and providing
testimony. According to Jansson (1984,pp. 57-58), social workers rely upon five fundamental
skills when pursuing policy practice activities: value-clarification skills for identifying and
assessing the underlying values inherent in policy positions; conceptual skills for identifying and
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
evaluating the relative merits of different policy options; interactional skills for interpreting the
values and positions of others and conveying one's own point of view in a convincing manner;
political skills for developing coalitions and developing effective strategies; and position-taking
skills for recommending, advocating, and defending a particular policy. These policy practice
skills reflect the hallmarks of critical thinking (see Brookfield, 1987; Gambrill, 1997). The central
activities of critical thinking are identifying and challenging underlying assumptions, exploring
alternative ways of thinking and acting, and arriving at commitments after a period of
questioning, analysis, and reflection (Brookfield, 1987). Significant parallels exist with the
policy-making process--identifying the values underlying policy choices, recognizing and
evaluating multiple alternatives, and taking a position and advocating for its adoption.
Developing policy practice skills seems to share much in common with developing capacities for
critical thinking. R.W. Paul (as cited in Gambrill, 1997) states that critical thinkers acknowledge
the imperative to argue from opposing points of view and to seek to identify weakness and
limitations in one's own position. Critical thinkers are aware that there are many legitimate
points of view, each of which (when thought through) may yield some level of insight. (p. 126)
John Dewey, the philosopher and educational reformer, suggested that the initial advance in the
development of reflective thought occurs in the transition from holding fixed, static ideas to
an attitude of doubt and questioning engendered by exposure to alternative views in
social discourse (Baker, 1955, pp. 36-40). Doubt, confusion, and conflict resulting from
discussion of diverse perspectives "force comparison, selection, and reformulation of ideas and
meanings" (Baker, 1955, p. 45). Subsequent educational theorists have contended that learning
requires openness to divergent ideas in combination with the ability to synthesize disparate
views into a purposeful resolution (Kolb, 1984; Perry, 1970). On the one hand, clinging to the
certainty of one's beliefs risks dogmatism, rigidity, and the inability to learn from new
experiences. On the other hand, if one's opinion is altered by every new experience, the result is
insecurity, paralysis, and the inability to take effective action. The educator's role is to help
students develop the capacity to incorporate new and sometimes conflicting ideas and
experiences into a coherent cognitive framework. Kolb suggests that, "if the education process
begins by bringing out the learner's beliefs and theories, examining and testing them, and then
integrating the new, more refined ideas in the person's belief systems, the learning process will
be facilitated" (p. 28). The authors believe that involving students in substantive debates
challenges them to learn and grow in the fashion described by Dewey and Kolb. Participation in
a debate stimulates clarification and critical evaluation of the evidence, logic, and values
underlying one's own policy position. In addition, to debate effectively students must
understand and accurately evaluate the opposing perspective. The ensuing tension
between two distinct but legitimate views is designed to yield a reevaluation and
reconstruction of knowledge and beliefs pertaining to the issue.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Policymaking Education
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Overview
Policymaking Education – policy simulations are a necessary supplement to
classroom education because they force students to critically analyze the ideas and
link them to practice. Regardless of whether any of us actually become
policymakers, policy simulation is the best way to reinforce our education. Prefer
our evidence – It comes from a professor at Stanford university and cites
educational studies – that’s Esberg and Sagan
Deliberation over political simulations are necessary to learn moral
decisionmaking
Hanghoj 8
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/
phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf Thorkild Hanghøj, Copenhagen, 2008
Since this PhD project began in 2004, the present author has been affiliated with DREAM
(Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials), which is located at the
Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark.
Research visits have taken place at the Centre for Learning, Knowledge, and Interactive
Technologies (L-KIT), the Institute of Education at the University of Bristol and the institute
formerly known as Learning Lab Denmark at the School of Education, University of Aarhus,
where I currently work as an assistant professor.
Joas’ re-interpretation of Dewey’s pragmatism as a “theory of situated creativity” raises a
critique of humans as purely rational agents that navigate instrumentally through meansendsschemes (Joas, 1996: 133f). This critique is particularly important when trying to understand
how games are enacted and validated within the realm of educational institutions that by
definition are inscribed in the great modernistic narrative of “progress” where nation states,
teachers and parents expect students to acquire specific skills and competencies (Popkewitz,
1998; cf. chapter 3). However, as Dewey argues, the actual doings of educational gaming
cannot be reduced to rational means-ends schemes. Instead, the situated interaction between
teachers, students, and learning resources are played out as contingent re-distributions of
means, ends and ends in view, which often make classroom contexts seem “messy” from an
outsider’s perspective (Barab & Squire, 2004). 4.2.3. Dramatic rehearsal The two preceding
sections discussed how Dewey views play as an imaginative activity of educational value, and
how his assumptions on creativity and playful actions represent a critique of rational means-end
schemes. For now, I will turn to Dewey’s concept of dramatic rehearsal, which assumes that
social actors deliberate by projecting and choosing between various scenarios for future
action. Dewey uses the concept dramatic rehearsal several times in his work but presents the
most extensive elaboration in Human Nature and Conduct: Deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal
(in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action… [It] is an experiment in
finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like (...) Thought runs ahead and
foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and
disaster. An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An act
tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable (Dewey, 1922: 132-3). This excerpt
illustrates how Dewey views the process of decision making (deliberation) through the lens of an
imaginative drama metaphor. Thus, decisions are made through the imaginative projection of
outcomes, where the “possible competing lines of action” are resolved through a
thought experiment. Moreover, Dewey’s compelling use of the drama metaphor also implies
that decisions cannot be reduced to utilitarian, rational or mechanical exercises, but that they
have emotional, creative and personal qualities as well. Interestingly, there are relatively few
discussions within the vast research literature on Dewey of his concept of dramatic rehearsal. A
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
notable exception is the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz, who praises Dewey’s concept as a
“fortunate image” for understanding everyday rationality (Schütz, 1943: 140). Other
attempts are primarily related to overall discussions on moral or ethical deliberation (Caspary,
1991, 2000, 2006; Fesmire, 1995, 2003; Rönssön, 2003; McVea, 2006). As Fesmire points out,
dramatic rehearsal is intended to describe an important phase of deliberation that does not
characterise the whole process of making moral decisions, which includes “duties and
contractual obligations, short and long-term consequences, traits of character to be affected, and
rights” (Fesmire, 2003: 70). Instead, dramatic rehearsal should be seen as the process of
“crystallizing possibilities and transforming them into directive hypotheses” (Fesmire, 2003:
70). Thus, deliberation can in no way guarantee that the response of a “thought experiment”
will be successful. But what it can do is make the process of choosing more intelligent than
would be the case with “blind” trial-and-error (Biesta, 2006: 8). The notion of dramatic
rehearsal provides a valuable perspective for understanding educational gaming as a
simultaneously real and imagined inquiry into domain-specific scenarios. Dewey defines
dramatic rehearsal as the capacity to stage and evaluate “acts”, which implies an “irrevocable”
difference between acts that are “tried out in imagination” and acts that are “overtly tried out”
with real-life consequences (Dewey, 1922: 132-3). This description shares obvious similarities
with games as they require participants to inquire into and resolve scenario-specific
problems (cf. chapter 2). On the other hand, there is also a striking difference between
moral deliberation and educational game activities in terms of the actual consequences that
follow particular actions. Thus, when it comes to educational games, acts are both imagined and
tried out, but without all the real-life consequences of the practices, knowledge forms and
outcomes that are being simulated in the game world. Simply put, there is a difference in
realism between the dramatic rehearsals of everyday life and in games, which only “play at” or
simulate the stakes and risks that characterise the “serious” nature of moral deliberation, i.e.
a real-life politician trying to win a parliamentary election experiences more personal and
emotional risk than students trying to win the election scenario of The Power Game. At the same
time, the lack of real-life consequences in educational games makes it possible to design a
relatively safe learning environment, where teachers can stage particular game scenarios to be
enacted and validated for educational purposes. In this sense, educational games are able to
provide a safe but meaningful way of letting teachers and students make mistakes (e.g. by giving
a poor political presentation) and dramatically rehearse particular “competing possible lines
of action” that are relevant to particular educational goals (Dewey, 1922: 132). Seen from this
pragmatist perspective, the educational value of games is not so much a question of learning
facts or giving the “right” answers, but more a question of exploring the contingent
outcomes and domain-specific processes of problem-based scenarios.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Topic Debate Good
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Economic Engagement
The world is at a crossroads of capitalism - Pragmatic discussions of economic
policy are uniquely important
Kolodko, 13 (Grzegorz Kolodko, Professor Grzegorz W. Kolodko is an intellectualist and
politician, a key architect of Polish reforms, and renowned expert on economic policy, “The New
Pragmatism and the Future of World Economy”, 1/25/23,
http://www.economonitor.com/blog/2013/01/the-new-pragmatism-and-the-future-of-worldeconomy/, rm)
The confrontation of two views of modern capitalism – neoliberal capitalism and state
capitalism - will determine the social market economy that forms the New Pragmatism in the
future. Even the International Monetary Fund, for many years the hub of economic orthodoxy,
admits that policy should be focused on increasing tax revenue, rather than on cutting budget
expenditure (at cost of socioeconomic inequality). How to reconcile the practical approach with
an approach which is fundamentally principled? Is it possible to practice economic pragmatism
and remain a man of principle? Is it worth it? It is, indeed, both possible and worthwhile. If we
want to live in a world of peace and harmonious development – and we certainly do – new
values must be introduced to the process of economic reproduction, however without
disregarding the requirements of pragmatism, which is a fundamental and indispensable
feature of rational economic management. We need to adopt a more pragmatic approach,
favoring multiculturalism and one emanating from a system of values that promote
participatory globalization, social cohesion and sustainable development. There is no
contradiction, as the core values underlying the social management process and its economic
purposes are concordant to a large extent. The most important aspect of the two approaches is a
balanced, long-term socio-economic development. Its equilibrium should be three-fold: (1)
sustainable economic growth, or growth associated with goods and capital markets, as well as
investment, finance and labor; (2) socially sustainable growth, or growth associated with a fair,
socially acceptable distribution of income and an appropriate participation of the main
population groups in basic public services; (3) environmentally sustainable growth, or growth
associated with maintaining adequate relations between our economic activity and nature.
Therefore, we do not have to sacrifice basic principles on the altar of short-term economic
matters or tactical issues but, instead, adapt practical strategic activities to these principles. This
imperative charts the evolutionary path for the political economy of the future.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Mexico
Pragmatic discussion of the US-Mexico relationship is essential to forming
coalitions and addressing political challenges
Acosta et al. 12 (Mariaclaire Acosta, “Policy Recommendations for U.S.-Mexico Relations”
Annenberg Retreat with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,
http://sunnylands.org/files/posts/159/stronger_f.pdf, 4/1/12, rm)
The U.S.-Mexico relationship is among the most important and complex bilateral relationships
in the world. The plethora of issues, actors, and stakeholders add political challenges to what at
times appear to be common sense, win-win solutions. Such complexity should not lead to
fatalism, but rather creative and intensive joint problem solving. Within the broad array of
voices that take interest in the relationship, there exists the potential for alliances and coalitions
powerful enough to overcome opposition and to achieve significant advances. Right now, during
the recovery from joint economic crises, cooperation to create jobs and strengthen the
competitiveness of regional manufacturers offers a tremendous opportunity and should be at
the center of the bilateral agenda. Prioritizing measures to enhance trade and reactivating the
alliance between the private sectors of the United States and Mexico could change the tone and
politics of the relationship. The security challenges faced by each country are real and
unavoidable. They should be prioritized, yet balanced with an agenda based on economic
opportunity and shared prosperity. The definition and implementation of new, more focused
security strategies designed to reduce violence and strengthen the rule of law, within a
framework of shared responsibility, may bring new energy and popular support to a difficult
ongoing issue. Political spaces may be opening for each nation to tackle what are in political
terms primarily domestic issues, despite their significant regional implications. The major
decline in illegal immigration and corresponding improvement in border security in the United
States presents a new starting point for discussions of comprehensive immigration reform.
Along similar lines, a burgeoning pragmatism toward the development of petroleum resources
in Mexico could change the parameters of the debate on energy reform. Progress in either
Mexico or the United States on these seemingly intractable issues could breathe new energy into
the bilateral relationship, and each side should seek to capitalize on any potential developments.
Partisan politics generally loom large in election years, and 2012 is no different for the United
States or Mexico. The truth is that there will be real political limitations on what the winner of
each election can do, but if there is a lesson from the history of U.S.-Mexico relations, it is that
an inclusive process of strategic planning can generate sound ideas and strengthen the political
will to seek real advances. This is precisely why the Wilson Center and The Annenberg Retreat at
Sunnylands came together: to stimulate this process. The ideas presented in this document are
based on the observation that Mexico, the United States, and the global context have all
undergone major transformations since the last time the two countries had simultaneous
election years in 2000.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Cuba
Not talking about Cuba causes a fortress mentality – which silences dissident
voices and censors political opinion
Starr 13 (Pamela K. Starr. “As Cuba Changes, U.S. Policy Does Not.” Dr. Pamela K. Starr is the
director of the U.S.-Mexico Network, a university fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy,
and an associate professor of teaching in the School of International Relations and in Public
Diplomacy. https://www.pacificcouncil.org/document.doc?id=539) NMehta
Finally, a discussion with Cubans about the Cuban economy and politics inevitably places U.S.
policy toward the island, and specifically the economic embargo, at center stage. We were
regularly reminded of the embargo’s role in limiting Cuba’s economic options and opportunities,
as well as its influence on Cuban politics. By signaling persisting U.S. hostility toward the
government, the embargo reinforces the regime’s “fortress mentality” and its associated bias
toward hyper-centralization and fear of dissident political voices. But if U.S. policy were such an
important obstacle to Cuba’s stated policy goals, one might have expected Cuba to focus on
convincing the U.S. government to lift the embargo. Instead, our hosts insisted that “Cuba has to
pretend that the United States doesn’t exist” (Alzugaray),and quoted Raúl Castro saying “Cuba
will change at the speed that is internally feasible, regardless of what the United States does,”
which makes perfect sense given what we learned about the bilateral relationship.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Venezuela
The US-Venezuela relationship is being reformed – now is a key point for
discussion
Negroponte, 13 (Diana Villiers Negroponte, “Hugo Chavez's Death an Opportunity for More
Pragmatic Relationship with U.S.” Brookings Institute, 3/5/13,
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2013/03/05-chavez-venezuela-negroponte,
rm)
The death of Hugo Chavez presents an opportunity for the new Venezuelan leadership to tone
down the rhetoric of anti-Americanism and put our bilateral relations on a pragmatic basis. The
U.S. remains the principal purchaser of Venezuelan oil which is refined in Gulf Coast refineries
for later export to China and other markets. Food and pharmaceutical products, cosmetics,
spare parts and electrical equipment are bought from the U.S. although payment for these goods
is delayed and consumers must wait 4 to 5 months for the new inventory to arrive at Venezuelan
ports. Venezuela is in the midst of an economic crisis with shortages of U.S. dollars, a
devaluation of 32 percent and the prospect of searing inflation. Furthermore, Venezuela needs
foreign direct investment, technical expertise and spare parts from the U.S. Rather than
demonizing Washington, an opportunity exists for Caracas to reframe the relationship to a
realistic mode.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Latin America
Education about Latin America is essential to create support for real economic
engagement
Hilsman, 12 (Hoyt Hilsman, Journalist, screenwriter, critic, former candidate for Congress,
“America's Missed Opportunities in Latin America”, Huffington Post,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hoyt-hilsman/latin-america-policy_b_1425868.html, 4/16/12,
rm)
President Obama's visit to the Summit of the Americas in Colombia underlines America's
failures to confront global and economic challenges as we focus inwardly on our own political
squabbles and endure partisan gridlock. It also demonstrates our blindness toward
developments around the world -- particularly in our own hemisphere -- as we squander
important opportunities to engage with some of the most dynamic economies and societies.
Most Americans still regard Latin America through the myopic lens of the past -- repressive
dictatorships, left-wing ideologues and drug cartels. In reality, Latin America is a diverse, rich
and rapidly growing collection of nations and peoples. Once burdened with uncontrollable debt,
most of Latin America has emerged from insolvency to impressive economic growth. Brazil, the
leading economic dynamo of Latin America, is now the sixth largest economy in the world and
number two in the hemisphere behind the United States. It has taken its place along with China,
India and other rapidly growing economies in aggressively diversifying its economy, with global
investments across the spectrum of industries and continents. No longer simply a major Latin
American power, Brazil is a global economic and political force. Other Latin American countries,
notably Colombia, Chile, Argentina and Peru, are shedding their difficult and often dark pasts to
emerge as regional economic powerhouses. A growing middle class throughout Latin America
has made it a vital market for a host of goods and services. Brazil, for example, has a GDP of
over $2 trillion, with imports of $182 billion annually. Despite difficult visa requirements and
long waits, 1.2 million Brazilians visit the U.S. each year, spending on average $5,000 per visit.
The center-left governments of Latin America, which replaced the right-wing (or left-wing)
dictatorships of the past, have steered a steady course of economic responsibility and political
moderation. These governments have been generally popular and have been able to achieve
political and economic reforms that had been impossible in the past. This, in turn, has led to
strong economic growth and wider participation in increasingly global markets. China, Russia
and other global economic powers have been aggressively participating in Latin American
growth -- investing in everything from factories and coal mines to banks and insurance
companies. Meanwhile, the United States remains largely sidelined in the economic and
diplomatic arena, even though it maintains strong security relations with Latin American
governments. Trade agreements -- like the one recently signed with Colombia -- have been
painfully slow to be completed. One problem -- in addition to the political stalemate in this
country -- is most Americans' outdated view of Latin America. Mexico, the one Latin
American country which has bucked the trend, slipping into violence, political dissension and
economic difficulty, seems to have an undue influence on Americans' perception of the Southern
hemisphere countries. In fact, Latin America has much more in common with quickly
developing countries in Asia than it does with Mexico. Certainly, Latin America is plagued with
many critical problems including economic inequality, drug trafficking and deficits in education
and infrastructure, but it has clearly emerged from a dark and sometimes dismal economic and
political past. Latin America presents enormous opportunities for the United States in terms of
economic and political cooperation, but we continue to squander these opportunities as we
squabble among ourselves over issues like immigration, drug policies and, most importantly,
our role in the global economy. As in other areas of the world, it is time for the United States to
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
wake up to reality and take constructive, cooperative action to promote our economic, political
and security interests in Latin America.
US policy in Latin America is dominated by militant tendencies that radicalize
resistance – a shift in posture to mutually beneficial economic relationship is
essential
Petras 10 (James Petras, former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, “U.S.Venezuelan Relations: Imperialism and Revolution”, dissident voice, 1/5/10,
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/u-s-venezuelan-relations-imperialism-and-revolution/, rm)
US-Latin America’s policy has failed to open a new relationship and certainly has deepened US
isolation. Obama has increased the degree of alienation and failed to recover hegemony. In large
part for the same reason that the Bush administration failed, Washington policymakers retain as
the “model”, Latin American submission to US supremacy during the “golden years” of the
1990’s. Undersecretary Arturo Valenzuela during his visit to Argentina revealed this reactionary
nostalgia when he recalled the “good times” during the Menem regime (1989-1999), a period of
pillage, plunder and monumental corruption, universally condemned. This gaffe provoked a
storm of protest and further soured Argentine-US relations beyond what existed under Bush.
Rising militarization under Obama as evidenced in the US-Colombia-Venezuela triangle is out of
sync with the Latin America’s big push for greater trade diversification, higher growth and
increased regional integration, including countries targeted by Obama. Chavez, despite his
defense spending, fits into the Latin American pattern, looking toward greater trade with
Argentina, Brazil, China, Iran while freezing trade relations with Colombia and attempting to
lower dependence on the US market. The Bush-Obama policy of confrontation and intimidation
to force a break between Latin America’s center-left and centrist governments and the “radicals”
has boomeranged, exacerbating conflicts across a series of diplomatic and economic issues. The
strategy of isolating Cuba and Venezuela has highlighted Washington’s lone vote on each
occasion. Washington’s resort to a military strategy reflects its global policy but one that is out of
tune with the changing priorities and political complexion of Latin regimes. As much as
anything, the Obama regimes’ military position reflects the decline of economic leverage, in
part a reflection of the primacy of finance over manufacturing, in part a result of the demise of
the empire-centered neo-liberal ideology which greased the wheels of US hegemony. It is clear
that Washington has failed to recognize that the restoration of the type of client regimes of the
previous decade is a highly dubious proposition; efforts to that effect are likely to provoke
greater regime and mass rejection of any overtures to ‘new relations’. Washington’s double
discourse of “free trade for your markets” and “protectionism for ours” does not fly. Brazil under
Lula, a staunch free marketer has said as much in the face of US tariffs on ethanol and other
competitive exports. What is striking about US-Latin American relations is that the
deterioration occurs at a time when the so-called center-left regimes have embraced capitalism,
foreign investment, moderate regulations on capital flows, co-opted radical social movements
and trade unions, retained the bulk of the dubious privatizations and the agro-mineral export
model. That the US and particular the Obama regime have failed to build a new positive
relationship in these eminently democratic capitalist circumstances can only be attributed to its
extremism, its deep-going commitment to military driven empire building. Even in the
case of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador, joint economic ventures with foreign capital
continue to thrive; the private sector still controls the mass media, banking, agriculture,
commerce and transport. Positive investment and trade relations thrive with other economic
blocs including the EU and the emerging dynamic capitalist countries of China, South Africa,
Russia as well as the Middle East. Chavez’ rejection of US military policies and interventionism
has solid popular backing and is supported by polls in the EU and even in the US. If Washington
proceeds toward a proxy war with Venezuela using Honduras as a dress rehearsal, (in addition
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
to its overstretch today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen) can it win a prolonged
offensive war? A highly dubious proposition. More likely it will re-radicalize the continent and
certainly turn Venezuela toward socialization of the economy and deepen its ties to radical social
movements elsewhere. As it stands today, Venezuela eschews ties to radical social movements,
favoring ties with social liberal and even conservative regimes willing to sign trade and
investment treaties and friendly diplomatic relations.
Pragmatic, economic policies are the best policies for Latin America – all else are
leftist whims
Carstens 06 (Agustín Carstens. Transcript of “Opening Remarks by Agustín Carstens.” Agustín
Guillermo Carstens Carstens is a Mexican economist who has served as Governor of the Bank of
Mexico since 1 January 2010. http://www.imf.org/external/np/tr/2006/tr060523.htm)
NMehta
The economic challenges that Latin America faces are well known. The region needs higher and
more sustained growth than it has experienced in recent decades, and growth needs to be more
inclusive. It needs to bring about greater reductions in poverty and inequality than have
happened in the past. Javier offers hope that some changes may be underway that would help
the region meet these challenges. He notes that we may be witnessing in much of Latin America
the emergence of the `politics or pragmatism'. I like this phrase very much. I think it is a very
fortunate phase. It refers to a politics that, and here I am quoting from the book, "is more
concerned with effective outcomes than with conceptual purity." The real challenge is:
how do you get it going, how can you really bring about the political consensus to make this
`politics of pragmatism' really work out. But I think this is a very close description of what is
going on and more of such politics would be quite fruitful in the region. Growth in the past has
suffered from policy reversals. Economic policies in the region have too often swung between
extremes driven by the political whims of the party or person in power. It would be a welcome
development if policies are chosen on the basis of evidence of what has worked. This ensures
broad continuity in policies and sets a basis for sustained growth. To me, the clearest evidence of
such a shift in attitudes is in the conduct of macroeconomic policies, particularly monetary
policies.
Engagement with Latin America facilitates reforms in the U.S
Schultz 2013 [Kylie, reporter for The International, “The Rocky U.S.-Venezuela Relationship: What Both Countries Could
Learn” March 17, The International, http://www.theinternational.org/articles/370-the-rocky-us-venezuela-relationship-wh]
The aforementioned 2012 report from The
Inter-American Dialogue on remaking U.S. and Latin American
relations states that the longer relations are stagnant, “the harder it will be to reverse course and
rebuild vigorous cooperation.” The United States has lost standing with Latin American countries who
see political gridlock, poor immigration policies, and substantial inequality and wealth disparity
in the United States as undermining its “capacity to propose and carry out strategies to deal with
the issues that most concern” Latin America. The United States has long been accused of putting Latin
American relations on the backburner which has led many Latin American countries to remain
economically connected with the United States, but politically detached. The Inter-American dialogue report
highlights the fact that the United States must be flexible, innovative and sensitive to different definitions of democratic ideals to
reshape regional institutions and “better align them with current realities and challenges to make them
more effective.” The United States has also seen a sharp increase in poverty, and as current discussions over the
national budget consider cutting social programs like welfare, medicaid and social security, the government needs to
consider the success of social programs throughout Latin America and Venezuela which have vastly
decreased those nations’ poverty levels, lowered infant mortality and unemployment, increased
literacy and availability of education, and increased living standards.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
US pragmatic engagement with Latin America checks radical populism
Daremblum 06 (Jaime Daremblum. December 13, 2006. “A Pragmatic Left in Latin America”.
The Washington Post. Ambassador Jaime Daremblum is a scholar of Latin America,
international politics, and international economics. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/12/12/AR2006121201112.html) NMehta
We have reached a stage in Inter-American relations where the U.S. should apply more finesse
when dealing with the new pragmatic left of the region. More engagement, more cooperation
and more support to Latin American programs for the poor such as education and health care,
and a minimum of lecturing and posturing, will make radical populism less tempting for the two
newly elected leaders.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Answers
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Limits Bad
Refusing limits is totalitarian – endless criticism will crowd out diversity and
radical change
Feldman, Assoc Prof Management Policy – Case Western U, ‘98
(Steven P, “Playing with the Pieces: Deconstruction and the Loss of Moral Culture,” Journal of
Management Studies Vol. 35 Iss. 1, p. 59-79)
Cultural authority imposes upon its members the awesome dichotomy between a meaningful
and a meaningless life (Rieff, 1987). Postmodernists, in scorning cultural authority, are
opposing the dynamics of culture. Culture opposes the primacy of possibility -- that is, the
ability of man/woman to express everything and therefore nothing. Culture acts through
authority to narrow possible meanings. Narrowing meaning is the dynamic of culture. Without
this dynamic, culture cannot exist. This is not totalitarian oppression. Totalitarianism operates
to destroy meaning in order to annihilate even the possibility of principled resistance. That is
what is totalizing about totalitarianism (Arendt, 1950).
Authority, on the contrary, is always given, or it is fraudulent (Rieff, 1985). Authority is given
not because people are dupes, tricked into controlling themselves for some systemic conspiracy,
but because through the hierarchical ordering of culture they find their way to purposeful
behaviour (Durkheim, [1925] 1973) and a feeling of self-respect that makes life meaningful and
worthwhile (Cooley, 1922; Rieff, 1985; Sullivan, 1950).
Authority, then, is essential to culture. It protects social life from the primacy of possibility that
surrounds every culture. Possibility is the opposite of cultural authority. Cultural diversity
cannot be an unlimited goal; its limitation is the central problem of culture (Plato, 1968). No
culture can tolerate unlimited diversity without being destroyed. Diversity can only exist inside a
culture as a limited range of possibility. Without this 'imaginary wall', individual and social
purpose is impossible (Durkheim, [1925] 1973). Deprivation must be the first and final function
of culture. Likewise, a culture composed of continuous criticism cannot possibly carry out its
meaning--defining function. To exist, culture must in some respects remain beyond criticism.
The notion of being beyond criticism is unthinkable to the modern mind, with its depthless
distrust of authority. This is why faith is not even conceived of as a possibility in the modern-postmodern debate between realism and relativism. The repression of faith evidences not only
the endless transitional condition of modern social life, but precisely the fallacy of postmodern
'openness'. Complete openness, like complete individuality, is impossible.
Postmodernism is, ironically, an example of cultural repression. To be meaningful, culture must
repress what it is not. Postmodernism must repress the idea of faith, because the mere idea of
being beyond doubt is contradictory to the postmodern vision of cultural openness. This is why
the postmodern discussion stops at belief: belief can be doubted, faith cannot. Herein lies the
problem of management ethics. Without a collective capacity for enduring commitment,
management ethics becomes vulnerable to the endless rationalizations of the critical intellect.
Parker's (1995b) ambivalent search for truth (faith) was intolerable to the critical intellects of his
colleagues. Where Parker sought truth, they could only feel/see power: '[W]here, oh where, is
some recognition of the role of power?' (Carter, 1995, p. 574). Power is to criticism what truth is
to faith. Only truth can stabilize a management ethics.
The assumption that limiting is always bad destroys their ability to create change
Feldman, Assoc Prof Management Policy – Case Western U, ‘98
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
(Steven P, “Playing with the Pieces: Deconstruction and the Loss of Moral Culture,” Journal of
Management Studies Vol. 35 Iss. 1, p. 59-79)
Language thus becomes the key villain in an implicit, undemocratic plot hidden deep within
organizational culture. Potential voices have been repressed, and the repression is not even
recognized. Cooper (1989,p. 483) refers to this use of language by the cultural process as a
'mystification' carried out by a 'violent hierarchy'. The 'violent hierarchy' has little to do with top
management; it is the repressiveness of language that silences potential voices in organizations.
Cooper (1989) follows Derrida in a wish to 'overturn' this hierarchy.
I will make four points concerning the process of deconstruction. First, Cooper's belief that
organization always harbours its opposite, disorganization, within itself is misleading. The idea
of antithetical meanings being active in words is Freud's (1957). The crucial concept here is
repression. Derrida's removal of the process of repression from social reality and positing it
solely in language is indeed questionable. Language takes on a life of its own independent of the
people who use it. This reification of language loses the driving force of repression in the
Freudian sense, that is, the socialization process by which the individual is narrowed into a
member of a culture. As John O'Neill (1988) points out, in this view language never has a local
value. But this is exactly what language does have in everyday life. This can be clearly seen in the
use of deconstruction in the field of organization theory. Joanne Martin (1990), for example,
uses a single paragraph from a speech to make far-ranging assertions about the suppression of
feminism in an organization and organizations in general without any attempt to demonstrate
the assertions empirically. Deconstruction thus licenses generalization independent of empirical
evidence, making it impossible to evaluate the logic and coherence of the argument.
Second, Cooper's view that the will to organize originates in an inherent ambivalence in
language is reductionistic. Clearly, as Gellner (1979) states, social reality is complex and there
are many factors that lead to organizational activities. Postmodernism's reification of language
ignores, for example, the influences of economic scarcity, geographical conditions, and
demographic influences. Even some animal groups organize for hunting and/or safety. Certainly
they are not motivated by existential ambivalences in language.
Third, Stephen Linstead does not ask the question why semantic closure is needed as a 'heuristic
device' in human life. If he did, he would realize that communities as well as organizations
require the 'inertial force' of tradition to hold together in a given form over time (Shils, 1981, p.
25). Without this force, trust and depth of experience would become difficult to say the least. In
any case, Linstead's acceptance of semantic closure for learning but rejection of it as a way of life
is contradictory, because learning assumes a way of fife. Thus, here too, the presumption of a
world of openness cannot be a world at all.
Fourth, Cooper's characterization of cultural authority as a 'violent hierarchy' is obviously a
condemnation of authority. The condemnation is based on the assumption that language is
'undecidable' and thus any hierarchy is repressive. Repression is seen unfavourably because
some meanings are 'privileged' while others are denied expression. This argument is misleading
because without repression, no meaning is possible. Linstead (1993b, p. 111), for example, wants
to reconceptualize the oppositional nature of culture as a 'mutually supportive pivotal point
around which meaning turns'. This will perhaps have no detrimental effect on organizations,
since its practical absurdity will be ignored by everyone 'except academics. In the area of
business ethics, however, Linstead and Grafton-Small's (1992,p. 341) goal of reconceptualizing
cultural opposition as 'cohabitation', 'joining', and 'both/and' is more dangerous because it
attacks precisely the dividing line between right and wrong. It is an attack on moral authority
and the capacity of organizations to define and enforce moral limits. Limits exist not
fundamentally to oppress the weak, but to define the good. Deconstructionists, by pushing the
democratization of meaning to the extreme because of their inability to distinguish between
power and authority, forget the lesson of the French Revolution: democracy requires limits, too.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
This can also be seen in collegial organization, which, without a moral consensus, can easily
break down to destructive levels of envy and self-interest (Hirschhorn, 1993).
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Roleplaying Bad
No link – we don’t think pretending to be the state is good, just that the USFG
provides a predictable and balanced forum to learn decisionmaking skills and
develop clash.
Debating over hypothetical government issues is a form of active praxis which can
create social change
Susan D. Carle, Dec. 2005, “Theorizing Agency,” 55 Am. U.L. Rev. 307, p ln
Precisely because he believed in the power of human agency, Dewey devoted a great deal of his
writing to developing prescriptions for change in response to the issues of his times. It is worth
quickly surveying some of those prescriptions here because they help illuminate the relationship
between Dewey's theory of the self and his [*361] overall philosophic system. Dewey's
deliberative theory ties elegantly into his theory of democracy, which in turn displays an
ascetically pleasing "fit" 274 with his pedagogical vision. Dewey's political theory is a large
topic, to which he devoted much writing but to which I can give only passing attention. Suffice it
to say that Dewey passionately believed in the virtues of democracy; indeed, Dewey scholars
have described democracy as Dewey's deepest preoccupation - the underlying passion that
motivated him in his prolific output. 275 Unlike philosophers such as John Rawls, however,
Dewey uncoupled democracy from the institutions of Western capitalism, and was intensely
critical of capitalism as he saw it developing in his lifetime. To Dewey, capitalism spelled
economic inequality, which was anathema to his vision of democracy based in local deliberative
processes. 276 Dewey saw education as the process through which children would acquire the
habits that would allow them to become members of a democracy, well equipped for the kind of
reflective thought and deliberation that democracy required. 277 Thus, education was for Dewey
a fundamental method of social progress and reform. 278 For this reason, Dewey, unlike most
modern philosophers, gave pedagogy a central place in his philosophy. Dewey saw education as
the scientific laboratory in which the ideas of pragmatism would be put to the test of experience.
279 To Dewey, the ability to engage in good [*362] deliberative judgment - to exercise clear
foresight on ethical as well as instrumental matters - was a habit that could and should be
cultivated through education. Thus Dewey thought that education should not be a "succession of
studies but the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience." 280
No relativist on matters concerning his own place and time, Dewey denounced the "inert stupid
quality of current customs," which "perverts learning into a willingness to follow where others
point the way, into conformity, constriction, surrender of scepticism and experiment." 281 In
lieu of teaching to new generations habits that represent such "enslavement to old ruts," 282
Dewey wanted to inculcate better habits - "flexible, sensitive" ones that could grow "more varied,
more adaptable by practice and use." 283 These, in turn, were the habits Dewey identified as
necessary for democracy to succeed. Here, the contrasts with Stanley Fish are stark. Fish, as we
have seen, argues that teaching methods of critical analysis to students does not change practice
outside the classroom. 284 Practice in the world outside the classroom and the doing of theory
proceed on two unrelated planes. Dewey, conversely, repudiated the separation of theory and
practice as a false dualism, arguing that those who espouse theory for theory's sake are in fact
espousing "two kinds of practice." 285 Moreover, he argued, "those who wish a monopoly of
social power find desirable the separation of habit and thought" because this "dualism enables
them to do the thinking and planning, while others remain the docile ... instruments of
execution." 286 Thus, for Dewey, theory was a form of practice in the world that had great
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
potential to fuel political and social change, and the decision to do and teach theory as a
practice separate from political and social issues was a political decision with particular
normative [*363] consequences - namely, the promotion of political disengagement and
apathy. 287
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Rules Bad
An activity without rules is un-navigable – certain limits are necessary to foster
creativity
Hatab 02, 2002 (Lawrence J., professor of philosophy at Old Dominion University, “Prospects
for a democratic Agon,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24)
Those who read Nietzsche as resisting "normalization" and "discipline" (this includes most
postmodern readings and Appel's as well 13 ), are not on very firm ground either. For one
thing, Nietzschean creative freedom is selective and most people should be ruled by
normative orders, because universal unrestricted freedom would cause havoc. 14
Moreover, even selective creative freedom is not an abandonment of order and
constraint. Creativity breaks free of existing structures, but only to establish new ones.
Shaping new forms requires formative powers prepared by disciplined skills
and activated by refined instruments of production. Accordingly, creativity is a
kind of "dancing in chains" (WS 140). 15 Creative freedom, then, is not an abandonment
of constraint, but a disruption of structure that still needs structure to prepare and execute
departures from the norm. Those who take Nietzsche to be diagnosing social institutions as
descendants of slave morality should take note of GM II,11, where Nietzsche offers some
interesting reflections on justice and law. He indicates that the global economy of nature is
surely not a function of justice; yet workable conceptions of justice and injustice are
established by the historical force of human law. Nietzsche does not indict such forces as
slavish infirmities. Legal arrangements are "exceptional conditions" that modulate natural
forces of power in [End Page 136] social directions, and that are not an elimination of
conflict but an instrument in channeling the continuing conflict of different power
complexes. Surprisingly, Nietzsche attributes the historical emergence of law not to reactive
resentment but to active, worldly forces that check and redirect the "senseless raging of
revenge," and that are able to reconfigure offenses as more "impersonal" violations of legal
provisions rather than sheer personal injuries. Here Nietzsche analyzes the law in a way
analogous to his account of the Greek agon and its healthy sublimation of natural impulses
for destruction. A legal system is a life-promoting cultural force that refashions natural
energies in less savage and more productive directions.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Aff is good education
You can still run your arguments in our framework – they just have to be tied to
the plan, not an external ethic.
Lack of predictability and forced theory debates mean we won’t actually debate
about your aff.
Fairness outweighs – our limits arguments prove their critique is irrelevant if we
could never win a debate.
Debating both sides of a social issue stimulates critical thinking and helps students
understand the complexities of policy dilemmas – this is critical to check
dogmatism.
Also, policy education is good – key to research and educational advantages. This
causes students to become advocates for change – not spectators.
Debates are necessary to prevent global atrocity – “awareness” is NOT enough
Beres 2003 (professor of international law @ Purdue University, ’03; Louis Rene, Journal and Courier,
June 5 ln)
For us, other rude awakenings are unavoidable, some of which could easily overshadow the horrors of Sept. 11. There can be little doubt that,
within a few short years, expanding tribalism will produce several new genocides and proliferating nuclear
weapons will generate one or more regional nuclear wars. Paralyzed by fear and restrained by impotence, various
governments will try, desperately, to deflect our attention, but it will be a vain effort. Caught up in a vast chaos from which no
real escape is possible, we will learn too late that there is no durable safety in arms, no ultimate rescue by authority, no genuine remedy in science
or technology. What shall we do? For a start, we must all begin to look carefully behind the news . Rejecting superficial
analyses of day-to-day events in favor of penetrating assessments of world affairs, we must learn quickly to
distinguish what is truly important from what is merely entertainment. With such learning, we Americans could
prepare for growing worldwide anarchy not as immobilized objects of false contentment, but as authentic citizens of
an endangered planet. Nowhere is it written that we people of Earth are forever, that humankind must thwart the long-prevailing trend
among all planetary life-forms (more than 99 percent) of ending in extinction. Aware of this, we may yet survive, at least for a while, but only if
our collective suppression of purposeful fear is augmented by a complementary wisdom; that is, that our personal mortality is undeniable and that
the harms done by one tribal state or terror group against "others" will never confer immortality. This is, admittedly, a difficult concept to
understand, but the longer we humans are shielded from such difficult concepts the shorter will be our time remaining. We must also look
closely at higher education in the United States, not from the shortsighted stance of improving test scores, but from the urgent
perspective of confronting extraordinary threats to human survival. For the moment, some college students are
exposed to an occasional course in what is fashionably described as "global awareness," but such exposure usually
sidesteps the overriding issues: We now face a deteriorating world system that cannot be mended through
sensitivity alone; our leaders are dangerously unprepared to deal with catastrophic deterioration; our schools are
altogether incapable of transmitting the indispensable visions of planetary restructuring. To institute productive student
confrontations with survival imperatives, colleges and universities must soon take great risks, detaching themselves from a
time-dishonored preoccupation with "facts" in favor of grappling with true life-or-death questions. In
raising these questions, it will not be enough to send some students to study in Paris or Madrid or Amsterdam
("study abroad" is not what is meant by serious global awareness). Rather, all students must be made aware - as a
primary objective of the curriculum - of where we are heading, as a species, and where our limited survival
alternatives may yet be discovered. There are, of course, many particular ways in which colleges and universities
could operationalize real global awareness, but one way, long-neglected, would be best. I refer to the study of
international law. For a country that celebrates the rule of law at all levels, and which explicitly makes international
law part of the law of the United States - the "supreme law of the land" according to the Constitution and certain
Supreme Court decisions - this should be easy enough to understand. Anarchy, after all, is the absence of law, and
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
knowledge of international law is necessarily prior to adequate measures of world order reform. Before international
law can be taken seriously, and before "the blood-dimmed tide" can be halted, America's future leaders must at least
have some informed acquaintance with pertinent rules and procedures. Otherwise we shall surely witness the birth of
a fully ungovernable world order, an unheralded and sinister arrival in which only a shadowy legion of gravediggers
would wield the forceps.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Discourse shapes reality
Discourse doesn’t shape policymaking
Tuathail 96 (Gearóid, Professor of Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech, The
patterned mess of history and the writing of critical geopolitics: a reply to Dalby, Political
Geography 15:6/7, p 661-5)
While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse and
concerns of foreign-policy decisionmakers are quite different, so different that they constitute a distinctive
problemsolving, 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 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
the important question of agency that I noted in my review essay.
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 selfinterested, 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
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
the
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.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
No state in debate
the only way to truly take the State out of debate is to debate the positive and
negative impacts of state action – rejecting it in a vacuum just makes them more
powerful.
Wallace 96 (William Wallace, Baron of Saltaire; Ph.D.; fmr Professor of International
Relations, London School of Economics, 1996 “Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats,”
JSTOR)
The failure of the Weimar Republic to establish its legitimacy owed something to the
irresponsibility of intellectuals of the right and left, preferring the private certainties of
their ideological schools to critical engagement with the difficult compromises of
democratic politics. The Frankfurt School of Adorno and Marcuse were Salonbolschewisten,
'relentless in their hostility towards the capitalist system' while 'they never abandoned the
lifestyle of the haute bourgeoisie'. The followers of Nietzsche on the right and those of
Marx on the left both worked to denigrate the limited achievements and the political
compromises of Weimar, encouraging their students to adopt their own radically
critical positions and so contribute to undermining the republic. Karl Mannheim, who had
attempted in Ideology and Utopia to build on Weber's conditional and contingent sociology of
knowledge, was among the first professors dismissed when the Nazis came to power.
Intellectuals who live within relatively open civil societies have a responsibility to
the society within which they live: to act themselves as constructive critics, and to
encourage their students to contribute to the strengthening of civil society rather
than to undermine it. 32 (308-9)
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Words have no meaning
Obviously words have no absolute meaning, but it’s possible to assign meaning –
evaluate language situationally
Knops, Sociology – University of Birmingham, ‘7
(Andrew, “Debate: Agonism as Deliberation – On Mouffe's Theory of Democracy,” Journal of Political
Philosophy, Vol. 15, Iss. 1, March)
As Pitkin explains, Wittgenstein's version of language suggests that we learn terms through practice. The
traditional account of language learning views it as the process of associating a term, for example a
name, with a particular object or picture of that object in our heads. We can then apply that name when
we encounter the object again. We associate a definition with that name, and it becomes a label for the
object.5 While language can be learned and used in this way, Wittgenstein argues that this is a very
limited account, which only explains a small section of what we use language to do. What about learning
the words ‘trust’, ‘spinster’ or ‘envy’?6 He therefore develops a more comprehensive account of language
learning which sees it as a particular practice. We learn to use a particular phrase in a particular context.
Having heard its use in a context before, we hear it repeated in similar circumstances. We therefore learn
to associate it with aspects of those circumstances, and to reproduce and use it in those circumstances
for ourselves. So, for example, the (polite!) child learns that “Please may I have the marmalade?” results
in the person who uttered it being passed the marmalade. They make the same sounds, and they are
themselves passed the marmalade. They later learn that “Please may I have the jam?” leads to their
being passed the jam. Finally, they understand that “Please may I have x?” will lead to their being given
whatever they choose to substitute for x. This example is helpful because it shows how the meaning of a
word can be refined through its use. It may be that a child initially only associates “Please may I have .
. .” with marmalade. It is only when the same words are used to elicit the passing of another object – in
our example, jam – that they associate it with that other object, and then eventually, after several
iterations, with any object. This process may also involve them using the phrase, and projecting it into
new contexts of their own. It may also, of course, involve them making mistakes, which are then
corrected. Because words are developed through repeated use in this way, they rarely have settled
meanings. By applying them to new contexts, we can use them to focus on different aspects of meaning.
Pitkin suggests the example of ‘feed the monkey’ and ‘feed the meter’.7 Prior to such application,
however, we may only have had a vague idea of the word's meaning, gathered through past usage. In
most, if not all, cases this process is ongoing. So words are learned through a kind of ‘training’ or
‘practice’, and learning or understanding a word is an activity that involves using the word in the correct
situation. It is not a case of applying a clear-cut rule to a definite situation.8 Because words develop
through practices and their use in particular situations, and in many cases we continue to develop their
meaning through such use, very rarely will a term have a single, fixed meaning. Rather, Wittgenstein
argues, the different situations in which such a general term is used are like separate language
games. Just like moves in a game, words that have meaning when used in one situation may be
meaningless when used in another. For example, we cannot talk of ‘checking the King’ in football. While
there are connections between games, they are linked like members of a family: some share the same
colour eyes, others the same shape of nose, others the same colour hair, but no two members have all
the same features.9 Wittgenstein also uses the analogy of an historic city to show how language builds
up. While some areas may be uniform, many have been added to higgledy-piggledy, with no clear pattern
over how streets are laid out, or which run into which.10 Wittgenstein therefore argues that it is impossible
to assimilate the operation of all language to a single model, such as the ‘picture theory’ or label model of
meaning. Different language games have different rules, and we can only discover these by
investigating particular practices of use in specific cases.11 However, Wittgenstein concedes that
there must be some kind of regularity to our use of words. Without some form of consistency, we could
not know that our use of a word in a new context was supposed to indicate or evoke a similar context in
which the word had been used in the past. That words do so, Wittgenstein argues, is due to their basis in
activity– they are used by us in certain situations – and that such use is grounded ultimately in activities
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
that are shared by groups of us, or all of us. Cavell sums this up well when he says: We learn and teach
words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into
further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place, just as nothing insures that we will
make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of
interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humour and of significance and of fulfilment, of what is
outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an
assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation – all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of
life’.12 These forms of life are not so much constituted by, but constitute, language. They serve as its
‘ground’. Therefore, although the process of explaining a term, and of reasoning in language, may
continue up to a point, it will always come to an end and have to confront simple agreement in activity,
ways of going on, or forms of life. Mouffe sees this account as ruling out the possibility of rational
consensus. Following Tully, she argues that the fact that arguments are grounded in agreement in forms
of life, which constitute a form of practice marking the end point of explanation or reasons, means that all
attempts at rational argument must contain an irrational, practical element.13 Neither is it possible to
suggest, as she accuses Peter Winch of doing, that we can see forms of life as some underlying
regularity, which argument or reasoning can then make explicit. Again with Tully, she contends that the
‘family resemblance’ or ‘historic city’ analogy for the development of language shows it to be far too
varied and idiosyncratic for such an account.14 Yet I would like to argue that Wittgenstein's theory as
characterised above does not rule out rational argument, and the possibility of consensus, at least in
principle. Wittgenstein himself characterises the offering of reasons as a kind of ‘explanation’. This much
is granted by Tully.15 Explanations are requested by someone unfamiliar with a practice, who would like to
understand that practice. Wittgenstein sees this as a completely legitimate use of language and reason.16
This is not surprising, as this process of explanation is precisely the form of language learning that
he sets out. A person uses a term based on their understanding of its use from their past experiences.
This projection either meets with the predicted response, or a different one. If the latter, the person
modifies their understanding of the term. It is only when we go further, and assume that there can be an
explanation for every kind of confusion, every kind of doubt, that we get into trouble.17 But this is precisely
not what a deliberative theory of reasoning holds. A deliberative theory of reasoning models
communicative reason – reason used to develop mutual understanding between two or more human
beings. To this extent, the truths that it establishes are relative, though intersubjective. They hold, or are
useful for, the collectivity that has discursively constructed them. They do not claim to be objective in an
absolute sense, although the concept can be extended, in theory, to cover all people and hence to arrive
as closely as possible to the notion of an absolute. The process that Habermas calls ‘practical
discourse’18 and the process that Wittgenstein calls ‘explanation’ are basically one and the same. Both
are synonyms for deliberation. Habermas sees the essentially rational nature of language as the capacity
for a statement to be rejected, in the simplest case with a ‘no’.19 It is with this response that the request
for reasons, latent in all rational statements, is activated.20 If we widen the sense of rejection meant by
Habermas beyond the paradigm case of the utterance of a ‘no’ to the broader case of a failure to elicit an
expected response, we can see the similarities between Habermas’ notion of deliberation and
Wittgenstein's concept of explanation. Like Wittgenstein, Habermas sees ‘normal’ language use as taking
place against a backdrop of conventionally shared meanings or understandings.21 It is only when this
assumption breaks down, when the response differs from what was expected, that deliberation is
required. Shared understandings and usage are established anew, through a dialogical sharing of
reasons, or explanations, which repairs the assumption that we do use these words in similar
ways.22
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Resolved before colon
Resolved presents the formal resolution, it doesn’t change meaning, that’s Army
Officer School.
Only after the colon matters
Webster’s Guide to Grammar and Writing 2k
Use of a colon before a list or an explanation that is preceded by a clause that can stand by itself.
Think of the colon as a gate, inviting one to go one…If the introductory phrase preceding the
colon is very brief and the clause following the colon represents the real business of the
sentence, beginning the clause after the colon with a capital letter.
Resolved means enact policy
Words and Phrases 1964 Permanent Edition
Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by
resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word
“enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Aff Specific
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Zapatistas
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
At exclusion
Turn – YOU should lose because your goal is to exclude policymakers – voting aff
only re-creates the very hegemonic structure they were trying to fight which coopts the aff’s movement
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
At butler
Butler is out of context – Game spaces like debate are distinct from other forms of
education and public speaking. There has to be a balance of ground or else one
side claims the high ground and creates a de facto monologue
Hanghoj 2008 – PhD, assistant professor, School of Education, University of Aarhus, also
affiliated with the Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials, located
at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark
(Thorkild,
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/
phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf)
Debate games are often based on pre-designed scenarios that include descriptions of issues to be debated, educational
goals, game goals, roles, rules, time frames etc. In this way, debate games differ from textbooks and everyday
classroom instruction as debate scenarios allow teachers and students to actively imagine,
interact and communicate within a domain-specific game space. However, instead of mystifying debate games as a
“magic circle” (Huizinga, 1950), I will try to overcome the epistemological dichotomy between “gaming” and “teaching” that tends to dominate
discussions of educational games. In short, educational gaming is a form of teaching. As mentioned, education and games
represent two different semiotic domains that both embody the three faces of knowledge: assertions, modes of representation and social forms of
organisation (Gee, 2003; Barth, 2002; cf. chapter 2). In order to understand the interplay between these different domains and their interrelated
knowledge forms, I will draw attention to a central assumption in Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy. According to Bakhtin, all
forms of
communication and culture are subject to centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin, 1981). A
centripetal force is the drive to impose one version of the truth, while a centrifugal force involves
a range of possible truths and interpretations. This means that any form of expression involves a duality of centripetal and
centrifugal forces: “Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear”
(Bakhtin, 1981: 272). If we take teaching as an example, it is always affected by centripetal and centrifugal forces in the on-going negotiation of “truths”
between teachers and students. In the words of Bakhtin: “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born
the dialogical
space of debate games also embodies centrifugal and centripetal forces. Thus, the election
scenario of The Power Game involves centripetal elements that are mainly determined by the
rules and outcomes of the game, i.e. the election is based on a limited time frame and a fixed voting procedure. Similarly, the
open-ended goals, roles and resources represent centrifugal elements and create virtually
endless possibilities for researching, preparing, presenting, debating and evaluating a variety of key political issues.
Consequently, the actual process of enacting a game scenario involves a complex negotiation
between these centrifugal/centripetal forces that are inextricably linked with the teachers and students’ game activities. In this way, the
between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin, 1984a: 110). Similarly,
enactment of The Power Game is a form of teaching that combines different pedagogical practices (i.e. group work, web quests, student presentations)
and learning resources (i.e. websites, handouts, spoken language) within the interpretive frame of the election scenario. Obviously, tensions may arise if
there is too much divergence between educational goals and game goals. This means that game
facilitation requires a balance
between focusing too narrowly on the rules or “facts” of a game (centripetal orientation) and a focusing too
broadly on the contingent possibilities and interpretations of the game scenario
(centrifugal orientation). For Bakhtin, the duality of centripetal/centrifugal forces often manifests itself as a
dynamic between “monological” and “dialogical” forms of discourse. Bakhtin illustrates this point with the
monological discourse of the Socrates/Plato dialogues in which the teacher never learns
anything new from the students, despite Socrates’ ideological claims to the contrary (Bakhtin,
1984a). Thus, discourse becomes monologised when “someone who knows and possesses the
truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error”, where “a thought is either affirmed or repudiated” by
the authority of the teacher (Bakhtin, 1984a: 81). In contrast to this, dialogical pedagogy fosters inclusive learning environments that are able to expand
upon students’ existing knowledge and collaborative construction of “truths” (Dysthe, 1996). At this point, I should clarify that Bakhtin’s term
“dialogic”
is both a descriptive term (all utterances are per definition dialogic as they address other utterances as
parts of a chain of communication) and
a normative term as dialogue is an ideal to be worked for against
the forces of “monologism” (Lillis, 2003: 197-8). In this project, I am mainly interested in describing the dialogical space of debate
games. At the same time, I agree with Wegerif that “one of the goals of education, perhaps the most important
goal, should be dialogue as an end in itself” (Wegerif, 2006: 61).
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Clash Good
Clash is the best education model – deliberation requires a predetermined
subject— they over-determine the rez more than us by assuming debates are the
ultimate arbiter of its value as opposed to a means to facilitate clash – cross-apply
this to their elitism DA and predictability turn
Adolf G. Gundersen, Associate Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M, 2000
POLITICAL THEORY AND PARTISAN POLITICS, 2000, p. 104-5. (DRGNS/E625)
Indirect political engagement is perhaps the single most important element of the strategy I am recommending here. It is also the
most emblematic, as it results from a fusion of confrontation and separation. But what kind of political engagement might
conceivably qualify as being both confrontational and separated from actual political decision-making? There is only one type, so far
as I can see, and that is deliberation. Political deliberation is by definition a form of engagement with the collectivity of which one is
a member. This is all the more true when two or more citizens deliberate together. Yet deliberation is also a form of
political action that precedes the actual taking and implementation of decisions. It is thus
simultaneously connected and disconnected, confrontational and separate. It is, in other words,
a form of indirect political engagement. This conclusion, namely, that we ought to call upon
deliberation to counter partisanship and thus clear the way for deliberation, looks rather
circular at first glance. And, semantically at least, it certainly is. Yet this ought not to concern us
very much. Politics, after all, is not a matter of avoiding semantic inconveniences, but of doing
the right thing and getting desirable results. In political theory, therefore, the real concern is
always whether a circular argument translates into a self-defeating prescription. And here that is
plainly not the case, for what I am suggesting is that deliberation can diminish partisanship, which will in turn
contribute to conditions amenable to continued or extended deliberation. That "deliberation promotes deliberation" is surely a
circular claim, but it is just as surely an accurate description of the real world of lived politics, as observers as far back as Thucydides
have documented. It may well be that deliberation rests on certain preconditions. I am not arguing that there is no such thing as a
deliberative "first cause." Indeed, it seems obvious to me both that deliberators require something to
deliberate about and that deliberation presumes certain institutional structures and
shared values. Clearly something must get the deliberative ball rolling and, to keep it rolling, the
cultural terrain must be free of deep chasms and sinkholes. Nevertheless, however extensive and
demanding deliberation's preconditions might be, we ought not to lose sight of the fact that,
once begun, deliberation tends to be self-sustaining. Just as partisanship begets partisanship,
deliberation begets deliberation. If that is so, the question of limiting partisanship and
stimulating deliberation are to an important extent the same question.
Clash solves aff’s in-round impacts—deliberative debate models impart skills vital
to respond to existential and structural threats
Christian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate
in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311
The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that
the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are
not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public
claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political
life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and
bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the
citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it
is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If
democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political
life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that
theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on
education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
because it builds
precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about
policy decisions that impact them, to son rhroueh and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for
and against a policy in an increasingly infonnation-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward
policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-
building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO)
argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with
the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but
perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly
complex and multimediatcd information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on
information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their
ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report
ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings,
looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been
assigned . . . students in the Instnictional [debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and
less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among
students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' selfefficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project,
instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and
Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases.
(Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate
in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills
demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their
essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue
was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of
learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials.
There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But
cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in
the classroom as a technology for
enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination
of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills,
and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues
for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids
students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for
creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the
possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life.
Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively
and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of
democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy
faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial
justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging
threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great
power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global
economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that
deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and
effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the
existential challenges to democracy [in an] increasingly complex world.
Turns case—supplanting dialogue to protest oppression leads to even worse forms
of authority
Morson 4
http://www.flt.uae.ac.ma/elhirech/baktine/0521831059.pdf#page=331
Northwestern Professor, Prof. Morson's work ranges over a variety of areas: literary theory
(especially narrative); the history of ideas, both Russian and European; a variety of literary
genres (especially satire, utopia, and the novel); and his favorite writers -- Chekhov, Gogol, and,
above all, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He is especially interested in the relation of literature to
philosophy.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Bakhtin viewed the whole process of “ideological” (in the sense of ideas and values, however
unsystematic) development as an endless dialogue. As teachers, we find it difficult to avoid a
voice of authority, however much we may think of ours as the rebel’s voice, because our
rebelliousness against society at large speaks in the authoritative voice of our subculture. We
speak the language and thoughts of academic educators, even when we imagine we are speaking
in no jargon at all, and that jargon, inaudible to us, sounds with all the overtones of authority to
our students. We are so prone to think of ourselves as fighting oppression that it takes some
work to realize that we ourselves may be felt as oppressive and overbearing, and that our own
voice may provoke the same reactions that we feel when we hear an authoritative voice with
which we disagree. So it is often helpful to think back on the great authoritative oppressors and
reconstruct their self-image: helpful, but often painful. I remember, many years ago, when, as a
recent student rebel and activist, I taught a course on “The Theme of the Rebel” and discovered,
to my considerable chagrin, that many of the great rebels of history were the very same people as
the great oppressors. There is a famous exchange between Erasmus and Luther, who hoped to
bring the great Dutch humanist over to the Reformation, but Erasmus kept asking Luther how
he could be so certain of so many doctrinal points. We must accept a few things to be Christians
at all, Erasmus wrote, but surely beyond that there must be room for us highly fallible beings to
disagree. Luther would have none of such tentativeness. He knew, he was sure. The Protestant
rebels were, for a while, far more intolerant than their orthodox opponents. Often enough, the
oppressors are the ones who present themselves and really think of themselves as liberators.
Certainty that one knows the root cause of evil: isn’t that itself often the root cause? We know
from Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s letters denouncing Prince Kurbsky, a general who escaped to
Poland, that Ivan saw himself as someone who had been oppressed by noblemen as a child and
pictured himself as the great rebel against traditional authority when he killed masses of people
or destroyed whole towns. There is something in the nature of maximal rebellion against
authority that produces ever greater intolerance, unless one is very careful. For the skills of
fighting or refuting an oppressive power are not those of openness, self-skepticism, or real dialogue. In
preparing for my course, I remember my dismay at reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf and discovering
that his self-consciousness was precisely that of the rebel speaking in the name of oppressed
Germans, and that much of his amazing appeal – otherwise so inexplicable – was to the German
sense that they were rebelling victims. In our time, the Serbian Communist and nationalist
leader Slobodan Milosevic exploited much the same appeal. Bakhtin surely knew that
Communist totalitarianism, the Gulag, and the unprecedented censorship were constructed by
rebels who had come to power. His favorite writer, Dostoevsky, used to emphasize that the worst
oppression comes from those who, with the rebellious psychology of “the insulted and
humiliated,” have seized power – unless they have somehow cultivated the value of dialogue, as Lenin
surely had not, but which Eva, in the essay by Knoeller about teaching The Autobiography of
Malcolm X, surely had. Rebels often make the worst tyrants because their word, the voice they
hear in their consciousness, has borrowed something crucial from the authoritative word it
opposed, and perhaps exaggerated it: the aura of righteous authority. If one’s ideological
becoming is understood as a struggle in which one has at last achieved the truth, one is likely to
want to impose that truth with maximal authority; and rebels of the next generation may
proceed in much the same way, in an ongoing spiral of intolerance.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Ext o/w
Extinction outweighs structural violence
Bostrum 12 (Nick, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford, directs Oxford's Future of Humanity
Institute and winner of the Gannon Award, Interview with Ross Andersen, correspondent at The
Atlantic, 3/6, “We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction”,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-ofhuman-extinction/253821/)
Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human
extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by
society . Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even
exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to
grow in number and potency over the next century.
Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime
advocate of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological
means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and
better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to
try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about
some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come,
and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them.
Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future
existential risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that
existential
risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the alleviation of
present suffering . Can you explain why?
Bostrom: Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much
as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn't matter whether someone exists at the current time or at
some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn't matter where somebody is
spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human
life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in
proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that
existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything
else that you could do . There are so many people that could come into existence in the
future if humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years,
our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and
billions times more people than exist currently . Therefore, even a very small reduction
in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even
immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria , which would be tremendous under
ordinary standards.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Borders
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
At: we meet
Semiotically engaging the resolution is not directly engaging economically with
Mexico – there are multiple versions of their aff that meet like a “dissolve the
borders aff” with race advantages – their refusal to engage in the resolution forces
a SHIFT AWAY from topic specific education and arbitrary discussions
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Framework=Border
Their border analogy is ridiculous – not only are all borders different, but their
silly comparison to T devalues the experiences of migrants
Vila, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, 2005 [Pablo,
“Conclusion: The Limits of American Border Theory,” Ethnography at the Border, Ed. Pablo
Vila, p.307-315]
After dominating the field for some time, this corpus of work has come under criticism in recent
years. This criticism does not deny the pathbreaking character of those books but seeks to
address several short- comings that have now become apparent. As Heyman points out, "A
single-image representing grand theoretical assertions is too general for the political and
economic environment of the border. I propose that we specify our analytical tools for the
border: that is, that we respect the concretely located nature of the Mexico-U.S. border" (1994,
43). Thus several authors have lately advanced different criticisms of mainstream border theory.
First, some Mexican scholars (Tabuenca, Barrera) have complained that the U.S.-Mexico border
most of this work portrays with such theo- retical sophistication has little resemblance to the
border they experience from the other side of the (literal) fence. Second, other writers have
noted the exclusionary character of border studies and theory exemplified in these major works
and claim that current mainstream border theory essentializes the cultures that must be crossed.
Third, as I claim hereafter, in the vast majority of recent border scholarship, there is a general
failure to pursue the theoretical possibility that fragmentation of experience can lead to the
reinforcement of borders instead of an invitation to cross them. Thus crossing borders, and not
reinforcing borders, is the preferred metaphor in current border studies and theory. Fourth, a
corollary of the previous trend is the tendency to construct the border crosser or the hybrid (in
some cases the Latin American inter- national immigrant in general, but in others the Chicano
in particular— at least in the books I am criticizing here) into a new "privileged subject of
history." Fifth, border studies have recently moved from the study of is- sues related to the U.S.Mexico border in particular to broader themes, in which the metaphor of borders is used to
represent any situation where limits are involved. Border studies thus takes as its own object of
inquiry any physical or psychic space about which it is possible to address problems of
boundaries: borders among different countries, borders among ethnicities within the United
States, borders between genders, borders among disciplines, and the like. Borderlands and
border crossings seem to have become ubiquitous terms to represent the experience of (some)
people in a postmodern world described as fragmented and continually producing new borders
that must again and again be crossed. And if current border studies and theory propose that
borders are everywhere, the border-crossing experience is in some instances assumed to be
similar: that is, it seems that for the "border crosser" or the "hybrid," the experience of moving
among different disciplines, different ethnicities, and different countries and cultures is not
dissimilar in character (Grossberg 1996). This approach not only homogenizes distinctive
experiences but also homogenizes borders.' Sixth, there is a tendency in current border studies
and theory to confiise the sharing of a culture with the sharing of an identity, so that use of the
"third country" metaphor promotes the idea that Fronterizo Mexicans and Mexican Americans
construct their social and cultural identities in similar ways. My criticism here is that it is quite
possible to share aspects of the same culture while developing quite different narrative
identities, to the point, in some instances, where the "other kind of Mexican" is constructed as
the abject "other." Finally, in some extreme circumstances and in particular locales, these
theoretical processes have developed a version of identity politics on the U.S.-Mcxico border
that rely on the metaphor of "brotherhood"-— meaning the purportedly intrinsic connections
between Mexican na- tionals, Mexican immigrants, and Chicanos. Yet because that brotherhood
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
does not exist in particular border situations (as exemplified, for instance, in Mexican American
support for Operation Blockade in the region dealt with in this collection), this form of identity
politics is doomed to failure.
Border analogies lead to poor analysis about oppressive structures – turns the
case
Ang, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1998 [Ien,
“Doing cultural studies at the crossroads,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 1(1), p. 27-28]
As I have already suggested, an explicitly comparative perspective is called for here, as the
strategy of comparison implies an awareness of difference as its episte- mological stimulus while
at the same time, in its very requirement of juxtaposing at least two realities, being a guard
against exaggerated notions of uniqueness and incommensurability. Thus, we should expect as
much as we can, say, from a dialogue between Gloria Anzaldua and Iain Chambers; and put as
much effort as we can in the substantiation and specification of the metaphors and concepts we
use to establish our common grounds. This is not altogether different from the ideal of
cosmopolitalism, embraced by Bruce Robbins not, in his words, 4as a false universal1 but *as an
impulse to knowledge that is shared with others, a striving to transcend partiality that is itself
partial, but no more so than the similar cognitive strivings of many diverse peoples' (ibid.: 194).
This, of course, returns us straight to the borderlands, the arena where the sharing of partial
perspectives and knowledges are supposed to take place, in what Robbins (ibid.: 196) calls 'a
long-term process of translocal connecting". What I have tried to emphasize in this chapter,
however, is the practical fact that there are limits to the sharing we can do, that there is only so
much (or so little) that we can share. Indeed, I think we could only stand to gain from the
recognition that any process of 'translocal connecting' not only needs hard work, but, more
importantly, can only be partial also. I would even suggest that our crossroads encounters would
be more productive if we recognize the moments of actual disconnection rather than hold on to
the abstract Utopian ideal of connection so bound up with celebrations of the borderlands. For it
is in the realization and problematization of such moments of actual disconnection - that is,
moments when the act of meaningful comparison and communication reaches its limits - that
the material consequences of difference, of the irreducible and unrepresentable specificity and
particularity of 'the local' are most bluntly exposed, but always-already within the translocal
context within which that 'local' is distinctively constituted. In short, it is at moments when
comprehending my local-specific narrative becomes problematic to you, my reader, when such
comprehension seems muted because I do not seem to speak in familiar discourse, that the
malleability of general theoretical concepts such as 'race', 'nation' and 'identity', not to mention
metaphors such as the 'borderlands' and the 'crossroads', becomes evident. It is the ways in
which we both do and do not share these (and many other) concepts and metaphors across
local/particular/spccific boundaries that we should begin to interrogate and highlight.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Switch Side Extension
Harrigan XTS
Switch side is key – forces both teams to research INDEPTH about a SPECIFIC
topic forcing us to engage in discussions that we may or may not favor.
Independently, it facilitates critical thinking – making us reflect on and analyze
EVERY decision we make. Without switch side we would be ceding the political
sphere to politicians while we NEVER engage in discussion about everyday
problems like the affirmative – that’s Harrigan
AT: SSD =/= Switch Ideologies
They say it “doesn’t switch ideologies” but Switch side turns –forces participation
in the POLITICAL SPHERE so there’s potential for implementation – allows us to
argue with a MULTI-FACETED approach rather than having a mess of
philosophical discussions that don’t concretely apply to the topic.
AT: Green and Hicks ‘05
Plan vs. counter–plan debates are portable – debates over personal viewpoints
fail
Muir ‘93
[Star A, Department of Communications at George Mason University, “A Defense of the Ethics of Contemporary Debate”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol.
26, No. 4]
The debate over moral education and values clarification parallels in many ways the controversy over switchside debate. Where values clarification recognizes no one set of values, debate forces a questioning and exploration of both
sides of an issue. Where cognitive-development emphasizes the use of role playing in the inception of moral judgment, debate
requires an empathy for alternative points of view. Where discussion provides an opportunity for expressions of personal
feelings, debate fosters an analytic and explicit approach to value assessment. Freeley describes the activity this way: Educational debate provides an
opportunity for students to consider the significant problems in the context of a multivalued orientation. They learn to look at a problem from many
points of view.
As debaters analyze the potential affirmative cases and the potential negative cases, including the
counterplans, they begin to realize the complexity of most
contemporary problems and to appreciate the worth of a multivalued orientation; as they debate both sides of a
possibility of negative
proposition under consideration, they learn not only that most problems of contemporary affairs have more than one side but also that even one side of
a proposition embodies a considerable range of values. The comparison between moral education and debate is useful because it contextualizes the
process of moral development within an educational setting. Several objections have been raised about the practice of moral education, and these
objections have direct relevance to the issue of switch-side debate. A view of debate as a form of moral education can be developed by addressing
questions of efficacy, of isolation from the real world, and of relativism. The first issue is one of effectiveness: Do clarification activities achieve the
espoused goals? Social coercion and peer pressure, for example, still occur in the group setting, leaving the individual choice
of values an indoctrination of sorts.27 Likewise, the focus of clarification exercises is arguably less analytic than expressive, less critical than emotive.28
individual preferences may be guided by simple reaction rather than by rational criteria. These problems are
minimized in the debate setting, especially where advocacy is not aligned with personal belief. Such advocacy
The expression of
requires explicit analysis of values and the decision criteria for evaluating them. In contemporary debate, confronted with a case they believe in,
debaters assigned to the negative side have several options: present a morass of arguments to see what arguments "stick," concede the problem and
offer a "counterplan" as a better way of solving the problem, or attack the value structure of the affirmative and be more effective in defending a
particular hierarchy of values. While the first option is certainly exercised with some frequency, the second and third options are also often used and are
of critical importance in the development of cognitive skills associated with moral judgment. For example, in attacking a case that restricts police
powers and upholds a personal right to privacy, debaters might question the reasoning of scholars and justices in raising privacy rights to such
significant heights (analyzing Griswold v. Connecticut and other landmark cases), offer alternative value structures (social order, drug control), and
defend the criteria through which such choices are made (utilitarian vs. deontological premises). Even within the context of a "see what sticks"
paradigm, these arguments require debaters to assess and evaluate value structures opposite of their own personal feelings about their right to privacy.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Adopting a
value just because everyone else does may be the surest way of losing a debate. A second objection to debate as
Social coercion, or peer pressure to adopt certain value structures, is minimized in such a context because of competitive pressures.
values clarification, consonant with Ehninger's concerns about gamesmanship, is the separation of the educational process from the real world. A
significant concern here is how such learning about morality will be used in the rest of a student's life. Some critics question whether moral school
knowledge "may be quite separate from living moral experience in a similar way as proficiency in speaking one's native language generally appears
quite separate from the knowledge of formal grammar imparted by school.” Edelstein discusses two forms of segmentation: division between realms of
school knowledge (e.g., history separated from science) and between school and living experience (institutional learning separate from everyday life).
Ehninger's point, that debate becomes a pastime, and that application of these skills to solving real problems is diminished if it is viewed as a game, is
largely a reflection on institutional segmentation The melding of different areas of knowledge, however, is a particular benefit of debate, as it addresses
topics of considerable importance in a real world setting. Recent college and
high school topics include energy policy, prison reform, care for
exceed the knowledge
the elderly, trade policy, homelessness, and the right to privacy. These topics are notable because they
boundaries of particular school subjects, they reach into issues of everyday life, and they are broad enough to force students to
address a variety of value appeals. The explosion of "squirrels," or small and specific cases, III the 1960s and 1970s has had the effect of opening up
each topic to many different case approaches. National topics are no longer of the one-case variety (as in 1955's "the U.S. should recog nize Red
China"). On the privacy topic, for example, cases include search and seizure issues, abortion, sexual privacy, tradeoffs with the first amendment, birth
The multiplicity of issues pays special dividends for
debaters required to defend both sides of many issues because the value criteria change from
round to round and evolve over the year. The development of flexibility in coping with the intertwining of issues is an essential
control, information privacy, pornography, and obscenity.
component in the interconnection of knowledge, and is a major rationale for switch-side debate.]
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Destroy Debate
Harrigan XTS
Switch side is key – forces both teams to research INDEPTH about a SPECIFIC
topic forcing us to engage in discussions that we may or may not favor.
Independently, it facilitates critical thinking – making us reflect on and analyze
EVERY decision we make. Without switch side we would be ceding the political
sphere to politicians while we NEVER engage in discussion about everyday
problems like the affirmative – that’s Harrigan
AT: SSD =/= Switch Ideologies
They say it “doesn’t switch ideologies” but Switch side turns –forces participation
in the POLITICAL SPHERE so there’s potential for implementation – allows us to
argue with a MULTI-FACETED approach rather than having a mess of
philosophical discussions that don’t concretely apply to the topic.
AT: Green and Hicks ‘05
Plan vs. counter–plan debates are portable – debates over personal viewpoints
fail
Muir ‘93
[Star A, Department of Communications at George Mason University, “A Defense of the Ethics of Contemporary Debate”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol.
26, No. 4]
The debate over moral education and values clarification parallels in many ways the controversy over switchside debate. Where values clarification recognizes no one set of values, debate forces a questioning and exploration of both
sides of an issue. Where cognitive-development emphasizes the use of role playing in the inception of moral judgment, debate
requires an empathy for alternative points of view. Where discussion provides an opportunity for expressions of personal
feelings, debate fosters an analytic and explicit approach to value assessment. Freeley describes the activity this way: Educational debate provides an
opportunity for students to consider the significant problems in the context of a multivalued orientation. They learn to look at a problem from many
points of view.
As debaters analyze the potential affirmative cases and the potential negative cases, including the
counterplans, they begin to realize the complexity of most
contemporary problems and to appreciate the worth of a multivalued orientation; as they debate both sides of a
possibility of negative
proposition under consideration, they learn not only that most problems of contemporary affairs have more than one side but also that even one side of
a proposition embodies a considerable range of values. The comparison between moral education and debate is useful because it contextualizes the
process of moral development within an educational setting. Several objections have been raised about the practice of moral education, and these
objections have direct relevance to the issue of switch-side debate. A view of debate as a form of moral education can be developed by addressing
questions of efficacy, of isolation from the real world, and of relativism. The first issue is one of effectiveness: Do clarification activities achieve the
espoused goals? Social coercion and peer pressure, for example, still occur in the group setting, leaving the individual choice
of values an indoctrination of sorts.27 Likewise, the focus of clarification exercises is arguably less analytic than expressive, less critical than emotive.28
individual preferences may be guided by simple reaction rather than by rational criteria. These problems are
minimized in the debate setting, especially where advocacy is not aligned with personal belief. Such advocacy
The expression of
requires explicit analysis of values and the decision criteria for evaluating them. In contemporary debate, confronted with a case they believe in,
debaters assigned to the negative side have several options: present a morass of arguments to see what arguments "stick," concede the problem and
offer a "counterplan" as a better way of solving the problem, or attack the value structure of the affirmative and be more effective in defending a
particular hierarchy of values. While the first option is certainly exercised with some frequency, the second and third options are also often used and are
of critical importance in the development of cognitive skills associated with moral judgment. For example, in attacking a case that restricts police
powers and upholds a personal right to privacy, debaters might question the reasoning of scholars and justices in raising privacy rights to such
significant heights (analyzing Griswold v. Connecticut and other landmark cases), offer alternative value structures (social order, drug control), and
defend the criteria through which such choices are made (utilitarian vs. deontological premises). Even within the context of a "see what sticks"
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
paradigm, these arguments require debaters to assess and evaluate value structures opposite of their own personal feelings about their right to privacy.
Adopting a
value just because everyone else does may be the surest way of losing a debate. A second objection to debate as
Social coercion, or peer pressure to adopt certain value structures, is minimized in such a context because of competitive pressures.
values clarification, consonant with Ehninger's concerns about gamesmanship, is the separation of the educational process from the real world. A
significant concern here is how such learning about morality will be used in the rest of a student's life. Some critics question whether moral school
knowledge "may be quite separate from living moral experience in a similar way as proficiency in speaking one's native language generally appears
quite separate from the knowledge of formal grammar imparted by school.” Edelstein discusses two forms of segmentation: division between realms of
school knowledge (e.g., history separated from science) and between school and living experience (institutional learning separate from everyday life).
Ehninger's point, that debate becomes a pastime, and that application of these skills to solving real problems is diminished if it is viewed as a game, is
largely a reflection on institutional segmentation The melding of different areas of knowledge, however, is a particular benefit of debate, as it addresses
topics of considerable importance in a real world setting. Recent college and
high school topics include energy policy, prison reform, care for
exceed the knowledge
the elderly, trade policy, homelessness, and the right to privacy. These topics are notable because they
boundaries of particular school subjects, they reach into issues of everyday life, and they are broad enough to force students to
address a variety of value appeals. The explosion of "squirrels," or small and specific cases, III the 1960s and 1970s has had the effect of opening up
each topic to many different case approaches. National topics are no longer of the one-case variety (as in 1955's "the U.S. should recog nize Red
China"). On the privacy topic, for example, cases include search and seizure issues, abortion, sexual privacy, tradeoffs with the first amendment, birth
The multiplicity of issues pays special dividends for
debaters required to defend both sides of many issues because the value criteria change from
round to round and evolve over the year. The development of flexibility in coping with the intertwining of issues is an essential
control, information privacy, pornography, and obscenity.
component in the interconnection of knowledge, and is a major rationale for switch-side debate.]
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
At state not moral
The state not being moral all the time is an independent reason why we need to
perpetually engage in discussions to critique, analyze and actively discuss
plausible policies – their pre-defined notion that the state is bad policy making and
prevents us from disagreeing with the government – roleplaying forces critical
thinking, arguing a plethora of viewpoints and politically engages us – that’s
Esberg
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Guantanamo
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
At: Barsky
1. Esberg and Sagan answer it – The policy debates that Barsky nonchalantly
indicts are uniquely necessary for high-school students to link the theories they
learn to real world implications. He does not have a real warrant for why debates
about policy are vacuous – even his NAFTA example fails to explain why a
discussion of the US-Mexico border comes first.
2. Reading poetry in a room may be creative, but in the context of Guantanamo it
sends the WRONG signal to students – Join a real activist group
Benjamin 6/2 (Medea Benjamin, Cofounder of Code Pink, “How You [and President Obama]
Can Close Guantanamo Prison”, Antiwar, 6/2/13, http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/07/02/howyou-and-president-obama-can-close-guantanamo-prison/, rm)
In a meeting with CODEPINK, Senator Levin’s chief of staff David Lyles suggested that activists
focus on helping the bill pass the Senate. But he also emphasized that while all of these issues
are being played out in Congress, we should not lose sight of the fact that the President still has
the executive authority to transfer the detainees cleared for release and that we should pressure
him to do so. Activists throughout the US have been doing just that. Various petitions to the
President have gathered more than 400,000 signatures. The most prominent was signed by Lt.
Colonel and former Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo, Morris Davis, and promoted by Witness
Against Torture. People have rallied and held vigils in cities and towns, flooded the White House
and Southern Command with phone calls and, by the hundreds, fasted in solidarity with the
hunger strikers. The faith community has called Guantanamo a deep moral wound, and 38
senior religious leaders sent the President and Congress a letter calling for the closure of
Guantanamo. Most dramatically, several U.S. citizens — among them military veterans — are
now deep into open-ended fasts, risking their health and even their lives in their effort to see
Guantanamo closed. In a dramatic action at the White House on June 26, Diane Wilson, 57 days
into her hunger strike, jumped over the White House fence. Twenty-two others, all dressed in
orange jumpsuits, were also arrested by refusing to leave the White House fence. Amnesty
International and other organizations are lobbying senators who are on the fence about closing
Guantanamo. CODEPINK is collecting signatures to hand-deliver to the new envoy Clifford
Sloan. Witness Against Torture is recruiting new people to join the US solidarity hunger strike.
And CloseGitmo.net is keeping people up-to-date on activism around the country.
3. Limits facilitate Creativity:
A. Challenging ourselves to innovate within the confines of rules creates far more
creative responses than starting with a blank slate
Mayer 6 – Marissa Ann Mayer, vice-president for search products and user experience at
Google, February 13, 2006, “Creativity Loves Constraints,” online:
http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/06_07/b3971144.htm?chan=gl
When people think about creativity, they think about artistic work -- unbridled, unguided
effort that leads to beautiful effect. But if you look deeper, you'll find that some of the
most inspiring art forms, such as haikus, sonatas, and religious paintings, are fraught
with constraints. They are beautiful because creativity triumphed over the "rules."
Constraints shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to overcome.
Creativity thrives best when constrained. But constraints must be balanced with a healthy disregard for
the impossible. Too many curbs can lead to pessimism and despair. Disregarding the bounds of what we know or accept gives
rise to ideas that are non-obvious, unconventional, or unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between
constraint and disregard for the impossible is fueled by passion and leads to revolutionary
change. A few years ago, I met Paul Beckett, a talented designer who makes sculptural clocks. When I asked him
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
why not do just sculptures, Paul said
he liked the challenge of making something artistically
beautiful that also had to perform as a clock. Framing the task in that way freed his
creative force. Paul reflected that he also found it easier to paint on a canvas that had a mark
on it rather than starting with one that was entirely clean and white. This resonated with me. It is
often easier to direct your energy when you start with constrained challenges (a
sculpture that must be a clock) or constrained possibilities (a canvas that is marked).
B. Innovative thinking comes from problem-solving like figuring out how to read
what you want to read while still being topical
Intrator 10 – David, President of The Creative Organization, October 21, 2010, “Thinking
Inside the Box,” http://www.trainingmag.com/article/thinking-inside-box
One of the most pernicious myths about creativity, one that seriously inhibits
creative thinking and innovation, is the belief that one needs to “think outside the
box.” As someone who has worked for decades as a professional creative, nothing could be further from
the truth. This a is view shared by the vast majority of creatives, expressed famously by the modernist
designer Charles Eames when he wrote, “Design depends largely upon constraints.” The myth of
thinking outside the box stems from a fundamental misconception of what creativity
is, and what it’s not. In the popular imagination, creativity is something weird and wacky.
The creative process is magical, or divinely inspired. But, in fact, creativity is not about divine
inspiration or magic. It’s about problem-solving, and by definition a problem is a
constraint, a limit, a box. One of the best illustrations of this is the work of photographers.
They create by excluding the great mass what’s before them, choosing a small frame in
which to work. Within that tiny frame, literally a box, they uncover relationships and
establish priorities. What makes creative problem-solving uniquely challenging is that you, as
the creator, are the one defining the problem. You’re the one choosing the frame. And you
alone determine what’s an effective solution. This can be quite demanding, both intellectually
and emotionally. Intellectually, you are required to establish limits, set priorities, and
cull patterns and relationships from a great deal of material, much of it fragmentary. More often
than not, this is the material you generated during brainstorming sessions. At the end of these sessions, you’re usually left with a
big mess of ideas, half-ideas, vague notions, and the like. Now, chances are you’ve had a great time making your mess. You
might have gone off-site, enjoyed a “brainstorming camp,” played a number of warm-up games. You feel artistic and
empowered. But to be truly creative, you have to clean up your mess, organizing those fragments
into something real, something useful, something that actually works. That’s the hard part. It
takes a lot of energy, time, and willpower to make sense of the mess you’ve just generated. It
also can be emotionally difficult. You’ll need to throw out many ideas you originally
thought were great, ideas you’ve become attached to, because they simply don’t fit into
the rules you’re creating as you build your box.
C. Railing against constraints actually shuts down thinking. Actually forcing
yourself to be topical makes you view things from new perspectives and be overall
more creative
Brewer 10 – Joshua Brewer, January 28, 2010, “Constraints Fuel Creativity,” online:
http://52weeksofux.com/post/358515571/constraints-fuel-creativity
We are often led to believe that the more freedom we have the more creative we will be.
Full creative license? Sweet. Unlimited budget? Awesome! No timetable? Even better. Yeah,
right. I say embrace your constraints and draw out of them the very solution that sets you
apart from the crowd. The imposition of constraints can lead to great design decisions.
Limitations often force you to view things from a perspective you are not accustomed
to and, in turn, can stimulate the clarity and purpose of the design, rather than debilitate
and hinder your creative process.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
Potlach
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
AT: Exclusion DA
Yea, we exclude the plan – it’s the aff burden to be topical, not the negs to make
sure. It wouldn’t be a problem if you were an ACTUAL form of economic
engagement – this disad has no impact, at best we turn it and portability and key
decision-making outweigh – that was above.
#switchingsides #fascism
Zsj Lab – Framework
AT: Decision Making DA
It’s also adorable that you think we don’t “increase education” or “usher in some
perfect roleplaying arena.” The esberg evidence is FANTASTIC on the question of
how political simulations facilitate an environment in which we can advocate and
learn about new perspectives in order to overcome the political – we solve their
“politics doesn’t provide us with what we need” args because engagement and
activism takes out their disad.
And I assure you their types of criticisms aren’t productive AT ALL. The harrigan
evidence indicates that to spur critical thinking and decision making we need to be
able to engage in switch side and comprehend the nuances and complexity of the
political.
#switchingsides #fascism