Introduction
Written by:
Reid Funston
Isaiah Sirois
Junior Contributors:
Jaden Lessnick
“McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.”-Joseph McCarthy
Strategic Recommendations
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Contention one is pronounced “yebat' rossiyu”
The generic K card is really, REALLY, good, like probably better than Sarah Palin
The specific cede the political cards are pretty good on the neg. 10/10 would cut again
The anthro link isn’t specific to satire but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad argument to go for
If you want to be funnier, throw in some cards from the 1AC supplement
The cap cards were actually the inspiration for the aff – they’re decent and you could frame a 1AC
around consumption instead of security if you really wanted. I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Have fun running this aff. Stay gold!
Explanation of the aff
This is functionally a security aff, contextualized to hyperbolic impacts in debate. While it looks
like a massive joke in the 1AC (mostly because it is) in the 2AC it turns into a serious aff- despite
all the tags in the children’s literature contention making no sense, it functions as a solvency
contention for the ability of this aff to deconstruct securitized debate practices. As such, for the
2AC I’d recommend writing out/memorizing the warrants of the cards because the tags aren’t
really useful.
We didn’t want to re-turn out impacts to cap and consumption, but you can take those out of
other files and use them- the aff also functions as a k of consumption/cap, the internal links are
in the cap block
For the neg- I know there’s a cap K link in here, but in hindsight a cap/consumption good K
might be a better option- it’s pretty much directly responsive (the link is the “all the oils!”
contention)
1AC
Contention #1 is All the Oils!
DRILL BABY DRILL!
There’s oil in the oceans – let’s drill! It will boost our AMERICA!
Magnoliazz, 10 a writer living on a tree farm in Wisconsin. She has 5 dogs, a flock of sheep,
and operates a cat, guinea pig and rabbit rescue. (“America Has More Oil Than Saudi Arabia,”
HubPages.com, http://magnoliazz.hubpages.com/hub/America-Has-More-Oil-Than-SaudiArabia)//IS
We Need To Start Drlling NOW! The United States has plenty of oil within US borders. We
don't have to rely on foreign oil anymore! It is just a matter of drilling and getting the oil out.
The oil is there! Remember the song...."America, America God shed his grace on thee"? It is
true! God provided this country with more than enough oil for generations to come. Did
you know... There is a massive 200 billion barrel oil field located in North Dakota, South Dakota
and Montana. And it even gets better! Because of new horizontal drilling technology, it is
estimated that this huge field may even produce up to 500 billion barrels of oil! The Saudi's are
estimated to have only 260 billion barrels of oil, clearly putting America in the cat bird seat!
http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news2.13s.html But the good news does
not stop there! Alaska is just waiting to drill for oil. In fact the governor of Alaska is suing the
government for failing to drill for oil. Alaskan oil fields are massive. At Gull Island, Prudhoe Bay,
Alaska, there is enough oil and natural gas to keep America going for the next 200 years! Yes, for
the next 200 years! http://www.pushhamburger.com/hidden.htm There is even better news!
The US Outer Continental Shelf has 112 billion barrels of oil, not to mention a whopping 656
TRILLION cubic feet of natural gas! WHY are people struggling to pay winter heating bills when
we have natural resources like this?
http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/1424734/us_should_drill_for_oil_and_gas_in_arcti
c_offshore Oil shale is abundant in the US. In fact, half of all the earth's oil shale deposits are
located within 150 miles of Grand Junction, Colorado! Shell Oil is working on new technology
which will make oil shale extraction financially feasible. They plan to open a shale oil plant in
2010. It will provide a piece of the puzzle toward energy independence for the United States.
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/reserves/publications/Pubs-NPR/40010-373.pdf Then
of course, just about everyone knows that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal. With 275
billon tons of coal! We have more coal than just about any other place in the world. Enough coal
for American needs for the next 250 years! Once again, new technology is underway to make
coal burning safe for our environment.
http://www.teachcoal.org/aboutcoal/articles/faqs.html#howmuch So there we have it! It is
time for the US to get serious about energy independence and drill for oil. The
environmentalists should move to China and India
where pollution is really is out of control. With the new technology used in the oil fields of today,
the impact on the environment is there but it is controlled. With environmental controls oil
fields can be environmentally safe. When it comes to the environment we need to understand
that as long as there are billions of people living on this planet, there will to be a negative impact
on the environment. That is just the way it is unless billions of people die, and even then
environmentalists would complain about rotting corpses creating a problem for the
environment. There is simply no way around problems with the environment when you have
billons of people to contend with. The human race needs to protect this planet, yet we have to
live too. Living without energy is not an option. Until we have plentiful, green energy we
will have to rely on the oil based solutions of old. It will take time to convert to green energy and
that quest is just as important as drilling for oil is now. We can't let the ball drop in either arena.
Obviously we should have been exploring our oil supplies 10 years ago. Now it will take at least 2
years before oil and then gas will come back down to a livable price for most Americans. 80% of
all Americans claim climbing gas prices are affecting their lives in a very negative way. And is it
no wonder! Food prices go up every time a barrel of oil reaches a new high. Add to all of this are
the flood woes of the Midwest which will mean even higher food prices yet to come. This winter
will be especially tough for most people as they struggle to heat their homes with the highest
projected heating costs of all time, and if that is not enough, they will be hit with unaffordable
food prices, making it harder than ever to put food on the table for the family. This is not the
America I know, or want to know. Whoever wants to be the next president can easily get elected
if they take the bull by the horns, and start drilling! We need to open the US oil fields in Alaska,
Montana, and North and South Dakota as soon as possible. And, once we have that oil flowing
all across America, we can tell the Middle East what to do with their
oil. For too long we danced to their tune. It was degrading to both President Bush and
Americans across the country when he went begging to the Saudi's, hat in hand, pleading for
increased oil production, which the Saudi's denied. No American president should ever have to
go through that again, especially when we have billions of barrels of oil right in our own back
yard. The next few years will be a time of financial hardship, but once American oil becomes
available, it will not take long for the economy to turn around. This time of austerity is beneficial
in a way, because it forces us to seek new and better ways to do things. And, new and better ways
of doing things.....well that is a lot of what this country is all about! In the face of adversity, we
will prevail and prosper in the end! We
can do it! God Bless America!
Without oil civilization collapses! We need security!
Connors-Maloney, 12 – Oklahoma 1st Congressional District Coordinator – Oklahoma’s
1st District Coordinator (Annie, 02/16/12 “I Resist Our Dependence on Foreign Oil - Drill Here,
Drill Now,”
http://patriotaction.net/group/iresistourdependenceonforeignoildrillheredrillnow)//IS
This group was developed to help dispel the myth created by many of our government officials
and environmentalists regarding the production of oil within the boundaries of our own country
and in it's designated waters. Drilling oil in our country is crucial to our National security. This
site is for discussion about what is going on within our government designed to further our
descent into a third world country and promoting our dependence on other governments by
disallowing the production of oil for our own needs. We need to find a way to get spread the
truth to more people and move our government officials along the path of independence of
foreign oil. It would be appreciated if you keep your posts in context to the subject of this group.
Anything pertaining to the energy field, bills within your state or the federal government that are
coming up in regard to energy, or your own comments about anything that you have knowledge
of pertaining to energy. Any other posts will be removed. Petroleum is vital to many industries,
and is of importance to the maintenance of industrialized civilization itself, and thus is a
critical concern for many nations. Oil accounts for a large percentage of the world’s energy
consumption, ranging from a low of 32% for Europe and Asia, up to a high of 53% for the Middle
East. Other geographic regions’ consumption patterns are as follows: South and Central America
(44%), Africa (41%), and North America (40%). The world consumes 30 billion barrels (4.8
km³) of oil per year, with developed nations being the largest consumers. 24% of the oil
produced in 2004 was consumed in the United States.The production, distribution, refining,
and retailing of petroleum taken as a whole represents the world's largest industry in terms of
dollar value. It is the number one major contributor to keeping our economy in this country
running. If the oil industry fails, so will our nations economy. My Own Needs to Dispel the Myth
I have worked for 35 years in the oil industry. I am the fifth generation in my family to be in the
oil business. I am a geophysicist and my job was finding oil. The US has so much oil off of it's
shores, in ANWR and in the areas of the Chukchi, Bering and Beaufort Seas, and in the Arctic
Ocean that we could make it on our own for more than 100 years. I have seen the maps.
Congress is preventing us from drilling for many reasons. Among them are the protection of the
polar bears, the seals and much of the wildlife in those seas. While I am an animal lover, and
would never do anything to harm an animal, I do believe that people come first. As I originally
specialized in Environmental Safety in the Oil Industry, and was among those specialists who
helped with the Valdez spill, I know that they oil companies hire people who are educated, know
what they are doing, and do everything that is possible to protect the environment of the seas
and lands where we find oil deposits and drill. I also know that much of the propaganda is just
that. I have never seen a polar bear or a seal struggling to find polar ice. I could tell you stories,
show you pictures, and I know because I have been there. Please remember the myth of the
Alaska Pipeline. That it would ruin the environment and keep animals from migrating. In fact
the opposite is true, and many of the animals collect, in the coldest parts of the winter, beneath
the warmth of the pipeline. It is a sight to behold. My goal is and always has been to clear up the
lies, and get the word out that oil companies are for the people (I know they make a profit, but
that is what America stands for - capitalism), against pollution (accidents happen everywhere,
even in our own homes), and working hard to make our country less dependent on foreign oil.
We need oil independence – it’s key to SECURITY, HEGEMONY, and MUH
FREEDOMS!
Powers, 10 – some person who wrote for CNN (Jonathan, “Independence from Dependence
(on oil),” CNN, http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/jesuscreed/2010/07/independencefrom-dependence-o.html)//IS
Oil poses a clear threat to America’s economic and national security. This spring we
have watched as untold millions of gallons of oil flowed into the Gulf. But for years, we have
watched as billions of dollars flowed to hostile nations to pay for oil. Every day, we send well
over a billion dollars out of this country to pay for oil — money that could and should be used to
grow our economy and create jobs. The simple fact is that our dependence on oil from nations in
the Middle East and other regions constrains our choices, hamstringing America’s flexibility
and choices on the world stage. Too often, we are forced to consider the
impact our foreign policy will have on our oil supply instead of whether a
choice is in line with our values. Every day, we make a clear choice between living up to those
values (and strengthening our security) and prolonging our weakness as a dirty-energy nation.
Today, thousands of Americans are calling for a new
freedom from oil — a dangerous,
10,000 American flags
were planted on the National Mall, each representing Americans
dirty and vulnerable source of energy. This week,
who have pledged to free our nation from a long and damaging cycle of dependence.
MUH FREEDOMS ARE A D-RULE
Petro, Wake Forest Professor in Toledo Law Review, 1974
(Sylvester, Spring, page 480)
However, one may still insist, echoing Ernest Hemingway - "I believe in only one thing: liberty."
And it is always well to bear in mind David Hume's observation: "It is seldom that liberty of any
kind is lost all at once." Thus, it is unacceptable to say that the invasion of one aspect of
freedom is of no import because there have been invasions of so many other aspects. That
road leads to chaos, tyranny, despotism, and the end of all human aspiration.
Ask Solzhenitsyn. Ask Milovan Dijas. In sum, if one believed in freedom as a supreme value
and the proper ordering principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and material
welfare, then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically identified and resisted with
undying spirit.
Heg is the best ever thing ever!
Khalilzad, 1995 analyst at the RAND Corporation (Zalmay, Washington Quarterly, Spring,
lexis)//IS
Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return
to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is
desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would
have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have
a better chance of dealing
cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional
hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude
the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another
global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including
nuclear exchange
a global
. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than
a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system.
Seriously, it’s key to all the power!
Herschinger 12 – lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of the
Armed Forces Munich, Germany
(Eva, “‘Hell Is the Other’: Conceptualising Hegemony and Identity through Discourse Theory”, Millennium - Journal of
International Studies September 2012 vol. 41 no. 1 65-90, dml)
Many IR-poststructuralists share with discourse theorists crucial commitments – most importantly, a specific understanding of
language, discourse and the role of contingency. To start with, language
does not merely reflect reality but
constructs reality: by speaking, something is done, for instance, in betting, giving a promise or naming a ship. 23
Thus, a material ‘reality’ of course exists; however, there is no objective or ‘true’ meaning
beyond linguistic representations. 24 Discourse is conceived in analogy, as it is constitutive for the construction
of knowledge and the constitution of objects. While there are different notions of discourse, the Essex School conceptualises
discourse as a ‘structured totality’, 25 a system of meaningful practices, which relates differences to establish their meaning. In other
words, the
meanings and the identities of objects and subjects are formed through a system of
practices embodied by discourse. These practices are routinised forms of human and societal
reproduction, which are material and articulatory at the same time, since ‘human beings constantly engage in
the process of linking together different elements of their social lives in these continuous and
projective sequences of human action’. 26
This constant process of linking hints at the role of contingency in the Essex School. Although being defined as a totality,
discourse is a structure penetrated by contingency and temporality, marked by ruptures and breaches
because the relation between differences can constantly change and meaning is organised
differently. Attempts to fix meaning around closed structures are in vain: ‘neither absolute fixity nor
absolute non-fixity is possible’. 27 However, to allow for identity and social formation, the Essex School argues that
meaning needs to be partially fixed; that is, partial fixations bind the very flow of differences temporally. Such fixations
are achieved as any discourse situates itself as ‘an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity’ 28 and subjects search for a
constitutive decision articulating social meaning in one way rather than another. With regard to international counter-terrorist
policies and drug prohibition measures, such
conceptualisations of language, discourse and contingency imply, on the
one hand, that these policies are based on specific, contingent linguistic representations of the
security problem they want to address and on specific, partially fixed constructions of Self and
Other. On the other hand, these linguistic representations fuel the actions of the respective
countermeasures by making them intelligible and legitimate. This is what I mean by conceptualising practices
to be articulatory and material at the same time.
In the Essex School, hegemony is conceptualised against this background inasmuch as it builds on Gramsci’s
claim that the articulation of collective wills takes place in the midst of political struggles within state, economy and civil society. For
Gramsci, hegemony is the genuine political moment marked by an ideological struggle which tries to unify economic, political and
intellectual objectives. 29 Hegemony is no longer confined to the attempt to form a political alliance but aims
at the total
fusion of different objectives, involving the creation of a collective will. The latter is forged via an ideological struggle
which, according to Mouffe, is ‘a process of disarticulation-rearticulation of given ideological elements in a struggle between two
hegemonic principles to appropriate these elements’. 30
As such, hegemony
is a discursive phenomenon produced through specific relations of forces.
Typically, these relations articulated in hegemonic practices organise the discursive space by
drawing boundaries and creating identities. In the Essex School context, such shaping of the discursive terrain is
encompassed by the logic of equivalence. While discursive elements are per se different, the logic of equivalence produces
‘equivalential differences’. To explain: a,b,c are equivalent with regard to something identical underlying them all; thus, a,b,c are
equivalent (But not identical!) with respect to z. This ‘something identical’ is termed the ‘general equivalent’. 31 By contrast, the
logic of difference encompasses the opposite movement as it extenuates the equivalential ties between elements, that is, it
disperses hegemonic formations and disintegrates current identities. The logic relates discursive elements
while preserving their difference – indeed, difference makes them conceivable as elements: a is different from b,b from c and so on.
Still, both logics ‘cannot do with or without each other’, as a certain degree of difference is conditional to establish equivalential
chains. One is diluted by what the other is trying to fix, but none of the logics dominates a discourse completely as only partial
fixations are possible. 32
Yet, to pursue my argument further, it
is necessary to establish a link between hegemony and the article’s
relational concept of identity, which states that in the process of identity construction, a Self and
corresponding Other(s) are created. While the terminology of a ‘Self’ is rarely employed in the Essex School context,
(which rather speaks of the ‘subject’), ties with the relational conceptualisation of identity in IR-poststructuralism are obvious when
Laclau claims that ‘[t]here is no way that a particular group living in a wider community can live a monadic existence – on the
contrary, part
of the definition of its own identity is the construction of a complex and elaborated
system of relations with other groups’. 33 This clearly resonates with the IR-poststructuralist thought of difference
being a requirement built into the logic of identity. 34 However, IR-poststructuralism has expended some energy trying to outline
that speaking
of Self and antagonistic Other(s) captures only half the story since the antagonistic
Other is ‘often situated within a more complicated set of identities’. 35 Identity construction produces
varying degrees of otherness and does not necessarily depend upon a juxtaposition to a radically threatening Other. 36 Still, the
treatment of antagonistic and non-antagonistic Others involves some ‘combination of
hierarchy, eradication, assimilation or expulsion’ – and in the moment of a blocked identity ‘the
self might be driven by the desire to move from a relationship of mutuality and interdependence
to one of autonomy and dominance’. 37 These dynamics show that in IR-poststructuralism, identities are
fragmented and can only be partially fixed: identity ‘does not signal that stable core of the self, unfolding from the beginning to end
through all the vicissitudes of history without change’. 38 On the contrary, the
discursive nature of identity always
allows for alternative constructions against which other identity notions are protected and
defended: identities are subject to constant (re)writing in the sense of inscribing a particular meaning so as to render more
permanent that which is originally contingent. 39
By taking into account these congruent conceptualisations of identity being based on difference in the Essex School and IRpoststructuralism, I argue that international hegemonies
are about creating a collective ‘Self’ juxtaposed to
its antagonistic Other, that is, that which the Self deems culpable of blocking its desired
identity. 40 Central to this claim are the operations of the logic of equivalence: modelling the discursive topography by outlining
what a number of elements have in common and drawing frontiers goes hand in hand with separating a discursive space into at least
two diametrically opposed entities. In hegemonic relations, the identities constructed are distinct from identities emerging in other
contexts (for instance, between cooperation partners). 41 Identity
construction in the context of hegemonies is a
process soaked in power, since the entities created by the logic of equivalence are separated by an
antagonistic frontier and are constructed as antagonistic camps. Thus, the logic makes ‘reference
to an “us– them” axis: two or more elements can be substituted for each other with reference to a common negation or
threat’. 42 Indeed, the joint project that the logic of equivalence links elements into consists of countering a
common enemy in order to achieve the vision of a world which is blocked by the presence of
the Other. According to the article’s conceptualisation of hegemony and identity, this is when a Self and an Other
are created – by outlining that elements are not equivalent in terms of sharing a positive property but in terms of having a
common enemy. And as this Self considers its identity as blocked by the Other, the latter appears to be
responsible for the failure of the Self to achieve its ‘full’ identity. The point is not that the Self is ‘nothing’
because it cannot be a full presence of itself. Rather, the political actions of the Self will be shaped by the idea
that the annihilation of the enemy will permit the Self to become the fully constituted
identity it seeks to be. 43 A typical assertion in this respect would be: ‘if we only eliminated terrorism,
the world would be a peaceful and safe place’..
It’s not like drilling hurts the environment
Unconfirmed Sources, no date (“Sarah Palin To Host Nature Show,” Unconfirmed
Sources http://unconfirmedsources.com/?itemid=4327)//IS
Nature lover Sarah Palin and Discovery Communications announced today that she will be
hosting a new TV series called "Sarah Palin's Alaska" in which she will challenge antiquated
notions such as Global warming, promote oil drilling as being beneficial to the environment and
discuss how to stop polar bears from being listed as endangered species. "Oil drilling doesn't
cause any problem with the animals or the environment", Palin stated. "I love to watch the furry
little animals scurry away into the woods as we start setting up the drilling equipment!" Palin
insists the animals all find alternate dwelling places that are even nicer than the holes they live
in now. She also insisted that even with oil drilling there will be "plenty of places for furry
animals to live and frolic". Palin also revealed that Alaska is just as cold as it ever was and
global warming is a myth. "There were times this past winter when we couldn't even go
outside it was so cold!" Palin lamented. "If people think there's global warming just let them
come to Alaska for a winter!" Palin insisted that polar bears be removed from the list of
endangered animals because "they are all over the place! You can't go to an iceberg without
seeing bunches of them!" "Besides", "Palin continued. "Polar bears eat people! We don't want
nasty bears eating nice people!"
Warming isn’t even real – if it was, I’d like it!
Connors-Maloney, 12 – Oklahoma 1st Congressional District Coordinator – Oklahoma’s
1st District Coordinator (Annie, 02/16/12 “I Resist Our Dependence on Foreign Oil - Drill Here,
Drill Now,”
http://patriotaction.net/group/iresistourdependenceonforeignoildrillheredrillnow)//IS
Science has now proven the following very important points:
* CO2 is definitely not a pollutant. It is a friendly trace gas necessary for all life.
* Human-produced CO2 is a miniscule fraction of a percentage of greenhouse gases.
* 96.5% of all greenhouse gases emit from the oceans, naturally.
* Without
CO2, vegetation dies, herbivores die, you die.
* CO2 levels used to be much higher many times in the past.
* Higher temperatures from the sun result in CO2 levels rising long afterwards.
* Rising CO2 is an effect of global warming, not a cause.
* Global warming and cooling is a natural phenomenon.
* The higher the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, the greener our planet becomes.
* Forests and plant life growth has increased by approx 40% over the last 50 years, thanks to
CO2.
* Increasing CO2 yields larger
food crops. This is beneficial to a growing population.
* The Earth is not currently warming, it is in fact cooling.
* Temperatures in the past have often been much warmer than today.
* Even if it were to happen, a warmer Earth is far better than a colder one, for all life.
* Many scientists believe we are on the brink of another ice age.
* When the planet warms and cools it is purely due to the sun. Not your car.
* Polar ice is now at record levels and still growing.
* Climate changes happen all the time, and have occurred much faster than anything in modern
times.
* There has been no increase in extreme weather. In fact, records show the exact opposite.
The list goes on and on, supported by NASA data, weather satellites, and much of the
meteorological and scientific world.
Contention #2 is ебать россию (yebat' rossiyu)
WOLVERINES!
The Russians are coming the Russians are coming! They’re evil and want to kill us
Nyquist no date (J.R., no date, former Russia analyst for the DOD and all around smart guy, “Russia's Disruptive
Role,” http://www.jrnyquist.com/Russia_s_Disruptive_Role.html)//RTF
On Sunday I spoke with Polish journalist Tomasz Pompowski, who wanted to give me an update on events in Europe. The picture he
painted was not entirely pleasant. Russia, he said, was
promoting economic and political instability. Russia’s
role is not generally understood, he explained, but “whenever you look behind a little, you see
the Russians. You see former KGB people.” The game appears to involve businesses, including media businesses –
but especially the energy business. The Russians make a great deal of money by exporting gas and oil. It
also appears they have a special strategy for dealing with their competition. “The peaceful siesta after
the collapse of the Berlin Wall was deceptive,” said Pompowski. The Russians, he explained, made use of the Arab
world in order to cause problems and play games with future energy prices. “If you talk to KGB
dissidents,” he said, “they will tell you that the most important research department in the KGB was that devoted to Arabic language,
culture and Islam, going back since before the invasion of Afghanistan.” The Arabs and the Iranian Muslims control a very
considerable part of global energy production. If
trouble can be stirred up within these countries, or between
countries, then Russia will get more money for its energy exports. For example, the political destabilization
of Saudi Arabia could be very profitable for Russia. At present, encouraging Iranian nuclear ambitions, with the attending sanctions
on Iran, may also lead to higher Russian profits. Russia
is also making economic moves into Europe and
Israel. “Russian tycoons are buying up the Israeli media,” he said. “Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch is
under attack just as he was starting to invest in Eastern Europe.” Pompowski pointed to the fact that
Murdoch’s rival in the United Kingdom is “former” Soviet KGB officer Alexander Lebedev, who
owns the Evening Standard and is buying Murdoch’s News of the World which was closed down three
weeks ago in the wake of a scandal in which News of the World was found by British police to have hacked the phone calls of nearly
4,000 people, including members of the Royal family. “Look at that,” said Pompowski. When
I asked Pompowski why
the Russian operatives would block Murdoch in Eastern Europe while taking over his outlets in
Britain, he explained: “I believe Moscow has to put down the alternative voices.” Why would this be
necessary? Moscow is trying to split off Europe from America through the agency of anti-American
active measures. Murdoch’s media outlets represent an obstacle to such an effort. “The late Gen. Odom believed that the Soviet
Union transformed itself into these different entities,” noted Pompowski. “Now the NATO states have to understand this new
complex of power, and they must take notice.” The danger, said Pompowski, is that Russia may “damage and destabilize the
structures established after the Second World War, which were part of the Western security system.” The official Russian policy is to
create a new “security architecture for Europe.” This translates as Europe without NATO – that is to say, Europe dominated by
Russia. Pompowski also spoke of revelations that the
bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Georgia last year was
carried out by Russian GRU officer Maj. Yevgeny Borisov, and was coordinated by Russian
military intelligence. Why would Russian military officials order an attack against a U.S. Embassy? “I believe the Russian
state is completely in disarray,” Pompowski explained. “There are several criminal powers within the state, all acting along different
lines. I think in the end they are lost. Russia
is a rogue state. It is completely a rogue state.” The idea is
that Russia is caught between nationalist, communist, mafia and ersatz-Orthodox Christian
power blocs. Yet all the various internal Russian power groups share a similar perspective when
it comes to America. “Have you seen the report on the visit of the Russian ambassador to NATO with members of Congress?”
asked Pompowski. “Ambassador Rogozin met with Senators Kyl and Kirk on Tuesday or Thursday,
and he called them ‘monsters of the Cold War.’” Pompowski also spoke of the ersatz-Christian Norwegian
terrorist, Anders Bhering Breivik, who was allegedly trained earlier this year at a secret
paramilitary field camp in Belarus (a former Soviet republic currently defended by the Russian military and used as a
conduit for exporting crime, drugs, weapons – and perhaps even terrorists). Supposedly, Breivik visited Minsk last
spring. “There is a discussion of Russian links with this tragedy in Norway,” said Pompowski. “The
information is growing all the time.” Breivik’s code name within the Belarus KGB was allegedly “Viking,” though his connection to
Russia is unproven, his praise for Putin and the Russian political system is coincident with his disgust for the soft, politically correct
democracies of Western Europe and Scandinavia. I asked Tomasz about the idea that somebody in Moscow has been pushing Right
Wing extremism in Europe. “I am close to this theory,” Pompowski responded. “But you cannot find in this a homogeneous Russian
goal. There is no one in control of the Russian state. It is a conglomerate of different states.” Of course, support for Slavic
nationalism is nothing new, he explained.” They were behind the nationalism of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, for example. The
Russians are involved in many manipulations, some of them established under Gorbachev or earlier.” According to Pompowski, the
tendency of these manipulations is to destabilize the West, to bring higher energy prices and to foster extremism. The Russian
military has indeed been fostering a movement in Europe, acknowledged Pompowski. “Unlike the militaries of the West, they had a
department of military philosophy placed high up within the strategic command system. These people claimed to be Russian
Orthodox, but the majority of the Russian Orthodox leadership had their origins within the KGB. Under the Soviet Union you had to
get through the KGB to rise as a priest. Now these people are given a free hand, and are still involved in KGB strategies.” I
asked
Pompowski about the release of an independent report on the tragic air crash that killed the
Polish president last year as he traveled to mark the 60th anniversary the Katyn Forest massacre
where thousands of Polish military officers were slaughtered by the Soviets in 1940. He
described how Russian officials hindered Polish investigators of the air crash, denying them
access to aircraft wreckage, onboard voice recordings and more. In summing up, Pompowski translated a
line from Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, which was used in the report, and which had to do with the Katyn massacre. “And do not
forgive “And you are not entitled to forgive “On behalf of those who are betrayed.” It is an apt three lines which the entire world
should commit to memory, especially as the number of those betrayed is bound to grow.
Seriously though, Russians are bullies
Roussel and Fossum 10- Stéphane Roussel is professor in the department of political
science at the Université du Québec à Montréal and Canada Research Chair in Canadian foreign
and defence policy. John Erik Fossum is professor of political science with the ARENA Centre
for European Studies at the University of Oslo and vice president of the Nordic Association for
Canadian Studies, (“The Arctic is Hot Again in America and Europe: Introduction to Part I”,
December 2010, http://ijx.sagepub.com/content/65/4/799.citation//nemo)
Hønneland’s examination of the Russian-Norwegian pattern of cooperation opens the door for a closer look at Russia’s approach to
the Arctic. In western capitals, and especially in Ottawa, Russians are depicted as aggressive, ambitious, and greedy. But the
contributors to this issue offer a much more nuanced portrait. First, Ekaterina Piskunova explores the idea that Russia is conducting
a foreign policy that is consistent with the notion of “soft balancing,” which means “a limited military buildup and security
understanding among actors, combined with preventive strategies as well as nonmilitary tools, to discourage, delay, or dismantle
unilateral aggressive policies by another great power” (852). Russia has clear interests in the Arctic, especially with regard to energy,
and defending these interests is a central concern for Moscow, demonstrated in its pattern of actions and reactions. But, as
Piskunova notes, its actions remain within the limits of the existing institutional and legal framework. Indra Øverland addresses
Russia’s Arctic strategy—and western perceptions of it—in the energy field. Øverland
stresses how western
perceptions have been shaped by underlying security considerations that may best
be understood as leftovers from the Cold War period, an image he notes is largely
reflected in the more jingoistic parts of the Russian media. Øverland instead underlines the many
important similarities between the Russian approach and that of western countries, such as Norway. What might set Russia
apart, however, is the proportion of Russian gas (80 percent) and oil (70 percent) that is located in the Arctic parts
of Russia. A significant proportion of these resources is located offshore, where Russia lacks
experience. The sheer size of the fields suggests that the more Russia wants to develop them, the
greater will be its reliance on foreign capital and technology. At the same time, there is still a
strong element of Russian resource nationalism, and Russia has a tendency to consider energy
to be a strategic asset. This is also partly reflected in different Russian models for the inclusion of foreign companies:
exploration of the Shtokman field has been more inclusive than exploration in Yamal. How Russia prioritizes these two
Arctic petroleum regions will shed important light on its openness to international companies.
One of the interesting conclusions raised by Øverland is that “western commentators also tend to overlook similarities between the
Russian approach and the approaches of their own countries to the Arctic” (866). These words are a good introduction to P. Whitney
Lackenbauer’s article. The author takes as his point of departure that “the Arctic is a topic of growing geostrategic importance.”
Realist analysts inject a certain Cold War mentality into the debate when they point to a
resurgent Russia as a major threat, a Russia that is heavily committed to Arctic involvement
and development. Russia fuels this perception through its belligerent and aggressive rhetoric,
which is picked up in Canada and mirrored in the Canadian debate. At the same time, Lackenbauer insists
that confrontational Russian rhetoric is really mainly intended for its domestic audience, because Moscow also continues to
emphasize that it is committed to abiding by international law. Russia
is sending mixed messages. The same pattern
important observation is that this hard-line
rhetoric serves the cause of those seeking to increase military spending and the securitization of
the north. This is also taking place in both countries, and “Canada finds itself cast in the unfamiliar role as a catalyst for
also applies to Canada, which is also sending mixed messages. An
militarizing the region, staging ‘Cold War-style exercises’ just like the Russians” (892). The situation has a clear ring to it of the
liberal security dilemma, where both parties “misperceive each other’s intentions and, in striving to be defensively secure, cause
others to perceive their actions as threatening” (893). At the same time, the fact that both countries are not only committed to
complying with international law but actually demonstrate compliance in their behaviour goes to show that the potential for conflict
is lower than one might infer from the many abrasive statements on both sides.
The mixed messaging nevertheless
carries the risk that the situation could spiral out of control. Lackenbauer, as do several other
contributors to this issue, suggests that it is important to maintain a broader perspective on the discourse.
It is also important to keep in mind that there are clear beneficiaries from securitization and increased interstate tensions, and that
these are generally not the inhabitants of the region. If these authors
add important nuance to the image of the
“bad guy” or the “troublemaker” that westerners tend to see in Russia, those dealing with Canada question
Ottawa’s image as the “good guy.” In his brief yet incisive overview of the central issues and challenges pertaining to the north,
Michael Byers underlines how the Arctic figured centrally in the Cold War and how the end of the Cold War and global climate
change have increased cooperation among the main actors there. He further notes that cooperation has generally improved more in
non-security than in security matters, where the Cold War divide remains a difficult issue to settle, although the Obama
administration has taken measures to improve relations. There are hardly any disputes over land, with the exception of Hans Island;
the important differences are over maritime boundaries and shipping routes. All the states are committed to work “within an
existing framework of international law to delimit their respective areas of jurisdiction over the seabed” (900). At the same time, the
Arctic coastal states are set to test the scope of their rights over an extended continental shelf under the UNCLOS provisions. There
are efforts in place to map the seabed, for instance, in the Beaufort Sea, which pit Canadians against Americans. Byers points to the
fact that with increased access, today’s security challenges involve non-state actors (smugglers, gunrunners, illegal immigrants, and
even terrorists) in the Northwest Passage, the northern sea route, and the Barents, Greenland, Beaufort, Chukchi, and Bering seas.
The proliferation security initiative is a cooperative mechanism set up to deal with these threats. Byers ends by noting that
contentious issues have been dealt with through international law, which has prevented a race for Arctic resources.
Specifically Putin is an evil pinko communist
Bikermog 08 (Bikermog, sometime 6 years ago according to yahoo answers, preferred answerer on yahoo answers, “Is
Vladimir Putin a communist?,” https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081226134641AAO7a3v)//RTF
Is Vladimir Putin a communist? Is
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy, a communist? I also ask considering how
he has arrested and murdered journalists by the tens of hundreds, and rigs elections. He also
called the collapse of the Soviet Union a "catastrophe." Do you think its possible a new USSR comes up in the
next decade? Best AnswerAsker's Choice bikermog answered 6 years ago if it looks, walks, and
quacks like a duck, why would anyone think it was a giraffe? of course he's a
communist. Asker's rating & comment 5 out of 5
He’s even trying to over the world, and even worse, AMERICA!
Trinko 3/18 (Katarina, 3/18/14, managing editor of The Daily Signal and a member of USA Today's Board of Contributors, “
Putin Is Launching a New Version of the Evil Empire. What the U.S. Needs to Do Now,” http://dailysignal.com/2014/03/18/putinlaunching-new-version-evil-empire-u-s-needs-now/)//RTF
Today Russian president Vladimir Putin
announced that he would make Crimea officially part of Russia.
Crimea, which is currently part of Ukraine, had a forced referendum Saturday. “
Vladimir Putin is
launching a new version of the evil empire that Ronald Reagan resisted decades
earlier,” observes Nile Gardiner, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom. “The United
States and the free world must resist Putin’s ugly power grab.” “Putin’s attempt to annex the Crimea is only
the beginning of his imperial ambitions,” Gardiner warned. “This is likely a precursor to Russia seizing the whole of
Ukraine. If Putin succeeds in taking the Ukraine, he will have his eyes set on the Baltic states as his next likely conquest.”
“Crimea has always been an integral part of Russia in the hearts and minds of people,” Putin told Russian politicians today,
according to the New York Times. “That faith has been preserved and passed on from generation to generation.” Gardiner wrote this
weekend on how the United States should respond to Putin’s aggressive actions: President Putin should be told in no uncertain
terms that there will be an immediate price to be paid for enacting his imperial ambitions, beginning with the immediate
U.S.
withdrawal from the hugely flawed New START Treaty and the swift implementation of targeted sanctions, including
visa bans and the freezing of financial assets, against any Russian official or private citizen (including the oligarchs that surround the
Kremlin) involved in aggression against Ukraine or in human rights violations on the ground. The Magnitsky Act, passed by
Congress in 2012, should be applied without mercy against Russia’s ruling elites, who have been instrumental in keeping Putin’s
brutal regime in power. A hard-line sanctions policy—with real teeth and not just empty rhetoric—must be coupled with the
bolstering of NATO allies in close proximity to Russia. This should include the deployment of additional U.S. military assets to the
region, especially the four members that border Ukraine: Poland, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, and the Baltic States of Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania. The message should be sent directly to Moscow that any threat to a NATO member will be met with the
invocation of Article 5 of the Washington Treaty and the full force of the NATO alliance. In addition, the Obama Administration
must act to lift restrictions on the export of liquefied natural gas to U.S. allies in Europe that have become increasingly energy
dependent on Moscow.
Drilling lets us kill the Russians- two warrants
1. Drilling makes Russia mad! That means WAR!
Reuters 12/10 (Reuters, 12/10/13, “New cold war: Russia eyes chilly Arctic in global energy play,”
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101262037#.)//RTF
President Vladimir Putin
ordered Russia's military to increase its focus on the Arctic and finish plans
by the end of the year to upgrade military bases in the resource-rich region where world powers
jostle for control. Speaking to Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, Putin praised the military's work in the Arctic,
where Canada said on Monday it was claiming the North Pole as part of an broader claim on the region. The United States, Denmark
and Norway are also pressing for control of what they consider their fair share of massive untapped oil and natural gas reserves. "I
request that you pay special attention to the deployment of infrastructure and military units in
the Arctic," Putin said, speaking at a Defence Ministry board meeting. "By the end of the year it is planned
- and I expect it will be done ... the renewal of the Tiksi airfield and completion of construction
work on the Severomorsk-1 airfield," he said in televised comments. Russia has already completed work
on renovating an airfield on the Novosibirsk Islands, Putin said, which was abandoned in 1993. Earlier this year
Moscow sent 10 warships and four icebreakers to the islands in a show of force. Underscoring Moscow's sensitivity
over Arctic claims, Russia arrested 30 people on board a Greenpeace ship during a September
protest against Russian offshore Arctic drilling. They now face charges carrying seven year jail
sentences. Putin said earlier this week that Russia's military presence in the Arctic was needed
to protect against potential threats from the United States. The U.S. Geological Survey says the Arctic
contains 30 percent of the world's undiscovered natural gas and 15 percent of oil. The world's largest oil producer, Russia
expects to see oil output decline at its mainstay western Siberian oilfields in coming years and
has looked further afield to potential Arctic reserves. Russia, Canada and Denmark all say an underwater
mountain range known as the Lomonosov Ridge, which stretches 1,800 km (1,120 miles) across the pole under the Arctic Sea, is part
of their own landmass
It’s all good because we would totally win
Wolfeyes 08 (Wolfeyes, yahoo answers said they answered 6 years ago, commenter on yahoo answers, “Can America win
a war against Russia?,” https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080817101640AAYkVXY)//RTF
Can America win a war against Russia? while Americans fight amongst each other. Russia plans an attack on the us.
Update : By the way America is the greatest country in the world. That is why we ...show
more Best Answer wolfeyes_89 answered 6 years ago Of course we can, but war is always uncertain. In terms of pure assets
yes of course we can win 100 times over. If you think about it all of our weapons were made to fight
a WW III with the soviet union, not Russia, which in blatant terms was a superpower while
Russia is only an emerging superpower that cant afford to pay it's officers. From our M1A1
Abrams (which is the most powerful and technologically advanced tank in the world to date) to our
fleets and our F-22's, we are very prepared to fight a war with Russia. The fact that we have forces active
in Iraq and other parts of the world really doesn't matter because we still have enough forces to fight another two
or three conventional wars and keep our mainland safe. To put it in laments terms. One carrier strike
group has enough power to eliminate the entire Russian air force and navy, and we only have
about 2 or 3 in Iraq out of 10 (but don't quote me on that) and seeing as how Russia will chose to fight a conventional war
we wont have to be dispersing high value assets to eliminate gorilla targets on a massive scale like we have to right now in Iraq.
Furthermore we don't only have the navy, we have an air force that outnumbers the Russians in
terms of technology and manpower. So really all we have to worry about is nukes. I really don't
think that a superpower like the U.S. doesn't have a contingency for nukes I mean we build new
nukes every ten years :D. So in conclusion
we would win but we would suffer about 25-35%
casualties of the total number of forces that we would deploy, because at the end of the day Russia's armed forces are a big threat.
2. Drilling LITERALLY KILLS THE RUSSIA
US gas exports are great!
Kasperowicz 3/5 (Pete, 3/5/14, staff writer for The Hill, “Boehner: Weaken Russian influence by exporting US natural
gas,” http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/199978-boehner-weaken-russian-influence-by-exporting-us-natural-gas)//RTF
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Wednesday called on the Obama administration to allow more exports of natural gas,
which he said is a move that would help weaken the influence of Russia. Boehner said Russia's involvement in Ukraine is "more than
a cause for concern, it's a cause for action." He said Congress would work with the White House to counter Russia's move into
Ukraine, but said energy policy should also be a part of the U.S. reaction. He said selling
more natural gas abroad
would help boost U.S. values overseas, but said so far, President Obama's Energy Department is holding these exports
back. "We can supplant Russia's influence, but we won't so long as we have to contend with the Energy Department's
achingly slow approval process," Boehner said on the House floor. Boehner said the Department has received 24 export permits, but
has approved only six. "This amounts to a de facto ban only emboldens Vladimir Putin, allowing him to sell large quantities of
natural gas to our allies," Boehner said. "President should do the right thing here, and end this de facto ban so we can strengthen our
economy here and our security here and abroad." Earlier in the day, Boehner indicated that language on natural gas could be part of
a Ukraine bill that could come up this week or next. Soon after Boehner spoke, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) announced on the floor that
he is proposing legislation that would require the Department of Energy to expedite all natural gas export permits to Ukraine, all
former Soviet nations, and the European Union. "Ukraine is almost totally dependent on Russia for energy," Poe said. "Russian
imperialism has proved that it's willing to use gas as a political, economic weapon to intimidate its neighbors. "The
demand is
there and the American supply is overwhelming. The only thing standing in the way are the
bureaucrats in the Department of Energy." Poe also said he would propose a bill to withhold all visas for Russian
government officials until the Secretary of State confirms that all Russian military activity in Ukraine has ceased. Boehner and Poe
add to the growing chorus of Republican lawmakers pushing for Obama to expedite U.S. liquefied natural gas exports. Sens. John
Barrasso (Wyo.), Jim Inhofe (Okla.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) all blasted Obama this week for failing to "maintain leadership in the
world." "If
President Obama is serious about helping the people of Ukraine, he will immediately
expedite the approval process for liquefied natural gas exports," Barrasso said.
RIP in peace Russia
Aron 6/29 (Leon, 6/29/14, Resident Scholar and Director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, “The
political economy of Russian oil and gas,” http://www.aei.org/outlook/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/europe/the-politicaleconomy-of-russian-oil-and-gas/)//RTF
Finally, among
the most destabilizing consequences of the continuing dependence on oil and gas
will be the Kremlin’s declining ability to secure the elites’ loyalty. Fiercely protective of their share of the
politically apportioned riches of Russia’s state capitalism, powerful clans will squabble to secure the same share
of a diminishing pie, in the process threatening the stability of the regime. “Putin’s unchallenged
power” rests on a tripartite foundation: “oil and gas money, the Federal Security Service, and
television,” a Russian observer noted last December.[75] Today, one leg of this tripod is beginning to look
wobbly. These may not be the challenges of tomorrow or the day after. Yet in the medium term and longer term, trends in
technology and the global economy, as well as the country’s own economic, social, political, and demographic dynamics, seem to
have conspired to leave the Kremlin no good, risk-free choices.
You have a moral obligation to vote aff
Cromstar, Day 982 (Cromstar, day 982, Patriot, “So You Want to Kill Russians?,”
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/so-you-want-to-kill-russians--1471663/1/20)//RTF
Kill Russians
So You Want to
? Day 982, 13:13•by Cromstar Good for you! It’s not just a fun
thing to do, it’s your patriotic duty as a citizen of the eUSA! And don’t feel bad for the Russians,
either…they hate apple pie, and have insulting things to say about your mother. I can’tbelieve
how low those fellows will go! So now that you know what you want to do, you need to get down to business!
Unfortunately, while it may be fun to ride around in yourtank or helicopter and blow Russians up on the battlefield, that doesn’t
alwayshelp the eUSA win the war. You can’t just fight, you have to fight smart. After you’ve picked your weapon and stepped onto the
battlefield to gun down a few members of the Red Menace, you have to ask yourself, “How can I help the eUS win this
battle?” First off, you should seriously consider joining up with the eUS military (or a militia if you swing that way). In addition to
thefun of being a member of some of the most kick-ass organizations in eRepublik,they provide better instructions on how, when,
and where to fight, plus theyhelp provide you with cheap/free weapons, moving tickets, and other suppliesyou need to be effective. If
you already are in a militia or the military, youshould contact your superior in the chain-of-command for instructions. If you aren’t
in any of those organizations, or you are, but you’ve been told to cut loose, don’t just go blasting Ruskies all willy-nilly!That does
NOT help win battles most of the time. Despite his best efforts, Rambo didn’t save Oregon from Russia because he doesn’t know
enough about battlefield tactics. So, learn from Rambo’s mistakes, and learnsome strategy! Remember reading all that stuff admins
talked about in their articles? Well, whether or not you do, here’s a reminder: there are twoconditions to winning a battle. One side
must complete both conditions towin the battle. 1. Hold the Capital city of the region. 2. Possess at least 75% of the tiles in a region.
If neither side has completed both objectives at the end of the 24 hour period for a battle, it enters into overtime…and that means
thefirst side to complete both conditions at the same time wins automatically. So what does this mean for you? Well, due to the way
the new war module works, it means that the beginnings of most battles hold very little meaning on the outcome of thefight. In fact,
we’ll go so far as to say that, unless the Department of DefenseOrders say otherwise, don’t fight in the first day of any particular
battle. Sadly, after you go to bed that night, the OTHER side will wake up in the morning and undo all your progress when you aren’t
around tostop them. What does that mean? It means you probably wasted health, time,weapons, and money and got nothing to
show for it. However, during the second day of a battle, people begin to act, in the hopes of completing the conditions and winning
the battle for theirside! Now’s your chance to act, and you should know what to do! Russians, Russians, everywhere, and not a friend
in sight? That will probably happen sometimes. In those cases, you might end up getting attacked by a dozen enemies and end up
dead. Remember, youaren’t superman! Even a Field Marshall and a Veteran with a Q5 weapon willeventually be brought down by
enough Russians. You want to take them downwithout being taken down yourself. Basic tactics Remember the terrain bonuses and
use them to your advantage for both offense and defense. Infantry, stick to forests and mountains,especially when facing tanks (they
will just run you over if you catch them inthe hills where they have the terrain bonus!) Don’t forget your unit bonuseseither infantry!
Whenever you spot an enemy artillery defending a city, bridge,or just out in the open, you can move in on him. He’ll have the
defense bonusin a city tile, but anywhere else, you can just destroy that artillery and freethe ground for friendly helios to join the
fight at your side. Tanks, just remember to run over any infantry you can find. You can’t chase them into the mountains, but if you
get into the hills and getthe terrain bonus for yourself, your unit bonus will give you that much of anedge to destroy them. You’ve got
2 movement points each turn, an advantage overinfantry and artillery, so use them well to cover ground fast if you need toget
somewhere in a hurry. Just be sure to watch out for helicopters…especiallyon open ground. Helicopters, you have most useful
functions in a battle. In addition to 3 movement points, you can cross ANY terrain, a huge bonus overevery other unit. In
fact, water tiles can only be captured by helicopters, andyou are the only unit that isn’t affected by bridge blockades. Use
yourmovement to benefit your allies, by helping to get around behind blockades atstrategic locations, crossing rivers where there
aren’t any enemy units,sneaking into the backfield to capture tiles unopposed, or just bearing down ona tank and blowing it to
pieces. Artillery, you have an extremely important role to play. Helicopters are extremely versatile units that can cause a lot of
problems ifleft unchecked. Luckily, you have the advantage over them…oh, and you have anadvantage when in a city. Gee…regional
capitals are cities. That makesartillery perfect for defending capitals…especially against rouge helios thatjust fly over a river to avoid
the defenses at bridgeheads! No, I’m afraid that isn’t all there is. Remember, just remembering the basics about unit strengths and
bonuses only gets you so far…you need to know a bit more about tactics onthe battlefield in order to best help the eUSA. Here’s the
nitty-gritty detail. Things the experts know but you might not. Learn them by heart. Deployment Where you deploy on the map is
important in a battle. If you didn’t deploy in the first day of the battle and waited until the second,you’ll have the extra luxury of
deploying most anywhere on the map your alliesstill control. That’s another reason to wait on joining a battle…after you’vejoined the
battle once, you are limited in where you are allowed to deploy to thebattlefield. Oh, and while you should carefully consider where
to deploy, you should also remember that deployment is important to the other side as well.Remember that. So where to deploy?
Generally speaking, deploying for the first time leaves you with 4 main options you might run into you. If either side owns the entire
map, you pretty much have a choice of where to deploy…along the front line of the deployment zone. If yourside owns the map, you
should deploy along the enemy’s deployment zone and helpkeep them from breaking out. If the enemy owns the map, deploy in your
owndeployment zone and help your allies to break out. If the battle is particular close or tight, there’s likely to be large zones
controlled by one side or the other. If there is fightingaround the capital of a region, and you can deploy nearby, that might be a
goodidea, so that you can join in on the attack or defense of the capital,depending on who owns it. Sometimes, when you go to
deploy, you’ll notice that there’s a major front where both sides are stacked up heavily. If there’s only that onefront, you can choose
where to deploy and do your best to break the enemy’slines and secure the battle for your side. Finally, sometimes you might get
lucky and your allies will have taken a large zone behind the enemy lines. Deploying in these zones toattack the enemy and capture
tiles behind his lines, where he’s weak andusually has few units, can really help your allies. It not only pushes towardsthe tileholding victory condition, but it also draws fighters away from thefront lines of battle, forcing the enemy to lose ground if he’s not
careful andtoo many people leave the front. Tiles versus Fights
Everyone wants to kill the
enemy. We all know that. However, killing the enemy doesn’t actually win the battle. It’s controlling tiles. Sometimes you’ll
want to jump into the fight and blow some stuff up. However, you might be more useful performing the dull job ofcapturing tiles. It
might not sound as glamorous as fighting the enemy up-closeand personal, but it often has a bigger impact on the battle itself.
Remember how important deployment zones are? Remember when we mentioned deploying in the backfield to cause trouble for the
enemy? Well,the enemy can do the same to you! So if you happen to be nearby a cluster of enemy tiles, and they are behind the main
front of a battle, quickly capture them so the enemycan’t deploy there! The last thing you and your friends want is for a dozenField
Marshall’s to appear right beside the capital because you were too busychasing the enemy away to capture the tiles. If there’s any
form of breach inthe front where a helicopter popped across a river, or a clump of tiles wheresome tough guys made their last stand,
then please help capture those tilesbefore getting back into the fight. Capturing tiles and cutting off enemy deployments can turn the
tide of battle! And remember, you need 75% of the tiles to win the battle…ifyour side only needs those last few tiles, these ones are
easier to pick upthan the ones the enemy is currently sitting on. Bridges and rivers Three of the four unit types are blocked by rivers
and require a bridge to cross. So naturally, rivers form strong barriers against all but helios,and bridges become very important in
the long run. When it comes to attackingor defending rivers, everyone needs to pull together to do it right! Tanks and infantry, being
limited to land, have only one real option: take the bridges! Tanks
and infantry serve as the backbone of
anysuccessful attack or defense of a bridge crossing a river. You need to pileonto the bridge and surrounding
tiles, push back enemy attacks on yourpositions, and try and dislodge the enemy from their own positions. Onceyou’ve secured the
bridge, everyone should be moving across it and into thetiles on the other side of the bridge. Don’t get caught up in just holdingthe
bridge tile, when you can use the terrain on the far side to increase yourdefensive advantage! Helicopters also play an important role
in river-crossing, since they aren’t limited to the bridge. While some helicopters should assistat the bridge itself, still others should
find undefended parts of the riverto cross and enter the enemy’s territory, dragging vital resources awayfrom the bridge AND
capturing tiles for your side. Remember, helicopters have along range (3 moves per turn) and you can easily out run the enemy and
forcehim to chase you around. Artillery have as big a role in defending rivers as helicopters do in assaulting them. In fact, it’s
because helicopters have suchan important role in crossing rivers. Artillery should spread themselves outalong the entire length of a
river bank and prevent enemy helios fromcrossing the river. If you don’t, they enemy can circumvent any defense at thebridge and
weaken your allies. Defending the capital We cannot stress this enough, so we’re going to make it big and bold so you don’t miss it.
DO NOT JUST PILE INTO THE CAPITAL CITY TILE AND HOPE TO KEEP THE ENEMY FROM TAKING IT. Did you catch that?
Good…means we don’t have to say it again. But we are anyway. DO NOT sit on the capital tile and assume you are doing a good job.
You are NOT. In fact, with a few exceptions, the only units that should be camped out on the capital tile itself are artillery, since they
have a defensebonus in cities. Everyone else should make positive use of the terrainaround the capital to increase the defenses of the
capital. Check theterrain and look at where the enemy units are coming from. Are helicopters crossing a nearby river to attack? Some
artillery should take up positions along the river or just wait at the capitalto shoot them down. There’s not much point in tanks
sitting between them, onlyto get shredded by helios. Nearby bridge head providing the only land access to the capital? Then all the
tanks and infantry should be on the land between the capital andthe bridge, and pushing to take that bridge and cripple the enemy
assault. Does the capital sit in the middle of ground, with no near by rivers? The enemy can come in from everywhere? Then use the
terrain toyour advantage! If there are nearby mountains and forests, the infantryshould be piled up knee deep in there, using the
terrain bonus to attack enemyunits from the cover. Helicopters should zoom around the open plains, attackingthe enemy and
avoiding slow-moving artillery. Tanks should find any hills ifthey can…and if they can’t, they should concentrate on preventing
enemyinfantry from entering the forests or mountains. Catch the infantry in the openbefore they can make it to the forest and
destroy them that much easier. Closing thoughts So
you want to kill Russians? Good to hear. And
remember…killing Russians just isn’t enough. We want to win the war as well! Hopefully you’ll
remember the lessonswe’ve taught you today, and put them to use on the field tomorrow! And don’t forget, ladies, gentlemen, and
whatever the rest of you are, if you aren’t sure what to do, the eUS Department of Defense has apublic IRC channel where you can
come and ask for advice on where and how tofight! Join us in the Rizon channel #defense where all your questions will beanswered.
Now, on to victory!
Contention #3 are the Stock Issues
Thus the plan: The United States federal government should/shall/ought to
substantially increase its substantial investment, leasing, developmental
development, explorational development and/or developmental exploration, in/of
the Earth’s oceans.
Contention #4 is Children’s Literature
Voting neg is for Dave Strauss- vote aff
Phiddian 97 (Robert, 1997, lecturer in English at Flinders University of South Australia, “Are Parody and Deconstruction
Secretly the Same Thing?,”
https://dspace.flinders.edu.au/jspui/bitstream/2328/1032/1/Are%20Parody%20and%20Deconstruction%20Secretly%20the%20S
ame%20Thing.pdf)//RTF
I'd like to go a step further, and assert that parody
is a form of deconstruction. I want to assert this with all the
the tropical force a ttributed to metaphor in "White Mythology."
I'm not just arguing that parody is like deconstruction; I'm arguing that they are secretly the
same thing. Consider this passage from Of Grammatology: "The movements of deconstruction do not destroy
[sollicitent] structures from the ou tside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take
accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always
force that metaphor can muster, with all
inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside , borrowing all the strategic and
economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate
their elements and atoms,
the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own
work." 20 It is clear that deconstruction, especially as Derrida practices it, nests in the structure of the texts
and ideas it criticizes, as a cuckoo infiltrates and takes over the nests of other birds. It operates
from inside the arguments of metaphysical texts and systems such as structuralism and phenomenology,
showing how they cannot totalize the visions they proclaim, and precisely where they double and collapse. It is not primary
thought, always secondary, always "borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of
subversion from the old structure." And this is precisely what parody does too. It is preeminently a genre-bricoleur,
living off the energies and inadequacies of previous writings, "borrowing them structurally" and transforming them with a critical
eye.
Don Quixote is in a deconstructive economy with romance, just as surely as Grammatology is
in a deconstructive economy with Rousseau's theory of language; and in many similar ways. Umberto Eco's
The Name of the Rose inhabits the rhetorical structure of the detective story, "operating necessarily from the inside,
borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure." It does
not destroy it "from the outside," and is, indeed, much more complicit with what it deconstructs
than the blank idea of criticism suggests. It does not entirely repudiate the detective story, and actually "falls prey to
its own work" by becoming a sort of costume detective story in turn; yet the detective story is also ironized and placed under erasure.
It looks different after The Name of the Rose, and that difference looks very like a play of différance.
Seriously, Russians are assholes
Zizek 2k8 (Slavoj, 2008, Professor of Sociology at University of Ljublajana, “In Defense of Lost Causes,”
http://moodle.tau.ac.il/2012/pluginfile.php/365364/mod_resource/content/1/Zizek%20%20In%20Defense%20of%20Lost%20Causes.pdf, 342-343)//RTF
Critchley's claim that "[s]ome versions of psychoanalysis, particularly Lacans, have a problem with the superego" is thus odd:
Lacan was fully aware not only of the link between humor and the superego, but also of the
brutal-sadistic aspect of humor. The Mar x Brothers' Duck Soup, their masterpiece, is regarded
as a work that makes fun of ridiculous totalitarian state rituals, denouncing their empty
posturing, and so on: laughter is the mightiest weapon, no wonder that totalitarian regimes found it so
threatening . . . This commonplace should be turned upside down: the powerful effect o£Duvk Soup does not reside in
its mockery of the totalitarian state's machinery and paraphernalia, but in openly displaying the
madness, the "fun," the cruel irony, which are already present in the totalitarian state. The Mar x
brothers' "carnival" is the carnival of totalitarianism itself. Wha t is the superego? Recall the strange fact, regularly evoked
by Primo Levi and other ffolocaust survivors, regarding how their intimate reaction to their survival wa
s marked by a deep split: consciously, they were fully aware that their survival wa s just a meaningless accident, that they
were not in any wa y responsible for it, that the only guilty perpetrators were their Nazi torturers; at the same time, they wer e
(more than mildly) haunted by the "irrational" feeling of guilt, as if they had survived at the
expense of others who had died and were thus somehow responsible for their deaths —as is well-
known, this unbearable feeling of guilt drove many of the survivors to suicide. This feeling
of guilt displays the agency
of the superego at its purest: the obscene agency which manipulates us into a spiraling
movement of self-destruction. Wha t this means is that the function of the superego is precisely
to obfuscate the cause of the terror constitutive of our being human, the inhuman core of being
human, the dimension of what the German Idealists called nega- tivity and what Freud called the death drive. Far from
being the traumatic hard core of the Real from which sublimations protect us, the superego is
itself the mask screening the Real. The humorous superego is the cruel and insatiable agency which bom- bards me with
impossible demands and which mocks m y failed attempts to meet them, the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the
more 1 try to suppress m y "sinful" strivings and meet its demands. As I have noted, the cynical Stalinist motto about the accused at
the show trials wh o professed their innocence ("the more they are innocent, the more they deserve to be shot") is the superego at its
purest. Consequently, for Lacan, the superego "has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are
concerned:"''* the superego is, on the contrary, the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization of our ethical betrayal. As such, the
superego is, at its most elementary, not a prohibitive, but a productive agency: "Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego.
The superego is the imperative oijouL)Mnce— ^n)oy\" ' Although jouldMnce can be translated as "enjoy- ment," translators of Lacan
often leave it in French in order to render palpable its excessive, properly traumatic character: we
are not dealing with
simple pleasures, but with a violent intrusion that brings more pain than pleasure. No wonder, then,
that Lacan posited an equation between jouMdance and the superego: to enjoy is not a matter of following one's spontaneous
tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty. When, following Badiou, Critchley defines the
subject as something that emerges through fidelity to the Good ("A subject is the name for the w a y in which a self binds itself to
some conception of the good and shapes its subjectivity in relation to that good"),'^ from a strict Lacanian perspective, he is
confusing subject and subjectivization. Lacan is here to be opposed to the discourse-theory doxa about the subject as an effect of the
process of subjectivization: for Lacan, the subject preceded sub- jectivization, subjectivization (the constitution of the subject's
"inner life" of experience) is a defense against the subject. As such, the subject is a (pre)condition of the process of subjectivization,
in the same sense in which, back in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse claimed that freedom is the condition of liberation. Insofar as, in
away , the subject, in its content, "is " nothing positively but the result of the process of subjectivization, one can also say that the
subject precedes ihielf—'m order to become subject, it already has to be subject, so that, in its process of becoming, it becomes what
it already is. (And, incidentally, this feature distinguishes the properly Hegelian dialectical process from pseudo-Hegelian
"dialectical evolution.") The
obvious counter-argument to this is that we are dealing here with the
archetypal case of ideological illusion: there is no subject prior to the process of subjectivization,
its préexistence is precisely the inversion that bears witness to the success of the ideological
constitution of the subject; once constituted, the subject necessarily experiences itself as the
cause of the very process that constitutes it, that is, it perceives this process as its "expression."
This, precisely, is the reasoning one should reject —but why exactly?
Conditionality is a voting issue- skews 2AC strat and time and lets the neg go for
the path of least resistance
Cheeseman and Bruce 96 (Graeme, Senior Lecturer at New South Wales, and Robert, editor,
widespread author on security, Discourses of Danger & Dread Frontiers, p. 5-9)
This goal is pursued in ways which are still unconventional in the intellectual milieu of
international relations in Australia, even though they are gaining influence worldwide as traditional modes of theory and
practice are rendered inadequate by global trends that defy comprehension, let alone policy. The inability to give meaning
to global changes reflects partly the enclosed, elitist world of professional security analysts and
bureaucratic experts, where entry is gained by learning and accepting to speak a particular,
exclusionary language. The contributors to this book are familiar with the discourse, but accord
no privileged place to its ‘knowledge form as reality’ in debates on defence and security. Indeed,
they believe that debate will be furthered only through a long overdue critical re-evaluation of
elite perspectives. Pluralistic, democratically-oriented perspectives on Australia’s identity are both
required and essential if Australia’s thinking on defence and security is to be invigorated. This is
not a conventional policy book; nor should it be, in the sense of offering policy-makers and their
academic counterparts sets of neat alternative solutions, in familiar language and format, to problems
they pose. This expectation is in itself a considerable part of the problem to be analysed. It is, however, a book about
policy, one that questions how problems are framed by policy-makers. It challenges the
proposition that irreducible bodies of real knowledge on defence and security exist
independently of their ‘context in the world’, and it demonstrates how security policy is
articulated authoritatively by the elite keepers of that knowledge, experts trained to recognize
enduring, universal wisdom. All others, from this perspective, must accept such wisdom or
remain outside the expert domain, tainted by their inability to comply with the ‘rightness’ of the
official line. But it is precisely the official line, or at least its image of the world, that needs to be
problematised. If the critic responds directly to the demand for policy alternatives, without
addressing this image, he or she is tacitly endorsing it. Before engaging in the policy debate the
critics need to reframe the basic terms of reference. This book, then, reflects and underlines the importance of
Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said’s ‘critical intellectuals’.15 The demand, tacit or otherwise, that the policy-maker’s
frame of reference be accepted as the only basis for discussion and analysis ignores a three
thousand year old tradition commonly associated with Socrates and purportedly integral to the Western tradition of
democratic dialogue. More immediately, it ignores post-seventeenth century democratic traditions which insist that a good
society must have within it some way of critically assessing its knowledge and the decisions
based upon that knowledge which impact upon citizens of such a society. This is a tradition with a slightly
different connotation in contemporary liberal democracies which, during the Cold War, were proclaimed different and superior to
the totalitarian enemy precisely because there were institutional checks and balances upon power. In short, one of the major
differences between ‘open societies’ and their (closed) counterparts behind the Iron Curtain was that the former encouraged the
critical testing of the knowledge and decisions of the powerful and assessing them against liberal democratic principles. The latter
tolerated criticism only on rare and limited occasions. For some, this represented the triumph of rational-scientific methods of
inquiry and techniques of falsification. For others, especially since positivism and rationalism have lost much of their allure, it meant
that for society to become open and liberal, sectors of the population must be independent of the state and free to question its
knowledge and power. Though we do not expect this position to be accepted by every reader, contributors to this book believe that
critical dialogue is long overdue in Australia and needs to be listened to. For all its liberal democratic
trappings, Australia’s security community continues to invoke closed monological narratives on defence and security. This book
also questions the distinctions between policy practice and academic theory that inform
conventional accounts of Australian security. One of its major concerns, particularly in chapters 1 and 2, is
to illustrate how theory is integral to the practice of security analysis and policy prescription. The
book also calls on policy-makers, academics and students of defence and security to think critically about what they are reading,
writing and saying; to begin to ask, of their work and study, difficult and searching questions raised in other disciplines; to
recognise, no matter how uncomfortable it feels, that what
is involved in theory and practice is not the ability
to identify a replacement for failed models, but a realisation that terms and concepts – state
sovereignty, balance of power, security, and so on – are contested and problematic, and that the world is
indeterminate, always becoming what is written about it. Critical analysis which shows how particular kinds
of theoretical presumptions can effectively exclude vital areas of political life from analysis has
direct practical implications for policy-makers, academics and citizens who face the daunting
task of steering Australia through some potentially choppy international waters over the next
few years. There is also much of interest in the chapters for those struggling to give meaning to a world where so much that has
long been taken for granted now demands imaginative, incisive reappraisal. The contributors, too, have struggled to
find meaning, often despairing at the terrible human costs of international violence. This is why readers will find no
single, fully formed panacea for the world’s ills in general, or Australia’s security in particular. There are none.
Every chapter, however, in its own way, offers something more than is found in orthodox literature, often by exposing ritualistic Cold
War defence and security mind-sets that are dressed up as new thinking. Chapters 7 and 9, for example, present
alternative
ways of engaging in security and defence practice. Others (chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8) seek to alert policy-makers,
academics and students to alternative theoretical possibilities which might better serve an Australian
community pursuing security and prosperity in an uncertain world. All chapters confront the policy
community and its counterparts in the academy with a deep awareness of the intellectual and material constraints
imposed by dominant traditions of realism, but they avoid dismissive and exclusionary terms which often in
the past characterized exchanges between policy-makers and their critics. This is because, as
noted earlier, attention needs to be paid to the words and the thought processes of those being
criticized. A close reading of this kind draws attention to underlying assumptions, showing they
need to be recognized and questioned. A sense of doubt (in place of confident certainty) is a
necessary prelude to a genuine search for alternative policies. First comes an awareness of the
need for new perspectives, then specific policies may follow. As Jim George argues in the following chapter,
we need to look not so much at contending policies as they are made for us but at challenging ‘the
discursive process which gives [favoured interpretations of “reality”] their meaning and which
direct [Australia’s] policy/analytical/military responses’. This process is not restricted to the small, official defence
and security establishment huddled around the US-Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It also encompasses much of Australia’s
academic defence and security community located primarily though not exclusively within the Australian National University and
the University College of the University of New South Wales. These
discursive processes are examined in detail in
subsequent chapters as authors attempt to make sense of a politics of exclusion and closure
which exercises disciplinary power over Australia’s security community. They also question the
discourse of ‘regional security’, ‘security cooperation’, ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘alliance politics’ that
are central to Australia’s official and academic security agenda in the 1990s. This is seen as an
important task especially when, as is revealed, the disciplines of International Relations and
Strategic Studies are under challenge from critical and theoretical debates ranging across the
social sciences and humanities; debates that are nowhere to be found in Australian defence and
security studies. The chapters graphically illustrate how Australia’s public policies on defence and security are informed,
underpinned and legitimised by a narrowly-based intellectual enterprise which draws strength from contested concepts of realism
and liberalism, which in turn seek legitimacy through policy-making processes. Contributors
ask whether Australia’s
policy-makers and their academic advisors are unaware of broader intellectual debates, or
resistant to them, or choose not to understand them, and why?
Everyone dances to her or his own personal boomboom- dance to your
boomboom!
Disyaka 13 (Ali, 2/1/13, writer for E International Relations Students, “Towards a Critical Securitization Theory: The
Copenhagen and Aberystwyth Schools of Security Studies,” http://www.e-ir.info/2013/02/01/towards-a-critical-securitizationtheory-the-copenhagen-and-aberystwyth-schools-of-security-studies/)//RTF
According to the Copenhagen School,[6] security
is about survival. Copenhagen School theorists argue that in
international relations something becomes a security issue when it is presented as posing an
existential threat to some object – a threat that needs to be dealt with immediately and with extraordinary measures.[7]
Apart from sharing this traditional military understanding of security with traditional security scholars, the conceptual
apparatus of the Copenhagen School theorists – a mix of neorealist and social constructivist concepts – differs immensely
from their traditional colleagues. Three conceptual tools of analysis can be distinguished here:
sectors of security, regional security complex theory[8] and securitization theory[9]. Nevertheless,
although sectors are used in this paper, it will concentrate on the innovative and influential securitization theory as well as on the
under-theorised desecuritization theory.[10] The main
argument of securitization theory is that in
international relations an issue becomes a security issue not because something constitutes an
objective threat to the state (or another referent object), but rather because an actor has defined
something as existential threat to some object’s survival. By doing so, the actor has claimed the right to handle
the issue through extraordinary means to ensure the referent object’s survival. Security is thus a self-referential practice: an issue
becomes a security issue only by being labelled as one. However, the
fact that security is a social and
intersubjective construct does not mean that everything can become easily securitized. In order
to successfully securitize an issue, a securitizing actor has to perform a securitizing move (present
something as an existential threat to a referent object) which has to be accepted by a targeted audience. Only by
gaining acceptance from the audience, the issue can be moved above the sphere of normal
politics, allowing elites to break normal procedures and rules and implement emergency
measures.[11] However, it is important to note that for the Copenhagen School, “security should be seen as a negative, as a failure
to deal with issues of normal politics”.[12] Therefore, the Copenhagen School prefers desecuritization, whereby
issues are moved out of the sphere of exceptionality and into the ordinary public sphere. II. The
Aberystwyth School: Critical Theory and Security/Emancipation The Aberystwyth School of security studies or Critical Security
Studies (hereafter CSS)[13] works within the tradition of Critical Theory which has its roots in Marxism. CSS is based on the
pioneering work of Ken Booth[14] and Richard Wyn Jones[15], which is heavily influenced by Gramscian critical theory and
Frankfurt School critical social theory as well as by radical International Relations theory most recently associated with the
neogramscian theorist Robert W. Cox.[16] As diverse as these approaches might seem, they all originate in the Marxian productivist
paradigm, seeking to develop a social theory orientated toward social transformation by exploring and elucidating human
emancipation’s barriers and possibilities.[17] Like other critical approaches, CSS sets out from a criticism of traditional security
studies and its state-centric nature. However, Booth and Wyn Jones not only criticise traditional approaches, but also offer a very
clear view of how to reconceptualise security studies – by making
human emancipation their focus. Only a
process of emancipation can make the prospect of ‘true’ human security more likely. For Booth and
Wyn Jones, the realist understanding of security as ‘power’ and ‘order’ can never lead to ‘true’ security. For them, the sovereign
state is not the main provider of security, but one of the main causes of insecurity. Indeed, during the
last hundred years far more people have been killed by their own governments than by foreign armies.[18] True security, Booth
argues, “can only be achieved by people and groups if they do not deprive others of it”.[19] In order to achieve true security, it must
be understood as emancipation. For Booth, emancipation
“offers a theory of progress for politics, it provides
a politics of hope and gives guidance to a politics of resistance (…) Emancipation is the only permanent hope
of becoming”.[20] For Booth security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin.[21] Furthermore, Booth rejects the claim
that security is a ‘contested concept’. In order to achieve security, Booth contends, we have to define it; and “[t]he best starting point
for conceptualising security lies in the real conditions of insecurity suffered by people and collectives”.[22] What is immediately
striking, Booth argues, is that biological drives for security are universal (to have food, shelter, safety etc.) as well as the fact that the
lack of security is a life determining condition. Booth calls this condition survival, which he defines as the struggle of a person or a
group of people in order to exist. “Survival is not synonymous with living tolerably well, and less still with having the conditions to
pursue cherished political and social ambitions”; for the latter, Booth argues, “security is required, and not just survival. In this
sense security is equivalent to survival-plus (the plus being some freedom from life determining threats, and therefore space to make
choices)”.[23] In short, survival is being alive; security is living.
We control uniqueness- CIR isn’t going to pass
Mark Neocleous, Prof. of Government @ Brunel, 2008 [Critique of Security, 185-6]
The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of
security altogether - to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real
political thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up.
That is clearly something that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and
thus could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something that
the constant iteration of the refrain 'this is an insecure world' and reiteration of one fear, anxiety
and insecurity after another will also make it hard to do. But it is something that the critique of
security suggests we may have to consider if we want a political way out of the impasse of
security. This impasse exists because security has now become so all-encompassing that it
marginalises all else, most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that
animate political life. The constant prioritising of a mythical security as a political end - as the
political end constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a
mode of action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that
arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people might come to
believe that another world is possible - that they might transform the world and in turn be
transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse, it remoeves it while purportedly
addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political questions into
debates about the most efficient way to achieve 'security', despite the fact that we are never quite
told - never could be told - what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this
sense, an anti-politics,"' dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security
state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the monopolistic
character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security
politics, not add yet more 'sectors' to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state and
legitimises state intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives. Simon Dalby reports a
personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security
Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole that's left
behind? But I'm inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole."' The mistake has been to
think that there is a hole and that this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision of
security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or gendered or humanised or expanded or
whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary, and consequently
end up reaffirming the state as the terrain of modern politics, the grounds of security. The real
task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of security, but to fight for an
alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security
and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. That's the point of
critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we
want. Thus while much of what I have said here has been of a negative order, part of the
tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as significant as the positive in setting
thought on new paths. For if security really is the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the
fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep harping on about insecurity and to keep
demanding 'more security' (while meekly hoping that this increased security doesn't damage our
liberty) is to blind ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian
tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would allow us
to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved through the constant securitising of social and
political issues, debilitating in the sense that 'security' helps consolidate the power of the
existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most
democratic forms. It would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a different
conception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and
politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of
the word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly requires
recognising that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising
that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the
human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning
to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and 'insecurities' that come with being human; it
requires accepting that 'securitizing' an issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but
bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave enough to return the gift."'
Also, Congress doesn’t get the blame for anything—they’re too adorable
The Onion ’13 (The Onion, America’s finest news source Poll Shows Majority Of Americans
Can’t Blame Congress For The Shutdown, Not With Those Adorable Faces They Can’t
NEWS IN BRIEF • Politics • Government • Politicians • ISSUE 49•41 • Oct 7, 2013)//gingE
WASHINGTON—As the federal government shutdown enters its second week, a recent CBS News/New York Times poll
revealed Monday that an overwhelming majority of Americans
just can’t find it in their hearts to blame
congressmen for the ongoing impasse, especially not with those adorable little faces of theirs.
“I’m obviously upset that our elected officials can’t work together to figure out a reasonable budget resolution, but
honestly, how could you ever stay mad at those cutie pies?” said 46-year-old Silver Spring, MD resident Daniel
Hadler, one of the 78 percent of Americans who want to pinch congressmen and women right on
their big chubby cheeks, while a further 91 percent said they would love to put the lawmakers
between two slices of bread and just eat them right up. “Have you ever seen anything so
precious in your whole life? I mean, look at them—dressed up in their little suits with their big-boy ties
on, huffing and puffing around the Capitol building. You can’t be angry when your heart’s
practically melting.” At press time, 94 percent of Americans were about to lash out at the legislative branch, but after taking
one look at Congressman Ken Calvert’s sweet punim, decided that all they could do was pick the little guy up, squeeze him
tight, and give him a big, sloppy kiss on the cheek.
I promise we’re topical! (not entirely highlighted)
Burke 07 (Anthony, 2007, Australian political theorist and international relations scholar and Associate Professor (Reader) of
Politics and International Relations in the University of New South Wales, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason,”
Project MUSE)//RTF
Two Ontologies of War This
essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of
cuts beneath analyses based either on a given sequence of events, threats,
insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial
complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper
bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a powerful structure of common sense
but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential' and 'rationalist'
discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely
arguments, rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing
action and critique for peace -- that
political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and
rationale. But they
run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most powerful and
fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being
which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must be maintained as it is. I am
thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality
of being (in this case political being, that of the nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and
certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application of strategic knowledge for
the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from
the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some
phenomenon; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its
essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power,
I see ontology as a
particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic
foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is
thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual
socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most
sweeping and powerful form. I see such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as
particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the existential and
rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for ideational hegemony
and closure that limits debate and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries of a
particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being, in the truth of truth
as such. The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a
simultaneously social and conceptual structure that generates violence. Here we are witness to an
epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of violence (the national security state). When we consider their
relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone (and doubly in
combination) tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and
duration, or in unintended effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be
picked up and used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being.
This essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl
Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger),
showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz.
This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they
embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of technology and
being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use, control and destruction, and force -- in the words of one famous
Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces neither
the linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon
itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and
Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that
'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what
occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in war persons 'play roles in which
they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21 What I am trying to
describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these
are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because
in the social field named by security, statecraft and
violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like charges
darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic
roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and political necessity. Positivistic or scientific
claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability to policy and political action, which in turn support
larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central
features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about
truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a distinction between epistemology (knowledge as
technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action. The
epistemology of
violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity about
techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired
end, an end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order.
However in practice, technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First,
instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure national existence which itself
admits no questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to any conflict,
and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its perpetuation. In this way
knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate purpose (securing
being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an instrument of state power but ontologises
itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity
outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms, technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique,
immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for
Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its
wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in
early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale
for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that
unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.'
22 The
danger obviously raised here is that these dual ontologies of war link being, means, events
and decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be
examined. As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is
also obviously at work in the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West
Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of action', which begs the question of whether
strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong ontologies of the insecure nation-state.23
This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror'.24 Reframing such
concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing
'problematizations' of truth.25 However such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to
disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up choice in that way. However without interrogating more deeply how
they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought -- and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war -- tragically
violent 'choices' will continue to be made. The essay concludes by
pondering a normative problem that arises out
of its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and the violent and
instrumental vision of 'enframing' have, as Heidegger suggests, come to define being and drive
'out every other possibility of revealing being', how can they be escaped?26 How can other choices and alternatives
be found and enacted? How is there any scope for agency and resistance in the face of them? Their social and discursive power -- one
that aims to take up the entire space of the political -- needs to be respected and understood. However, we are far from powerless in
the face of them. The need is to critique dominant images of political being and dominant ways of securing that being at the same
time, and to act and choose such that we bring into the world a more sustainable, peaceful and non-violent global rule of the
political. Friend and Enemy: Violent Ontologies of the Nation-State In his Politics Among Nations Hans Morgenthau stated that 'the
national interest of a peace-loving nation can only be defined in terms of national security, which is the irreducible minimum that
diplomacy must defend with adequate power and without compromise'. While Morgenthau defined security relatively narrowly -- as
the 'integrity of the national territory and its institutions' -- in
a context where security was in practice defined
expansively, as synonymous with a state's broadest geopolitical and economic 'interests', what
was revealing about his formulation was not merely the ontological centrality it had, but the
sense of urgency and priority he accorded to it: it must be defended 'without compromise'.27
Morgenthau was a thoughtful and complex thinker, and understood well the complexities and dangers of using armed force.
However his formulation
reflected an influential view about the significance of the political good
termed 'security'. When this is combined with the way in which security was conceived in
modern political thought as an existential condition -- a sine qua non of life and sovereign political existence -and then married to war and instrumental action, it provides a basic underpinning for either the
limitless resort to strategic violence without effective constraint, or the perseverance of limited
war (with its inherent tendencies to escalation) as a permanent feature of politics. While he was no militarist, Morgenthau
did say elsewhere (in, of all places, a far-reaching critique of nuclear strategy) that the 'quantitative and
qualitative competition for conventional weapons is a rational instrument of international
politics'.28 The conceptual template for such an image of national security state can be found in the work of Thomas Hobbes,
with his influential conception of the political community as a tight unity of sovereign and people in which
their bodies meld with his own to form a 'Leviathan', and which must be defended from enemies within and without. His image
of effective security and sovereignty was one that was intolerant of internal difference and
dissent, legitimating a strong state with coercive and exceptional powers to preserve order and
sameness. This was a vision not merely of political order but of existential identity, set off against a range
of existential others who were sources of threat, backwardness, instability or incongruity.29 It
also, in a way set out with frightening clarity by the theorist Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Georg Hegel, exchanged
internal unity, identity and harmony for permanent alienation from other such communities
(states). Hegel presaged Schmitt's thought with his argument that individuality and the state are single moments of 'mind in its
freedom' which 'has an infinitely negative relation to itself, and hence its essential character from its own point of view is its
singleness': Individuality is awareness of one's existence as a unit in sharp distinction from others. It manifests
itself
here in the state as a relation to other states, each of which is autonomous vis-a-vis the
others...this negative relation of the state to itself is embodied in the world as the relation of one state to another and as if the
negative were something external.30 Schmitt is important both for understanding the way in which such alienation is seen as a
definitive way of imagining and limiting political communities, and for understanding how such a rigid delineation is linked to the
inevitability and perpetuation of war. Schmitt argued that
the existence of a state 'presupposes the political',
which must be understood through 'the specific political distinction...between friend and
enemy'. The enemy is 'the other, the stranger; and it sufficient for his nature that he is, in a
specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in an extreme case
conflicts with him are possible'.31 The figure of the enemy is constitutive of the state as 'the
specific entity of a people'.32 Without it society is not political and a people cannot be said to exist: Only the actual
participants can correctly recognise, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict...to judge
whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve
one's own form of existence.33 Schmitt
links this stark ontology to war when he states that the political is
only authentic 'when a fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy
is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of
men, particularly to the whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship...in its
entirety the state as an organised political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy
distinction'.34 War, in short, is an existential condition: the entire life of a human being is a
struggle and every human being is symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy and combat
concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical
killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.35 Schmitt claims that
his theory is not biased towards war as a choice ('It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war and
every political deed a military action...it neither favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism') but it is hard to
accept his caveat at face value.36 When
such a theory takes the form of a social discourse (which it does in a
general form) such an ontology can only support, as a kind of originary ground, the basic
Clausewitzian assumption that war can be a rational way of resolving political conflicts -- because
the import of Schmitt's argument is that such 'political' conflicts are ultimately expressed through the possibility of war. As he says:
'to the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat'.37 Where Schmitt meets Clausewitz, as I explain further below,
closed circle
of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the emergence of conflict
can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is conceived in
terms of the distinction between friend and enemy; because the very existence of the other constitutes an
the existential and rationalistic ontologies of war join into a closed circle of mutual support and justification. This
unacceptable threat, rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted of Hezbollah, they 'deny our
right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility from policy and political discourse: our actions can be conceived as
independent of the conflict or quarantined from critical enquiry, as necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not
contribute to a new and unpredictable causal chain. Similarly
the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by
transporting a Newtonian category from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further
encourages the resort to military violence. We ignore the complex history of a conflict, and thus
the alternative paths to its resolution that such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as
fundamental and existential in nature; as possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable.
Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action.
Secondly, the militaristic force of such an ontology is visible, in Schmitt, in the absolute sense of
vulnerability whereby a people can judge whether their 'adversary intends to negate his
opponent's way of life'.38 Evoking the kind of thinking that would become controversial in the Bush doctrine, Hegel
similarly argues that: ...a state may regard its infinity and honour as at stake in each of its concerns, however minute, and it is all the
more inclined to susceptibility to injury the more its strong individuality is impelled as a result of long domestic peace to seek and
create a sphere of activity abroad. ....the state is in essence mind and therefore cannot be prepared to stop at just taking notice of an
injury after it has actually occurred. On the contrary, there arises in addition as a cause of strife the idea of such an injury...39
Identity, even more than physical security or autonomy, is put at stake in such thinking and can
be defended and redeemed through warfare (or, when taken to a further extreme of an absolute
demonisation and dehumanisation of the other, by mass killing, 'ethnic cleansing' or genocide).
However anathema to a classical realist like Morgenthau, for whom prudence was a core political virtue, these have been influential
ways of defining national security and defence during the twentieth century and persists into the twenty-first. They infused Cold War
strategy in the United States (with the key policy document NSC68 stating that 'the Soviet-led assault on free institutions is
worldwide now, and ... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere')40 and frames dominant Western responses to
the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in 2006, 'We could have chosen security as the battleground.
But we didn't. We chose values.')41 It has also become influential, in a particularly tragic and destructive way, in Israel, where
memories of the Holocaust and (all too common) statements by Muslim and Arab leaders rejecting Israel's existence are mobilised
by conservatives to justify military adventurism and a rejectionist policy towards the Palestinians. On the reverse side of such
ontologies of national insecurity we find pride and hubris, the belief that martial preparedness and action are vital or healthy for the
existence of a people. Clausewitz's thought is thoroughly imbued with this conviction. For example, his definition of war as an act of
policy does not refer merely to the policy of cabinets, but expresses the objectives and will of peoples: When whole communities go
to war -- whole peoples, and especially civilized peoples -- the reason always lies in some political situation and the occasion is
always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy.42 Such a perspective prefigures Schmitt's definition of the
'political' (an earlier translation reads 'war, therefore, is a political act'), and thus creates an inherent tension between its tendency to
fuel the escalation of conflict and Clausewitz's declared aim, in defining war as policy, to prevent war becoming 'a complete,
untrammelled, absolute manifestation of violence'.43 Likewise his argument that war is a 'trinity' of people (the source of 'primordial
violence, hatred and enmity'), the military (who manage the 'play of chance and probability') and government (which achieve war's
'subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone') merges the existential and rationalistic
conceptions of war into a theoretical unity.44 The idea that national identities could be built and redeemed through war derived
from the 'romantic counter-revolution' in philosophy which opposed the cosmopolitanism of Kant with an emphasis on the absolute
state -- as expressed by Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Bismarkian Realpolitik and politicians like Wilhelm Von Humbolt. Humbolt, a
Prussian minister of Education, wrote that war 'is one of the most wholesome manifestations that plays a role in the education of the
human race', and urged the formation of a national army 'to inspire the citizen with the spirit of true war'. He stated that war 'alone
gives the total structure the strength and the diversity without which facility would be weakness and unity would be void'.45 In the
Phenomenology of Mind Hegel made similar arguments that to for individuals to find their essence 'Government has from time to
time to shake them to the very centre by war'.46 The historian Azar Gat points to the similarity of Clausewitz's arguments that 'a
people and a nation can hope for a strong position in the world only if national character and familiarity with war fortify each other
by continual interaction' to Hegel's vision of the ethical good of war in his Philosophy of Right.47 Likewise Michael Shapiro sees
Clausewitz and Hegel as alike in seeing war 'as an ontological investment in both individual and national completion...Clausewitz
figures war as passionate ontological commitment rather than cool political reason...war is a major aspect of being.'48 Hegel's text
argues that war is 'a work of freedom' in which 'the individual's substantive duty' merges with the 'independence and sovereignty of
the state'.49 Through war, he argues, the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilization of finite
institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so
the corruption in nations would be the product of a prolonged, let alone 'perpetual' peace.50 Hegel indeed argues that 'sacrifice on
behalf of the individuality of the state is a substantial tie between the state and all its members and so is a universal duty...if the state
as such, if its autonomy, is in jeopardy, all its citizens are duty bound to answer the summons to its defence'.51 Furthermore, this is
not simply a duty, but a form of self-realisation in which the individual dissolves into the higher unity of the state: The intrinsic
worth of courage as a disposition of mind is to be found in the genuine, absolute, final end, the sovereignty of the state. The work of
courage is to actualise this end, and the means to this end is the sacrifice of personal actuality. This form of experience thus contains
the harshness of extreme contradictions: a self-sacrifice which yet is the real existence of one's freedom; the maximum selfsubsistence of individuality, yet only a cog playing its part in the mechanism of an external organisation; absolute obedience,
renunciation of personal opinions and reasonings, in fact complete absence of mind, coupled with the most intense and
comprehensive presence of mind and decision in the moment of acting; the most hostile and so most personal action against
individuals, coupled with an attitude of complete indifference or even liking towards them as individuals.52 A more frank statement
of the potentially lethal consequences of patriotism -- and its simultaneously physical and conceptual annihilation of the individual
human being -- is rarely to be found, one that is repeated today in countless national discourses and the strategic world-view in
general. (In contrast, one of Kant's fundamental objections to war was that it involved using men 'as mere machines or
instruments'.53) Yet however bizarre and contradictory Hegel's argument, it constitutes a powerful social ontology: an apparently
irrefutable discourse of being. It actualises the convergence of war and the social contract in the form of the national security state.
Strategic Reason and Scientific Truth By itself, such
an account of the nationalist ontology of war and
security provides only a general insight into the perseverance of military violence as a core
element of politics. It does not explain why so many policymakers think military violence works.
As I argued earlier, such an ontology is married to a more rationalistic form of strategic thought that
claims to link violent means to political ends predictably and controllably, and which, by doing
so, combines military action and national purposes into a common -- and thoroughly modern -horizon of certainty. Given Hegel's desire to decisively distil and control the dynamic potentials of modernity in thought, it is
helpful to focus on the modernity of this ontology -- one that is modern in its adherence to modern scientific models of truth, reality
and technological progress, and in its insistence on imposing images of scientific truth from the physical sciences (such as
mathematics and physics) onto human behaviour, politics and society. For example, the military theorist and historian Martin van
Creveld has argued that one of the reasons Clausewitz was so influential was that his 'ideas seemed to have chimed in with the
rationalistic, scientific, and technological outlook associated with the industrial revolution'.54 Set into this epistemological matrix,
modern politics and government engages in a sweeping project of mastery and control in which all of the world's resources -mineral, animal, physical, human -- are made part of a machinic process of which war and violence are viewed as normal features.
These are the deeper claims and implications of Clausewitzian strategic reason. One of the most revealing contemporary examples
comes from the writings (and actions) of Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor and later U.S. National Security Adviser and
Secretary of State. He wrote during the Vietnam war that after 1945 U.S. foreign policy was based 'on the assumption that technology
plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in
emerging countries'. This 'scientific revolution' had 'for all practical purposes, removed technical limits from the exercise of power in
foreign policy'.55 Kissinger's conviction was based not merely in his pride in the vast military and bureaucratic apparatus of the
United States, but in a particular epistemology (theory of knowledge). Kissinger asserted that the West is 'deeply committed to the
notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data -- the more accurately
the better'. This, he claimed, has since the Renaissance set the West apart from an 'undeveloped' world that contains 'cultures that
have escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking' and remain wedded to the 'essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world
is almost entirely internal to the observer'.56 At the same time, Kissinger's hubris and hunger for control was beset by a corrosive
anxiety: that, in an era of nuclear weapons proliferation and constant military modernisation, of geopolitical stalemate in Vietnam,
and the emergence and militancy of new post-colonial states, order and mastery were harder to define and impose. He worried over
the way 'military bipolarity' between the superpowers had 'encouraged political multipolarity', which 'does not guarantee stability.
Rigidity is diminished, but so is manageability...equilibrium is difficult to achieve among states widely divergent in values, goals,
expectations and previous experience' (emphasis added). He mourned that 'the greatest need of the contemporary international
system is an agreed concept of order'.57 Here were the driving obsessions of the modern rational statesman based around a hunger
for stasis and certainty that would entrench U.S. hegemony: For the two decades after 1945, our international activities were based
on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about
domestic transformations in "emerging countries". This direct "operational" concept of international order has proved too simple.
Political multipolarity makes it impossible to impose an American design. Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the creativity of a
pluralistic world, to base order on political multipolarity even though overwhelming military strength will remain with the two
superpowers.58 Kissinger's
statement revealed that such cravings for order and certainty continually
confront chaos, resistance and uncertainty: clay that won't be worked, flesh that will not yield,
enemies that refuse to surrender. This is one of the most powerful lessons of the Indochina wars, which were to continue
in a phenomenally destructive fashion for six years after Kissinger wrote these words. Yet as his sinister, Orwellian exhortation to
'evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world' demonstrated, Kissinger's hubris was undiminished. This is a vicious, historic irony:
a
desire to control nature, technology, society and human beings that is continually frustrated, but
never abandoned or rethought. By 1968 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the rationalist policymaker par
excellence, had already decided that U.S. power and technology could not prevail in Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger's refusal to accept
this conclusion, to abandon their Cartesian illusions, was to condemn hundreds of thousands more to die in Indochina and the
people of Cambodia to two more decades of horror and misery.59 In 2003 there would be a powerful sense of déja vu as another
Republican Administration crowned more than decade of failed and destructive policy on Iraq with a deeply controversial and
divisive war to remove Saddam Hussein from power. In this struggle with
the lessons of Vietnam, revolutionary
are witness to an enduring political and cultural theme:
of a craving for order, control and certainty in the face of continual uncertainty. Closely related to this
resistance, and rapid geopolitical transformation, we
anxiety was the way that Kissinger's thinking -- and that of McNamara and earlier imperialists like the British Governor of Egypt
Cromer -- was embedded in instrumental images of technology and the machine: the machine as both a tool of power and an image
of social and political order. In his essay 'The Government of Subject Races' Cromer envisaged effective imperial rule -- over
numerous societies and billions of human beings -- as best achieved by a central authority working 'to ensure the harmonious
working of the different parts of the machine'.60 Kissinger analogously invoked the virtues of 'equilibrium', 'manageability' and
'stability' yet, writing some six decades later, was anxious that technological progress no longer brought untroubled control: the
Westernising 'spread of technology and its associated rationality...does not inevitably produce a similar concept of reality'.61 We
sense the rational policymaker's frustrated desire: the world is supposed to work like a machine,
ordered by a form of power and governmental reason which deploys machines and whose desires and processes are meant to run
along ordered, rational lines like a machine. Kissinger's desire was little different from that of Cromer who, wrote Edward Said:
...envisions a seat of power in the West and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central
authority yet commanded by it. What the machine's branches feed into it from the East -- human material, material wealth,
knowledge, what have you -- is processed by the machine, then converted into more power...the immediate translation of mere
Oriental matter into useful substance.62 This
desire for order in the shadow of chaos and uncertainty -- the
constant war with an intractable and volatile matter -- has deep roots in modern thought, and
was a major impetus to the development of technological reason and its supporting theories of
knowledge. As Kissinger's claims about the West's Newtonian desire for the 'accurate' gathering and classification of 'data'
suggest, modern strategy, foreign policy and Realpolitik have been thrust deep into the apparently
stable soil of natural science, in the hope of finding immovable and unchallengeable roots there.
While this process has origins in ancient Judaic and Greek thought, it crystallised in philosophical terms most powerfully during and
after the Renaissance. The key figures in this process were Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and René Descartes, who all
combined a hunger
for political and ontological certainty, a positivist epistemology and a naïve faith
in the goodness of invention. Bacon sought to create certainty and order, and with it a new human power over the world,
through a new empirical methodology based on a harmonious combination of experiment, the senses and the understanding. With
this method, he argued, we can 'derive hope from a purer alliance of the faculties (the experimental and rational) than has yet been
attempted'.63 In a similar move, Descartes sought to conjure certainty from uncertainty through the application of a new method
that moved progressively out from a few basic certainties (the existence of God, the certitude of individual consciousness and a
divinely granted faculty of judgement) in a search for pure fixed truths. Mathematics formed the ideal image of this method, with its
strict logical reasoning, its quantifiable results and its uncanny insights into the hidden structure of the cosmos.64 Earlier, Galileo
had argued that scientists should privilege 'objective', quantifiable qualities over 'merely perceptible' ones; that 'only by means of an
exclusively quantitative analysis could science attain certain knowledge of the world'.65 Such
doctrines of mathematically
verifiable truth were to have powerful echoes in the 20th Century, in the ascendancy of systems
analysis, game theory, cybernetics and computing in defense policy and strategic decisions, and
in the awesome scientific breakthroughs of nuclear physics, which unlocked the innermost secrets of matter
and energy and applied the most advanced applications of mathematics and computing to create the atomic bomb. Yet this new
scientific power was marked by a terrible irony: as even Morgenthau understood, the control over matter
afforded by the science could never be translated into the control of the weapons themselves,
into political utility and rational strategy.66 Bacon thought of the new scientific method not merely as way of
achieving a purer access to truth and epistemological certainty, but as liberating a new power that would enable the creation of a new
kind of Man. He opened the Novum Organum with the statement that 'knowledge and human power are synonymous', and later
wrote of his 'determination...to lay a firmer foundation, and extend to a greater distance the boundaries of human power and
dignity'.67 In a revealing and highly negative comparison between 'men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe and in any
wild and barbarous region of the new Indies' -- one that echoes in advance Kissinger's distinction between post-and pre-Newtonian
cultures -- Bacon set out what was at stake in the advancement of empirical science: anyone making this comparison, he remarked,
'will think it so great, that man may be said to be a god unto man'.68 We may be forgiven for blinking, but in Bacon's thought 'man'
was indeed in the process of stealing a new fire from the heavens and seizing God's power over the world for itself. Not only would
the new empirical science lead to 'an improvement of mankind's estate, and an increase in their power over nature', but would
reverse the primordial humiliation of the Fall of Adam: For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over
creation, both of which can be partially recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences.
For creation did not become entirely and utterly rebellious by the curse, but in consequence of the Divine decree, 'in
the sweat
of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; she is now compelled by our labours (not assuredly by our disputes or magical
ceremonies) at length to afford mankind in some degree his bread...69 There is a breathtaking, world-creating hubris in this
statement -- one that, in many ways, came to characterise western modernity itself, and which is easily recognisable in a generation
of modern technocrats like Kissinger. The Fall of Adam was the Judeo-Christian West's primal creation myth, one that marked
humankind as flawed and humbled before God, condemned to hardship and ambivalence. Bacon forecast here a return to Eden, but
one of man's own making. This truly was the death of God, of putting man into God's place, and no pious appeals to the continuity or
guidance of faith could disguise the awesome epistemological violence which now subordinated creation to man. Bacon indeed
argued that inventions are 'new creations and imitations of divine works'. As such, there is nothing but good in science: 'the
introduction of great inventions is the most distinguished of human actions...inventions are a blessing and a benefit without injuring
or afflicting any'.70 And
what would be mankind's 'bread', the rewards of its new 'empire over creation'? If the new
method and invention brought modern medicine, social welfare, sanitation, communications, education and comfort, it also
enabled the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and two world wars; napalm, the B52, the
hydrogen bomb, the Kalashnikov rifle and military strategy. Indeed some of the 20th Century's
most far-reaching inventions -- radar, television, rocketry, computing, communications, jet
aircraft, the Internet -- would be the product of drives for national security and militarisation.
Even the inventions Bacon thought so marvellous and transformative -- printing, gunpowder and the compass -- brought in their
wake upheaval and tragedy: printing, dogma and bureaucracy; gunpowder, the rifle and the artillery battery; navigation, slavery and
the genocide of indigenous peoples. In
short, the legacy of the new empirical science would be
ambivalence as much as certainty; degradation as much as enlightenment; the destruction of
nature as much as its utilisation.
Extra solvency card
Securitization fails, justifies state violence against vulnerable populations, and
only reinforces insecurity and the impacts it tries to solve
Ahmed 12 (Nafeez, 1/5/12, Department of International Relations , University of Sussex , UK, “Global Change, Peace &
Security: formerly Pacifica Review: Peace, Security & Global Change,”
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14781158.2011.601854#.U76Xp_ldWSo)//RTF
Instead, both realist and liberal orthodox IR approaches focus on different aspects of interstate behaviour, conflictual and
cooperative respectively, but each lacks the capacity to grasp that the unsustainable trajectory of state and inter-state behaviour is
only explicable in the context of a wider global system concurrently over-exploiting the biophysical environment in which it is
embedded. They are, in other words, unable to address the relationship of the inter-state system itself to the biophysical
environment as a key analytical category for understanding the acceleration of global crises. They simultaneously therefore cannot
recognise the embeddedness of the economy in society and the concomitant politically-constituted nature of economics.84 Hence,
they neglect
the profound irrationality of collective state behaviour, which systematically erodes
this relationship, globalising insecurity on a massive scale – in the very process of seeking
security.85 In Cox’s words, because positivist IR theory ‘does not question the present order [it instead] has the effect of
legitimising and reifying it’.86 Orthodox IR sanitises globally- destructive collective inter-state
behaviour as a normal function of instrumental reason – thus rationalising what are clearly
deeply irrational collective human actions that threaten to permanently erode state power and
security by destroying the very conditions of human existence. Indeed, the prevalence of orthodox IR as a
body of disciplinary beliefs, norms and prescriptions organically conjoined with actual policy-making in the international system
highlights the extent to which both realism and liberalism are ideologically implicated in the acceleration of global systemic crises.87
By the same token, the incapacity
to recognise and critically interrogate how prevailing social, political
and economic structures are driving global crisis acceleration has led to the proliferation of
symptom-led solutions focused on the expansion of state/regime military–political power rather
than any attempt to transform root structural causes.88 It is in this context that, as the prospects for meaningful
reform through inter-state cooperation appear increasingly nullified under the pressure of actors with a vested interest in sustaining
prevailing geopolitical and economic structures,
states have resorted progressively more to militarised
responses designed to protect the concurrent structure of the international system from
dangerous new threats. In effect, the failure of orthodox approaches to accurately diagnose global crises, directly
accentuates a tendency to ‘securitise’ them – and this, ironically, fuels the proliferation of violent conflict and
militarisation responsible for magnified global insecurity. ‘Securitisation’ refers to a
‘speech act’ – an act of labelling – whereby political authorities identify particular
issues or incidents as an existential threat which, because of their extreme nature,
justify going beyond the normal security measures that are within the rule of law.
It thus legitimises resort to special extra-legal powers. By labelling issues a matter of ‘security’,
therefore, states are able to move them outside the remit of democratic decision-making and
into the realm of emergency powers, all in the name of survival itself. Far from representing a mere
aberration from democratic state practice, this discloses a deeper ‘dual’ structure of the state in its
institutionalisation of the capacity to mobilise extraordinary extra-legal military– police
measures in purported response to an existential danger.89 The problem in the context of global ecological,
economic and energy crises is that such levels of emergency mobilisation and militarisation
have no positive impact on the very global crises generating ‘new security
challenges’, and are thus entirely disproportionate.90 All that remains to examine is on the ‘surface’
of the international system (geopolitical competition, the balance of power, international regimes, globalisation and so on),
phenomena which are dislocated from their structural causes by way of being unable to recognise the biophysically-embedded and
politically-constituted social relations of which they are comprised. The consequence is that orthodox
IR has no means of
responding to global systemic crises other than to reduce them to their symptoms. Indeed,
orthodox IR theory has largely responded to global systemic crises not with new theory, but with
the expanded application of existing theory to ‘new security challenges’ such as ‘low-intensity’
intra-state conflicts; inequality and poverty; environmental degradation; international criminal
activities including drugs and arms trafficking; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction;
and international terrorism.91 Although the majority of such ‘new security challenges’ are non-military in origin –
whether their referents are states or individuals – the inadequacy of systemic theoretical frameworks to
diagnose them means they are primarily examined through the lenses of military-political
power.92 In other words, the escalation of global ecological, energy and economic crises is recognised
not as evidence that the current organisation of the global political economy is fundamentally
unsustainable, requiring urgent transformation, but as vindicating the necessity for states to
radicalise the exertion of their military–political capacities to maintain existing power
structures, to keep the lid on.93 Global crises are thus viewed as amplifying factors that could
mobilise the popular will in ways that challenge existing political and economic structures,
which it is presumed (given that state power itself is constituted by these structures) deserve
protection. This justifies the state’s adoption of extra-legal measures outside the normal sphere of democratic politics. In the
context of global crisis impacts, this counter-democratic trend-line can result in a growing propensity to
problematise potentially recalcitrant populations – rationalising violence toward them as a
control mechanism. 3.2 From theory to policy Consequently, for the most part, the policy implications of
orthodox IR approaches involve a redundant conceptualisation of global systemic crises purely
as potential ‘threat-multipliers’ of traditional security issues such as ‘political instability around
the world, the collapse of governments and the creation of terrorist safe havens’. Climate change
will serve to amplify the threat of international terrorism, particularly in regions with large
populations and scarce resources.94 The US Army, for instance, depicts climate change as a ‘stress-multiplier’ that will
‘exacerbate tensions’ and ‘complicate American foreign policy’; while the EU perceives it as a ‘threat-multiplier which exacerbates
existing trends, tensions and instability’.95 In practice, this
generates an excessive preoccupation not with the
causes of global crisis acceleration and how to ameliorate them through structural
transformation, but with their purportedly inevitable impacts, and how to prepare for them by
controlling problematic populations. Paradoxically, this ‘securitisation’ of global crises does not
render us safer. Instead, by necessitating more violence, while inhibiting preventive action, it
guarantees greater insecurity. Thus, a recent US Department of Defense report explores the future of international
conflict up to 2050. It warns of ‘resource competition induced by growing populations and expanding economies’, particularly due to
a projected ‘youth bulge’ in the South, which ‘will consume ever increasing amounts of food, water and energy’. This will prompt a
‘return to traditional security threats posed by emerging near-peers as we compete globally for depleting natural resources and
overseas markets’. Finally, climate change will ‘compound’ these stressors by generating humanitarian crises, population migrations
and other complex emergencies.96
1AC Satire Supplements
All the Oils!
Anthro preempt
But seriously, don’t worry friends we aren’t anthropocentric- we’ll drill animals
too!
The Onion 06 (The Onion, 11/10/06, Satirical news source, “Bush Urges Expanded Drilling Of Alaskan Wildlife,”
http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-urges-expanded-drilling-of-alaskan-wildlife,2063/)//RTF
WASHINGTON, DC—Following a recent ruling by a U.S. District Court that blocked the sale of 1.7 million acres of federally
protected caribou, President Bush
urged Congress Tuesday to pass an appropriations bill that would enable
expanded drilling of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's animals. President Bush says the U.S. must shed
its dependence on drilling foreign wildlife. "There are over 100 billion tons of untapped, domestic wildlife
lying beneath, on, and above the surface of Alaska's North Slope region," said Bush during a White House
press conference. "We have an obligation not only to our society, but to future
generations, to begin drilling these polar bears, grizzlies, harbor porpoises,
Roosevelt elks, sea otters, muskrats, and snowshoe hares immediately." According to
Secretary Of The Interior Dirk Kempthorne, who recently toured the Lake Teshekpuk area with a team of bio-mineralogists, one in
four animals drilled in early tests have shown positive yield. "We can achieve our goal without disturbing the delicate balance of the
ecosystem," said Kempthorne, looking on as rig operators took exploratory core samples of 20 bearded seals in order to gauge the
mammals' interior density. "But if the government opens up the nearly 200 species of birds, fish, and marine and land mammals to
public drilling, the U.S. would be capable of churning out over 9.3 billion barrels of wildlife each year—more than three times the
amount we currently drill." Wildlife prospectors in other parts of Alaska applaud Bush's position, saying that,
if funding is
increased, drillers will be able to tap larger, higher-yield animals such as grizzly bears and musk
oxen. "The technology is there, but there's little economic incentive to drill anything larger than
timber wolves," said Cal Fowler, an independent prospector and former wildcat driller. "With more federal money we can
invest in necessary hardware, such as more durable annular diamond-impregnated drill bits, which can bore two-inch diameter
holes deep through a solid bull-walrus midsection in seconds." Workers near Alaska's Lake Teshekpuk take a core sample from a
grizzly bear cub. Drill foremen have already begun digging shallow exploratory holes through the surface flesh of over 5 million
animals to provide workspace for the drillers and their equipment. Once this step is complete, an electrical generator powered by a
large diesel engine will plunge rotating carbide-steel-tipped drill bits through the animal, boring through the skin, bone, or blubber
at speeds of up to 6,500 rpm. The drillers will then guide the direction of the borehole using top-drive rotary steerable wellbores,
which allow them to drill through targeted areas in the wildlife with incredible precision. Walking through a field of steadily
pumping Canada lynx, Fowler defended wildlife drilling as "one of the most environmentally responsible methods of drilling," saying
that it is a renewable resource, and the ecologically sensitive wildlife refuge is almost completely unaffected since pre-existing
environmental laws ensure that the drilling of individual animals will not damage the environment. Energy giant ExxonMobil has
already begun to widen its wildlife-drilling efforts in response to the Bush Administration's stance. "We have set up an offshore
production platform capable of efficiently extracting over 15,000 Arctic grayling fish from the Beaufort Sea each day, and then
drilling them," ExxonMobil Chief Engineer For Wildlife Drilling Operations Frank Salinas said. "And advances in horizontal
directional drilling may soon allow us to simultaneously drill through two arctic foxes three miles apart." "It's an exciting time to be
in the wildlife-drilling field," Salinas added. Bush's call for more wildlife drilling has come under fire by alternate wildlife-use
advocates, who call his policy shortsighted. "The
administration should be encouraging research into viable
new technologies," said Sylvia Hermann, chairman of Advocates For Cleaner-Burning Fauna. "The energy produced by solar
generators could be used to incinerate vast herds of moose, even in the coldest winter months. Wind-produced electricity could
electrocute Beluga whales in their own habitats, with no need for offshore drilling, and hydroelectric dams could be used to drown
grizzly bears. Perhaps one day geothermic heat could be harnessed to broil entire wildlife-rich regions alive." Continued Hermann,
"It's vital that we preserve the arctic wildlife so that our children, and our children's children, will still have animals to drill when
they grow up." The Bush administration is also proposing the creation of a Strategic Wildlife Preserve, a series of 15-million-cubicmeter above-ground tanks that would store an emergency supply of over 700 million tightly packed animals.
God Add-On
Not using oil makes God cry
Edwards, 12 – a writer for The Raw Story (David, “Bryan Fischer: ‘Enormously insensitive’
to hurt God’s feelings by not using oil,” The Raw Story,
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/30/bryan-fischer-enormously-insensitive-to-hurt-godsfeelings-by-not-using-oil/)//IS
Fischer likened the situation to a birthday present he was given at the age of six. “I opened up a
birthday present that I didn’t like, and I said it right out, ‘Oh, I don’t like those,’” the radio host
recalled. “And it just crushed — and the person that gave me gift was there. You know, I just
kind of blurted it out, ‘I don’t like those.’ And it just crushed that person. It was enormously
insensitive of me to do that.” “And you think, that’s kind of how we’re treating God when
he’s given us these gifts of abundant and inexpensive and effective fuel sources,”
Fischer added. “And we don’t thank him for it and we don’t use it.” “You know,
God
has buried those treasures there because he loves to see us find them.”
ебать россию
XO Preempt
Obama’s a communist and the Russians are going to sneak attack us
Hodges 13 (Dave, 2/26/13, award winning psychology, statistics and research professor, a college basketball coach, a
mental health counselor, a political activist and writer who has published dozens of editorials and articles in several publications,
“Russia Is Preparing To Attack America,” http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/02/26/russia-is-preparing-to-attackamerica2558/)//RTF
United States has not been attacked on the home front for 200 years dating back to the War of 1812. There
exists a plethora of confirming information to support the fact that America’s days may be numbered and that we
are totally unprepared for what is coming. Russia, through the traitorous cooperation and
complicity of President Obama, is positioning its assets in order to attack Alaska. Before I piece
together the many elements of the planned Russian “surprise attack”, it is important for America to understand
that it takes a communist to bring communism to America. Obama
was bred by
communists, raised by communists, educated at the finest schools
with communist money, his political career was launched by
communists and his controllers in the White House are
communists. Part one of this series will clearly establish the fact that Obama is the lynchpin of a multigenerational plan
to hand America over to the Russians and to the Chinese communists. Obama did not just wake up one day and decide to weaken
American defenses and hand over the country to the Russian communists. Obama
the past several years. He
was groomed for this position for
is indeed the right communist, at the right
time, whose mission is to bring America the most crippling form of communism the world has ever seen. Russian Defectors
Have Warned the US About This Moment High-profile
Soviet defectors have been telling American
intelligence agencies for decades that the Russians
have engaged in a
multigenerational plot to destabilize America prior to the takeover
in which both the Russians and the Chinese will unleash a
ferocious military assault upon our country. To match feature USA-RUSSIA/SPYThe
high-ranking defector, Sergei Tretyakov, who repeatedly warned Americans that Russia’s core
government had never abandoned the Cold War and still aimed to destroy the United States. In
his later years, he said his main goal was to “wake up” the American people to the deadly threat posed to them by the former Soviet
Union. His
death was reported as a cardiac event, however, his family remains suspicious.
Tretyakov joined a plethora of others who defected from the former Soviet Union in order to
warn the American people about a planned attack sponsored by the Russian government with assistance from
within the American government. Former Soviet defector, Yuri Bezmenov, a well renowned media/propaganda expert
defected to the United States. in 1970, and subsequently exposed the KGB’s subversive tactics
against American society. Yuri Bezmenov has conducted a number of interviews in which he explains how Marxist ideology
is deconstructing America’s values by controlling the media and which would ultimately serve to demoralize the country, destabilize
the economy, and provoke crises in order to Sovietize the United States. Bezmenov is well
known for revealing Russia’s
doctrine of “ideological subversion”, a slow, long-term multi-decade process of media-based
brainwashing in which the sole purpose is to confuse, confound, and destroy the moral base of
America. Can anyone argue that our country’s values represent a debasement of our national
sense of morality? Every perversion known to mankind in now honored in our media. Christians
are out and hedonists are in. Loyal husbands and fathers are out and a philandering lifestyle is a
honored “virtue.” On this point, the Russians have won. Former Russian Colonel Stanislav Lunev has
the distinction of being the highest ranking Russian military officer to defect to the United
States after doing so in 1992, after Boris Yeltsin came to power. Lunev’s information was considered to be
so volatile, but accurate, that the CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA placed Lunev, where he remains to this
day, in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program. Lunev reported that Russia’s military, despite
“losing the cold war”, continues in its war preparations which are designed to conquer the
United States by stealth Anatoliy Golitsyn, a high-ranking KGB defector who fled to the United States
in order to warn Americans about the secret Russian plan to attack the United States. Golitsyn is
generally considered to be among the first and most revealing on the subject of the secret
Russian plans to attack. Having authored the The Perestroika Deception in which Golitsyn wrote about the deceitful
intent behind the Leninist strategy in which the present-day Communists are actively pursuing
as they fake American style democratization efforts in Russia. According to Golitsyn, the short-term strategic
objective of the Russians is to achieve a technological convergence with the West solely on
Russian terms and mostly through a series of one-sided disarmament agreements. According to
Golitsyn, after the United States military is eliminated as a strategic threat to Russia, the longrange strategic Russian plan is to pursue Lenin’s goal of replacing nation states with collectivist
model of regional governments as a stepping stone to global governance. In order to achieve their final
Russia, after lulling America to sleep, will join with
China in order to attack the United States from both the outside
and inside as he detailed that …the Soviets and the Chinese will be
officially reconciled and enact a “scissors strategy” in which China
will attack the US through the southern border and Russia
through northern border by way of Alaska. As the reader will clearly see in the following
goal, Golitsyn states that
paragraphs, Obama is the catalyst in making these long-range communist plans come to fruition. Obama the Communist Obama
has been surrounded by nothing but communists for all of his life. From Obama’s real father,
Frank Marshall Davis, to the husband and wife communist terrorist team of Bill Ayers and
Bernadine Dohrn from the Weathermen Underground terrorist organization, Obama has known
nothing but Marxist communist philosophy in his formative years. The late Senator, Joseph McCarthy, is
rolling over in his grave due to the fact that a sitting President has such a retrograde pattern of communist
associations and still managed to attain the presidency. Former FBI Weatherman Task Force supervisor, Max
Noel, notes that the FBI utilized a CARL test when it conducted background checks on various
suspects. The acronym CARL stands for Character, Associates, Reputation, and Loyalty used to assess
candidates fitness to hold the highest office in the country. On each of these four points of power, Obama fails
and fails miserably. Like many FBI law enforcement agents and officials, Noel was alarmed by the fact that someone like
Barack Obama could capture the presidency. For some unexplained reason, Obama was never vetted before he became a candidate
for the presidency by the FBI. This
is an unacceptable result of our national security system and is
wholly suggestive of internal plot to allow the installation of a blatantly communist advocate
into the highest political position in America. Today, many people have been in a position to now vet the President
after Obama’s four years of “fundamentally transforming America“. This particular series will continue to connect the dots of the
secretive and nefarious communist background of Barack Hussein Obama and tie his associations, actions and internal belief system
to a current coup d’état which is close to capturing all of the vital elements of power in this country. Comrade
Obama’s
ascension to the presidency has been a long time in the making. Interestingly, Barack Obama’s past
associates especially the communist terrorists which funded his Harvard legal education and ultimately launched his political career
as an Illinois state senator, namely, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, have been in lockstep with Obama his entire adult life.
However, Dohrn and Ayers were not the first to indoctrinate Obama with the Marxist communist philosophy. For that information,
we have to begin with Frank Marshall Davis. Obama’s
real father, Frank Marshall Davis, was a member of
the Communist Party and a former Soviet Agent who was under FBI investigation for a total of 19 years. In 1948,
Davis moved from Chicago to Hawaii leaving behind a colleague named Vernon Jarrett, father-in-law of Senior White House
advisor, Valerie Jarrett. Yes, the Jarrett’s are communists as well. Both Jarrett and Davis wrote for a left wing newspaper called the
Chicago Defender in which they espoused a communist takeover of the United States Government. In 1971, Davis, according to Joel
Gilbert, reunited with his then nine-year-old son, Barack Obama, and schooled him in the ways of being a good communist for the
next nine years. Chicago Slum Lord, Valerie Jarrett Chicago Slum Lord, Valerie Jarrett White House advisers, David Axelrod and
Valerie Jarrett, were both “Red Diaper Babies, in which they were the sons and daughters of well-to-do parents who desired
communism and lived out their dreams through their children’s revolutionary activities. Other notable red-diaper babies also
included Rahm Emanuel and Eric Holder. Jarrett’s situation is particularly interesting in that her family and the Ayers family have
been multigenerational friends which also included a marriage between the two families. Much of the Obama administration is a
nest of communists and this should serve to gravely concern every American citizen. Following the nine years of mentoring and
parenting by Frank Davis, Obama made some very important communist connections which ultimately led to him obtaining an
impressive college education financed by some very familiar communist activists’, namely, Tom Ayers, Con Ed CEO, and then his
son Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. You remember Bill and Bernardine, don’t you? Bill Ayers Mug Shot Bill Ayers Mug Shot The
Prairie Fire book was co-authored by Dohrn and Ayers, and, quite unbelievably, it was dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s
assassin. Former FBI informant, While appearing on The Common Sense Show, Larry Grathwohl, revealed that he testified in a
court of law that Ayers and Dohrn had direct involvement in a terrorist plot which killed San Francisco police sergeant, Brian V.
McDonnell, by a bomb made and planted by these Weathermen Underground terrorists. Grathwohl also revealed that he asked
Ayers, in a meeting of about 25 well-to do Weatherman, most with advanced degrees from Ivy League Universities, what the
Weathermen planned to do when they achieved their goal of a communist take over the government. Grathwohl stated that Ayers
paused for a moment and then said that it was likely that about 50 million Americans will have to be re-educated in concentration
camps located in the American Southwest and that about 25 million would have to be eliminated, meaning that they would have to
be murdered. Bill and Bernardine’s Weather Underground had the support of Cuba, East German intelligence and the North
Vietnamese. I believe that since Obama was able to secure a second term, and with the power granted to him by the NDAA, that he
will fulfill Ayers’ promise to Grathwohl to murder 25 million Americans who cannot be “re-educated”. Obama’s educational and
political benefactors, Ayers and Dohrn, raised a son, Chesa Boudin, who worked for Hugo Chavez , communist dictator in charge of
Venezuela. Chesa Boudin was the child of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, members of a Weather Underground spin-off group who
went to prison for an armored car robbery that resulted in the murders of two police officers and a security guard. Dohrn served
seven months for her role in the robbery and this is the reason that she is ineligible to become bar certified as an attorney. Is anyone
else uncomfortable with the fact that Ayers and Dohrn were the ones primarily responsible for educating Obama with communist
funds and then subsequently launched his political career from their living room? Well, it is true, please read on. Allen Hulton, a 39
year veteran of the postal service, provided a sworn affidavit to Maricopa County, AZ. Sheriff investigators, led by Sheriff Joe Arpaio,
in an effort toward determining whether or not former foreign college student, Barack Obama, is eligible to be placed on Arizona’s
2012 election ballot. After reviewing Hulton’s affidavit, it is apparent that Ayers and Dohrn were in fact the de facto adoptive parents
to this foreign student destined to become the first illegitimate President of the United States. As a result, Obama was treated to the
finest Ivy League education that communist backed money could buy as Hulton maintains that the Ayers’ told him that they were
financing the education of a promising foreign student at Harvard. Hulton also testified that he met Obama while at the Ayer’s home
and he asked Obama what he going to do with all his education, to which Obama politely answered, “I am going to become the
President”. Readers should take note that this is an affidavit, and as such, is formally considered to be evidence, not conjecture or
hearsay. There can be no other conclusion that the communist terrorist, Bill Ayers, began grooming Obama to become America’s
first communist President during Obama’s college years. Their relationship continues into the present time as it is on record that
Ayers visited the White House in August of 2009. We also know that Obama’s communist affiliations continued well into his
adulthood because of the good work of Joel Gilbert who discovered that Obama was active with a Weathermen Underground
support group known as The May 19th Communist Organization, in New York. Perhaps, this is why Ayers was visiting the White
House. Frank Chapman, a communist activist and a member of the communist front group known as the World Peace Council.
Chapman clearly used the term “mole” to describe Obama. He said Obama’s political climb and subsequent success in the 2008
Democratic presidential primaries was “a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle.” Chapman further stated
that, “Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that
he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary ‘mole,’ not only showing his traces on the surface but
also breaking through. The Communist Party USA backs Obama to the hilt.” It is clear that Obama is their man! America is at a
serious crossroads. The United States is preparing to go to war with Iran and its allies, China and Russia, in a last ditch effort to save
the Petrodollar scheme as opposed to letting China and Russia buy Iranian oil in gold. If America loses this struggle, the dollar will
collapse. America’s economy is in shambles and the country can ill-afford being purposely run into the ground by a series of reddiaper babies bent on the communist takeover of this country. There can be no doubt about it, Barack Obama is a traitor to this
country. He is the culmination of a distinct and purposeful mufti-generational communist plot to install a communist dictator who
would weaken this country to the point that it is very vulnerable to an outside Russian attack. obama_communist_flag_cardp137872120744570903q0yk_400Russian troops have infiltrated the United States and all signs in and around Alaska point to the
fact that the Russian attack will commence through the Bering Strait and proceed southward into British Columbia, Oregon,
Washington and Idaho. Part two of this series will explore the emerging evidence to support the belief that Alaska is about to be
attacked by Russia.
2AC Blocks
K
Every K
Perm do both- inclusion of parody makes the critique more accessible, opens up
spaces to challenge hegemonic knowledge production and question
representations, and forwards the critique more effectively
Mack 09 (Nancy, May 2009, associate professor of English and co-director of the Summer Institute on Writing at Wright State
University. She teaches undergraduate courses for preservice teachers, as well as graduate courses in composition theory, memoir,
and multigenre writing, “Representations of the Field in Graduate Courses: Using Parody to Question All Positions,”
http://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=english)//RTF
First, for my purposes, parody
has the potential to emphasize the relationship between two discourses: the
popular and the academic. Because the university plays a large role in preserving traditional
knowledge, academics may hold the popular in contempt. However, parody gives some power to
popular discourses—so that the students’ expertise in beer consumption or recent films can have
academic usefulness and could even give them an edge in making witty commentary. Students
should select something of great familiarity when they create a parody. My graduate classes have a diverse population of majors and
identity groups, including many types of nontraditional students. My students do make references to popular culture; however, I
would expand Hutcheon’s definition of the popular to include any culture located outside of
school, especially home cultures and daily life experiences. For example, an ESL student marshaled her
experience with different brands of international phone cards to call attention to the differences in theory groups. In
emphasizing the relationship between the popular and the academic, the intertextuality of
parody can accentuate discourse differences—if nothing more than in terminology. As they become
more familiar with theoretical jargon, students can find humor in references that would previously have been undecipherable. Being
able to laugh at jokes such as Jeff Reid’s Postmodern Toasties cartoon, David Gauntlett’s Theory Trading Cards, or the Virtual
Academic is a powerful moment in which a student can respond as a veteran academic would.
does not really change the relatively low status of the newcomers, but it does
This moment of laughter
offer some respite in their travails at
becoming academics. Parody is based on a revisiting of the past, which unavoidably legitimizes the power that it subverts.
Like most academics, I claim that a familiarity with history is crucial for future subversion. Nonetheless, students’ emerging
conception of scholarship should not be so totalizing that they have no power in relation to it. A
second feature of a
parody-writing assignment is that it can present a way to make composition and rhetoric theories less alienating, thus making
elite knowledge more accessible. In her introduction, Hutcheon cites Walter Jackson Bate as suggesting that parody
is one way that a writer can deal with the “rich and intimidating legacy of the past ” (4). Rather
than keeping knowledge at arm’s length, I want students to get directly involved. Another literary
theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, discusses parody’s laughter as having “the remarkable power of making an
object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all
sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it,
take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it” (Dialogic 23). Although
he fears that modern parody has lost its radical function (Dialogic 71), the preceding quotation from Bakhtin concretizes the writer’s
interaction with the object of the parody and is worth sharing with students when they later reflect on what they have learned from
this assignment. Bakhtin’s scholarship has given us an understanding of carnival as a critique of the normalizing forces that narrow
language, giving the non-elite momentary permission to disrupt hierarchies (Rabelais 10). In other contexts, a parody can be a
dangerous threat for its mocking of authority. Likewise, I enjoin graduate students to ponder whether their parodies could be
regarded as disrespectful by the scholars represented in their parodies. Certainly, the teacher’s respectful stance toward these
scholars sets the tone and models how academics should avoid caustic condemnations of their colleagues. Writing parodies will not
place students on an equal footing with senior scholars, but students report that these assignments give them a way in, an inroad to
making sense of the field. Textual intimidation affects not only how students read and interpret texts but how they construct their
position relative to the knowledge within those texts. It is not possible to construct knowledge without learning one’s relative power,
as indicated by Peter H. Sawchuck’s research on legitimate and illegitimate learning spaces for working-class groups. Accessibility to
academic knowledge occurs when assignments create spaces for students to act as academics. Altruistic
motives to help
students can mislead teachers into designing dumbed-down assignments, assuming students to
be incapable. This assumption cheapens the language experience such that students become
alienated from academic knowledge, learning their subordinate position instead. This textual
intimidation makes it imperative that marginalized students be permitted to bring their senses
of humor into the classroom. Mary Louise Pratt points to parody as one of the “literate arts of the contact zone” that
oppressed groups can appropriate and adapt from the dominant culture (179). Of course, there are no guarantees that the students
or I will fully understand one another’s jocularities. The previously mentioned student example of the international phone cards
required some explanation for me to understand, just as I might have benefited from an explanation of a quip about a medieval
holiday during a recent departmental meeting. Believing that students should participate in activities that are fundamentally
different from those done by academics can undermine even the best assignment. In addition to the myriad of personal
contradictions that students face when they make the transition to a new role within the academic community, the teacher’s
pejorative beliefs about students’ relative status and capabilities can subtly affect whether students engage meaningfully with the
text or assignment. As
a third aspect, even a superficial parody changes the students’ role from that of
a passive consumer to a more active producer of critique—unless the students are just reformatting the
teacher’s views. This problem may be more likely to occur if students are constructing a parody of only one of the theory groups. A
parody assignment that invites students to depict the pitfalls of all positions directs students to
expose the ideology present in each. Ideology is very difficult to reveal. Like dialect, we often presume that
it is the other who “speaks funny,” whereas we speak correctly. It is important to examine how academics and
everyday people learn critique. To wit, reading and writing scholarship have made me cautious about the ideas that I
forward. As painful as it might seem, the blind review process employed by academic journals and the open forums at conferences
and on listservs help scholars anticipate critiques by others within the field. Sharing worries about the misrepresentations that are
inevitable in glosses, taxonomies, and parodies can be an opening gambit for critique. However, it is never the assignment alone that
accomplishes the goal, but the classroom context in which the assignment becomes a dynamic activity. If knowledge is presented to
students as immutable truth, it becomes unlikely that students will do more than learn the teacher’s critiques as more knowledge to
be consumed. One concern might be that these parodies are not very potent critiques, but merely authorized transgressions—that
they do not move radically away from given taxonomies or that they encourage overgeneralizations about which elite academic club
to join. At their worst, parody assignments might only be comic relief from the otherwise daily drudgery of coursework. Obviously,
the larger culture is rife with parodies of politicians that evoke laughter, but, as some maintain, these parodies have little more than
entertainment value for those who are unable to partake in political agency by voting or speaking out against policies that limit their
material conditions. Fredric Jameson might caution that parodies function as simplistic stylistic devices that are devoid of a political
claim in which a schizophrenic subject gains no agency. Similarly, students could just invent stereotypes for contextless scholars
without any participation in the field. Critique ought to be the beginning and not the end of what academics do. As a future
possibility for critique, I am incubating an assignment in which students profile a person from their lives who has developed an
awareness of a dominant ideology limitation and has rejected a specific cultural metanarrative. More times than not, an assignment
may function in a way that the teacher did not intend. Regretfully, innovative assignments are probably more likely to be
misinterpreted by students; consequently, the burden falls on the teacher to sponsor metacognitive reflection about the learning
experience, which I address in a later section. As a fourth feature, parody
can question representations of
knowledge. Although students may map taxonomies without doubting the way that scholars and theory groups are represented,
the parody assignment problematizes the history of our field as textually mediated and
constructed. Hutcheon expresses my point this way: “To parody is not to destroy the past: in fact, to parody
is both to enshrine the past and to question it” (6). A problem when representing a discipline or a university is that,
through reification, the discourse loses its dynamic human quality. For instance, I mentally resist whenever I am told that I must do
something for the good of the university. Administrators tend to privilege the needs of the reified institution over those of the faculty
or the students. Although questions lengthen the time spent in committee meetings, academics are very good at questioning
knowledge. From the outset, graduate students should be involved in interrogating canonical knowledge. Otherwise, composition
and rhetoric can be misconceived as an impenetrable, indisputable truth. Even the names for groups and terminology should be
challenged. Recently, on the Writing Program Administrator’s listserv, I read postings in response to a query about differences
among the terms “liberatory,” “transformative,” “cultural studies,” and “critical pedagogy.” The commentary from several academics
about these terms reminded me how, at different moments in my career, I have read and applied ideas to my scholarship and
teaching from the various groups associated with them. Sometimes the name for a group or concept emerges late in the development
of ideas.4 I have been fortunate to participate in a few collaborative projects in which senior scholars took me seriously and treated
me with respect. I see no reason why graduate students should not be permitted to join scholarly discussions. Listservs, wikis, blogs,
and even Wikipedia can be used to share the controversies of the field as an electronic version of Gerald Graff’s disciplinary debates.
If nothing else, questions about differences in terminology can present the impetus to investigate further and learn more. Parody
can provide a space for questioning that which is represented as factual. From Hutcheon’s reference, I
tracked down the unorthodox ideas of Raymond Federman. Federman proposes “play-giarism” in fiction, which exposes the
fictionality of reality or “makes fun of what it does while doing it” (par. 35). Writing
parodies can be a playful method
for countering the reification of disciplinary knowledge. I want the parody assignment to help students gain a
critical distance from the knowledge of the field for the purpose of questioning it. Education philosopher Nicholas C. Burbules
describes parody as “[. . .] enacting a perspective while simultaneously lampooning it, or provisionally embracing multiple
perspectives without actually advocating any of them. The parodist thrives on paradox, and sees in it an opportunity for humor and
for critical commentary” (“Postmodern” par. 23). Building from Hayden White’s work on metahistory, Burbules advocates parody as
one of three narrative tropes (in addition to irony and tragedy) for dealing with the postmodern condition of doubt—a foundational
doubt, which sometimes threatens the presuppositions that we can hardly live without. I hope that, by asking students to question all
positions, I will not further alienate students from the field. I want to involve them in the politics of representation, first through
mapping and parody and then later through researching the context and doing close reading of a scholarly text. I want students to
examine the relationship among text, language, and identity and to understand how culture becomes inscribed in all three.
Cap
No link and aff solves the K- our satirical interrogation of energy practices is the
most effective means of fighting capitalism and consumption
Pehlivan et al. 13 (Ekin 1 Pierre Berthon1, Jean-Paul Berthon2 and Ian Cross1, 6/11/13, 1 Bentley University, Waltham,
Massachusetts USA and 2 Southampton University, Southhampton, UK, “Viral irony: using irony to spread the questioning of
questionable consumption,” Wiley Online Library, Page 173)//RTF
GREEN IRONY In
the public sphere, claims of truth and fact are essentially social constructs, wherein the powerful
can stipulate what is ‘legitimate’ (cf. Bourdieu, 1991). This can be keenly observed in the claims and
counterclaims over the environment. In a recent review of the literature on attitudes to the environment in the USA
(Daniels et al., 2011), it was found that depending on the specific question, 35–80% of consumers where concerned or very
concerned about the environment. Thus, powerful
organizations, keen to gain environmental credibility in the eyes of the
public, are spending huge sums of money in advertising their ‘green’ credentials (Naish, 2008).
Countering many of these claims is the environmental movement, which focuses on promoting awareness of, and generating
solutions to, the negative impact that humans are having on the planet (Guha, 1999). It argues that many of the green claims made
by firms are half-truths or entirely bogus and label much of the advertising by firms as greenwashing (e.g. Naish, 2008). Two
strategies are typically employed when countering the ‘environmentally responsible’ claims of
firms: direct and indirect. The directmethod is simply a public negation of the initial claim combined with a counter claim.
The indirect method is to employ a rhetorical device such as irony to problematize or subvert the
initial message. This latter strategy has two potential advantages. First, it eschews the claim,
counter-claim problem of which side to believe, but rather subverts the original message so that
the viewers question the claim themselves. Second, it, as we shall argue, helps the counter
message spread. Consider the much-advertised claim of ‘clean coal’ by the coal industry. The
industry argues that technology has rendered coal, the world’s number one source of CO2
emissions (e.g. Gore, 2006), as a clean energy. However, environmental groups on the web (e.g. http://www.coalis-dirty.org/, http:// climaterealityproject.org/, and http://beyondcoal. org/) vehemently dispute this claim. As well
as directly refuting the claims of the coal industry, some of these groups employ irony in their
messaging to undermine the industry’s assertions. Consumer-generated content suggests that
irony is popular among consumers. For example, the ‘(s)ales of the Kitsch Three wolf moon t-shirt shot up 2300% after
a spate of ironic reviews went viral’ (Emery, 2009). Customers left a string of ironic reviews for the environmentally friendly t-shirt
(currently a staggering 2371 http://www.amazon.com/The-Mountain- Three-Short-Sleeve/dp/B002HJ377A), making it one of the
most popular products on Amazon. Clearly, consumers demanded, created, and reveled in the ironic humor in promoting the
product (cf. Stern, 1990), and the phenomenon suggests that irony has the ability to help a message go viral. In the
fight against the claims of clean coal, the Coen brothers created an ironic ad called ‘clean coal-air freshener’. The ad is a parody of a
regular air freshener commercial. The spokesperson introduces an all-American family to ‘clean coal’ scented air freshener. The
script reads Is regular clean, clean enough, for your family? Not when you can have ‘Clean coal’ clean! Clean coal harnesses the
awesome power of the word ‘clean’, to make it sound like the cleanest clean there is. Clean coal is supported by the coal industry, the
most trusted name in coal! and the 30 s ad ends with a low pitch buzzing sound with the words projected on a black screen ‘In reality
there is no such thing as clean coal’ (http://action. thisisreality.org/page/s/coenbrothers). The message of the ad on the surface
violates conventional expectations, yet the use of irony emphasizes the absurdity of the concept of clean coal;
irony is used to let consumers question questionable consumption of the world’s number one source of CO2.
Perm do both- the inclusion of irony spreads the alt net better
Pehlivan et al. 13 (Ekin 1 Pierre Berthon1, Jean-Paul Berthon2 and Ian Cross1, 6/11/13, 1 Bentley University, Waltham,
Massachusetts USA and 2 Southampton University, Southhampton, UK, “Viral irony: using irony to spread the questioning of
questionable consumption,” Wiley Online Library, Pages 176-177)//RTF
GREEN VIRUSES: HOW IRONY CAN HELP MESSAGES SPREAD Now that we have specified how irony works and the various
types that can occur in marketing communications, we
can turn our attention to the relationship between
irony and the probability that a consumer will spread the message via text, e-mail, social network, or word
of mouth. Specifically, we ask two questions. First, what is it about the mechanism of irony that helps a message to spread?
Second, why is irony especially predominant in viral videos on environmental issues? In answer to the first question, we suggest that
irony can help a message go viral because it differentiates, aids memorability, and enhances the
aesthetics of a message. Differentiation: With the rise of electronic communication and the
increasing number of message types and media, there is an ever-increasing dissonance of voices
in the marketplace (Kietzmann et al., 2011). Consumers are deluged with communications every minute of their lives, and
thus marketers are increasingly employing unconventional mechanisms to attract attention. Irony is one of these tools. As Brown
(2003: 81) observes, ‘Ironic
advertising takes marketing-savvy consumers as a given and seeks to
ironize the norms, clichés, and customercentric sanctimoniousness of the marketing industry.’
As we have seen, irony employs incongruity between levels or elements of a message, and research
shows that incongruity attracts and arrests attention to a marketing message (e.g. McQuarrie and Mick
1996). Memorability: Along with delivering incongruity, irony is often used to evoke humor. Irony elicits both elements,
so can enhance a message’s memorability compared with a direct advertisement (e.g. Stern, 1990, Lee
and Schumann, 2004). Moreover, because additional cognitive effort needs to be expended when
interpreting an indirect message (over and above the cognitive load needed to interpret the direct message), the
presence of irony is likely to increase the number of associative paths stored in the memory (cf.
Mitchell, 1983).
Visibility
1. This is our last stand- all other means of criticism of modern debate practices
have been coopted and just turned into meaningless debate arguments- only a risk
the aff can solve because invisibility empirically fails
2. There is definitively no link- the aff can’t be coopted- 1AC Phiddian says that
parody is a form of deconstruction and that deconstruction solves by nesting
within a structure and tearing it down from the inside- the aff is literally the same
as the K- our movement is invisible- you didn’t know what we were doing until the
top of the 2AC- means perm do both solves
3. (pull the second pehlivan card from cap, it says irony/viral spread is best)
Micropolitical performative challenges in debate disrupt hegemonic knowledge
production by making it visible- key to participation in the movement
Kulynych 97 (Jessica, 1997, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, “Performing Politics:
Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation,” Polity (30.2), p, 37)//RTF
Participation as resistance compels us to expand the category of political participation. Whereas
traditional studies of participation delimit political participation from other "social" activities,
once participation is defined as resistance this distinction is no longer tenable. Bonnie Honig suggests
that performative action is an event, an agonistic disruption of the ordinary sequence of things, a
site of resistance of the irresistible, a challenge to the normalizing rules that seek to constitute,
govern, and control various behaviors. And, [thus,] we might be in a position to identify sites of
political action in a much broader array of constations, ranging from the self-evident truths of
God, nature, technology and capital to those of identity, of gender, race and ethnicity. We might then be in
a position to act-in the private realm."¶ A performative concept of participation as resistance explodes
the distinction between public and private, between the political and the apolitical. As Foucault explains, what
was formerly considered apolitical, or social rather than political, is revealed as the foundation of
technologies of state control. Contests over identity and everyday social life are not merely additions to the
realm of the political, but actually create the very character of those things traditionally considered
political. The state itself is "superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the
family, kinship, knowledge, technology and so forth."72 Thus it is contestations at the micro-level, over the
intricacies of everyday life, that provide the raw material for global domination, and the key to
disrupting global strategies of domination. Therefore, the location of political participation extends
way beyond the formal apparatus of government, or the formal organization of the workplace, to
the intimacy of daily actions and iterations.¶ A performative understanding of political
participation demands recognition of a broader array of actors and actions as well. Performative
participation is manifest in any activity that resists the technological and bureaucratic construction
of privatized client-citizens, or reveals the contingency of contemporary identities. Political action,
understood in this sense, does not have to be intentional, rational, and planned; it may be accidental, impulsive, and spontaneous. It
is the disruptive potential, the surprising effect, rather than the intent of an action that determines its status as participation.
Consequently, studies
of participation must concern themselves not just with those activities we
intentionally take part in and easily recognize as political participation, but also with those
accidental, unplanned, and often unrecognized instances of political participation. If resistance is a
matter of bringing back into view things that have become self-evident, then we must be prepared to recognize that consciousness of
the contingency of norms and identities is an achievement that happens through action and not prior to action. Performative
participation is manifest in any action, conscious or unconscious, spontaneous or organized,
that resists the normalizing, regularizing, and subjectifying confines of contemporary
disciplinary regimes.¶ Such a concept of political participation allows us to see action where it
was previously invisible. So where Gaventa, in his famous study of Appalachian miners, sees quiescence in "anger [that is]
poignantly expressed about the loss of homeplace, the contamination of streams, the drain of wealth, or the destruction from the
strip mining all around ... [but is only] individually expressed and shows little apparent translation into organized protest or
collective action,"" a concept of performative resistance sees tactics and strategies that resist not only the global strategies of
economic domination, but also the construction of apathetic, quiescent citizens. When
power is such that it can create
quiescence, then the definition of political participation must include those forms of political
action that disrupt and counter quiescence. A concept of political participation that recognizes participation in
sporadically expressed grievances, and an "adherence to traditional values" by citizens faced with the "penetration of dominant
social values," is capable of seeing not only how power precludes action but also how power relationships are "not altogether
successful in shaping universal acquiescence." "
Permutation: occupy the space in between the visible and invisible- solves the K
best
De Vries 2013 (Leonie Ansems, 10/23/13, Visiting Fellow @ RCIR, “The Politics of (In)visibility: Governance--‐
Resistance of Refugees,” http://kclrcir.org/2013/10/23/the-politics-of-invisibility-governance-%C2%AD%E2%80%90resistance-ofrefugees/)//RTF
Migrants and refugees are in the spotlight across the globe. To give only a snapshot of recent news coverage: Millions of people are
fleeing Syria; two overcrowded boats carrying refugees capsized near Lampedusa earlier this month; the Australian government
sends asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea under a new ‘offshore resettlement policy’; the UK government is under fire for its
controversial ‘Go Home’ campaign, urging ‘illegal migrants’ to ‘go home or face arrest’. These events and policies bring to light the
importance and urgency of responding to both the plight of refugees and the securitisation of migration in very practical ways. It also
prompts the need to conceptualise these issues in ways other than through discourses of threat, (in)security and/or victimisation. I
would like to throw a different light on the issue of refugees and migration by focusing on the affirmative political practices of
refugees in Malaysia. What
I call the politics of (in)visibility, plays out at the intersection of theory and
practice as well as at the juncture of governance and resistance.¶ In Malaysia, refugees are legally non--‐
existent. The apparent simplicity of this legal invisibility hides a complex field of practices. The Malaysian state is not a signatory to
the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Only two categories of migrants exist in
Malaysian law: legal and illegal. The absence of the category of the refugee means that all undocumented migrants are considered
‘illegal migrants’ and subject to the Immigration Act, which allows for the detention, deportation and (coroporal) punishment of
illegal migrants. The securitisation of migration by the Malaysia authorities in combination with the absence of legal rights leaves
undocumented migrants in a very vulnerable position.¶ Yet, what struck me whilst working with refugees from Myanmar in the
Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur was the affirmative character of their practices more than the hopelessness of their situation. For
instance, refugees have set up community associations, advocacy organisations, churches and schools and many have found work.
This more affirmative perspective emerges with the observation that the field of governmental practices stretches beyond state
authorities as well as beyond official procedures and legislation. Of significance in this respect is the role of the UNHCR as both
facilitator of resistance and governmental body of regulation and management.¶ The Malaysian state does not have an asylum
system in place to register and administer refugees. The UNHCR has stepped in to offer assistance and support to refugees,
including registration, status determination, documentation and resettlement. Relations among government, UNHCR and refugees
are ambiguous and informal, as symbolised by the UNHCR identity card. Upon registration with the UNHCR, migrants receive a
UNHCR identity card, granting them a kind of unofficial official status. Unofficial insofar as the identity card does not grant a
refugee an official status under Malaysian law; and unofficial insofar as the card is no guarantee against arrest and detention –
although, informally, the card should give a refugee this protection. In practice, the possession of an identity card appears to help
reduce violence against refugees at least to a degree. It is official insofar as undocumented migrants gain the status of refugee in the
eyes of the UNHCR as well as ‘the international community’. That is to say, the UNHCR does not merely make visible the existence
of refugees in Malaysia, it produces the category of the refugee by dividing the field of ‘illegal migrants’ into refugees and economic
migrants. A division denied by the government.¶ Identification as a refugee thus involves the simultaneity of resistance – against the
denial of legal status by the government – and governmentalisation – by the UNHCR. The
example of identity cards
indicates that the legal and the illegal, as well as the visible and the invisible, cannot be captured
in binary terms. A large domain exists in which the legal, the illegal, the formal and the informal
are at play in a more complex manner. It is in this domain that refugees produce an affirmative
politics of resistance. If their official illegality and invisibility leaves refugees in a vulnerable
position, their occupation of the space in--‐between – between the visible and the invisible also
allows them to claim an identity other than that of either passive victim or dangerous other. The
community associations and schools set up by various refugee communities constitute a clear example of practices that challenge the
denial of affirmative subjectivity.¶ Attention to the detail of micro--‐practices in the case of refugees in Malaysia thus challenges
prevailing discourses that frame migrants and refugees either in terms of dangerous other or passive victim. It also challenges the
assumption that governance and resistance can be captured in a binary terms. Rather, governance and resistance appear as a
complexity of co--‐constitutive practices. It is on the basis of their official illegality and invisibility, yet in the in--‐between of
(il)legality, (in)visibility and (in)formality, that refugees create an informal yet active politics both enabled and compromised by
practices of governance.
Visibility is critical to effective resistance
Gordon 2002 (Neve, 2002, Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University, “On Visibility and Power:
An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault.” Human Studies 25: 125–145)//RTF
Plurality and natality are the conditions of possibility of Arendtian power. We¶ read that power, as that which “springs up between
men when they act together¶ and vanishes the moment they disperse” is dependent on the human condition¶ of plurality (Arendt,
1958, p. 200). Seyla Benhabib traces Arendt’s notion¶ of plurality to Heidegger’s being-with-others, whereby “the world is never¶ just
the world around one, it is always also the world we share with othersӦ (as quoted in Benhabib, 1996, p. 53). Whereas for Heidegger,
being-with-others¶ has negative connotations of fallenness into the chatter of everyday life,¶ for Arendt “human plurality, the basic
condition of both action and speech,¶ has the twofold character of equality and distinction.” Arendt adds, “we are¶ all the same, that
is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as¶ anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live” (1958, pp. 107, 108).
Plurality¶ accordingly describes two interrelated conditions. First, it signifies the human¶
condition of being-with-others-in-the-world. Second, it underscores the duality¶ of human
existence whereby all individuals, as humans, are the same,¶ and yet simultaneously each one is
a unique being. Plurality, one should note,¶ is an ontological category that constitutes human
existence in its most primordial¶ sense. Put differently, insofar as one is human, plurality is an
integral part¶ of one’s existence.¶ Moreover, plurality is essential to visibility. In Arendt’s view,
the world¶ gains meaning as a result of the human condition of plurality. As Bhikhu Parekh¶ puts it, one’s
experience of the world is dependent “upon the recognition and confirmation of others” (Parekh, 1981, p. 87). Even one’s own
identity, not¶ only in the sense of what one is, but also who one is, is contingent upon how¶ others interpret one’s words and deeds.
Arendt goes so far as to suggest that¶ even “the great forces of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thought¶ of the mind, the
delights of the senses – lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence¶ unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and
deindividualized,¶ as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance” (1958, p. 50). A sense¶ of reality, even the most intimate
and private reality, is, according to Arendt,¶ intersubjectively derived, while intersubjectivity is dependent on the twofold¶ character
of plurality.¶ Arendt’s discussion of plurality and her claim that meaning is dependent¶ on intersubjective experience have far
reaching implications for Foucault’s¶ notion of nonsubjective power. While Foucault discloses forms of control that¶ Arendt did not
notice, both thinkers would agree that the diverse attributes¶ that are ascribed, for example, to sex – which are, in effect, forms of
positive¶ and negative control – become meaningful and remain so only insofar as they¶ are corroborated in public, insofar as they
are visible. Devoid
of visibility,¶ power becomes powerless. Thus, visibility is, as mentioned before,
both an¶ effect of power and its condition of possibility. Arendt’s writings demonstrate¶ that
visibility is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is the visibility of¶ “the social” that make it
into a form of control (Gordon, 2001). Writing about¶ Arendt, Melissa Orlie – echoing Butler –
underscores this point, describing¶ how the on-going reiteration of social norms engenders a socalled “rule of¶ necessity, as well as the violations and exclusions it abets” (1995, p. 340). On¶ the
other hand, any form of resistance is also dependent on visibility, on the¶ ability of people to see
and hear defiant acts. Without visibility, all confrontations¶ are meaningless. Foucault, I believe,
would have agreed that visibility¶ is resistance’s condition of possibility, yet, to the best of my
knowledge, he¶ never says so explicitly.
Other Args
Cede the Political
Satire doesn’t cede the political – it’s actually key to motivate action
Thai, 14 – editor for The Crimson (Anthony, “Political Satire: Beyond the Humor,” The
Crimson, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/2/6/harvard-political-satire/)//IS
Despite these advantages, some have argued that political satire encourages cynicism, trivializes
politics, and promotes a narrow point of view (stemming from the predominantly liberal
leanings of most political satirists and comedians). It is true that, when taken in isolation,
political satire poses many drawbacks, and that the constant critique of political figures and
media outlets can lead to skepticism. However, viewers of satire are more likely to watch and
read traditional news sources as well, according to an article in the Columbia Journalism
Review. In fact, satirists often refer to other news sources to provide background for their
critiques, as Stewart has done numerous times with CNN and Fox News, serving the dual
purpose of communicating news and criticizing the current methods of political media. The
same article also references research that suggests increased viewership of political humor does
not distance the audience from politics but instead “increases knowledge of current events, leads
to further information-seeking on related topics, and increases viewer interest in and attention
paid to politics and news.” This more informed and interested audience naturally has more
opportunities to share educated opinions with others and provoke discussion. Arguments that
satire actually increases narrow-mindedness because it panders to liberals also have their flaws.
While there are few Republican and conservative viewers, data show that less than half of the
viewers of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” are liberals; in fact, 38 percent of viewers
of “The Colbert Report,” as well as 41 percent of those watching “The Daily Show,” consider
themselves independents. These shows have roughly the same percentage of Democrat viewers
as the New York Times and USA Today and a lower percentage than CNN, all of which claim to
be non-partisan news sources. Moreover, humorists connect with their audience more
effectively than news anchors do. While politics in news is often portrayed as a field separate
from daily life, Stewart and Colbert easily relate their coverage to the average viewer. In contrast
to Sunday talk shows such as NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “This Week,” which host
roundtables of pundits discussing the political issues of the day in non-personal terms, satirists
need to be personal for their comedy to be understood and entertaining. Finally, instead of
allowing experts to express their opinions as fact as some journalists do, humorists often
challenge the views of experts to the audience’s benefit. For example, in October 2013, Stewart
hosted Kathleen Sebelius, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, and criticized
Obamacare for delaying compliance with the bill for big businesses but not individuals. He
critiqued the fact that these businesses can lobby for their interests while individuals cannot.
Although some coverage of this issue made news sources, Stewart presented it at length with an
authentic source and in a comedic and memorable fashion. He caught viewers’ attention and
demonstrated that experts are not always correct. Taken together with traditional news sources,
political humor at least molds a more informed public and at best increases political
involvement and excitement. The humor provides the tools; viewers must decide whether to
use them.
Satire is key to political action – empirics
Freedman, 10 – UCLA Professor of Political Science, specializing in American and British
politics, and as Dean of UCLA Extension. Since his retirement he has taught a seminar on
political satire in UCLA’s undergraduate Honors Collegium. His political satire presentations for
university and community audiences extend an avocation begun in a common setting for
political satire in Britain – the university musical review. Len’s publications include: The
Offensive Art: Political Satire and its Censorship Around the World From Beerbohm to Borat
(2009); Power and Policy in America, 7th edition (2000)(“Why Political Satire Matters,”
http://www.strictlysatire.com/mysites/WhySatireMatters.aspx)//IS
And yet, if satire alone is unlikely to change the course of history, it often accompanies and
reinforces political action. And though its impact can never be measured precisely, it seems
likely that, together with other forces of dissent, political satire can make a difference. The
cartoons and lascivious jokes leveled at the royal family helped to create the atmosphere of
derision and fury that culminated in the French Revolution. The satirists’ rage against the
Vietnam war played its part in the shift of public sentiment that at last forced its end. Colbert
and Stewart make politics amusing and interesting to youthful audiences who otherwise tend to
be politically uninvolved. Moreover, if some authoritarian regimes have contemptuously
tolerated a limited amount of satire, most have not. And here we come to the most important
argument for why political satire matters – its role as a bulwark against political oppression.
Political satire, after all, is by definition aggressive, hostile, offensive. Political leaders generally
don’t like being offended, and especially they don’t enjoy being made to look ridiculous.
Satire Good
Satire is a key form of public pedagogy – it’s a prerequisite to meaningful debate
McClennen, 12 – Ph.D., Duke University M.A., Duke University A.B., Harvard University,
cum laude Dr. McClennen directs Penn State's Center for Global Studies as well as its Latin
American Studies program and has ties to the departments of Comparative Literature, Spanish,
and Women's Studies. She has published seven books and has three in process. Her latest
single-authored volume is Colbert's America: Satire and Democracy (2012), which studies the
role of Stephen Colbert in shaping political discourse after 9/11. (Sophia. A, “America According
to Colbert: Satire as Public Pedagogy post 9/11,” July 3rd,
http://societyforcriticalexchange.org/conferences/MLA%202011/Public%20Intellectuals/Amer
ica%20According%20to%20Colbert.htm)//IS
By inquiring into the ways that Colbert has functioned as a public intellectual, this paper
suggests that satire is a comedic and pedagogic form uniquely suited to provoke critical
reflection. Its ability to underscore the absurdity, ignorance, and prejudice of commonly
accepted behaviors by means of comedic critical reflection offers an especially potent form of
public critique, one that was much needed in the post 9/11 environment. This paper argues that,
in contrast to the anti-intellectualism, the sensationalism, and the punditry that tend to govern
most mass media today, Colbert’s program offers his audience the opportunity to understand
the context through which most news is reported and to be critical of it. In so doing Colbert’s
show further offers viewers an opportunity to reflect on the limited and narrow ways that
political issues tend to be framed in public debate. Colbert’s satire, then, is a form of what Henry
Giroux defines as “public pedagogy” since it demonstrates the use of media as a political and
educational force. Recognizing that the political opinions of most US citizens are shaped by an
uncritical acceptance of the issues as provided by the mainstream media, Colbert uses the same
venue to critique that process. By impersonating a right-wing pundit, Colbert differs in
significant ways from other critical comedians since his form of humor embodies that which it
critiques. This paper suggests that this form of parody has both the potential to be more incisive
in its critique and also more dangerous, since its dependence on a cult of personality could
merely mirror the same passive viewing practices common to programs like The O’Reilly Factor.
This paper also contributes to the ongoing conversation about how satire and humor post 9/11
have been able to effectively encourage critical perspectives on major social issues, thereby
providing an important source of public pedagogy. Focusing on one of the leading figures of
“satire TV,” my paper claims that Colbert’s program incorporates a series of features that foster
critical thinking and that encourage audiences to resist the status quo. By analyzing the context
within which the program emerged and the specific features of the program, this book offers
readers insight into the powerful ways that Colbert’s comedy challenges the cult of ignorance
that has threatened meaningful public debate and social dialogue since 9/11.
Satire Works
If people don’t understand the irony at first, it’ll make an even bigger impression
on them once they get it – we can always explain the joke later
Day, 8 – Ph.D. and Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University; (Amber,
“Are They For Real? Activism and Ironic Identities,” 2008,
http://www.cios.org/www/ejc/EJCPUBLIC/018/2/01846.html)//IS
Hutcheon warns of the potential danger inherent in the use of irony in that it can easily backfire.
She explains, “those whom you oppose might attribute no irony and simply take you at your
word; or they might make irony happen and thus accuse you of being self-negating, if not selfcontradicting. Those with whom you agree (and who know your position) might also attribute
no irony and mistake you for advocating what you are in fact criticizing” (16). The Yes Men, it
seems, found themselves precisely falling prey to these traps, but have hit upon a method of
using the pitfalls to their advantage, allowing audiences to read them seriously and then
exposing them for being complicit with the offensive ideas put forward. In hindsight, the irony is
much more obvious, meaning either that those present at the live event appear morally
unscrupulous or that the media is spurred to engage in reflection about why they were taken in.
Perhaps more importantly, the revealed hoaxes speak to a growing number of fans who take
delight in witnessing organizations and corporations they are already critical of be publicly
pranked, again providing affirmation for existing discursive communities.
Framework
We aren’t actually policymakers- they aren’t real world and destroy education by
creating role confusion—there’s no benefit to policy if we can’t put it into effect
Kappeler, 95 (Susanne, The Will to Violence, p. 10-11)
`We are the war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society - which
would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of
`collective irresponsibility', where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal
responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal.' On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyse the specific and
differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of
power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for
their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective `assumption' of responsibility. Yet our
habit of focusing
on the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation
to our own sphere of competence, our own power and our own responsibility - leading to the
well-known illusion of our apparent `powerlessness’ and its accompanying phenomenon, our so-called
political disillusionment. Single citizens - even more so those of other nations - have come to feel secure in
their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and BosniaHercegovina or Somalia - since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are not
responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no
responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgement, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our
own sphere of action. In particular, it
seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between
our own actions and those events, or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own
personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls `organized irresponsibility', upholding the apparent lack
of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences. It also
proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers: For we
tend to think that we cannot `do' anything, say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are
not where the major decisions are made. Which
is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with
politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of `What would I do if I
were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?' Since we seem to
regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political
analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to
peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as `virtually no
possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a
general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN - finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like `I want to
stop this war', `I want military intervention', `I want to stop this backlash', or `I want a moral revolution." 'We are this war',
however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our `noncomprehension’: our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring
innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the
advantages these offer. And we `are' the war in our `unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the `fact that you have a
yellow form for refugees and I don't' - our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of
our own and one for the `others'. We
share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let
them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape `our feelings, our relationships, our values' according to
the structures and the values of war and violence.
Our Violent representations matter, and are the root cause of war and violence.
Kappeler 95
(Susanne, 1995, lecturer in English at the University of East Anglia and an Associate Professor at the
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Al Akhawayn University,[2] and now works as a freelance writer
and teacher in England and Germany. Kappeler also taught 'The literary representation of women' in the
Faculty of English at Cambridge while a research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge[3] and was a parttime tutor for the Open University Course, “A History of Violence,” pg 8-9)
Violence — what we usually recognize as such — It is no misbehaviour of a minority amid good
behaviour by the majority, nor the deeds of inhuman monsters amid humane humans, in a society in
which there is no equality, in which people divide others according to race, class, sex
and many other factors in order to rule, exploit, use, objectify, enslave, sell, torture and
kill them, in which millions of animals are tortured, genetically manipulated, enslaved
and slaughtered daily for 'harmless' consumption by humans. It is no error of judgement, no
moral lapse and no transgression against the customs of a culture which is thoroughly steeped in the
values of profit and desire, of self-realization, expansion and progress. Violence as we usually perceive
it is 'simply' a specific —and to us still visible — form of violence, the consistent and logical application
of the principles of our culture and everyday life. War does not suddenly break out in a peaceful
society; sexual violence is not the disturbance of otherwise equal gender relations.
Racist attacks do not shoot like lightning out of a non-racist sky, and the sexual
exploitation of children is no solitary problem in a world otherwise just to children. The
violence of our most commonsense everyday thinking, and especially our personal will
to violence, constitute the conceptual preparation, the ideological armament and the
intellectual mobilization which make the 'outbreak' of war, of sexual violence, of racist
attacks, of murder and destruction possible at all.`We are the war', writes Slavenka Drakulic
at the end of her existential analysis of the question, 'what is war?': I do not know what war is, I want
to tell [my friend], but I see it everywhere. It is in the blood-soaked street in Sarajevo, after 20 people
have been killed while they queued for bread. But it is also in your non-comprehension, in my
unconscious cruelty towards you, in the fact that you have a yellow form [for refugees] and I don't, in
the way in which it grows inside ourselves and changes our feelings, relationships, values — in short:
us. We are the war ... And I am afraid that we cannot hold anyone else responsible. We make this war
possible, we permit it to happens 'We are the war' — and we also 'are' the sexual violence, the
racist violence, the exploitation and the will to violence in all its manifestations in a
society in so-called 'peacetime', for we make them possible and we permit them to
happen.
Their world of debate is bad- it causes disinterested argumentation and reinforces
oppression.
Spanos 04 (William Spanos, 2004, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University
and kind of an asshole, “Spanos on debate,” http://the3nr.com/2010/01/17/spanos-on-debate/)//RTF
Dear Joe MIller, Yes, the statement about the American debate circuit you refer to was made by me, though some years ago. I
strongly believed then –and still do, even though a certain uneasiness about “objectivity” has crept into the “philosophy of debate” —
that debate
in both the high schools and colleges in this country is assumed to take place
nowhere, even though the issues that are debated are profoundly historical, which means that
positions are always represented from the perspective of power, and a matter of life and death . I
find it grotesque that in the debate world, it doesn’t matter which position you take on an issue — say,
the United States’ unilateral wars of preemption — as long as you “score points”. The world we live in
is a world entirely dominated by an “exceptionalist” America which has perennially claimed that it has been
chosen by God or History to fulfill his/its “errand in the wilderness.” That claim is powerful because American
economic and military power lies behind it. And any alternative position in such a world is
virtually powerless. Given this inexorable historical reality, to assume, as the protocols of debate
do, that all positions are equal is to efface the imbalances of power that are the fundamental
condition of history and to annul the Moral authority inhering in the position of the oppressed .
This is why I have said that the appropriation of my interested work on education and empire to this transcendental debate world
constitute a travesty of my intentions. My scholarship is not “disinterested.” It is militant and intended to ameliorate as much as
possible the pain and suffering of those who have been oppressed by the “democratic” institutions that have power precisely by way
of showing that their language if “truth,” far from being “disinterested” or “objective” as it is always claimed, is informed by the will
to power over all manner of “others.” This is also why I
told my interlocutor that he and those in the debate
world who felt like him should call into question the traditional “objective” debate protocols and
the instrumentalist language they privilege in favor of a concept of debate and of language in
which life and death mattered. I am very much aware that the arrogant neocons who now saturate the government of
the Bush administration — judges, pentagon planners, state department officials, etc. learned their
“disinterested” argumentative skills in the high school and college debate societies and that,
accordingly, they have become masters at disarming the just causes of the oppressed. This kind
leadership will reproduce itself (along with the invisible oppression it perpetrates) as long as the training ground and the debate
protocols from which it emerges remains in tact.
A revolution in the debate world must occur. It must force
that unworldly world down into the historical arena where positions make a difference. To invoke
the late Edward Said, only such a revolution will be capable of “deterring democracy” (in Noam Chomsky’s ironic phrase), of
instigating the secular critical consciousness that is, in my mind, the sine qua non for avoiding the immanent global disaster towards
which the blind arrogance of Bush Administration and his neocon policy makers is leading.
Their complaint is with the form rather than the content of the 1AC—translating
this complaint into a rule plays into sovereign hands which turns
decisionmaking and guts education
Steele 10—Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas (Brent, Defacing Power: The Aesthetics of
Insecurity in Global Politics pg 109-111)
The rules of language and speaking can themselves serve to conceal truth in world politics. I begin here
with the work of Nicholas Onuf (1989), which has inspired constructivists to engage how “language is a rule-governed activity”
(Wilmer 2003: 221). Rules
help construct patterns and structures of language exchanges, and
“without these rules, language becomes meaningless” (Gould 2003: 61). From the work of Onuf, we recognize
that rules do more than set appropriate boundaries for language, as the ¶ paradigm of political society is aptly
named because it links irrevocably the sine qua non of society— the availability, no, the unavoidability of rules— and of politics— the
persistence of asymmetric social relations, known otherwise as the condition of rule. (1989: 22) ¶ Rules
lead to rule— what
linguistic rules demarcate relations of power and serve to
perpetuate the asymmetry of social relations. The structure of language games is valued because it
provides order and continuity. But because those rules are obeyed so frequently and effortlessly,
they are hard to recognize as forms of authority. ¶ Where does the need for such continuity arise?
As mentioned in previous chapters, Giddensian sociology suggests that the drive for ontological security, for the
securing of self-identity through time, can only be satisfied by the screening out of chaotic
everyday events through routines, which are a “central element of the autonomy of the developing individual” (Giddens
Onuf (1989) titles the “rule-rules coupling.” Thus,
1991: 40). Without routines, individuals face chaos, and what Giddens calls the “protective cocoon” of basic trust evaporates (ibid.).
Yet, as I have discussed in my other work (2005, 2008a) and as Jennifer Mitzen notes (2006: 364), rigid
routines can
constrain agents in their ability to learn new information. This is what the rhythmic strata of
aesthetic power satisfies. In the context it creates for parrhesia, these routines , connected to an agent’s sense of
Self, shield that agent from the truth.4 “The shallowness of our routinized daily existence,” Weber once
stated, “consists indeed in the fact that the persons who are caught up in it do not become aware,
and above all do not wish to become aware, of this partly psychologically, part pragmatically
conditioned motley of irreconcilably antagonistic values” (1974: 18). The need for such rhythmic
continuity spans all social organizations, including scholarly communities (thus we refer to such
communities as “disciplines”). ¶ The function of these rules creates a similar problematic faced by the
parrhesiastes who is attempting to “shock” these structured rules and habits of the targeted agent. Because the
parrhesiastes may find the linguistic rules or at least “styles” or language used by the targeted power to be part of the problem
(the notion that one must be “tactful,” for instance), she or he must perform a balancing act between two goals.
First, the parrhesiastes must challenge the conventions that serve to simplify and even conceal the
truth the parrhesiastes is speaking. Second, the parrhesiastes must observe some of these
speaking rules, part of which may themselves be responsible for or derivate toward the style of
the Self that needs to be challenged by the parrhesiastes. Favoring the first, the parrhesiastes is
prone to being ignored as irrational, as someone “on the fringe” or even unintelligible or, in the words of
Harry Gould already noted, “meaningless.” Favoring the second moves the parrhesiastes away from the
truth attempting to be told or at least obscures the truth with the language of nicety. As developed by
Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, parrhesia existed within this spectrum: at times, it bordered on
“harsh frankness” that was “not mixed with praise”; at other times, the frankness was more
subdued (Glad 1996: 41). 5 As the examples of Cynic and academic-intellectual parrhesia provided later in this chapter illustrate,
different manifestations of truth-telling as a form of counterpower occupy different spaces along this spectrum— balancing between
abiding by these conventions of decorum and style; the need to provide forceful, decloaked truth; or, in the case of Cynic parrhesia,
flauntingly contradicting the conventions altogether. ¶ The
parrhesiastes will most likely face charges of the
first order (ignoring convention) regardless of the manner in which parrhesia is delivered. If, indeed,
“the truth hurts” and if the target of such truth cannot deny the facts being delivered, the most convenient option
for the victim is to blame “the way” in which the parrhesiastes said something, knowing full well that it
was the substance of what that person said that was, for the victim, inappropriate or, more to the point, inconvenient.
Resolved is to reduce by mental analysis
Random House 11 (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/resolve)
Resolved is to reduce by mental analysis,
Should indicates desirability
OED 11 (http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/should?region=us)
Should indicates desirability,
USFG = the people
Howard, 5 (Adam, “Jeffersonian Democracy: Of the People, By the People, For the People,”
http://www.byzantinecommunications.com/adamhoward/homework/highschool/jeffersonian.
html, 5/27)
the government is the people, and people is the government. Therefore, if a
particular government ceases to work for the good of the people, the people may and ought to
change that government or replace it. Governments are established to protect the people's rights using the power they get from
the people.
Ideally, then, under Jeffersonian Democracy,
Explore means to inquire or discuss a subject or issue in detail
Oxford Dictionary no date (Oxford dictionary, no date, “explore,”
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/explore)//RTF
explore Syllabification: ex·plore Pronunciation: /ikˈsplôr / VERB [WITH OBJECT] 1Travel in or through (an unfamiliar
country or area) in order to learn about or familiarize oneself with it: the best way to explore Iceland’s northwest FIGURATIVE the
project encourages children to explore the world of photography MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES SYNONYMS 1.1 [NO OBJECT]
(explore for) Search for resources such as mineral deposits: the company explored for oil MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES
1.2Inquire into or discuss (a subject or issue) in detail: he sets out to explore fundamental questions MORE
EXAMPLE SENTENCES 1.3Examine or evaluate (an option or possibility): you continue to explore new ways to generate income
MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES SYNONYMS 1.4Examine by touch: her fingers explored his hair MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES 1.5
Medicine Surgically examine (a wound or body cavity) in detail. MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES
Exploration is consideration or thinking
Vocabulary.com, no date – (Vocabulary.com,
http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/exploration)//IS
exploration 1 n to travel for the purpose of discovery Synonyms: geographic expedition Type of:
expedition a journey organized for a particular purpose n a careful systematic search Types:
probe an exploratory action or expedition Type of: hunt, hunting, search the activity of looking
thoroughly in order to find something or someone n a systematic consideration “he called for a
careful exploration of the consequences” Type of: consideration the process of giving careful
thought to something
Neg
Cede the Political
Satire cedes the political
Coe, 10 – satirical author of novels including ‘What a Carve Up!’ and ‘The Terrible Privacy of
Maxwell Sim’ (Jonathan, “Has political satire gone too far: I am less convinced that satire is
good for democracy,” Financial Times: The Arts, 10/11/10,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5784ac84-bc50-11df-8c0200144feab49a.html#axzz37BmCs8Yz)//IS
However, far from tearing down the established order, most satire (except in a few very great,
very extreme cases – Swift’s A Modest Proposal being the obvious example), does the exact
opposite. It creates a welcoming space in which like-minded people can gather together and
share in comfortable hilarity. The anger, the feelings of injustice they might have been suffering
beforehand are gathered together, compressed and transformed into bursts of laughter, and
after discharging them they feel content and satisfied. An impulse that might have translated
into action is, therefore, rendered neutral and harmless. I remember a recent edition of Radio
4’s News Quiz where the comedian Jeremy Hardy brought this up: after cracking a series of
(brilliant) jokes about failed bankers collecting enormous bonuses, he suddenly said, “Why are
we laughing about this? We should be taking to the streets.” He was right. So it’s no wonder that
the rich and the powerful have no objection to being mocked. They understand that satire can be
a useful safety valve, and a powerful weapon for preserving the status quo.
Satire cedes the political – laughter stops incentives to take action
Ziv, 1988 –written extensively on the subject of humor, his titles including Humor in
Education: A Psychological Approach, The Psychology of Humor, and Personality and Sense of
Humor, from which the following has been excerpted. Ziv chairs the department of education
sciences at Tel Aviv University and has also chaired international conferences on humor. His ten
books have been translated into a half-dozen languages. (Avner. "Humor as a Social Corrective."
Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum 3rd ed. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen,
eds. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1988. 356-60.)//IS
In every oppressive regime there is this kind of underground humor, and it fulfills an important
function: Laughter shared by the (page 360 begins here) oppressed at the expense of the
oppressor reduces fear and helps people to go on living under the regime with more ease.
Totalitarian regimes possibly do themselves a disservice in preventing manifestations of humor
against themselves, for laughter may be a safety valve for the release of tension and frustration.
Similarly, a government that lets its subjects laugh at it evinces its strength, inasmuch as it is not
afraid of mockery. Feelings of hostility and frustration may well be increased among the
oppressed by the restraint enforced on humorous expression. When such feelings build up and
must be held in, a kind of "pressure cooker" is created, which can explode in violent ways. It is to
be supposed that in democratic societies, in which freedom of expression is given to political
humor, satire indirectly serves the interests of the government. The possibility of ventilating
feelings against the state by means of laughter offers release; the hostility might otherwise be
demonstrated in far more violent forms, even outright rebellion. The first piece of methodical
research on the function of humor as a mode of facing oppressive social power was carried out
by Oberdlik (1942). He investigated the jokes that appeared in Czechoslovakia during World
War II, when the country was under Nazi occupation. In analyzing the humor of that period, he
stressed its role as a mode of coping with the conquerors. One of his examples is as follows: "Did
you hear that the Germans have decided to lengthen the day to 29 hours?" "No, why?" "Because
the Fuhrer has promised them that by the spring they'll be in Moscow!"
Attempts to totally reject the current system of politics are doomed to fail, and
strengthen those in power already. Only by making specific attainable demands on
the system can we hope to change it.
Zizek 07 (Slavoj Zizek. “Resistance is Surrender” 11/15/07,
http://www.lacan.com/zizsurcrit.htm)//IS
The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new
politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are
accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist
state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is,
of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is
nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left. Simon Critchley’s recent book,
Infinitely Demanding, is an almost perfect embodiment of this position. For Critchley, the
liberal-democratic state is here to stay. Attempts to abolish the state failed miserably;
consequently, the new politics has to be located at a distance from it: anti-war movements,
ecological organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of
local self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the state
with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main
argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the state hinges on the
ethical dimension of the ‘infinitely demanding’ call for justice: no state can heed this call, since
its ultimate goal is the ‘real-political’ one of ensuring its own reproduction (its economic growth,
public safety, etc). ‘Of course,’ Critchley writes,¶ history is habitually written by the people with
the guns and sticks and one cannot expect to defeat them with mocking satire and feather
dusters. Yet, as the history of ultra-leftist active nihilism eloquently shows, one is lost the
moment one picks up the guns and sticks. Anarchic political resistance should not seek to mimic
and mirror the archic violent sovereignty it opposes.¶ So what should, say, the US Democrats
do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state
power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it? And what would
Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like Hitler? Surely in such a case one should ‘mimic
and mirror the archic violent sovereignty’ one opposes? Shouldn’t the Left draw a distinction
between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and
those in which all one can and should do is use ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’? The
ambiguity of Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it
is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state?
Why not accept the basic premise of the Third Way? Why limit oneself to a politics which, as
Critchley puts it, ‘calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in
order to do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian sense, but
in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect’? These words simply demonstrate that
today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics
exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the
state does the work of running and regulating society. Critchley’s anarchic ethico-political agent
acts like a superego, comfortably bombarding the state with demands; and the more the state
tries to satisfy these demands, the more guilty it is seen to be. In compliance with this logic, the
anarchic agents focus their protest not on open dictatorships, but on the hypocrisy of liberal
democracies, who are accused of betraying their own professed principles. The big
demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer
an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their
paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful
souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in
power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the
already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s
reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what
we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here - protesting against their government
policy - will be possible also in Iraq!’ It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has
embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from
resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly
using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the
barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is
feeling the economic effects of capital’s ‘resistance’ to his rule (temporary shortages of some
goods in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to consolidate the 24
parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this
move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan
revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed: the task is to
make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle
for the mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). What should
we say to someone like Chávez? ‘No, do not grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and
the current situation in place’? Chávez is often dismissed as a clown - but wouldn’t such a
withdrawal just reduce him to a version of Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican
leftists now refer to as ‘Subcomediante Marcos’? Today, it is the great capitalists - Bill Gates,
corporate polluters, fox hunters - who ‘resist’ the state. The lesson here is that the truly
subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil.
Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem
for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of
world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to
make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power
with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same
excuse.¶
Satire cedes the political – people want satirist to act for them
Bremner 10 – a satirist known for his work on ‘Spitting Image’ and ‘Bremner, Bird and
Fortune’ (Rory, “Has political satire gone too far: People want satirists to fight their battles for
them,” Financial Times: Art, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5784ac84-bc50-11df-8c0200144feab49a.html#axzz37BmCs8Yz)//IS
I’m amused, and intrigued, by the perennial debate about the health of satire. Often it’s a sign
that the political opposition (or, as Jim Naughtie suggests, the media) is weak and ineffectual,
and in some way people want the satirists to fight their battles for them.
I disagree with John Lloyd. I don’t think satirists (at least any with a sense of self-irony) make,
or should make, any grand claims for themselves or their power. In fact, often it is the opposite.
Remember Peter Cook pointing out how satire in the 1930s “did so much to prevent the rise of
Adolf Hitler”? And I imagine most people in Britain knew Saddam was a tyrant. We didn’t need
a satirist to tell us that but it didn’t stop Britain from arming him. (We did satirise that, by the
way.)
They cede the political
Boggs 97 (Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, “The great
retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America,” Theory and Society,
December 1997, SpringerLink, p. 773-774)//IS
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.75
Anthro
Satire is inherently anthropocentric
Kohavi, 07 – Ph.D from the University of Edinburgh, (Zohar, “Animals, anthropocentrism,
and morality analysing the discourse of the animal issue,” The University of Edinburgh,
https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/6582)//IS
This dissertation identifies and criticises a fundamental characteristic of the philosophical
discourse surrounding the animal issue: the underlying anthropocentric reasoning that informs
the accounts of both philosophy of mind and moral philosophy. Such reasoning works from
human paradigms as the only possible starting point of the analysis. Accordingly, the aim of my
dissertation is to show how anthropocentric reasoning and its implications distort the inquiry of
the animal debate. In extracting the erroneous biases from the debate, my project enables an
important shift in the starting line of the philosophical inquiry of the animal issue. In chapters
one and two, I focus on philosophy of mind. I show how philosophical accounts that are based
on anthropocentric a priori reasoning are inattentive to the relevant empirical findings
regarding animals' mental capacities. Employing a conceptual line of argument, I demonstrate
that starting the analysis from a human paradigm creates a rigid conceptual framework that
unjustifiably excludes the possibility of associating the relevant empirical findings in the
research. Furthermore, I show how the common approaches to the issue of animals' belief and
intentions deny that animals can have these capacities, and I demonstrate how such denials can
be avoided. The philosophical discourse that I examine denies intentional mental capacities to
animals. Such denials take place, I maintain, because the analysis is anthropocentric: it uses
humans' most sophisticated capacities as the only possible benchmark for evaluating animals'
mental abilities. A central example of such anthropocentric reasoning is the oft-mentioned view
that there is a necessary link between language and intentionality. Such a link indeed
characterises humans. Yet the claim that there is no intentionality without language is a
problematic framework for analysing the supposed intentionality of non-linguistic and
prelinguistic creatures. Employing a standard that applies to normal, adult humans excludes the
possibility of animals' intentionality from the outset. It seems, however, that intentionality is a
capacity that evolves in stages, and that simple intentional mental states do not require
language. At the same time, such an analysis ignores, to a large extent, cases of attributing
intentionality to pre-linguistic humans and even normal, adult humans. Thus, I show how the
denial that animals may have intentional mental capacities results in a double standard. In
chapters three to six, I critically examine the anthropocentric nature of the debate concerning
animals' moral status. The anthropocentric reasoning relates to the conditions of moral status in
an oversimplified manner. I show that human prototypes, e.g., rational agency and autonomy,
have mistakenly served as conditions for either moral status in general or of a particular type.
Seemingly, using such conditions excludes from the proffered moral domain not only animals,
but also human moral patients. Yet eventually only animals are excluded from the proffered
moral domain. I identify and criticise the manoeuvre that enables this outcome. That is,
although the proffered conditions are based on individual characteristics of moral agents, they
are applied in a collective manner in order to include human moral patients in the moral
domain under examination. I also show that when animals are granted moral status, this status
appears to be subjugated by human needs and interests, and therefore the very potential to
substantiate animal moral status becomes problematic. Significantly, I also criticise arguments
in favour of animals' moral status, claiming that they sustain the oversimplified nature of the
inquiry, hence reproducing the major problems of the arguments they were originally designed
to refute. As part of my critique towards both such arguments and anthropocentric reasoning, I
suggest a non-anthropocentric framework that avoids oversimplification with regard to the
conditions of moral status. The aspiration of anthropocentric reasoning as well as of proanimals philosophers is to find a common denominator that is allegedly shared by all members
of the moral community as the single foundation of moral status, which consists of individual
characteristics. My framework challenges this aspiration by showing that this common
denominator cannot account for all cases. The framework that I suggest enables establishing
moral statuses upon distinctive foundations, and at the same time, my proposal avoids falling
into the trap of speciesism.
Cap
Satire reinforces capitalism
Corner 13 (Adam, 11/21/13, research associate in psychology at Cardiff University, “Ad nauseam,”
http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/how-advertising-turned-anti-consumerism-into-a-secret-weapon/)//RTF
In 1796, the English physician Edward Jenner injected an eight-year-old boy in Gloucestershire with cowpox. Reasoning that
absorbing a small amount of the virus would protect the child from a full-strength attack of smallpox in the future, Jenner’s bold
experiment founded the practice of vaccination. Two hundred years later, the marketing industry has cottoned on to Jenner’s
insight: a little bit of a disease can be a very useful thing. If you’re one of the more than 7 million people who have watched the global
fast-food chain Chipotle’s latest advertisement, you’ll have experienced this sleight of hand for yourself. The animated short film —
accompanied by a smartphone game — depicts a haunting parody of corporate agribusiness: cartoon chickens inflated by robotic
antibiotic arms, scarecrow workers displaced by ruthless automata. Chipotle’s logo appears only at the very end of the three-minute
trailer; it is otherwise branding-free. The motivation for this big-budget exposé? ‘We’re trying to educate people about where their
food comes from,’ Mark Crumpacker, chief marketing officer at Chipotle, told USA Today, but ‘millennials are sceptical of brands
that perpetuate themselves’. Never mind that Chipotle itself — with more than 1,500 outlets across the US, and an annual turnover
of $278 million — is hardly treading lightly on the world’s agricultural system. The real story is that the company is using a dose of
anti-Big Food sentiment to inoculate the viewer against not buying any more of its burritos. Chipotle are very happy to sell the idea
that they’re on our side if it helps to keep the millennials happy. If it’s advertising we don’t like, then it’s advertising we won’t get. In
the UK, the telecommunications giant Orange creates cinema ads which are spoof scenes from well-known feature films, doctoring
the scripts to include gratuitous references to cell phones. One popular instalment features the actor Jack Black recreating a scene
from Gulliver’s Travels (2010), in which Gulliver is captured by the tiny Lilliputians and lashed to the ground with ropes. As the
product placements for Orange become increasingly blatant, Black realises he has been tricked into acting in a cellphone ad, breaks
character and begins a speech about how he won’t be duped by Orange. ‘Don’t let a mobile phone ruin your film’ runs the slogan. It’s
annoying, but they know this. And they know that you know that they know. And ... well you get the gist. These ads want to be our
friends — to empathise with us against the tyranny of the corporate world they inhabit. Just when we thought we’d cottoned on to
subliminal advertising, personalised sidebars on web pages, advertorials and infomercials, products started echoing our contempt
for them. ‘Shut up!’ we shout at the TV, and the TV gets behind the sofa and shouts along with us. It
seems almost quaint,
now that popular culture is riddled with knowing, self-referential nods to itself, but the aim of
advertising used to be straightforward: to associate a product in a literal and direct way with positive images of a desirable,
aspirational life. How we chortle at those rosy-cheeked families that dominated commercials in the post-war era. Nowadays,
we
adopt the slogans and imagery as ironic home decor — wartime advertisements for coffee adorn
our kitchen walls; retro Brylcreem posters are pinned above the bathroom door. But our reappropriation of artefacts from a
previous era of consumerism sends a powerful message: we wouldn’t be swayed by such naked pitches today. The iconic VW 'Think
small' campaign. The iconic VW 'Think small' campaign. Genre-subverting
ads started to emerge as early as
1959, when the Volkswagen Beetle’s US ‘Think Small’ campaign began poking fun at the German
car’s size and idiosyncratic design. In stark contrast to traditional US car adverts, whose brightly coloured depictions of
gargantuan front ends left the viewer in no doubt that bigger was better, the Beetle posters left most of the page blank, a tiny image
of the car itself tucked away in a corner. These designs spoke to a generation that was becoming aware of how the media and
advertising industries worked. The American journalist Vance Packard had blown the whistle on the tricks of the advertising trade in
The Hidden Persuaders (1957), and younger consumers increasingly saw themselves as savvy. Selling to this demographic required
not overeager direct pitches, but insouciant ‘cool’, laced with irony. Ads for sports drinks bemoan the abundance of minutely
differentiated sports drinks on the market, and beers yearn for the day when a beer was just a beer In subsequent decades, selfaware adverts became the norm, and advertising began to satirise the very concept of itself. In 1996, Sprite launched a successful
campaign with the slogan ‘Image is nothing. Thirst is everything. Obey your thirst’. In 2010, Kotex sent up the bizarre conventions of
1980s tampon adverts (happy, dancing women, jars of blue liquid being spilt) by flashing up the question ‘Why are Tampon adverts
so ridiculous?’ before displaying its latest range of sanitary products. ‘Companies
try to convince you that they are
part of your family,’ says Tim Kasser, professor of psychology and an expert on consumer culture at Knox College in Illinois.
‘They want to create a sense of connection or even intimacy between the viewer and the
advertiser. An ad that says: “Yes, I know you know that I’m an ad, and I know that you know that I’m annoying you” is a
statement of empathy, and thus a statement of connection. And as any salesperson will tell you, connection is key to the sales.’ This
technique of cultivating empathy through shared cynicism has taken off over the past decade.
Today, ads for sports drinks bemoan the abundance of minutely differentiated sports drinks on the
market, and beers yearn for the day when a beer was just a beer . The Swedish brewery Kopparberg has done more
than any other company to promote the idea that cider can come in many delicious fruity flavours, so if anyone is to blame for the
difficulty in buying plain old apple cider, it is Kopparberg. Yet their most recent invention is ‘Naked’ apple cider. As the company’s
UK managing director Davin Nugent told The Morning Advertiser: Innovation through fruit is not enough. The bigger picture is
apple cider and we’re opening the back gate into the category. The apple taste in cider has been lost and become bland… we’re on to
something exciting. Corporate advertising is the ultimate shape-shifter; the perpetual tease. No sooner had the virulently anti-
capitalist ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement begun than the American rapper Jay Z’s clothing label created and marketed an ‘Occupy
All Streets’ spin-off T-shirt. But as citizen cynicism has advanced, the space in which advertising can operate without tripping on its
own rhetoric has become ever more restricted, and ever more bizarre. Feeling jaded and cynical about samey scripts in ads?
Commercials such as 2012’s Old Milwaukee Super Bowl spoof, in which Will Ferrell’s formulaic endorsement gets cut off midsentence, might still speak to you. Getting a vicarious thrill from viral videos? Ads can mimic that excitement, with carefully
coordinated campaigns to capture the grassroots feel, such as the ‘amateur footage’ of a man hacking the video screens in Times
Square, New York, in fact promoting the film Limitless (2011). Cynical about the lack of spontaneity in advertising messages? ‘Realtime’ news-led marketing can make even the most hackneyed of products seem cutting-edge — although American Apparel’s attempt
in October last year to launch the #SandySale off the back of the worst Hurricane to hit New York in living memory was not the blast
they had hoped for. The ambiguous, semi-disguised adverts of today would appear to be the commercials we deserve: self-cynical
sales pitches for a jaded generation At the same time, Magazine content, musical and theatrical entertainment and, in particular,
online media are often entirely integrated with the commercial messages that bankrolled them. This probably wouldn’t have been
possible if advertisers had not made the strategic move from the blatant salesmanship of yore to the subtler, more oblique arts of
modern industry. As consumers cottoned on to the tricks of the trade, ads have stayed one step ahead. There have, of course, been
attempts to kick back. An entire lexicon has flourished around the idea of subverting the advertising industry — from acts of
‘brandalism’, which distort or undermine corporate iconography, to ‘culture jamming’ (satirical analyses of the business world).
Adbusters, the long-running Canadian magazine, has dedicated itself to exposing and challenging the the corporate world generally,
not just advertising. But a 2011 report for the Public Interest Research Centre about the cultural impact of commercial messages
argued that: The public debate about advertising — such as it exists — has also been curiously unfocused and sporadic. Civil society
organisations have almost always used the products advertised as their point of departure — attacking the advertising of a harmful
product like tobacco, or alcohol, for instance — rather than developing a deeper critical appraisal of advertising in the round. So
what would a deeper look tell us? Perhaps
it is that the ‘cynical distance’ inherent in knowing, selfimmolating, empathetic adverts not only perpetuates brands, but is at the foundation of
advertising itself. By ‘factoring in’ dissent, the ad neutralises it in advance, like the stock market
inoculating itself against future shocks by including their likelihood in share prices. The
advertising industry anticipates and then absorbs its own opposition, like a politician cracking
jokes at his own expense to disarm a hostile media. And the industry’s seemingly endless capacity
to perpetuate itself matters. Marketing is not simply a mirror of our prevailing aspirations. It
systematically promotes and presents a specific cluster of values that undermine pro-social and
pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour. In other words, the more that we’re encouraged to
obsess about the latest phone upgrade, the less likely we are to concern ourselves with society’s
more pressing problems. That’s a reason to want to keep a careful tab on advertising’s elusive
and ephemeral forms. Encouragingly, there is some evidence that young people are quietly developing their own defence
mechanisms — the ‘click-through’ rate for online advertising has plummeted from a heady 78 per cent for the world’s first banner ad
in 1994 to a meagre 0.05 per cent for Facebook ads in 2011. The Beetle adverts at the tail end of the 1950s picked up on the growing
media smarts of the post-war generation, and Sprite’s ironic critique of image-led branding could almost have been lifted from the
arguments of the 1990s anti-globalisation movement. The ambiguous, semi-disguised adverts of today would then appear to be the
commercials we deserve: self-cynical sales pitches for a jaded generation. Instead of questioning the economic mechanisms that lead
to the homogenisation of town centres, we shop and drink coffee in commercial spaces disguised in the stylishly-frayed aesthetics of
the counter-culture. Satire
has long been acknowledged as a paradoxical crutch for a society’s existing
power structures: we laugh at political jibes, and that same laughter displaces the desire for change. As such as Chipotle's —
which express our concerns about the failings of globalisation in a safe space before packing them away — are surely an equivalent
safety valve for any subversive rumblings. We all like to think that we’re above the dark art of advertising; that we are immune to its
persuasive powers. But the reality is that, though we might have been immunised, it is not against ads: it is against dissent.
Satire Bad
Satire renincribes existing political differences and hurts democracy
LaMarre, et, al 9 – an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of
Journalism and
Mass Communication, where she studies political communication, strategic communication,
and entertainment media. LaMarre’s research examines the persuasive influence of political
entertainment media on individual-level attitudes and opinions. (Heather L. "The Irony of
Satire." Apr. 2009.
http://www.democracynow.org/resources/63/263/The_Irony_of_Satire.pdf)//IS
These results suggest that assumptions previously held regarding the role of latenight comedy
and political satire might not be accurate and that perception plays a significant role in way
audiences interpret the comedy. Extending this to other forms of political satire such as latenight comedy programs, stand-up comedians, animation, movies, and political cartoons, we
must consider the possibility that these political messages are influencing audiences in
differingways and that audience perceptions play a much stronger role that previously thought.
More importantly, political satire may not affect people in the way that it has historically been
assumed (i.e., satire has been feared and banned because it is seen as a powerful force, Feinberg
1967). It is quite possible that this type of political entertainment is processed with biases and
reinterpreted in ways that serve to reinforce political viewpoints. It 226 International Journal of
Press/Politicsappears from these results that biased processing serves a function of reinforcing
individually held political beliefs and attitudes. Thus, when conditions for biased processing
exist (e.g., Colbert’s deadpan satire) polarization is likely to result. As individuals on each side of
the political issue interpret the source as targeting the opposition and agreeing with their own
viewpoint, the two opposing sides are likely to strengthen their own position as “the correct
position,” thereby leading to a deeper divide between the two groups. This type of
polarization effect has been found to have negative consequences for democracy
(e.g., Cigler and Getter 1977). While it is important to consider that much of the political satire
offered by comedians includes contextual cues to aid audiences in interpreting the messages, it
is equally important to note that when biased processing takes place the effects of such
processing will likely play a significant role in strengthening attitudes (Krosnick and Petty 1995).
The post hoc analysis revealed the mediating role that biased perceptions of an ambiguous
source can play between individual political ideology and individual political attitudes. While
this was a cursory analysis and more work in the area of biased processing and political attitudes
is needed before conclusions can be reached, it does appear that conservative’s biased
perceptions of Colbert’s attitudes had a significant influence on their individual attitudes about
the same attitude object. Strong conservatives were significantly more likely to perceive Colbert
as having personal political attitudes that were consistent with their own. These biased
perceptions of Colbert’s personal attitudes were a strong predictor of individual attitudes, such
that the individuals’ attitudes were significantly more likely to remain consistent with
perceptions of Colbert’s attitude. In sum, conservatives’ personal attitudes were influenced by
their perception of Colbert’s attitude, and relatively strong conservatives were more likely to
report attitudes consistent with their perceptions of Colbert’s attitude. Although we are far from
suggesting that perceptions of Colbert’s attitudes are driving individual attitudes, we can
conclude that biased perceptions are playing an important mediating role in this process that
merits much more investigation. From these analyses, it appears that biased processing is
serving two potential roles: attitude formation and strengthening. Thus, we suggest that future
studies focus on these two roles of biased processing in the study of political entertainment and
attitudes. In addition to examining the potential influence of biased processing on attitudes,
future studies should also examine biased message processing and long-term recall of the
satirist’s political position. For example, do people who watch late-night political comedy and
consume ambiguous political messages from The Colbert Report have accurate recall of
Colbert’s political viewpoint at a later time? Or, is there a potential sleeper effect that should be
examined? It might be possible that even those who accurately identified the satire and
understood Colbert was joking experience difficulty in accurately recalling the comedian’s
political messages.
Satire Fails
Satire fails to change mindsets – Colbert and data proves
LaMarre, et, al 9 – an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of
Journalism and
Mass Communication, where she studies political communication, strategic communication,
and entertainment media. LaMarre’s research examines the persuasive influence of political
entertainment media on individual-level attitudes and opinions. (Heather L. "The Irony of
Satire." Apr. 2009.
http://www.democracynow.org/resources/63/263/The_Irony_of_Satire.pdf)//IS
This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and
the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that
political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in
late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level
political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. Additionally,
there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but
conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely
meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not
serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions
that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of
Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and
individual-level opinion.
Satire fails – audiences see what they want to see
LaMarre, et, al 9 – an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of
Journalism and
Mass Communication, where she studies political communication, strategic communication,
and entertainment media. LaMarre’s research examines the persuasive influence of political
entertainment media on individual-level attitudes and opinions. (Heather L. "The Irony of
Satire." Apr. 2009.
http://www.democracynow.org/resources/63/263/The_Irony_of_Satire.pdf)//IS
Recent work in social psychology demonstrates that individuals process information in ways
that personally benefit them and that people tend to see what they want to see when the
information is ambiguous (e.g., Balcetis and Dunning 2006; Kunda 1990; Long and Toppino
2004). Because satire is often ambiguous, biased information processing models provide an
excellent framework for understanding how audiences see what they want to see in Colbert’s
political satire.As such, the present study uses ambiguous message processing theory (Balcetis
and Dunning 2006) to address two core questions: (1) what role does individual-level political
ideology play in processing political satire, and (2) are individuals driven by in-group favoritism
or a similar need to reinforce the favorable status of their political group to “see what they want
to see in political satire?” Taken together, these questions raise the possibility that individuals,
motivated by their needs for political affiliation and self-enhancement, engage in biased
processing of political messages offered in ambiguous form (i.e., deadpan satire or parody).
What follows is an overview of these concepts and ideas, results of an online survey with an
embedded clip of Stephen Colbert, and a discussion of the findings and their implications for
political entertainment research.
Visibility
1NC
Revolution will be destroyed as soon as it becomes visible- an invisible movement
solves the aff best
The Invisible Committee 7 (The Invisible Committee, 2007, an anonymous group of French professors, phd
candidates, and intellectuals, in the book “The Coming Insurrection” published by Semiotext(e) (attributed to the Tarnac Nine by the
French police), http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf)//RTF
From any angle... Whatever angle you look at it from, there's
no escape from the present. That's not the least of its
virtues. For those who want absolutely to have hope, it knocks down every support. Those who
claim to have solutions are proven wrong almost immediately. It's understood that now everything can only
go from bad to worse. "There's no future for the future" is the wisdom behind an era that for all its appearances of extreme normalcy
has come to have about the consciousness level of the first punks. The
sphere of political representation is closed.
the same nothingness acting by turns either as the big shots or the virgins, the
same sales shelf heads, changing up their discourse according to the latest dispatches from the information service. Those who
still vote give one the impression that their only intention is to knock out the polling booths by
voting as a pure act of protest. And we've started to understand that in fact it’s only against the
vote itself that people go on voting. Nothing we've seen can come up to the heights of the present situation; not by far.
From left to right, it's
By its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more 'grown up' than all those squabbling amongst themselves to govern it do. Any
Belleville chibani1 is wiser in his chats than in all of those puppets’ grand declarations put together. The lid of the social kettle is
triple-tight, and the pressure inside won’t stop building. The ghost of Argentina’s Que Se Vayan Todos2 is seriously starting to haunt
the ruling heads. The fires of November 2005 will never cease to cast their shadow on all consciences. Those first joyous fires were
the baptism of a whole decade full of promises. The media’s “suburbs vs. the Republic” myth, if it’s not inefficient, is certainly not
true. The fatherland was ablaze all the way to downtown everywhere, with fires that were methodically snuffed out. Whole streets
went up in flames of solidarity in Barcelona and no one but the people who lived there even found out about it. And the country
hasn’t stopped burning since. Among the accused we find diverse profiles, without much in common besides a hatred for existing
society; not united by class, race, or even by neighborhood. What was new wasn’t the “suburban revolt,” since that was already
happening in the 80s, but the rupture with its established forms. The assailants weren’t listening to anybody at all anymore, not
their big brothers, not the local associations assigned to help return things to normal. No “SOS Racism3 ” could sink its cancerous
roots into that event, one to which only fatigue, falsification, and media omertà4 could feign putting an end. The
whole series
of nocturnal strikes, anonymous attacks, wordless destruction, had the merit of busting wide
open the split between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious weight of
this assault which made no demands, and had no message other than a threat which had
nothing to do with politics. But you’d have to be blind not to see what is purely political about
this resolute negation of politics, and you’d certainly have to know absolutely nothing about the
autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years. Like abandoned children we burned the first baby toys of a
society that deserves no more respect than the monuments of Paris did at the end of Bloody Week5 -- and knows it. There’s no social
solution to the present situation. First off because the
vague aggregate of social groupings, institutions, and
individual bubbles that we designate by the anti-phrase “society” has no substance, because
there’s no language left to express common experiences with. It took a half-century of fighting by the
Lumières to thaw out the possibility of a French Revolution, and a century of fighting by work to give birth to the fearful “Welfare
State.” Struggles creating the language in which the new order expresses itself. Nothing like today. Europe is now a de-monied
continent that sneaks off to make a run to the Lidl6 and has to fly with the low-cost airlines to be able to keep on flying. None of the
“problems” formulated in the social language are resolvable. The “retirement pensions issue,” the issues of “precariousness,” the
“youth” and their “violence” can only be kept in suspense as long as the ever more surprising “acting out” they thinly cover gets
managed away police-like. No one’s going to be happy to see old people being wiped out at a knockdown price, abandoned by their
own and with nothing to say. And those who’ve found less humiliation and more benefit in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will
not give up their weapons, and prison won’t make them love society. The rage to enjoy of the hordes of the retired will not take the
somber cuts to their monthly income on an empty stomach, and will get only too excited about the refusal to work among a large
sector of the youth. And to conclude, no
guaranteed income granted the day after a quasi-uprising will lay
the foundations for a new New Deal, a new pact, and a new peace. The social sentiment is rather
too evaporated for all that. As their solution, they’ll just never stop putting on the pressure, to
make sure nothing happens, and with it we’ll have more and more police chases all over the
neighborhood. The drone that even according to the police indeed did fly over Seine-Saint-Denis7 last July 14th is a picture of
the future in much more straightforward colors than all the hazy images we get from the humanists. That they took the time to
clarify that it was not armed shows pretty clearly the kind of road we’re headed down. The
country is going to be cut up
into ever more air-tight zones. Highways built along the border of the “sensitive neighborhoods”
already form walls that are invisible and yet able to cut them off from the private subdivisions .
Whatever good patriotic souls may think about it, the management of neighborhoods “by community” is most effective just by its
notoriety. The purely metropolitan portions of the country, the main downtowns, lead their luxurious lives in an ever more
calculating, ever more sophisticated, ever more shimmering deconstruction. They light up the whole planet with their whorehouse
red lights, while the BAC8 and the private security companies’ -- read: militias’ -- patrols multiply infinitely, all the while benefiting
from being able to hide behind an ever more disrespectful judicial front. The
catch-22 of the present, though
perceptible everywhere, is denied everywhere. Never have so many psychologists, sociologists,
and literary people devoted themselves to it, each with their own special jargon, and each with
their own specially missing solution. It’s enough just to listen to the songs that come out these days, the trifling “new
French music,” where the petty-bourgeoisie dissects the states of its soul and the K’1Fry mafia9 makes its declarations of war, to
know that this coexistence will come to an end soon and that a decision is about to be made. This
book is signed in the
name of an imaginary collective. Its editors are not its authors. They are merely content to do a
little clean-up of what’s scattered around the era’s common areas, around the murmurings at
bar-tables, behind closed bedroom doors. They’ve only determined a few necessary truths, whose universal
repression fills up the psychiatric hospitals and the painful gazes. They’ve made themselves scribes of the situation. It’s the privilege
of radical circumstances that justice leads them quite logically to revolution. It’s enough just to say what we can see and not avoid
the conclusions to be drawn from it.
2NC
The movement has to stay invisible- visibility allows it to quickly be crushed
The Invisible Committee 7 (The Invisible Committee, 2007, an anonymous group of French professors, phd
candidates, and intellectuals, in the book “The Coming Insurrection” published by Semiotext(e) (attributed to the Tarnac Nine by the
French police), http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf)//RTF
Stay invisible. Put anonymity on the offense. In a demonstration, a unionist pulls the mask off an anonymous
protester who had just broken a window: “Assume responsibility for what you’re doing instead of hiding yourself.” To be visible is to
be out in the open – that is, above all to be vulnerable. When the leftists of all nations continually
make their cause
more “visible” – whether that of the homeless, of women, or of immigrants – in the hope that it will get taken care
of, they’re doing exactly the opposite of what they ought to. To not be visible, but rather to turn to
our advantage the anonymity we’ve been relegated to, and with conspiracies, nocturnal and/or
masked actions, to make it into an unassailable attack-position. The fires of November 2005 offer a
model. No leader, no demands, no organization, but words, gestures, complicities. To be nothing
socially is not a humiliating condition, the source of some tragic lack of recognition (to be recognized: but by who?), but on the
contrary is the precondition for maximum freedom of action. Not signing your name to your
crimes, but only attaching some imaginary acronym – people still remember the ephemeral BAFT (Tarterets53 Anti- Cop Brigade)
– is a way to preserve that freedom. Obviously, one of the regime’s first defensive maneuvers was to create a “suburban
slum” subject to treat as the author of the “riots of November 2005.” Just take a look at the ugly mugs of those who are someone in
this society if you want help understanding the joy of being no one. Visibility
must be avoided. But a force that
gathers in the shadows can’t escape it forever. Our appearance as a force has to be held back
until the opportune moment. Because the later we become visible, the stronger we’ll be. And
once we’ve entered the realm of visibility, our days are numbered; either we’ll be in a position to
pulverize its reign quickly, or it will crush us without delay.