T
A. Interpretation – Domestic surveillance is info gathering on US persons
IT Law Wiki 15 IT Law Wiki 2015 http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Domestic_surveillance
Definition Edit
Domestic surveillance is the acquisition of nonpublic information concerning United States
persons.
B. Violation – surveillance of foreign agents is not domestic surveillance, even if
in the us
McCarthy 6 Andrew C. McCarthy former assistant U.S. attorney, now contributing editor of
National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. May 15, 2006 National
Review It’s Not “Domestic Spying”; It’s Foreign Intelligence Collection
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/122556/its-not-domestic-spying-its-foreignintelligence-collection-andrew-c-mccarthy
Eggen also continues the mainstream media’s propagandistic use of the term “domestic surveillance [or
'spying'] program.” In actuality, the electronic surveillance that the NSA is doing — i.e., eavesdropping
on content of conversations — is not “domestic.” A call is not considered “domestic” just
because one party to it happens to be inside the U.S., just as an investigation is not
“domestic” just because some of the subjects of interest happen to reside inside our
country. Mohammed Atta was an agent of a foreign power, al Qaeda. Surveilling him — had we done
it — would not have been “domestic spying.” The calls NSA eavesdrops on are “international,”
not “domestic.” If that were not plain enough on its face, the Supreme Court made it
explicit in the Keith case (1972). There, even though it held that judicial warrants were required for
wiretapping purely domestic terror organizations, the Court excluded investigations of threats
posed by foreign organizations and their agents operating both within and without the
U.S. That is, the Court understood what most Americans understand but what the media, civil
libertarians and many members of Congress refuse to acknowledge: if we are investigating the
activities of agents of foreign powers inside the United States, that is not DOMESTIC
surveillance. It is FOREIGN counter-intelligence. That, in part, is why the statute regulating
wiretaps on foreign powers operating within the U.S. — the one the media has suddenly decided it
loves after bad-mouthing it for years as a rubber-stamp — is called the FOREIGN Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA). The United States has never needed court permission to conduct
wiretapping outside U.S. territory; the wiretapping it does inside U.S. territory for
national security purposes is FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION, not
“domestic surveillance.”
B.1 War on Terror implies international
US Legal 15 (US Legal
http://definitions.uslegal.com/w/war-on-terror/,
The War on terror is an international military campaign launched in 2001 with the US and UK
invasion of Afghanistan in response to the attacks on New York and Washington of 11
September 2001. It is a global military, political, legal and ideological struggle employed
against organizations designated as terrorist and regimes that were accused of having a
connection to terrorists or presented as posing a threat to the US and its allies in general. The
phrase War on Terror was adopted by former US President George W. Bush and other highranking US officials. The campaign was led by the U.S. and the U.K. with the support of other
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and non-NATO countries. The campaign was
originally carried on against al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations with the purpose of
eliminating them. It is also known as the Global War on Terror or the War on Terrorism.¶
C. Standards
1. Limits – justifies the inclusion of the people of more than 200 other
countries—explodes the topic and destroys research and predictability
2. Ground – there is a huge difference in the literature between US persons and
non-US persons—robs all predictable ground
3. Extra Topicality – it’s not okay for the Aff to curtail surveillance of both
domestic and international persons. If we win that they are distinct then it’s
not within the scope of Aff topical fiat
D. Reasonability is arbitrary; prefer competing interps. Depth over breadth,
that’s key to detailed debates and sufficient neg ground.
T is a voter for Fairness and Education
Bordering K
The notion that the 1AC can end the War on Terror within the “domestic”
United States is a part of a desire for a unified national identity, one that now
includes the “terrorist”. This desire cannot be fulfilled because every social
body is a realization of multiple ideals and perspectives. A focus on territories
masks the violence that created the state. An inability for the US to become a
unified identity is translated to labeling others threats and dangers that
challenge the unified identity
Shapiro 1997 (Shapiro, Professor of Political Science at Hawaii, “Violent
Cartographies,” p. 149-150.)//rf
The complicity of social sciences, psychology, and psychiatry in the idea that there is a normal
and cohesive American
character type served ultimately to help depoliticize issues of racism, sexism, class, repression,
and other forms of antagonism with a discourse on deviance and irrationality. The repression of difference
at the level of institutional politics was therefore reinforced with a conceptual repression. ¶
Nevertheless, the forces of fragmentation persist, and those that are particularly threatening to representational
practices of selfhood and nationhood as coherent and undivided are, among other things, “peripheral sexualities” (hence the recent
furor over gays in the military, a conflict at the level of models of individuality) and various social antagonisms (hence the recent
struggle over entitlements). Adding a dimension to Herman Melville’s insights about the masks of history, Slavoj Zizek
has
argued, with a Lacanian frame, that the drive for coherent identity at either individual or collective
levels is necessarily always blocked. As this drive to overcome incompleteness is played out at the
collective level, the imposed story of coherence is a mask that covers a void. The fact of social
antagonism is displaced by a myth of undividedness. And rather than facing the disjuncture
between fact and aspiration, the dissatisfaction is turned outward, becoming an “enjoyment”
in the form of a disparaging model of enemy-others, dangerous character types, and outlaw
nations. ¶ As Zizek notes, it is not an external enemy that prevents one from achieving an identity
with oneself; that coherence is always already impossible. But the nonacceptance of that
impossibility produces fantasy in the form of “an imaginary scenario the function of which is
to provide support filling out the subject’s constitutive void.” When this kind of fantasy is
elaborated at the level of the social, it serves as a counterpart to antagonism. It is an
imagination of a unified and coherent society that supposedly came into being by leaving a
disordered condition of struggle behind. ¶ This mythologizing of origin, which constructs the
society as a naturally bounded and consensual community, is a political story that those
seeking legitimacy for a national order seek to perpetuate. But the disorder continues to
haunt the order. The mythic disorder of the state of nature, supposedly supplanted by the
consensual association as society comes into being, continues to haunt the polity. It is
displaced outside the frontiers and attributed to the Other. ¶ In short, the anarchic state of
nature is attributed to relations between states. This displacement amounts to an active
amnesia, a forgetting of the violence that both founds and maintains the domestic order; it
amounts to a denial of the disorder within the order. This tendency to deny domestic disorder in general and
to overcome more specifically the disorder and antagonisms in post-Vietnam War America – stresses between generations, between
military and civilian order, between the telling of imperialist tales and the telling of post-colonial ones – has been reflected in the
media of post- Gulf War America. The triumphalists after the Gulf War have been attempting to write out of the U.S. history the
post-Vietnam agonism in which tensions within the order were acknowledged. They seek to banish a politics of interpretation and
self-appraisal that was part of both the official and popular culture during the post-Vietnam period. This was especially evident in
the orchestration of Norman Schwarzkopf’s career as a media personality.
The transnational nature of surveillance means that a focus on “domestically”
solving an international issue takes us in the wrong direction
Bauman, Zygmunt, et al. "After snowden: Rethinking the impact of surveillance." International
Political Sociology 8.2 (2014): 121-144.
¶ These ways of gathering
and sharing information have paradoxical effects on national security requirements. National
security is no longer national in its acquisition, or even analysis, of data and allies’ different
national security imper-atives may clash, causing trust to disappear. Digitization creates big
data gathered at a transnational scale, blurring the lines of what is national as well as the
boundaries between law enforcement and intelligence. These trends encourage the move from the judicial
framework of criminal policing to preventive, pre-emptive and predictive approaches and from a high degree of certainty about a
small amount of data to a high degree of uncertainty about a large amount of data. The
hybridization of private and
public actors destabilizes socialization through national state interests and secrecy , opening
possibilities for major leaks by persons with different values.¶ ¶ To put this more theoretically, the change and
uncertainty surrounding the categories of “foreign” and “domestic” is dispersing them
through the webs of connections and transforming the sovereign line that separated them
clearly into a Mobius€ strip (Bigo 2001). By projecting national security “inside out”—through a
transnational alliance of the professionals of national security and sensitive data, both public
and private—an unexpected “outside in” effect of suspicion is created for all Internet subjects.
Many of these “data subjects” react and reject the situation in which all Internet users are treated as potential
suspects, rather than as innocent in principle.¶ ¶ The practices of large-scale surveillance by the NSA
and its counterparts must thus be understood, not as media-driven scandal which will soon pass,
but as indicators of a much larger transformation affecting the way the boundaries of national
security function. This is due to the conjunction of three processes that have become interwoven:
transnationalization, digitization, and privatization.¶ ¶ This conjunction creates an overarching effect of
dispersion that challenges the very idea of a reason of state conducted by a “state” in which the
govern-ment determines national interests and national security and asks its own ser-vices to operate
accordingly. Even if it has always rested on exaggerated claims about autonomy and self-determination, the concept of
reason of state is now less and less encapsulated in the formula of a national security
performed by intelligence services socialized into secrecy and public responsibility, patriotism, and suspicion of
services in other nations. Rather, we see the transformation of a reason of state through the emergence
of a digitized reason of state performed by a heterogeneous complex of professionals, of sensitive
information hybridiz-ing private and public actors. The transnational nature of gathering information that
crosses the boundaries of states dissociates the discursive, homogeneous nat-ure of national
security interests while reconstructing an aggregate of profession-als. These professionals exchange information through digital
technologies, produce intelligence according to their own interests, and despise the idea that the rights of all Internet users can
create limitations to their projects.¶ ¶ Consequently these
transnational guilds of professionals are directly
challeng-ing the authority of the professionals of politics which, in principle at least, and within the limits of an
international order, had the capacity and authority to define the content of national interests and security
(Bigo 2013). They also chal-lenge the authority of national citizens by reconfiguring the ideas of privacy,
secrecy of communication, presumption of innocence, and even democracy. It may not be going too far to suggest that what
we
still call national security has been colonized by a new nobility of intelligence agencies
operating in an increasingly autonomous transnational arena.
The collectivization of people, terrorists, under the territory of the nation-state
justifies the ability to create solidified identities that result in antagonism and
violence toward Others.
Shapiro 1997 (Shapiro, Professor of Political Science at Hawaii, “Violent
Cartographies,” p. 7)//rf
In this investigation I also turn to geography, but not to provide an explanation of state-level
decision making. As I noted, I want less to understand war, in the traditional
empirical/explanatory sense, than to effect a political and ethical resistance to the enmities
upon which it feeds. To do this I emphasize an approach to maps that provides distance from
the geopolitical frames of strategic thinkers and security analysts. Geography is inextricably
linked to the architecture of enmity But rather than an exogenous “explanatory variable’ it is a
primary part of the ontology of a collective. Along with various ethnographic imaginaries—the
ethnoscapes that are a part of geographic imaginations—it constitutes a fantasy structure
implicated in how territorially elaborated collectivities locate themselves in the world and
thus how they practice the meanings of self and Other that provide the conditions of
possibility for regarding others as threats or antagonists. Grammatically, then, it is appropriate
for me to recognize cartographic violence instead of speak ing of the geographic causes of
violence.
The division of peoples based upon nation-states justifies violence and
genocide
Shapiro 1997 (Shapiro, Professor of Political Science at Hawaii, “Violent
Cartographies,” p. 6-7.) //rf
The attitude of the English commanders to the results of the destruc tion of the Pequots went
beyond complacency; they saw their actions as morally vindicated. In addition to invoking the
code of military professionalism to justify their genocidal approach to their hostilities with the
Pequots, they found legitimation in their reading of Scripture. For example, allowing that the
scene of the burning and killing at the fort produced a “most doleful cry;” Captain Underhill, in
response to queries about slaughtering women and children, responded: “We had sufficient
light from the word of God for our proceedings?” And this view only strengthened during the
colonial period. The prominent Puritan preacher Increase Mather, writing an account of the war
forty years later, emphasized the power of prayer, which, he argued, delivered his people from
“the rage of the heathen.” Mather ascribed the burning of the fort to the action of “the Lord”:
“The Lord burnt them up in the fire of his wrath, & dunged the ground with their flesh, it was
the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous to our eyes?’ ¶ [continued] ¶ The Pequot War has virtually no
place in the Euro-American telling of the history of warfare or in the story of gradual proprietary
control over the North American continent. To give it a place of importance, it is necessary to
analyze the forces at work that allowed the Pequots and their practices to be so devalued as
to become targets of an attempt at total extermination. Moreover, such an analysis serves as
a prelude to what I shall be calling an ethnographically oriented approach to warfare, one that
is aimed both at disclosing the interpretations through which war ring groups impose meaning
and value on each other and at providing a critique of approaches to warfare favored by many
contemporary historians and political scientists. The dominant, strategically oriented treatment
of war, historical or contemporary, provides a rationale for violence rather than for respectful
encounters. More specifically, a geographic imaginary, a nation-state-oriented geopolitical
map, which provides the ground plan for what are known as “security studies,” tends to frame
conduct and events within a state-oriented cartography and thereby reproduces the
structures of nonrecognition operating in the seventeenth century, when Pequots turned out to
be easy prey for merchants, militias, and moral consciences.
The alt is to reject the collective identity the aff constructs by focusing on
geopolitical boundaries and embrace our vulnerability to alterity. This
cultivates an ethical relationship to otherness.
Shapiro 1997 (Shapiro, Professor of Political Science at Hawaii, “Violent
Cartographies,” p. 173-180.)//rf
To claim membership in a particular tribe, ethnicity, or nation—that is, to belong to a
“people”—one must claim location in a particular genealogical and spatial story. Such stories
precede any particular action aimed at a future result and provoke much of the contestation over
claims to territory and entitlement to collective recognition. To the extent that they are part of the reigning
structure of intelligibility, identity stories tend to escape contentiousness within ongoing political and
ethical discourses. To produce an ethics responsive to contestations over identity claims and their related spatial stories, it is
necessary to intervene in the dominant practices of intelligibility. Michel Foucault was calling for such
intervention when he noted that the purpose of critical analysis is to question, not deepen, existing structures of intelligibility. Intelligibility
results from aggressive, institutionalized practices that, in producing a given intelligible world, exclude alternative
worlds. “We must,” Foucault said, “make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its necessity. We must think that
what exists is far from filling all possible spaces?’ ¶ Like Foucault, Derrida claimed that a recognition of practices of exclusion is a necessary condition
for evoking an ethical sensibility. His in sights into the instability and contentiousness of the context of an utterance, in his critique of Austin, provides
access to what is effectively the protoethics of ethical discourse, the various contextual commitments that determine the normative implications of
statements. To heed this observation, it is necessary to analyze two particular kinds of contextual commitments that have been silent and often
unreflective predicates of ethical discourses. And it is important to do so in situations in which contending parties have something at stake—that is, by
focusing on the ethics of encounter. Accordingly, in what follows, my approach to “the ethical” locates ethics in a respect for an-Other’s identity
performances with special attention to both the temporal or narrative dimension ¶ and the spatial dimension of those performances. Moreover, to
produce a critical political approach to the ethics of the present, it is necessary to oppose the
dominant stories of modernity and the institutionalized, geopolitical versions of space, which support
existing forms of global proprietary control, for both participate unreflectively in a violence of representation. The
ethical sensibility offered in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas provides an important contribution
to the ethics-as-nonviolent encounter thematized in my analysis. Levinas regarded war, the ultimate form of violence, as
the suspension of morality; “it renders morality de risory,” he said. Moreover, Levinas’s thought fits fh general ¶ anti
Clausewitzian/antirationalist approach to war th in prior chapters, for Levinas regarded a strategically oriented politics—”the art of foreseeing war and
of winning it by every means’ which is “enjoined as the very essence of reason”—as “opposed to morality.” In order to oppose war and promote peace,
Levinas enacted a linguistic war on the governing assumptions of Western philosophy. He
argued that philosophy from Plato through Heidegger constructed persons and peoples within
totalizing conceptions of humanity. The ethical regard, he insisted, is one that resists
encompassing the Other as part of the same, that resists recognizing the Other solely within
the already spoken codes of a universalizing vision of humankind. However problematic Levinas’s
notion of infinite respect for an alterity that always evades complete comprehension may be (an issue I discuss later), it
nevertheless makes possible a concern with the violence of representation, with discursive control
over narratives of space and identity, which is central - to my analysis. Edward Said emphasized the
ethicopolitical significance of systems of discursive control, locating the violence of
imperialism in the control over stories: “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from
forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”
Indeed, contemporary neoimperialism resides in part in the ¶ dominance of a spatial story that
inhibits the recognition of alternatives. A geopolitical imaginary, the map of nation-states, dominates
ethical discourse at a global level. Despite an increasing instability in the geo political map of states, the more general discourses of
“international affairs” and “international relations” continue to dominate both ethical and ¶ political problematics. Accordingly, analyses of
global violence are most often constructed within a statecentric, geostrategic cartography, which
organizes the interpretation of enmities on the basis of an individual and collective national subject and on crossboundary antagonisms. And ethical theories aimed at a normative inhibition of these antagonisms continue to presume this same
geopolitical cartography.’° To resist this discursive/representational monopoly, we must challenge the
geopolitical map. Although the interpretation of maps is usually subsumed within a ¶ scientific imagination, it is nevertheless the case that
“the cartographer’s categories’s J. B. Harley has put it, “art the basis of the morality of the 11 “ here emerges most icantly from the boundary and
naming practices that construct the map. The nominations and territorialities that maps endorse constitute, among other things, a “topographical
amnesia.” Effacements
of older maps in contemporary namings and configurations amount to a
non- recognition of older, often violently displaced practices of identity and space. Among the
consequences of this neglected dimension of cartography, which include a morality-delegating spatial unconscious
and a historical amnesia with respect to alternatives, has been a radical circumspection of the kinds of persons
and groups recognized as worthy subjects of moral¶ solicitude. State citizenship has tended to
remain the primary basis for the identities recognized in discourses such as the “ethics of
international affairs.” The dominance and persistence of this discursive genre, an “ethics” predicated on absolute state sovereignty, is
evident in a recent analysis that has attempted to be both critical of the ethical limitations of the sovereignty system and aware that “conflict has
increasingly moved away from interstate territorial disputes.” Despite these acknowledged sensitivities, the analysis proceeds within a discourse that
reinstalls the dominance of geopolitical thinking, for it remains within its cartography and conceptual legacy Arguing for a humanitarianism that avoids
interstate partisanship, the writers go on to reproduce the geopolitical discourse on war, which ¶ grants recognition only to state subjects. Even as they
criticize the language of “intervention” as a reaffirmation of a sovereignty discourse, they refer to the “Persian Gulf War” on the one hand and
“insurgencies” on the other. As I noted in chapter i, Bernard Nietschmann has shown that the
map of global warfare changes
dramatically when one departs from the language of sovereignty. Challenging the state-oriented language of
war and unmapping the ¶ geostrategic cartography of “international relations;’ Nietschmann refers to the “Third World War,” which is “hidden from
view because the fighting is against peoples and countries that are often not even on the map”—a war in which “only one side of the fighting has a
name.” Focusing on struggles involving indigenous peoples, Nietschmann proceeds to map 120 armed struggles as part of the “war’ In his mapping,
only 4 of the struggles involved confrontations between states, while 7 involve states against nations. ¶ In
order to think beyond the
confines of the states orientation, it is therefore necessary to turn to ethical orientations that
challenge the spatial predicates of traditional moral thinking and thereby grant recognition
outside of modernity’s dominant political identities. -This must necessarily also take us outside
the primary approach that contemporary philosophy has lent to (Anglo-American) ethical theory. As
applied at any level of human interaction, the familiar neo-Kantian ethical injunction is to seek transcendent
values. Applied to the inter state or sovereignty model of global space more specifically, this
approach seeks to achieve a set of universal moral imperatives based on shared values and
regulative norms. This dominant tradition has not yielded guidance for specific global
encounters because it fails to acknowledge the historical depth of the identity claims involved
in confrontations or collisions of difference— difference that includes incommensurate
practices of space and conflicting narratives of identity. The tradition depends instead on two highly abstract
assumptions. The first is that morality springs from what humanity ¶ holds in common, which is thought to yield the possibility of a shared intuition of
what is good. The second is that the values to be apprehended are instantiated in the world and are capable of being grasped by human consciousness,
wherever it exists. As Hegel pointed out in one of his earliest remarks on Kantian moral reasoning, Kant’s system involves “a conversion of the
absoluteness of pure identity. . . into the absoluteness of content.” Because, for Kant, the form of a concept is what determines its rightness, there
remains in his perspective no way to treat “conflicts among specific matters.”17 A brief account of an encounter between alternative spatial imaginar
ies helps to situate the alternative ethical frame to be elaborated later. It is provided by the reflections of the writer Carlos Fuentes after an un
anticipated encounter with a Mexican peasant. Lost driving with friends in the state of Morelos, Mexico, Fuentes stopped in a village and asked an old
peasant the name of the village. “Well, that depends;’ an approach that assails such totalizations with the aim of providing an ethics of encounter.
Levinas and the Ethics of the Face to Face Fuentes’s experience and the conclusions he draws from are elaborately prescripted in the ethical writings of
Levinas, for whom the ¶ face-to-face encounter and the experience of the Other as a historical trace are crucial dimensions of an ethical responsibility.
To confront Levinas is to be faced with an ethical tradition quite different from those
traditionally applied to issues of global encounter. In Levinas’s ethical thinking and writing,
morality is not an experience of value, as it is for both the Kantian tradition and Alasdair Maclntyre’s post-Kantian concern with
an anthropology of ethics, but a recognition of and vulnerability to alterity. This conception of
vulnerability to alterity is not a moral psychology, as is the case with, for example, Adam Smith’s notion of interpersonal
sympathy. It is a fundamentally ethical condition attached to human subjectivity; it is an
acceptance of the Other’s absolute exteriority, a recognition that “the other is in no way
another myself, participating with me in a common existence.” According to Levinas, we are
responsible to alterity as absolute alterity, as a difference that cannot be subsumed into the same,
into a totalizing conceptual system that comprehends self and Other. For relations with Others
to be ethical they must therefore be nontotalizing. Rejecting ontologies that homogenize
humanity, so that self-recognition is sufficient to constitute the significance of Others, Levinas
locates the ethical regard as a recognition of Others as enigmatically and irreducibly other, as
prior to any ontological aim of locating oneself at home in the world: “The relations with the
other... [ not arise within a totality nor does it establish a totality, integrating me and the
other. Ontologies of integration are egoistically aimed at domesticating alterity to a frame of
understanding that allows for the violent appropriation of the space of the Other: ¶ My being in the
world or my ‘place in the sun,’ my being at home, have not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man
whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third-world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling,
stripping, killing? 23 To be regarded ethically, the Other must remain a stranger “who disturbs the
being at home with oneself.” The ethical for Levinas is, in sum, “a non-violent relationship to
the as infinitely other.” we recall the problematic presented in chapter 5, it should be evident within a Levinasian ethical perspective, one
would, for example, accept Ward Just’s perpetually enigmatic Vietnam rather than endorse Norman Schwarzkopf’s domesticated version.
White Supremacists PIC
Plan: The United States Federal Government should limit its war on terror to
white supremacists by substantially curtailing its domestic surveillance of all
suspected terrorists except white supremacists.
White supremacists are terrorists, FBI uses the Joint Terrorism Task force to
deal with them
FBI 5-22-2012, "Domestic Threat: White Supremacy Extremism," FBI,
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/may/extremism_052212/extremism_052212
It was a gruesome and hateful crime—three men with white supremacist tattoos punching and
kicking the face and body of an African-American man at a bus stop in Houston last summer
simply because of the color of his skin. All three were recently convicted of the attack, following
an investigation by the FBI and its partners.¶ It’s not an isolated case. It seems like a throwback
to a different era, but white supremacy—which sees whites as inherently superior to those of
other races—still exists in America today. Having those kinds of beliefs is not against the
law…as a matter of fact, it’s protected by the First Amendment. But white supremacy becomes
a crime—and for the FBI, a form of what we call extremism—when it is furthered through
threatened or actual use of force or violence or other illegal activity.¶ The Bureau has been
investigating the criminal activities of white supremacy extremists like Ku Klux Klan members
since as early as 1918. Today’s extremists are more challenging than ever. They’re affiliated with
a variety of white supremacy groups, and they can be motivated by any number of religious or
political ideologies. We’re also seeing more lone offenders and small, violent factions of larger
groups at work, which makes detection of these crimes tougher.¶ ¶ White supremacy
extremists specifically target racial, ethnic, and religious minorities; the federal government;
and in some instances, even each other. Their tactics include assault, murder, threats and
intimidation, and bombings. They also commit other kinds of crimes—like drug trafficking, bank
and armored car robberies, and counterfeiting—to fund their hate-filled activities.¶ Over the
years, the federal government has successfully charged white supremacy extremists using a
number of federal statutes, including civil rights violations, racketeering, solicitation to commit
crimes of violence, firearms violations, explosives violations, counterfeiting and forgery, and
witness tampering.¶ In recent months, the FBI has led or participated in several significant
investigations involving violence or attempted violence by self-admitted white supremacists. A
few examples:¶ In February 2012, an Arizona man was sentenced to federal prison after pleading
guilty to possessing and transporting improvised explosive devices near the U.S.-Mexico border.
Details¶ In January 2012, the last of four Arkansas defendants charged with firebombing the
home of an interracial couple was sentenced to federal prison. Details¶ In December 2011, a
Washington man was sentenced to 32 years in prison for attempting to bomb a Martin Luther
King, Jr. Unity Day march in Spokane. Details¶ In May 2010, an Oregon man pled guilty to mailing
a hangman’s noose to the home of the president of a local NAACP chapter in Ohio. Details¶
Moving forward, we see three keys to turning back the ongoing scourge of white supremacy
extremism:¶ Our increased emphasis on the lawful gathering, analyzing, and sharing of
intelligence on current and emerging trends, tactics, and threats.¶ Continued collaboration
with our local, state, tribal, and federal partners, especially on our Joint Terrorism Task Forces
around the nation.¶ And most importantly, the support of Americans who find these types of
crimes abhorrent and antithetical to our way of life.¶ If you have information on domestic terror
threats of any kind, submit a tip or contact your local FBI field office.
Their 1AC ignores the domestic terrorism that routinely takes place in the form
of white supremacy – recreates the whiteness implicit in the western definition
of terrorism and masks over anti-black violence
King 15 (Shaun, “Why we Must Call Dylan Roof a Terrorist”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/18/1394297/-Why-we-must-call-Dylann-Roofa-terrorist)
What is terrorism if it is not peaceful people worshipping their God who are shot and killed
by a gunman they openly allowed into their church? Dylann Roof, who is now the primary suspect in the
Charleston, South Carolina, massacre of nine women and men in the historic Emmanuel AME Church is a terrorist. Call it domestic terrorism if
you must, but this man is a terrorist and what he did, pure and simple, was terrorism. He knowingly and willfully targeted a church full of African
American men and women not because he knew them—all indications are that he didn't, but because he wanted to send a message and strike
terror into people. This is not a guess. Read this description from someone who was there. He left a witness living so she could tell everyone
what happened. Church members at Emanuel AME were gathered for a prayer meeting when gunfire erupted in the 19th century building. A
female survivor told family members that the gunman initially sat down in the church for a while before standing up and opening fire, according
to Dot Scott, president of the Charleston NAACP. The gunman reportedly told the woman that he was letting her live so she could tell everyone
else what happened, Scott said. Mullen confirmed that the shooter was in the church for almost an hour attending the prayer meeting with the
group before shooting. African American churches across the United States will be on high alert not only this weekend, but for the foreseeable
future. The actions of this man caused this terror to have ripple effects far beyond Charleston. Don't
call this a tragedy. A
mudslide or an earthquake is tragic. An accidental house fire is tragic. Those things don't
cause people 11 states over to have genuine fear. If a house burns down in Iowa, homeowners in Florida aren't
scared shitless the next day. If a mudslide happens in Santa Barbara, homeowners in Montana aren't worried to death it will happen to them
This is terrorism. Don't call this the act of a madman. It is an insult to those battling mental illness and it is
also a degree of deference you never saw given to men like Osama Bin Laden. This was a well-planned,
well-conceived attack. The murderer didn't stumble upon this church in some type of manic accident. It was strategic. Dylann Roof is a
racist and his actions were driven by his racism. On his jacket, in the picture above, are patches from the racist
next.
regimes of apartheid South Africa and colonial Rhodesia. This means he had a philosophy, a worldview, which celebrated the brute force and
violence used against Africans on the continent. Could
it be that America, with its deeply troubling racist past,
is refusing to call Dylann Roof a terrorist because it would then mean that so many other
people in our history who inflicted such pain would also have to fit the bill? Are we saying
that terrorists can't be white? Are we saying that terrorists can't be American? Must they be
brown? Must be Muslims? Of course not. This is terrorism. Calling it anything less is an
insult to the victims of this massacre.
Anti-black terror at the hand of white supremacist groups is the biggest
threat to U.S. national security—no links to their threat construction
claims that are contextualized to right-wing fear of Islamic terror.
Julia Craven, 6-24-2015, "White Supremacists More Dangerous Than Foreign Terrorists:
Study," Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/domesticterrorism-charleston_n_7654720.html *edited for biased language
Nine people were added to a long list of lives taken by domestic terrorism when Dylann Roof allegedly began shooting inside a historic black
church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17. At
least 48 people have been killed stateside by right-
wing extremists in the 14 years since since the September 11 attacks -- almost twice as many as
were killed by self-identified jihadists in that time, according to a study released Wednesday by the New America Foundation, a Washington,
D.C., research center. The study found that radical anti-government groups or white
supremacists were responsible
for most of the terror attacks. The data counters many conventional thoughts on what terrorism is and isn’t. Since Sept. 11,
many Americans attribute terror attacks to Islamic extremists instead of those in the
right wing. But the numbers don't back up this popular conception, said Charles Kurzman, a
professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kurzman is co-authoring a study with David Schanzer of Duke University, set to be
published Thursday, that asks police departments to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their jurisdiction. Law
enforcement agencies reported they were more concerned about the activities of
right-wing extremist groups than Islamic extremists in their jurisdictions (about 74 percent versus 39 percent) due to the
"menacing" rhetoric used by some of these groups -- and that they were training officers to take caution when they saw signs of potentially
violent individuals, Kurzman and Schanzer found. "Muslim extremism was taken seriously in many of these jurisdictions that we surveyed… but
overall,
they did not see as much of an issue with Muslim extremism as with right-wing
extremism in their locations," Kurzman told The Huffington Post. He added that it's hard to get a definitive statistical picture
of plots and acts of violent extremism since that definition tends to vary and data for incidents nationwide is hard to come by. The
accused Charleston shooter is currently being investigated under domestic terrorism
charges by the Department of Justice -- a move that acknowledges the long history of
anti-black terrorist attacks. America’s first federal anti-terrorism law, known as the Third Force Act or the Ku Klux Klan Act,
which was passed by Congress in 1871, caused nine counties in South Carolina to be placed under martial law and led to thousands of arrests.
The Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 1882. David Pilgrim, the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State
University, told HuffPost in February that the actions of foreign extremist groups are no better or worse than the historic violence against
African-Americans by domestic actors. "There's nothing you're going to see today that's not going to have already occurred in the U.S.," he said.
"If
you think of these groups that behead now -- first of all, beheading is barbaric
[horrendous] but it's no more or less barbaric [horrendous] than some of the
lynchings that occurred in the U.S." Pilgrim said he found it offensive that, after Sept.
11, some Americans bemoaned that terrorism had finally breached U.S. borders.
"That is ignoring and trivializing -- if not just summarily dismissing -- all the people,
especially the peoples of color in this country, who were lynched in this country; who had their homes bombed in this country; who
were victims of race riots," he said evoking lynching victims who were often burned, castrated, shot, stabbed -- and in some cases beheaded. And
while most officially acknowledged anti-black terrorism cases occurred during the eras of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, as recent news
demonstrate,
this type of terrorism is still an ongoing concern.
Terrorists are destroying historically Black churches throughout the South in the
wake of the mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina. This not only
represents thousands of dollars in damages to the churches but also a
resurfacing of decades of terror in the Jim Crow South.
Emma Green, managing editor of TheAtlantic.com, 7-1-2015, "Black Churches Are Burning
Again in America," Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/07/arsonchurches-north-carolina-georgia/396881/
On Wednesday, July 1, a fire was reported at the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Greeleyville, South Carolina. The AP reports that an anonymous federal official said the fire did not appear
to be intentionally set, but Winfred Pressley, a division operations officer at the regional Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco division,
said that the investigation is still ongoing, as did other local investigators. Shanna Daniels, a spokesperson for the FBI, declined to
comment on the case, but said that church arson “has been a hot topic over the past few days.” “What's the church doing on fire?”
Jeanette Dudley, the
associate pastor of God's Power Church of Christ in Macon, Georgia, got a call
a little after 5 a.m. on Wednesday, June 24, she told a local TV news station. Her tiny church of
about a dozen members had been burned, probably beyond repair. The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and
Tobacco got called in, which has been the standard procedure for church fires since the late 1960s. Investigators say
they’ve ruled out possible causes like an electrical malfunction; most likely, this was arson.
The very same night, many miles away in North Carolina, another church burned: Briar Creek
Road Baptist Church, which was set on fire some time around 1 a.m. Investigators have ruled
it an act of arson, the AP reports; according to The Charlotte Observer, they haven’t yet determined whether it might be a
hate crime. Two other predominantly black churches have been the target of possible arson in
the past fornight: Glover Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Warrenville, South Carolina,
which caught fire on Friday, and College Hill Seventh Day Adventist, which burned on Monday
in Knoxville, Tennessee. Investigators in Knoxville told a local news station they believed it was an act of vandalism,
although they aren’t investigating the incident as a hate crime. (There have also been at least four other cases of fires at churches in
the past fortnight. At Fruitland Presbyterian Church in Gibson County, Tennessee, and the Greater Miracle Temple Apostolic Holiness
Church in Tallahassee, Florida, officials suspect the blazes were caused by lightning and electrical wires, respectively, but
investigations are still ongoing. A church that is not predominantly black—College Heights Baptist Church in Elyria, Ohio—was
burned on Saturday morning. The fire appears to have been started in the sanctuary, and WKYC reports that the cause is still under
investigation. The town’s fire and police departments did not immediately return calls for confirmation on Sunday.* And a Monday,
June 29, fire at Disciples of Christ Ministries in Jackson, Mississippi, was ruled accidental.) These
fires join the murder of
nine people at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church as major acts of
violence perpetrated against predominantly black churches in the last fortnight. Churches are
burning again in the United States, and the symbolism of that is powerful. Even though many
instances of arson have happened at white churches, the crime is often association with racial
violence: a highly visible attack on a core institution of the black community, often done at
night, and often motivated by hate. As my colleague David Graham noted last week, the history of American
church burnings dates to before the Civil War, but there was a major uptick in incidents of
arson at black churches in the middle and late 20th century. One of the most famous was the 1963 bombing
of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls. Three decades later, cases of church arson rose
sharply. In response, in 1995, President Bill Clinton also set up a church-arson investigative task force, and in 1996, Congress passed
a law increasing the sentences for arsonists who target religious organizations, particularly for reasons of race or ethnicity. Between
1995 and 1999, Clinton’s task force reported that it opened 827 investigations into burnings and bombings at houses of worship; it
was later disbanded. In recent years, it’s been harder to get a clear sense of the number of church fires across the country. The
National Fire Protection Association reports that between 2007 and 2011, there were an average of 280 intentionally set fires at
houses of worship in America each year, although a small percentage of those took place at other religious organizations, like funeral
homes. One of the organization’s staffers, Marty Ahrens, said that tracking church arson has become much more complicated since
reporting standards changed in the late ‘90s. Sometimes, fires that are reported to the National Fire Incident Reporting System are
considered “suspicious,” but they can’t be reported as arson until they’re definitively ruled “intentional.” Even then, it’s difficult to
determine what motivated an act of arson. “To know that something is motivated by hate, you either have to know who did it or
they have to leave you a message in some way that makes it very obvious,” she said. “There are an awful lot of [intentionally set
fires] that are not hate crimes—they’re run-of-the-mill kids doing stupid things.” The
investigations in North Carolina,
Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, and Tennessee are still ongoing, and they may end up
in that broad category of fires of suspicious, but ultimately unknowable, origin that Ahrens
described. But no matter why they happened, these fires are a troubling reminder of the
vulnerability of our sacred institutions in the days following one of the most violent attacks on
a church in recent memory. It’s true that a stupid kid might stumble backward into one of the
most symbolically terrifying crimes possible in the United States, but that doesn’t make the
terror of churches burning any less powerful.
What has the government done in response to this rise in terrorism? Nothing.
Now, the aff calls to decrease domestic surveillance, making any chance of
involving federal authorities to investigate who these terrorists are impossible.
The burning of Black churches in the south necessitates an increase of domestic
surveillance in order to prevent future horrific attacks.
Deirdre Griswold, 7-14-2015, "As Black churches burn, where are the feds?," Workers World,
http://www.workers.org/articles/2015/06/29/as-black-churches-burn-where-are-the-feds/
As of June 29, six Black churches in the South have either been destroyed or suffered severe
damage from fires since Charleston. At least three are confirmed to have been caused by
arson, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The loss to the people of these communities comes to hundreds of
thousands of dollars. Worse, the torchings are a threat of further violence to a people whose painful
history at the hands of white exploiters still resonates so strongly. The first burning deemed by fire
marshals to be arson destroyed the College Hills Seventh Day Adventist Church in Knoxville, Tenn., on June 22. The Knoxville fire
department said the arsonist set multiple fires on the church’s property. The church’s van was also burned. The very next day, a fire
in the sanctuary of God’s Power Church of Christ in Macon, Ga., was also blamed on arson. And the day after that, a fire was
deliberately set at the Briar Creek Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., that destroyed an education wing meant to house a summer
program for children. The gymnasium and sanctuary burned, causing an estimated $250,000 in damage. That same week, three
other Southern Black churches — in Tennessee, Florida and South Carolina — also suffered fires, although two may have had natural
causes. Investigations are continuing. After
what happened in Charleston, S.C., there can be little doubt
that the arson fires were set by white supremacists, whose outpourings of hate in print and on
the Internet call again and again for violence against people of color, using at best flimsily
disguised language and at worst the vilest and most degrading terms. One might think that
mass murder of the type that happened in Charleston would immediately lead to arrests of
those advocating race war against Black people. We have seen many examples in recent years
of elaborate sting operations set up by the FBI and local police authorities to ensnare Black
militants on charges of plotting terrorist acts — which government agents had encouraged
and facilitated. But just as with the murders of the three civil rights workers in 1964 — James
Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — by members of the Ku Klux Klan, the
authorities have not intervened to stop such attacks, even though it is logical to assume that, in this day and
age of wide surveillance, they have knowledge of them.
Although before Charleston, the FBI and NSA were not doing enough to fight
right-wing terrorism, after the recent increase in attacks, the focus has shifted
to fight right-wing and white supremacist extremists.
Jaeah Lee, 6-17-2015, "The Rise Of Violent Right-Wing Extremism, Explained," Mother Jones,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/right-wing-extremism-explainer-charlestonmass-shooting-terrorism
The federal and local governments ramped up efforts to combat domestic terrorism of all
kinds in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. A few months
following the 9/11 attacks, FBI official Dale Watson testified before the Senate Intelligence
Committee that "right-wing groups continue to represent a serious terrorist threat." But
Johnson, German, and others assert that federal counterterrorism programs since 9/11 have
focused overwhelmingly on the perceived threat from Islamic extremism. That includes the
Obama administration's "countering violent extremism" strategy, which "revolves around
impeding the radicalization of violent jihadists," according to a 2014 Congressional Research
Service report. The attack in Charleston underscored "the failure of the federal government to
keep closer tabs" on right-wing extremists, argues Gerald Horne, a historian and civil rights
activist at the University of Houston. But the focus may soon increase. In February, CNN
reported that DHS circulated an intelligence assessment that focused on the domestic terror
threat posed by right-wing extremists. Kurzman and Schanzer also point to a handout from a
training program sponsored by the Department of Justice, cautioning that the threat from
antigovernment extremism "is real."
Case
Reforms fail – the NSA will circumvent
Greenwald 14 (Glenn, lawyer, journalist and author – he founded the Intercept and has
contributed to Salon and the Guardian, named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100
Global Thinkers of 2013, “CONGRESS IS IRRELEVANT ON MASS SURVEILLANCE. HERE’S
WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD”, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-us-congress-stopping-nsas-mass-surveillance/)
All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this:
limits on
the powers of
the last place one should look to impose
the U.S. government is
limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of empires.
. . . the U.S. government. Governments don’t walk around trying to figure out how to
The entire system
in D.C.
is designed
at its core
to prevent
real reform . This Congress is not going to enact anything resembling fundamental limits on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance. Even if it somehow did,
this White House would never sign it. Even if all that miraculously happened, the fact that
Security State
the U.S. intelligence community
and National
operates with no limits and no oversight means they’d easily co-opt the entire
reform process . That’s what happened after the eavesdropping scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment of congressional intelligence
committees and a special
FISA “oversight ” court—the committees were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme servants of the intelligence
community like Senators Dianne Feinstein and Chambliss, and Congressmen Mike Rogers and “Dutch” Ruppersberger, while the court
a rubber stamp with subservient judges
opinion (in both the U.S. and globally) began radically changing,
Obama:
quickly became
who operate in total secrecy. Ever since the Snowden reporting began and public
the White House’s strategy has been obvious . It’s vintage
Enact something that is called “reform ”—so that he can give a pretty speech telling the world that he heard and responded
to their concerns—
but that
in actuality
changes
almost
nothing , thus strengthening the very system he
can pretend he “changed.” That’s the same tactic as Silicon Valley, which also supported this bill: Be able to point to something called “reform”
so they can trick hundreds of millions of current and future users around the world into believing that their communications are now safe if they use Facebook, Google,
Skype and the rest. In pretty much every interview I’ve done over the last year, I’ve been asked why there haven’t been significant changes from all the disclosures. I
vehemently disagree with the premise of the question, which equates “U.S. legislative changes” with “meaningful changes.” But it has been clear from the start that
U.S. legislation is not going to impose meaningful limitations on the NSA’s powers of
mass surveillance, at least not fundamentally.
Can’t stop the war on terror, international targeted killings justify any security
concerns.
Jonathan Hafetz, 10-19-2011, "Targeted Killing and the 'War on Terror'," Al Jazeera,
https://www.globalpolicy.org/war-on-terrorism/50878-targeted-killing-and-the-war-onterror.html?itemid=id#609
Focussing only on citizenship, however, obscures larger concerns about targeted killing. The
United States' increasing use of Predator drones predominantly affects non-citizens. Tethering
criticism of targeted killing to its potential impact on a relatively small number of US citizens
suggests that the killing of non-citizens - whether as targets or as collateral damage - poses no
problem. This asymmetrical approach to the rights of non-citizens legitimates criticisms of the
United States as an imperial power concerned only with furthering its own interests,
regardless of the costs to others.¶ Furthermore, the legal analysis of targeted killings under
international law does not vary based on the target's citizenship. As numerous scholars have
argued, targeted killing is problematic under the international law of war. Notre Dame Law
School professor Mary Ellen O'Connell, for example, has described the US position on targeted
killing as "illegal, immoral, and dangerous".¶ Far-reaching powers¶ One problem lies in the
United States' expansive view of war itself. While there is still an armed conflict in Afghanistan,
there is no armed conflict in Yemen. The US position, however, rests not on a target's
connection to the Afghan conflict, but rather to an amorphous, global, armed conflict against
al-Qaeda and "associated groups" - a conflict that, conveniently, has proven sufficiently
malleable to accompany the shifting focus of US counter-terrorism operations from
Afghanistan and Iraq to Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The distinction is important because
outside of armed conflict, peacetime law applies and prohibits extrajudicial killing absent
exceptional circumstances.¶ Also, targeting rules differ depending on the type of armed conflict
in which a nation is engaged. In a traditional, state-versus-state conflict (known as international
armed conflict), one state may kill a member of an opposing state's armed forces even when
that person is not on the battlefield. But in an armed conflict against a non-state actor (known
as a non-international armed conflict), states are more constrained in their ability to kill
opponents. As Melbourne Law School professor Kevin John Heller explains, in a noninternational armed conflict the target must either be a civilian who is directly participating in
hostilities or an individual who exercises a "continuous combat function" in the terrorist group.
The mere fact that the United States believes an individual is dangerous is insufficient.¶ These
distinctions are not mere technicalities, but have potentially far-reaching implications for
human rights and global stability. The United States may think it can wield its targeted killing
power wisely. The American public, for its part, may care little for legal niceties when it hears
that their government has eliminated individuals like Awlaki, who allegedly inspired several
terrorist plots against the United States through his fiery sermons. But such thinking is
shortsighted.¶ The US targeted killing policy encourages other states to expand their counterterrorism operations in similar ways - ways that might seem less attractive when the same
principles are invoked in different contexts. The United States, for example, might feel
differently if Russia were to target Chechen rebels in Georgia, or if India were to target
Pakistani-backed forces in Kashmir.¶ Targeted killing, moreover, illustrates how US concerns
about terrorism seem to justify any means deemed necessary to improving security. A similar
dynamic helps explain the United States' resort to torture in the interrogation of detainees after
9/11 - a decision whose consequences will continue to be felt for years to come, even if most
controversial methods, such as waterboarding, have been abandoned. This is not to equate
current US targeted killing policy with the US torture programme under the Bush administration,
which was based on a calculated attempt to circumvent the law. Rather, it is to suggest how the
war on terrorism can twist the law so that it accommodates the government's never-ceasing
demand for new powers to counter the terrorist threat.
Anxiety is good
Shepard 07 (Mark, Neuro Linguistic Programming Expert, “Anxiety - the ultimate survival tool!,”
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2050501/Anxiety-The-Ultimate-Survival-Skill)
As much pain and suffering that highly sensitive people go through because of our worry and
ensured humanity's survival
anxiety habits , these are traits that have
since time immemorial. What do I mean? First of all you have to understand that
anxiety is a
thought process . It is not a mental disease. When you are anxious, what are you thinking about? What's great? What's wonderful? How everything is
going to turn out better than you can possibly imagine? No! You are imagining the worst case scenario.
you do not want to have happen.
Anxiety is thinking about what
Think about it! Let's float back in time for a moment to One Gazillion B.C. You are hanging out with
your hunter gatherer buddies and it's summer time...There's plenty to eat and it's warm. All of a sudden you have an anxious thought. You think of something unpleasant
about the future. You suddenly think of the coming... winter! You imagine digging through snow drifts scavenging for whatever scraps of food you can find. You imagine
starving. You imagine your children, hungry, cold, sick. That's anxiety. Thinking about what you do not want to have happen. What it's supposed
trigger a resourceful response. In
to
do
is
this case, you come up with a brilliant idea. In order to avoid starvation in the coming winter you
start drying food and storing it in underground containers. Thinking about the cold, you come up with the idea that you can make warm clothing. Come Fall you gladly
trade that little summer loin cloth in for a nice woolly mammoth coat. Thus the first root cellar is born and the fur coat is invented, because of anxiety. Your ability to
think ahead and visualize bad things happening enables you to plan ahead and take decisive action to create a different outcome. This planning for the winter results in
your family and tribe surviving! Your children and their children pass along this anxiety gene. The "lug-heads" who don't have this ability perish. Survival is good, isn't it?
So those who were able to foresee the future and imagine the worst were able to better plan and as a result create a better future. Now. Fast forward to today. I would be
willing to bet that you've been using this wonderful imagination of yours to imagine the worst. The added factor here is that your unconscious mind does not know the
difference between what is real and what is imagined, so when you imagine the worst, your body reacts as if that bad thing is really happening. That releases all sorts of
stress hormones and chemicals in your body. The point is to stop beating yourself up for having anxiety.
Anxiety is
merely
an excellent
survival tool that's been pushed beyond its original purpose . You can reclaim it's usefulness by doing what
ancient people did. Become aware of a possible negative outcome in the future and then take positive, decisive action to make sure something better happens.
If
it's something beyond your control, practice imagining it working out positively and
see how that feels in your body . For example: if you are worried about your kids driving home from college in a snow storm imagine
them arriving safely and sitting in front of the fire sipping hot cocoa.
Psychological threat construction is inevitable and key to rational decision
making
Pyszczynski et al 6 – Tom Pysczczynski is the Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado. Sheldon Solomon is the
Professor of Psychology at Skidmore College. Jeff Greenberg is the Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. Molly Maxfield works at
the University of Colorado. (“On the Unique Psychological Import of the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and Variations”, Psychological
Inquiry, Volume 17, Issue 4)
human beings share with many other
survival instinct. They argue that natural selection can only build instincts that respond to specific adaptive challenges in specific situations, and thus could not have
Kirkpatrick and Navarette’s (this issue) first specific complaint with TMT is that it is wedded to an outmoded assumption that
species a
designed an instinct for survival because staying alive is a broad and distal goal with no single clearly defined adaptive response. Our use of the term survival instinct was meant to highlight the
general orientation toward continued life that is expressed in many of an organism’s bodily systems (e.g., heart, liver, lungs, etc) and the diverseapproach and avoidance
tendencies
that promote its survival and reproduction,ultimately leading to genes being passed on to fu- ture generations. Our use of this term also reflects
the classic psychoanalytic, biological, and anthropological influences on TMT of theorists like Becker (1971, 1973, 1975), Freud (1976, 1991), Rank (1945, 1961, 1989), Zilborg (1943), Spengler
(1999), and Darwin (1993). We concur that natural selection, at least initially, is unlikely to design a unitary survival instinct, but rather, a series of specific adaptations that have tended over
evolutionary time to promote the survival of an organism’s genes. However, whether one construes these adaptations as a series of discrete mechanisms or a general overarching tendency that
encompasses many specific systems, we think it hard to argue with the claim that natural selection usually orients organisms to approach things that facilitate continued existence and to avoid
things that would likely cut life short. This is not to say that natural selection doesn’t also select for characteristics that facilitate gene survival in other ways, or that all species or even all humans,
will always choose life over other valued goals in all circumstances. Our claim is simply that a general orientation toward continued life exists because staying alive is essential for reproduction in
most species, as well as for child rearing and support in mammalian species and many others. Viewing an animal as a loose collection of independent modules that produce responses to specific
adaptively-relevant stimuli may be useful for some purposes, but it overlooks the point that adaptation involves a variety of inter-related mechanisms working together to insure that genes
responsible for these mechanisms are more numerously represented in future generations (see, e.g., Tattersall, 1998). For example, although the left ventricle of the human heart likely evolved to
solve a specific adaptive problem, this mechanism would be useless unless well-integrated with other aspects of the circulatory system. We believe it useful to think in terms of the overarching
function of the heart and pulmonary-circulatory system, even if specific parts of that system evolved to solve specific adaptive problems within that system. In addition to specific solutions to
specific adaptive problems, over time, natural selection favors integrated systemic functioning (Dawkins, 1976; Mithen, 1997). It is the improved survival rates and reproductive success of
lifeformspossessing integrated systemic characteristics that determine whether those characteristics become widespread in a population. Thus, we think it is appropriate and useful to characterize
a glucose-approaching amoeba and a bear-avoiding salmon as oriented toward self-preservation and reproduction, even if neither species possesses one single genetically encoded mechanism
designed to generally foster life or insure reproduction, or cognitive representations of survival and reproduction. This is the same position that Dawkins (1976) took in his classic book, The selfish
gene: The obvious first priorities of a survival machine, and of the brain that takes the decisions for it, are individual survival and reproduction. … Animals therefore go to elaborate lengths to find
and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten themselves; to avoid disease and accident; to protect themselves from unfavourable climatic conditions; to find members of the opposite sex and
persuade them to mate; and to confer on their children advantages similar to those they enjoy themselves. (pp. 62–63) All that is really essential to TMT is the proposition that humans fear death.
Somewhat ironically, in the early days of the theory,we felt compelled to explain this fear by positing a very basic desire for life, because many critics adamantly insisted, for reasons that were
never clear to us, that most people do not fear death. Our explanation for the fear of death is that knowledge of the inevitability of death is frightening because people know they are alive and
because they want to continue living. Do Navarrete and Fessler (2005) really believe that humans do not fear death? Although people sometimes claim that they are not afraid of death, and on rare
occasions volunteer for suicide missions and approach their death, this requires extensive psychological work, typically a great deal of anxiety, and preparation and immersion in a belief system
that makes this possible (see TMT for an explanation of how belief systems do this). Where this desire for life comes from is an interesting question, but not essential to the logic of the theory. Even
if Kirkpatrick and Navarrete (this issue) were correct in their claims that a unitary self-preservation instinct was not, in and of itself, selected for, it is indisputable that many discrete and
A desire to stay alive, and a fear of anything that
threatens to end one’s life, are likely emergent properties of these many discrete
mechanisms that result from the evolution of sophisticated cognitive abilities for symbolic, futureintegrated mechanisms that keep organisms alive were selected for.
oriented, and self-reflective thought. As Batson and Stocks (2004) have noted, it is because we are so intelligent, and hence so aware of our limbic reactions to threats of death and of our many
systems oriented toward keeping us alive that we have a general fear of death. Here are three quotes that illustrate this point. First, for psychologists, Zilboorg (1943), an important early source of
TMT: “Such constant expenditure of psychological energy on the business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant” (p. 467). For literature buffs, acclaimed
novelist Faulkner (1990) put it this way: If aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of
bewil- derment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it. (pp. 141–142) And perhaps most directly, for daytime TV fans, from The Young
consequence of
the emergence of this general fear of death is that humans are susceptible to anxiety due
to events or stimuli that are not immediately present and novel threats to survival that did not exist for our ancestors,such as AIDS, guns, or nuclear weapons. Regardless of
and the Restless (2006), after a rocky plane flight: Phyllis: I learned something up in that plane Nick: What? Phyllis: I really don’t want to die. An important
how this fear originates, it is abundantly clear that humans do fear death. Anyone who has ever faced a man with a gun, a doctor saying that the lump on one’s neck is suspicious and requires
further diagnostic tests, or a drunken driver swerving into one’s lane can attest to that. If humans only feared evolved specific death-related threats like spiders and heights, then a lump on an xray, a gun, a crossbow, or any number of weapons pointed at one’s chest would not cause panic; but obviously these things do. Of what use would the sophisticated cortical structures be if they
didn’t have the ability to instigate fear reactions in response to such threats?
Emancipation is a strategy of the privileged – it fails to resolve structural
security institutions
Brincat et al 12 (Shannon; co-editor for the journal Global Discourse, received doctorate
from the University of Queensland; Laura Lima, submitted her doctoral thesis @
Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University; João Nunes, Postdoctoral
Fellow @ University of Warwick; “Critical Theory in International Relations and Security
Studies: Interviews and Reflections”)
The insecurity of women requires transforming the relations of production, representation, recognition, and reproduction, and
the practices associated with them including diplomatic, military, and economic relations. Does the concept of emancipation
entail this transformation, or is emancipation in fact part of a system of oppression? From a post-structuralist perspective, any
that
emancipation is not transformative but always part of the system of oppression."
attempt to broaden our inclusiveness necessarily draws a new line of inclusion and exclusion," such
Interestingly enough, in the historical practice of slavery, emancipation has always been a part of slavery; it does not engender
a transformation from slavery. In a 1996 essay, Guyora Binder argues that manumission of slaves did not abolish the practice
of slavery. The argument is that the practice of slavery as described in new scholarship on slavery by Patterson (1982) and
others shows that the promise of emancipation was an essential practice of the institution of slavery. In fact, with the abolition
of the slave trade and the concurrent difficulty in replacing escaped slaves, the prospect of manumission became in
increasingly important tool for keeping slaves in slavery.18 Through informal agreements between slaves and owners, the
terms of which the owners controlled, the prospect of manumission for themselves or loved ones created incentives for slaves
not to try to escape. Further, individual manumission changed the
economic relationship between
freed slave and citizens, but not the political or social relationship . Binder suggests that even
the United States' Thirteenth Amendment, understandably interpreted as ending the practice of slavery — 'Neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude ... shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction' — in
practice only manumitted the slaves, it did not transform the social or political relations
between former slaves and citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment and subsequent civil rights legislation
attempted to change those relations. Binder argues that without transforming those relations,
'emancipation' was not a sufficient goal. From the perspective of feminist and critical race inquiry, security
and emancipation are complementary, but not in a way that promotes 'achievement of
greater equity in people's material life, a greater sense of understanding and tolerance of differences in culture
and ideas and a means of moderating conflict among peoples' (Cox, this volume, 20). Security requires 'protection' etc. It is
hierarchical and patronizing except between the two poles of a bi-polar international system. Those in struggle for their
security and their freedom cannot feel 'secured' if their enjoyment is dependent on others. Ironically, 'emancipation' is not
empowering on the face of it. If political power, security and rights are privileges that can be granted and taken away, then,
emancipation is an act of privilege, not a transformation in political relations. If political power, security and rights are
privileges, then the hierarchy underpinning their lack is not removed by their being granted. Wyn Jones seems to take this up
this concern: while I would insist on the centrality of emancipation, I would want to distinguish between taking emancipation
seriously and defining security in terms of emancipation. while I still think the former is imperative, I am now much more
dubious about the later, even if it was a pivotal argument in Ken's 'Security and Emancipation' piece as well as my own
subsequent work. We have been rightly critiqued on that score, and I think Ken moved away from his ‘two sides of the same
coin’ image even before those criticisms were leveled. But while the initial impulse to equate security and emancipation may
have been too crude, the concern with emancipation can and should remain absolutely central.
Islamic Nations will never have a democracy – The ages-old Sunni-Shiite dispute
means that there is a firm divide between parties, and there will never be a real
and equal democracy.
All it takes is one non-democracy to disrupt all prospects for democratic peace
Mearsheimer 3John, Professor of Political Science @ U Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Google Book
Another reason to doubt democratic peace theory is the problem of backsliding. No
democracy can be sure that another
democracy will not someday become an authoritarian state, in which case the reaming
democracy would no longer be safe and secure. Prudence dicatats that democracies prepare for that eventuality, which
means striving to have as much power as possible just in case a friendly neighbor turns into the neighborhood bully. But even if one rejects these
criticisms and embraces democratic peace theory, it is still unlikely that all the great powers in the system will become democratic and stay that
China or Russia to keep power politics in play, and both of these states
are likely to be non-democratic for at least part of the twenty first century. Social constructivists provide
way over the long term. It would only take a non-democratic
another perspective on how to create a world of states with benign intentions that are readily recognizable by other states. They maintain that
the way states behave toward eachother is not a function of how the material world is structured – as realists argue—but
instead is largely determined by how individuals think and talk about international plitics . This
perspective is nicely captured by Alexander Wendt’s famouns claim that “anarchy is what states make of it.” Discourse, in short, is the motor that
drives international politics. But unfortunately, say social constructivists, reaslim has been the dominantdiscourse for at least the past seven
centuries, and realism tells states to distrust other states and to take advantage of them whenever possible. What is needed to create a more
peaceful world is a replacement discourse that emphasizes trust and cooperation among states, rather than suspicion and hostility.