Minnesota Urban Debate League
Frontierism Kritik
Contents
***Negative*** .............................................................................................................................. 2
1NC .............................................................................................................................................. 3
2NC/1NR Overview .................................................................................................................... 6
Links: Colonization Rhetoric....................................................................................................... 8
Links: “Destiny” Rhetoric ......................................................................................................... 11
Links: Mars ................................................................................................................................ 12
Links: NASA ............................................................................................................................. 14
Links: Pro-Space Rhetoric/Discourse ........................................................................................ 16
Links: Resources/Economic Growth ......................................................................................... 18
Links: Science/Technology Gains ............................................................................................. 21
Links: Space/Frontier Mentality ................................................................................................ 23
Links: Space Policy ................................................................................................................... 24
Impacts: Colonialism/Empire .................................................................................................... 25
Impacts: Colonialism/Global Racism ........................................................................................ 26
Impacts: Ethics Extension ......................................................................................................... 27
Impacts: Imperialism/Ethnocentrism ......................................................................................... 30
Impacts: Imperialism/Ideological Exclusion ............................................................................. 31
Impacts: Imperialism/Racism .................................................................................................... 33
Impacts: Imperialism/Spanos .................................................................................................... 34
Impacts: Planetary Destruction .................................................................................................. 35
Add On: Capitalism ................................................................................................................... 36
Alternative: Solves Frontierism ................................................................................................. 42
Alternative: Solves Recursive Violence .................................................................................... 43
Permutation Answers ................................................................................................................. 44
AT: Colonies Key To Survival .................................................................................................. 47
AT: Overview Effect ................................................................................................................. 49
Framework: Can't Separate Space Policy from Ethics/Axiology .............................................. 51
Framework: Kritiks Key to Policy Processes ............................................................................ 53
Framework: Representations/Discourse Key to Policy Processes ............................................ 55
Framework: Epistemology Key to Policy Processes ................................................................. 56
Framework: Ontology Key to Policy Processes ........................................................................ 57
***Affirmative Answers*** ....................................................................................................... 58
Case is a Disadvantage to the Alternative ................................................................................. 59
Space Key to Value of Life ....................................................................................................... 61
The Overview Effect Solves the Impacts .................................................................................. 63
Alternative: Rejection Alone Fails ............................................................................................ 65
AT: Framework: Epistemology Key ......................................................................................... 67
AT: Framework: Ontology Key ................................................................................................ 68
AT: Framework: Representations/Discourse Key ..................................................................... 70
AT: Imperialism/Manifest Destiny............................................................................................ 72
Turn: Capitalism Good .............................................................................................................. 77
Turn: Imperialism Good ............................................................................................................ 81
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Minnesota Urban Debate League
Frontierism Kritik
***Negative***
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1NC
Representations of space exploration embody the illusion of benign colonialism and
imperialism that gloss over their history of genocide
Redfield--02
[Peter Redfield is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, “The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space,” Social Studies of Science, v. 32, pp. 791-85, 2002]
The rhetorical link between outer space and colonial history requires little introduction.
Anyone with a passing acquaintance of the Space Age is familiar with its frontier
metaphors and allusions to European colonial expansion, from the frequent appearance of male
explorers past in NASA presentations to the imaginary exploits of increasingly varied Star Trek crews. The above
quotation thus constitutes a reflexive, though casual, reference; its intended import lies less in the actual words
transcribed than the reminder of a larger pattern echoing through them.
Just like colonial history itself, the
field of representation running through outer space is complex, multiple and full of tension,
encompassing the possibility of reversals and counter-themes, such as the reverse
colonialism of alien abductions. However, at the base of rockets we can identify a consistent
and optimistic reading of history through the future. In the aftermath of the 20th century, advocates
of space exploration constitute perhaps the last unabashed enthusiasts of imperialism,
cheerfully describing conquest, settlement and expansion, and hesitating not a whit before
employing the term ‘colony’. Theirs is a Columbus of exploration, nation building and risk
taking, not of invasion, domination and genocide. History is cleansed above the planet; unlike a group
of Native American scholars meeting in the immediate aftermath of the Apollo landing, it would never occur to
participants of workshops such as the one cited above to ‘pity the Indians and the buffalo of Outer Space’.
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The endpoint of colonialist imperialism is species extinction
Porter--98
[Robert B. Porter is Professor of Law and Director of the Tribal Law and Government Center, University of Kansas,
Chief Justice, Supreme Court of the Sac and Fox Nation, “A Proposal to the Hanodaganyas to Decolonize Federal
Indian Law,” University of Michigan Journal of Law, p. 11, 1998]
Nonetheless, this otherwise natural process was dramatically altered by colonization. These colonizing
efforts
were accomplished by force and often with great speed, producing dramatic changes within
Indigenous societies and interfering with the natural process of adaptation and change.
This disruption has had a genocidal effect; groups of Indigenous peoples that existed 500
years ago no longer exist. There should be no doubt that their extinction was not an accident – it
was the product of a concerted effort to subjugate and eliminate the native human
population in order to allow for the pursuit of wealth and manifest destiny. As a result,
extinction is the most dramatic effect of colonization. Allowed to run its full course,
colonization will disrupt and destroy the natural evolutionary process of the people being
colonized to the point of extinction.
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Alternative: Vote negative to critically interrogate the affirmative's advocacy for space
exploration and development.
Deconstructing the relationship between space advocacy and nationalist imperialism
improves space policy making by opening new analytical categories that transcend Cold
War binary divisions
Siddiqi--10
[Asif A. Siddiqi, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University, “Competing Technologies,
National(ist) Narratives, and Universal Claims: Toward a Global History of Space Exploration,” Technology and
Culture, v51, n2, pp. 425-443, April 2010]
My goal in this essay has been to explore the relationship between nationalism and spaceflight, problematize it, and, using
Although nationalist
narratives (and nationalism) have been essential to the project of space exploration and its
retelling, barring a few exceptions, space historians have not critically explored the relationship
between spaceflight and national identity.43 Deconstructing this relationship has become
more urgent as a flotilla of non-Western nations are becoming more visible in the endeavor
of space exploration, rendering the old cold-war dynamic—both in reality and in memorialization—less
effective as an explanatory tool for understanding the process of space exploration.
Deterministic explanations from the cold war often rely on simplistic binary and
oppositional divisions; although not trivial, these display their limitations as tools to fully explain the complexities of
insights from that process, suggest some possible new avenues in the practice of space history.
space exploration both during and after the cold war. Without disposing of technological determinism, I would urge historians to
incorporate a broader matrix of approaches, including, particularly, the highlighting of global flows of actors and knowledge
across borders, communities, and identities. Ultimately, this approach might lend itself to constructing for the first time a global
Since a global history would theoretically be
decentered and a nation’s space program rendered as a more nebulous transnational
process, one might expect a multitude of smaller, local, and ambiguous processes and
meanings to become visible. With a new approach grounded in a global history of
spaceflight, we might learn much more about how individuals, communities, and nations
perceive space travel, how they imbue space exploration with meaning, and especially how
those meanings are contested and repeatedly reinvented as more and more nations
articulate the urge to explore space.
and transnational history of rocketry and space travel.
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2NC/1NR Overview
The 1AC is ridden with representations of space as a final frontier to be conquered for a
predetermined end, stemming from the American mythology of "civilizing" the West. Our
Redfield evidence argues that these representations are not neutral but are tied to a legacy of
imperialism and genocide. Without interrogating the affirmative's assumptions of exploration
and development, colonialism and imperialism will spur endless wars culminating in species
extinctions--our Porter '98 evidence. Instead,
We should take a step back before enacting the plan; otherwise, our desire to colonize will
destroy all life
Lavery--92
[David M. Lavery, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Communication at Memphis State University, 1992
Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age, pp. 3-4, 1992]
Whatever our ambitions, "The Earth," Arendt hastens to remind us, remains "the very quintessence
of the human condition," and "earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe
in providing human beings with a habitat in which they move and breathe without effort
and without artifice". Now humankind seems increasingly committed to its abandonment,
intrigued by the challenge of perfecting a world ruled solely by human artifice. The desire
to explore and eventually to colonize space represents, as Arendt insists we remember, the most farreaching means yet imagined for "cutting the last tie through which man belongs among
the children of nature." Yet "there is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an
exchange," Arendt adds, "just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all
organic life on Earth". As a rational alternative to such a rash and momentous course of
action, Arendt suggested more than thirty years ago that we stop for a moment in order "to think
what we are doing". With some notable exceptions, however, few have heeded her recommendation. ("Considering the
quarter-century duration of the Space Age, its primacy in national and international affairs, and the way it has affected our lives,"
When we have
stopped at all--as we did, for example, after the Challenger disaster--it has only been to think in a
calculative, not a meditative, way: for purposes of technological reassessment or political
reappraisal, not in pursuit of wisdom, not to seek a philosophical or psychohistorical
understanding of our extraterrestrial urges prior to their enactment.
David Ehrenfeld has noted, writing in 1986, "surprisingly little intelligent thought has been devoted to it".)
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The alternative is to reject the affirmative in favor of critically interrogating the 1AC
justifications for space exploration. Our Siddiqi evidence shows how deconstructing the inherent
ties between the case and nationalist imperialism improves space policy making by better
analyzing problems and possibilities outside of current Cold War binaries. The alternative solves
100% of the case.
The affirmative can advocate space without relying on frontierism
Fernau--09
[Fletcher Fernau, International Studies, American University, “Putting U.S. Space Policy in Context, How Have
Policymakers Drawn on Existing Rhetorical Commonplaces to Legitimate U.S. Space Policy?,” Capstone Project
for Honors in International Studies, ACC. 6-21-11, May 2009, http://wrlcsun3-ge.wrlc.org/bitstream/1961/7793/1/
Fernau,%20Fletcher,%202009S.pdf]
The choice of the frontier as a symbol was not inevitable. A number of options were
available for defining a rhetorical frame for Kennedy. Some were even used to a lesser extent in his
speeches. Certainly there was the option of explicitly framing everything in the language of the Cold War and the Communist
Threat. This strategy presented a number of problems, however. Challenging Eisenhower on military credentials would have
been difficult, given his popularity and extensive World War II record, as well as Kennedy’s own relative youth and
inexperience. For all that the Kennedy campaign would harp on the idea of a missile gap, the Cold War menace as a rhetorical
commonplace did not provide the same universally acceptable and unifying rhetorical force as the frontier. Space
policy, at
least, could also have been framed as a purely scientific endeavor, thus avoiding the dangers
or controversy of militarization while still emphasizing American preeminence. However, this
was essentially what Eisenhower had done, and Kennedy’s rhetoric would have to be differentiated against the
Eisenhower/Nixon program. Furthermore, the series of stinging Soviet “firsts” in space undermined the assumption of American
technical and scientific supremacy.
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Links: Colonization Rhetoric
Using the term "colony" instead of "settlement" in space reflects an imperial history of
colonization
Anker--05
[Peder Anker, PhD in history of science from Harvard University and currently a research fellow at the Center for
Development and the Environment at University of Oslo, “The Ecological Colonization of Space,” Environmental
History, vol. 10, pp. 239-240, April 2005]
The use of colonial terminology was deliberate and in line with the imperial tradition from
which ecology as a science emerged. According to Stewart Brand, a leading defender of space colonization,
the term “space colony” (instead of “space settlement”) was unproblematic since “no Space
natives [were] being colonized.” Yet, as this article argues, when space colonies became the
model for Spaceship Earth, all human beings became “Space natives” colonized by
ecological reasoning: Social, political, moral, and historical space were invaded by
ecological science aimed at reordering ill-treated human environments according to the
managerial ideals of the astronaut’s life in the space colony. The colonialist agenda of space
research invites the use of postcolonial theory. Though hardly novel in other areas of historical research,
postcolonial analysis has yet to be applied to the history of ecology. The connection
between ecological
colonization of outer and earthly space has largely been ignored. The few historical analyses of
space ecology that do exist have hardly paid attention to its importance to ecologists’ understanding of Earth.
Scholars have rightly emphasized the significance of modeling closed ecosystems, but have
not placed this methodology in the context of ecological colonization of space. This article holds
that advocates of the Martian ecological perspective sought to create on Earth what one proponent described as a “neo-biological
civilization” at the expense of the humanist legacy, which holds that every human being has intrinsic and unique capacities,
dignity, and worth.
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We should reject using the term "colonization"
Grinspoon--04
[David Grinspoon is a NASA-funded scientist, “Bringing life to Mars: Inhabited or not, the Red Planet isn't ours to
conquer or to colonize,” Ottawa Citizen, p. A13, 12 January 2004]
But the future peopling of Mars is much more than a scientific endeavor. It is a step of
historic and spiritual importance for the human race. Any group that seeks to garner
support for human journeys to Mars must reassure people that this goal is broadly
humanistic and environmentally conscientious. There is no reason why this can't be the case. The
fanatical comments quoted above do not represent the majority view of Mars Society members: Some are credible,
thoughtful activists with an inclusive vision more likely to win wide support for continued Mars exploration. I hope
they succeed in burying the "pioneering the West" analogy before it does any more damage to the cause. While
we're at it, let's
retire the word "colonization," which carries a permanent stain, and talk
instead about the "cultivation" or "animation" or "peopling" of Mars. I know that some of
you Mars hounds will dismiss the above as a bunch of PC nonsense. Fine, but it's your
movement that is not yet taking the world by storm.
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The discourse of colonization will be modeled and replicated ecologically on earth, forming
an earth-space feedback loop of colonialism
Anker--05
[Peder Anker, PhD in history of science from Harvard University and currently a research fellow at the Center for
Development and the Environment at University of Oslo, “The Ecological Colonization of Space,” Environmental
History, vol. 10, pp. 239-240, April 2005]
Space colonization caused hardly any controversy until 1975, when royalties from the
counterculture sourcebook, The Whole Earth Catalog, were used to finance space-colonization research. In the
debate that followed, the overwhelming
majority thought space colonies could provide wellfunctioning environments for astronauts seeking to push human evolutionary expansion
into new territories, while also saving a Noah’s Ark of earthly species from industrial
destruction and possible atomic apocalypse on Earth. To supporters, space colonies came to
represent rational, orderly, and wise management, in contrast to the irrational, disorderly,
and ill-managed Earth. Some of them built Biosphere 2 in Arizona to prepare for colonization of Mars and to
create a model for how life on Earth should be organized. The skeptical minority argued that space
colonization was unrealizable or unethical, yet nevertheless adopted terminology,
technology, and methodology from space research in their efforts to reshape the social and
ecological matrix onboard Spaceship Earth.
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Links: “Destiny” Rhetoric
Describing space as "destiny" replicates American Western expansionism
Neal--94
[Valerie Neal, Department of Space History at Smithsonian Institute, former NASA Shuttle engineer, "Where Next
Columbus? The Future of Space Exploration," p. 197, 1994]
The second concept is that
it is our destiny to explore, that exploration is in our national character.
This idea of exploration is wed to the West and pioneering. Space is the "high frontier,"
and it is manifest destiny that people, especially Americans, go pioneering there. At least
one historian has pointed out that the space program has adopted only parts of the
pioneering analogy—the parts about courage, self-reliance, ingenuity, and taming the wild.
There are also valuable lessons to be learned in what went wrong in the westward expansion, but they are usually ignored when the analogy is made to the "new frontier in space."
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Links: Mars
Going to Mars under a frontier mentality dooms the mission
Grinspoon--04
[David Grinspoon is a NASA-funded scientist, “Bringing life to Mars: Inhabited or not, the Red Planet isn't ours to
conquer or to colonize,” Ottawa Citizen, p. A13, 12 January 2004]
Today on Earth we are grappling with the fact that you cannot "conquer" a planet, even if -especially if -- it is your home and your life- support system. If we go to Mars with the idea
that we can charge ahead and subdue a new world, our efforts are doomed. We should
rather study how we might learn to help cultivate a Martian Biosphere that is balanced and
self-sustaining, as is the Earth's. (On the other hand, the conquering mentality would save us time and
money. We could skip planting the Martian forests, which would eventually be chopped down anyway, and go
straight to sprawling developments of condos, strip malls, Starbucks, and Blockbuster Videos.)
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Mars advocates should abandon pioneer metaphors to gain support
Grinspoon--04
[David Grinspoon is a NASA-funded scientist, “Bringing life to Mars: Inhabited or not, the Red Planet isn't ours to
conquer or to colonize,” Ottawa Citizen, p. A13, 12 January 2004]
But the future peopling of
Mars is much more than a scientific endeavor. It is a step of
historic and spiritual importance for the human race. Any group that seeks to garner
support for human journeys to Mars must reassure people that this goal is broadly
humanistic and environmentally conscientious. There is no reason why this can't be the
case. The fanatical comments quoted above do not represent the majority view of Mars Society
members: Some are credible, thoughtful activists with an inclusive vision more likely to win
wide support for continued Mars exploration. I hope they succeed in burying the
"pioneering the West" analogy before it does any more damage to the cause. While we're at it,
let's retire the word "colonization," which carries a permanent stain, and talk instead about the "cultivation" or
"animation" or "peopling" of Mars. I know that some of you Mars hounds will dismiss the above as a bunch of PC
nonsense. Fine, but it's your movement that is not yet taking the world by storm.
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Links: NASA
Romantic imagery of frontierism undergirds NASA policies; this gets recycled through
popular culture
Keltner--07
[Kathy A. Keltner, Ph.D., Philosophy at Ohio University, “From Myth to Metaphor to Memory: A Rhetorical
Analysis of Televised Representations pf Project Apollo, 1968-2004,” A dissertation presented to the faculty of the
Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University, p. 171, June 2007]
Romanticism, as defined by Mark Byrnes, is an image that emphasizes the spectacular while
enabling the public “to escape temporarily the humdrum routine of daily life.” Pertaining
to NASA’s endeavors, romanticism addresses emotional rewards such as overcoming
challenges, inspiring to achieve greater goals, having opportunities to explore new frontiers
and to satisfy curiosity, and having the imagination to dream and to exercise spirituality in
a peaceful world. Taken further, romanticism as it was portrayed on television involves the efforts of heroic
people (astronauts and members of Mission Control), and provides the kind of excitement that enables the American
public to live vicariously through these characters who are so skillfully crafted by NASA . While the
agency
has traditionally depended on romantic images throughout its existence, they were most heavily
utilized during the Apollo years. And television, like no other medium, can deliver romantic narratives through its
ability to visualize and verbalize mythic characters, to play and replay events to the point where they become part of
the cultural fabric. The meanings of Apollo, then, are produced through the stories television continues to tell.
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Frontier mythology rhetoric is used by NASA to advance space exploration and
development
Keltner--07
[Kathy A. Keltner, Ph.D., Philosophy at Ohio University, “From Myth to Metaphor to Memory: A Rhetorical
Analysis of Televised Representations pf Project Apollo, 1968-2004,” A dissertation presented to the faculty of the
Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University, p. 171, June 2007]
“The urge to explore is
innate in man,” according to NASA, and “space has been, and will continue to be an
American frontier.” Conquering new frontiers begets innovation and fosters discoveries, and CBS capitalized
One such story that has appealed to American culture is that of a pioneering spirit.
on the recurring romantic narrative that evoked exploration and the Western frontier. As historian Roger Launius has
noted, repeated use of the frontier metaphor has
convinced the American public to support
spacefaring activities because it embodies American ideals such as democracy and optimism.
Following NASA’s rhetoric, the networks employed several strategies to incorporate this
narrative. One was to cast the astronauts, and then engineers, as modern-day Christopher Columbuses and
frontiersmen. For instance, Eric Sevareid contrasted the three Apollo 8 astronauts with Columbus. Unlike those of
Columbus’ time, modern day explorers, thanks to television, could “perhaps change us as perceptions of Europeans
In addition to being called “foreign
visitors to a new land” and “first voyagers to another world”, the astronauts’ “incredible
voyage”, enabled them to be “conquering heroes,” and “pioneers of the past”. But there
were also several references to future frontiers. While Spiro Agnew predicted that Apollo 11’s success
changed with new knowledge of the New World to the West”.
would enable man to explore Mars by the end of the century, an unknown person on the street interviewed by CBS
additionally forecasted U.S. excursions to Venus and “beyond”. If man could successfully land on Moon and return
safely home, then he could venture on to other planets as a natural progression of exploration.
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Links: Pro-Space Rhetoric/Discourse
Space policy is all about rhetorical ploys to secure American exceptionalism
Fernau--09
[Fletcher Fernau, International Studies, American University, “Putting U.S. Space Policy in Context, How Have
Policymakers Drawn on Existing Rhetorical Commonplaces to Legitimate U.S. Space Policy?,” Capstone Project
for Honors in International Studies, May 2009, http://aladinrc.wrlc.org/handle/1961/7793]
This situation underlines the relevance of constructivism as a useful lens for understanding
space policy debates. It is clear that conflict over space policy today is a rhetorical battle, not
a question of technological capability. Postmodern skepticism of American exceptionalism
coupled with the failure of successive American leaders to convincingly maintain the space-asfrontier compound commonplace, even if they occasionally tried to use its language,
explains the stagnation of further ambitious space policy initiatives and reveals the
historical contingency of space policy discourse.
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Frontierist representations of space explorers conquering the new lands are gendered and
colonialist
Williamson--87
[Ray A. Williamson worked with the Office of Technology Assessment, “Outer Space as Frontier: Lessons for
Today,” Western Folklore, Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 255-267, October 1987]
In these stories, outer space is a vast, uncharted realm, ripe for exploration and
exploitation and ready to return new information, new industries, and great material
benefit to Earth. Above all, these stories present outer space as our nation's new or final
frontier, a challenge to all who possess the fortitude and sense of adventure to carry through the vision.
America has developed and prospered economically in the context of a well-developed lore
and mythology of the western frontier that is unique to the United States and embedded
deep within its popular culture. According to this lore, the western frontier consisted of
newly discovered, open land that required only hard work and resourcefulness to conquer.
It was an exciting place to be, a land of unparalleled economic opportunity and freedom for the
few who had the strength and stamina. Women had a distinct role in the myth of the frontier, as
they accompanied their men out of love and duty. These stories cast the native inhabitants
as temporary barriers to Anglo-European economic opportunity.
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Links: Resources/Economic Growth
The drive for resources in space will lead to mass consumption that destroys the
environment; scarcity is a natural check
Cockell--07
[Charles S. Cockell, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of Geomicrobiology, Open University, Space on Earth: Saving Our
World By Seeking Others, pp. 61-62, 2007]
Of all the connections between space settlement and environmentalism, the possibility of
gathering
resources from space is perhaps the one that could have the worst effect on Earth. This
utopian view of space resources that I have just sketched — maintaining the Earth as an oasis
and developing almost limitless sources of energy and minerals — is an attractive one. There
are an increasing number of books welcoming the emergence of an environmental future when space resources will
save the Earth. But
there are many potential problems with this future. Resources brought back
to Earth might simply fuel mass consumption. One could argue that the depletion and
limitation of resources we currently have on Earth is good — it keeps the population in
check, it keeps our waste under control, and it reduces the burden on the environment. But
imagine billions of people on Earth using unlimited resources from space. The only way to stop
this unfolding age of plenitude from destroying Earth's environment would be to remove the waste produced from
all these resources back into space, but it is not clear that this will be profitable or attractive enough for anyone to
bother doing it. The promise of
limitless resources from space will threaten the Earth's
environment in potentially very serious ways.
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The frontier mentality is manifested in the drive for space resource extraction
Marshall--95
[Alan Marshall, PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wollongong, “Development and
imperialism in space,” Space Policy, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 41-52, 1995]
Why should expansionist development occur in outer space? What is there to motivate
governments and private firms to develop space? Throughout the Space Age many officials
in the US public sector, as well as many entrepreneurially minded space writers, have set
their minds on the utilization of extraterrestrial resources.’ Some industries on Earth owe their
existence (or a substantial amount of their revenue) to the utilization of space resources (for instance; the
telecommunications, weather forecasting and living marine resource industries). Other private firms owe their
success not to the utilization of space resources but to the vague pursuit of space resource utilization. Such
companies succeed by campaigning their respective governments into giving them multi-million dollar contracts
based on the precept that at some time in the future they will be able to utilize extraterrestrial resources
Perhaps the most frequently elaborated rationale from human space expansion
is the pursuit of new raw materials - raw materials which on Earth are unavailable or have
become enormously rare. From this perspective, development in space is based upon the
search for resources. Historical precedents for such a model can be cited to support this
idea. For instance, British colonialism in South East Asia secured a ready supply of tin for England’s industrial
commercially.
revolution. American economic imperialism in Latin America supplied the USA’s burgeoning automobile industry
with cheap rubber during the early twentieth century.
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The drive for space resources will cause massive overconsumption
Marshall--95
[Alan Marshall, PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wollongong, “Development and
imperialism in space,” Space Policy, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 41-52, 1995]
Those that advocate the development of the solar system in the search for raw materials
often appeal to the neo-Malthusianism with regards to the need to find ever more resources
to satiate the expanding population of planet Earth. Although the grand plan to develop outer space so
as to remedy an over-populated and resource deficient world reeks of dubious economic principles, and transparent
self-interest, Malthusian
sentiments are still widely held by those within the astronautics
industry (especially by those charged with promoting the virtues of the industry). Even if resource
depletion was directly linked to the population of the planet, the development of even more
resources is not likely to provide for the necessities of most of the world’s people. New
resources contribute to the consumptive wants of the wealthy, not to the needs of the
populous poor.
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Links: Science/Technology Gains
Claims of advancing science and technology are hollow justifications for space, whichis a
colonial project of empire building
Siddiqi--10
[Asif A. Siddiqi, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at Fordham University, “Competing Technologies,
National(ist) Narratives, and Universal Claims: Toward a Global History of Space Exploration,” Technology and
Culture, v51, n2, pp. 425-443, April 2010]
Essential to this tension between the more specific narrative and the universal claim in the
case of the space program is the perceived importance of technological prowess in the
construction of a national identity. While the notion that scientific prowess is a constitutive
element of national identity goes back to at least the seventeenth century, the
Enlightenment strongly reinforced this relationship in the European context. By the late
nineteenth century, with the fruits of the Industrial Revolution evident and the appearance of a distinct category of
technology, many of the rationales used in favor of science were even more persistently applied to technology and
its essential role in the enterprise of nation-building. And,
as the European colonial project reached its
peak, the discussion over modern technology became inseparable from empire-building;
technology, in effect, became a dominant metric of modernity—Michael Adas’s “measure of men.”
By the early twentieth century, and especially in the light of experiences during WorldWar I, technology assumed a
fundamental role in the projection of national prowess, a role that was now further complicated by the specter of
international competition for global dominance—through science, technology, war, and imperial holdings. In his
study of the relationship between technology and modernity in early-twentieth-century Britain and Germany,
Bernhard Rieger notes that “[t]echnological innovations not only underpinned the competitiveness of national
economies as well as both countries’ military might; a large range of artifacts also became national symbols and
prestige objects that signaled international leadership in a variety of engineering disciplines.”
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Frontierism Kritik
Nationalistic calls for technological competitiveness from space reflect a frontier mentality
Marshall--95
[Alan Marshall, PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wollongong, “Development and
imperialism in space,” Space Policy, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 41-52, 1995]
In the recent past, nationalist and populist calls for an increase in the US space effort were
often imbued with ideological stances aimed at the activities of the USSR in space. Only two
years before the onset of glasnost, American space advocates tried to ressurrect a flailing US space interest by
appealing to intrinsic ideological sentiments of the US public. James Michener stated ‘I am increasingly disturbed
by the Soviet Union’s constantly widening lead in the utilization of low-Earth-orbit flight’ and Jerry Grey stated
‘Those goals, set by the Soviet Union even before the US formed NASA in 19.58, focus on the permanent
occupancy of space by Soviet cosmonauts and eventual domination of the entire cosmos by the Soviet Union’. Since
the break-up of the USSR in September 1991, the efficacy of campaigning for more US space activities on the basis
of a fear of a ‘Commie cosmos’ has diminished considerably. That, in turn, means a direct lessening in the role of
Now, those
who appeal to nationalist sentiment in order to increase the space effort have to resort to
arguments based upon the resurrection of American technological primacy in the face of
European and East Asian competition, and upon appealing to the ‘frontierism’ supposedly
entrenched in the American psyche as being responsible for the nation’s economic and
political greatness.
nationalism as a force in promoting solar system development, but certainly not to its evaporation.
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Frontierism Kritik
Links: Space/Frontier Mentality
Space expansion and development operate from a frontier mentality
Marshall--99
[Alan Marshall holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wollongong, "Gaining a share
of the final frontier", Technology and Public Participation, pp. 231-247, 1999]
Frontiersmen never die, they just drift off into space. So may read the bumpersticker of
space expansionists since for them space development is classed as the final frontier. It is the
next and ultimate step in an expansionist saga that has seen Europeans sail to the shores of the
New World and then drift relentlessly and purposefully westward across continental North
America. According to many space frontierists, just as the western frontier opened up new
land, new resources, new ideas, new freedoms and new and better technologies during the
first centuries of European presence in America, so the coming centuries of space
expansion will do the same.
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Frontierism Kritik
Links: Space Policy
The entire foundation of the US space program is rooted in nationalism
Marshall--95
[Alan Marshall holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wollongong, “Development and
imperialism in space,” Space Policy, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 41-52, 1995]
Nationalism has been the background against which the US space programme has gained
much of its popular support. The Kennedy and Johnson Administrations were able to tap
into the political mileage to be gained from space travel. In the face of an attack on
American national prestige by the Soviet Union’s space exploits nationalist sentiments were
easily excited to gain support for a space programme that would reaffirm the USA’s
technological prowess. Technological achievements are tangible examples of the superiority
of a society, or so many a political leader has sought to convince its subjects. The Kruschev
regime, too, held that the technological success of the Sputnik and Vostok projects clearly demonstrated the
superiority of the Soviet communist system. Throughout many periods of imperialist history, nationalism has
been an essential driving force. As Mommsen declares ‘Sometimes statesmen were far less inclined to
engage in costly overseas ventures than were those sections of the population, including the masses, who were
tempted by vague future greatness and economic advantage’. This situation may well apply to modern day USA, in
which the repeated public calls for a massive reassertment of America’s space programme are repeatedly ignored by
the US senate, who show a bias towards ‘prudent’ management of the federal budget rather than the future imperial
glory of the USA in space. It might be claimed that the lack of receptivity of the US Senate to vast popular
sentiments shows the inadequacy of America’s political structures in matters of representation. This may indeed be
the case, but it seems likely that the main reason populism is not successfully spurring on Solar System space
development is because space development is not popular enough.
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Impacts: Colonialism/Empire
Space exploration is the apex of modernity, where the local is erased under the new
privileged "global" empire of colonialism from above
Redfield--02
[Peter Redfield is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, “The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space,” Social Studies of Science, v. 32, pp. 791-85, 2002]
In this paper, I take a related but slightly different tack, emphasizing degrees of distance within locality, and
examining intersections of place, power and time implicit in the location and operation of a vast technical network.
For if we incorporate colonial history into our considerations of science and technology, do we not always,
My focus
will rest directly on the spatial edge between metaphor and materiality used to distinguish
global and local: the planet, united and bounded by its atmospheric limit, revealed and
transcended by technoscience. The general argument I will advance here is that outer space reflects a
practical shadow of empire. I mean by this two things. The first is that space represents a kind of
stabilization of ‘elsewhere’, and its removal from the globe. From the very inception of
influential modern dreams of space exploration, the masculine adventure of earthly
colonialism was a constant referent, and the temporal pairing of rocket launches and the
greatest anti-colonial movements only accentuated the parallel. Indeed, the realization of
outer space – its initial domestication if you will – represents the effective provincialization of
terrestrial empire from above. Once a few white men moved beyond the atmosphere they
became newly, artificially human by virtue of the nonhuman space around them, cast as
universal representatives by virtue of their transcendent, hazardous location. Once
extended beyond the planet, modernity acquired the possibility of another geographic
frame, intermingled with a new temporal order. Whatever the past may have been, the future was
continually, need to ask what it might mean for something to be somewhere relative to somewhere else?
clearly out there, and everything else a local concern. Aliens became extraterrestrials.
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Impacts: Colonialism/Global Racism
US colonialism globalizes racial hierarchies, which is the root cause of all war and genocide
Batur--07
[Pinar Batur, PhD, Professor of Scociology at Vassar, “The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide,”
Handbook of the The Soiology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 441-443, 2007]
The terms of exclusion were set by the institutions that fostered and maintained
segregation, but the intensity of exclusion, and redundancy, became more apparent in the
age of advanced capitalism, as an extension of post-colonial discipline. The exclusionary measures
when tested led to war, and genocide. Although, more often than not, genocide was perpetuated and
fostered by the post-colonial institutions, rather than colonizing forces, the colonial identification of the
“inferior other” led to segregation, then exclusion, then war and genocide. Violence glued
them together into seamless continuity. Violence is integral to understanding global racism.
Fanon (1963), in exploring colonial oppression, discusses how divisions created or reinforced by
colonialism guarantee the perpetuation, and escalation, of violence for both the colonizer and
colonized. Racial differentiations, cemented through the colonial relationship, are integral to
the aggregation of violence during and after colonialism: “Manichaeism [division of the
universe into opposites of good and evil] goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes”.
Within this dehumanizing framework, Fanon argues that the violence resulting from the destruction of
everyday life, sense of self and imagination under colonialism continues to infest the post-colonial
existence by integrating colonized land into the violent destruction of a new “geography of
hunger” and exploitation. The “geography of hunger” marks the context and space in which oppression and
exploitation continue. The historical maps drawn by colonialism now demarcate the boundaries of post-colonial
arrangements. The white racial frame restructures this space to fit the imagery of symbolic racism, modifying it to fit
the television screen, or making the evidence of the necessity of the politics of exclusion, and the violence of war
and genocide, palatable enough for the front page of newspapers, spread out next to the morning breakfast cereal.
Two examples of this “geography of hunger and exploitation” are Iraq and New Orleans.
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Impacts: Ethics Extension
Absent ethics, politics becomes the discourse of the powerful, justifying infinite violence
Lutz--2000
[Donald S. Lutz, professor of political science at the University of Houston, “Political Theory and Constitutional
Construction,” Political Theory and Partisan Politics, pp. 36-37, 2000]
to the extent such a discussion between political theorists and
politicians does not take place we damage the prospects for marrying justice with power.
Since the hope of uniting justice with power was the reason for creating political philosophy in the first place, political
theorists need to pursue the dialogue as part of what justifies their intellectual project. Politics is the realm of power. More specifically it is the realm where force and violence are
replaced by debates and discussion about how to implement power. Without the
meaningful injection of considerations of justice, politics tends to become discourse by the
most powerful about how to implement their preferred regime. Although constitutionalism tends to be
The position argued here is that
disparaged by contemporary political science, a constitution is the very place where justice and power are married.
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We’ll take everything good & bad about human culture. Ethical consciousness before space
is essential
Genta and Rycroft--03
[Giancarlo Genta, Technical Univ. of Turin, Italy AND Michael Rycroft, Int’l Space Univ., Strasbourg, France &
DeMontfort Univ, Leicaster, UK, "Space, the Final Frontier?" p. 359, 2003]
we must not delude ourselves into thinking that technological progress
automatically leads to our moral improvement. When our frontiers enlarge, and include
new horizons far from our original planet, humans will carry with them all their good and
evil. For this reason our ethics have to develop too, particularly if during this expansion in
space we come into contact with unexpected lifeforms or new forms of intelligence.
So let us now rise from the planet where humankind started its adventure to face our
future challenges and responsibilities as a space-faring species.
As a final consideration,
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Our ethical orientation necessarily determines space policies
Sadeh and Lester--03
[Eligar Sadeh, Prof. of Space Studies, Univ. of North Dakota, and James P. Lester, Former Professor of Political
Science, Colorado State University, Space Politics and Policy: An Evolutionary Perspective, Ch. 8: “Space and the
Environment,” p. 155, 2003]
Ethics, as a distinctive feature of humans to reflect and question the justification, motivation, contents,
significance, and repercussions of their actions, is particularly necessary in the space field now that
space has become accessible to human beings. Ethical questions condition the acceptability
of policies and plans in space. “Space ethics” raise increasingly important questions that
include a concern for the extraterrestrial environment. Important questions to consider include: what
is the role of human beings in the cosmos; how can links between Earth and space be organized; who is to determine
the priorities and choices of science and on the basis of which objectives to society; and what is the level of moral
responsibility to which individuals, groups, organizations, and governments must aspire for present and future
generations.
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Impacts: Imperialism/Ethnocentrism
The frontier mentality embeds space exploration with an ethnocentric ontology that
replicates the legacy of colonial imperialism
Marshall--99
[Alan Marshall holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wollongong, "Gaining a share
of the final frontier", Technology and Public Participation, pp. 231-247, 1999]
It is debatable whether these people are basing their ideology upon sound premises. It can be argued, for instance,
that at best intellectual, humanitarian and technological progress was quite independent of expansion across the
Atlantic and across the West and that at worst such expansion only gave rise to and reflected the oppressiveness of
European ideas and technology. An
entrenched ethnocentrism is contained within the frontierist
attitude to space expansion. There are two great modern stories of westward expansion.
One is of glorious and civilised Euro-American discovery and settlement and the other is of
imperialist victimisation of colonised peoples. It is questionable whether either of these two stories is
adequate when dealing with the many local and enormously heterogeneous histories of North American people, but
the point is that space frontierists
only ever adopt one of these two great stories: that of grand
and glorious European expansion. In the many writings of space frontierists there is hardly
a sentence acknowledging the plight of colonised peoples in the face of such expansion,
except when it comes to rebutting the legitimacy of the alternative story. Space frontierists
feel safe in reinvigorating the ideas of frontierism because there are no indigenes on the
other planets. Thus imperialism can forevermore be excised from the final frontier because
there will be no victims in its pursuit. In this last point, however, they may be grossly
mistaken.
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Frontierism Kritik
Impacts: Imperialism/Ideological Exclusion
Participation in space will be controlled by technological elites who glorify missions along
silencing lines of ideological and cultural exclusion; a frontierist mentality masks the
imperialist motives behind their impacts
Marshall--99
[Alan Marshall holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wollongong, "Gaining a share
of the final frontier", Technology and Public Participation, pp. 231-247, 1999]
It is apparent that if you are interested in space development in the solar system you can
participate in it in only indirect ways. Either (a) you get yourself into a position that enables you to
formulate space policy, (b) you make do with being happy about receiving the audio-visual and scientific results
from projects that others plan, (c) you campaign for those others to do what you want, or (d) you follow some
misguided effort to do it by yourself. These realities expose a cavernous deficiency in the way that participation in
national space policy is formulated. This
lack of participation in formulating space policy may be
paralleled with equally deficient participation with regards to the global distribution of
future space benefits. This realm, of international participation, can be regarded as perhaps the most important
avenue of participation, not because it necessarily guarantees citizen participation in formulating space policy but
because it has the potential (conferred upon it by international law) to decide how the final frontier and its
accompanying material benefits may be shared. Though any one nation has myriads of barriers that stand in the way
of citizen participation in the formulation of space policy, it could be argued that even if these were resolved in your
favour you would soon come up against barriers against participation at the international level. There is within the
international realm a variety of conflicting views with regards to space development scenarios. Watching these
proposed scenarios clash exposes the significantly anti-participatory schemes at work in particular governments.
Though couched in terms of peace and inclusiveness the legal regimes emerging from the
machinations of international politics firmly veer the future of space in an imperialistic
direction, where the commonly owned resources of the solar system become entrenched in
the hands of a technological elite. At work to glorify such extraterrestrial technocracy is a
continuing ideological attachment to frontierism. Space frontierists speak of the rational
and renaissance character of space development much as those humanists of old heralded
the worldwide expansion of Europeans as the civilised dispersal of an enlightened culture
and nothing but. In so doing they become not only the ideologues of a misjudged past and
the silencers of alternative histories, but also the progenitors of future imperialism.
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Frontierism Kritik
Ideological exclusion replicates racialized physical exclusion; this is the logic of annihilation
of the other that manifests itself in institutionalized racial inequality and genocide
Batur--07
[Pinar Batur, PhD, Professor of Scociology at Vassar, “The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide,”
Handbook of the The Soiology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 449, 2007]
Exclusion in physical space is only matched by exclusion in the imagination, and racialized
exclusion has an internal logic leading to the annihilation of the excluded. Annihilation, in
this sense, is not only designed to maintain the terms of racial inequality, both ideologically
and physically, but is institutionalized with the vocabulary of self-protection. Even though the
terms of exclusion are never complete, genocide is the definitive point in the exclusionary racial
ideology, and such is the logic of the outcome of the exclusionary process, that it can
conclude only in ultimate domination. War and genocide take place with compliant
efficiency to serve the global racist ideology with dizzying frequency. The 21st century opened up
with genocide, in Darfur.
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Impacts: Imperialism/Racism
US imperialism operates under zones of racial exclusion; exceptionalist discourse charts
the cartography of Empire
Flanagan, et al.--08
[John Flanagan, Fellow at the University of Washington, et al., “Representing Permanent War,” New Centennial
Review, Vol. 8 No 2, 2008, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v008/8.2.feldman.html]
The concept “imperial formation,” recently distilled by Ann Laura Stoler, captures the mobile terrain on which these
battles for an anti-racist historical legibility have been waged. Imperial
formation suggests the shifting
degrees of rights, scale, rule, and violence through which the state projects sovereignty both
within and outside internationally agreed upon borders. They are “macropolities whose technologies of
rule thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and changing proliferation .”
They “thrive on turbid taxonomies that produce shadow populations and ever-improved coercive measures to protect
the common good against those deemed threats to it. Finally, imperial
formations give rise both to new
zones of exclusion and new sites of—and social groups with—privileged exemption” (2006,
128). This theory of the shifting cartography of empire as one built on differential forms of
exclusion and exemption that operate through racist social structures begins to help us see how
SNCC and, increasingly, many others involved in the black freedom movement began to see in Palestine “facts . . . that pertain to
our struggle here.” A critique of the widespread discourse of U.S. support for Palestine’s occupation could challenge the staid
exceptionalist arguments that the United States and Israel were somehow unique in achieving their philosophical commitments
and political practices of freedom and democracy. Indeed, U.S. exceptionalist discourse, as Stoler and David Bond
cogently note—and the black freedom movement’s post-1967 engagement with Palestine gives depth, complexity, and specificity
to—“has historically constructed
places exempt from scrutiny and peoples partially excluded
from rights” (2006, 95), what Etienne Balibar calls “a fluctuating combination of continued
exteriorization and ‘internal exclusion’”.
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Frontierism Kritik
Impacts: Imperialism/Spanos
Western modes of thinking seek to gain ontological dominion over the planet; reject the
affirmative's drive for an imperial truth
Spanos--2000
[William V. Spanos, professor of English and Comparative Literature, Binghamton University, "America’s Shadow:
Anatomy of An Empire," p. 61, 2000]
If the genealogy of the triumphalist imperial thinking I have undertaken in this chapter teaches us anything at all, it
is to take this telling "qualification" of the end-of-history discourse seriously. Doing so puts one in a position to
perceive not only the inordinately persuasive power of this kind of contradiction-defying "technological" thinking,
but also its weakness, a weakness that up to now has been obscured by oppositional discourses that contradictorily
think resistance in the logic prescribed by the dominant thought of the Enlightenment, the very thought they would
oppose. If, indeed, the highly
prized Western consciousness as such is a technological optical
machine of conquest, if the Western will to know is simultaneously a will to total power, if
the Western subject in fact defines itself as "I think; therefore I conquer ," and if it is this imperial
ocularcentric Western mode of thinking that has gained complete discursive dominion over
the planet, then surely in this interregnum the time has come for those who would
effectively resist the practical fulfillment of the Pax Metaphysica as the Pax Americana to
return to the site of ontology as point of departure. I mean the site of Heidegger's de-struction and of
the deconstruction of those like Derrida, Levinas, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, and others whose thought—
even their critique of Heidegger's—Heidegger's catalyzed.
In thus calling for such a "step back," I am
not positing the ontological in opposition to the other more "political" sites that,
admittedly, these thinkers originally neglected or rarefied. I am suggesting, rather, that the
"triumphant" liberal/capitalist democratic culture's overdetermination of the "truth" (the
correspondence of mind and thing) in justifying its "triumph" has rendered a rigorous analysis of
the ontological ground of this imperial truth an imperative of political resistance against
the New World Order, the Pax Americana, that would follow this Pax Metaphysica. I mean
an analysis such as that inaugurated in the post- Vietnam decade by these
"postmetaphysical" thinkers, but this time reconstellated into the context of the global
imperial politics enabled by metaphysical thinking in its fulfilled
technological/instrumental phase.
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Impacts: Planetary Destruction
IN TRYING TO SATISFY OUR DESIRE FOR COLONIZATION WE WILL DESTROY
PLANETS
Lavery--92
[David M. Lavery, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Communication at Memphis State University, "Late for the Sky:
The Mentality of the Space Age," pp. 48-49, 1992]
Spacekind's desire to explore and eventually to colonize the cosmos may be, Eiseley
hypothesizes, our response to a primordial urge within us and not merely the logical culmination of our
tremendous scientific and technological achievements. "Perhaps," Eiseley suggests, "man has evolved as a creature
whose centrifugal tendencies are intended to drive it as a blight is lifted and driven outward across the night". (The
explanation of the source of this urge, Eiseley liked to think, may lie in the old theory of the Swedish chemist
Arrhenius that life on Earth originated from spores falling from outer space, the desire to launch into space then
being the result of a longing to return home.) But
"to climb the fiery ladder that the spore bearers
have used," to reach that point in our evolutionary, historical, and technological
development when space travel even becomes a possibility, it has been necessary, as Eiseley
reminds us, to first "consume the resources of a world," to become what he calls world eaters, all
in order to hurl only a few spore-individuals into the reaches of space, where, as is the case
with the slime molds, only a handful will survive. History, Eiseley endeavors to show, is therefore an
"invisible pyramid"--an all-consuming project, secretly enslaved to a monomaniacal yearning: to construct the
means for leaving the planet Earth.
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Add On: Capitalism
THE RHETORIC OF SPACE EXPLORATION AND DEVELOPMENT EXPANDS
STATE POWER AND CAPITALISM
Fernau--09
[Fletcher Fernau, International Studies, American University, “Putting U.S. Space Policy in Context, How Have
Policymakers Drawn on Existing Rhetorical Commonplaces to Legitimate U.S. Space Policy?,” Capstone Project
for Honors in International Studies, May 2009, http://wrlcsun3-ge.wrlc.org/bitstream/1961/7793/1/
Fernau,%20Fletcher,%202009S.pdf]
Space development has incontrovertibly had a tremendous effect on the capabilities of the
American state. Yet space exploration has so far failed to deliver fully on the promises of
the frontier commonplace myth. Launius and McCurdy suggest: “Invoking the ideas of Frederick Jackson
Turner has become increasingly counterproductive for anyone attempting to carry on a discourse in a postmodern,
multicultural society.” Linda Billings echoes this thinking: The rhetoric
of space advocacy has sustained
an ideology of American exceptionalism and reinforced longstanding beliefs in progress,
growth, and capitalist democracy. This rhetoric conveys an ideology of spaceflight that can
be described, at its worst, as a sort of space fundamentalism. . . Although the social, political,
economic, and cultural context for space exploration has changed radically since the 1960s, the rhetoric of space
advocacy has not. [ellipses in original]
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The frontier mentality cannot be divorced from capitalist imperialism; the affirmative's
advocacy uses socio-psychological illusions to support the ideology of capital
Marshall--95
[Alan Marshall holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wollongong, “Development and
imperialism in space,” Space Policy, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 41-52, 1995]
In reality frontierism is
a more accepted and socially-sensitive word for capitalist
imperialism, since (just as in capitalist imperialism) it involves the appropriation of economic
resources that are considered previously unowned. Like capitalist imperialism, frontierism
perceives nothing of value in the frontier lands except what can be scraped from it
economically and converted into capital. In nineteenth-century USA, the value of native peoples
and the value of the landscape was arrogantly ignored as the West was made to succumb to
the utilitarianism of the imperialistic capitalists. Such is also the outlook of those who advocate
pioneering the ‘Final Frontier’. Frontierists views that the planets and moons of the solar system
are valueless hunks of rock until acted upon by humans to produce economic value and
contribute to capital accumulation. Space frontierists such as Wernher von Braun, Arthur C Clark,
Kraft Ehrick, William Hartmann and Gerard O’Neill feel that imperialism can be excised from their
frontierism by appealing to the innate curiosity in our personal consciousness. To them,
frontierism in space will amply channel the human propensity to explore and expand in a
constructive and benevolent way. These rationales for space expansion must, however, stand up for
themselves, since they are ultimately separate from the frontierism experienced in history. The fact that there
is confusion between these socio-psychological elements and the actual economic nature of
fronterism in modern day calls for space development gives credit to the nineteenth
century idealogues who so convincingly tied bourgeois economic policy with populist
ideology that it continues to fool so many into believing fronterism is a worthy nationalist
(even universalist) ideal.
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The impact is extinction via imperialist wars; the negative meets the consequences of the
affirmative framework as well
Harvey--06
[David Harvey is a Professor of Anthropology City University of New York, The Limits to Capital, p. 438, 2006]
At times of savage devaluation, interregional rivalries typically degenerate into struggles
over who is to bear the burden of devaluation. The export of unemployment, of inflation, of idle
productive capacity becomes the stakes in the game. Trade wars, dumping interest rate wars, restrictions on capital
flow and foreign exchange, immigration policies, colonial conquest, the subjugation and domination
of tributary economies, the forced reorganization of the division of labor within economic
empires, and, finally, the physical destruction and forced devaluation of a rival’s capital
through war are some methods at hand. Each entails the aggressive manipulation of some aspect of
economic, financial or state power. The politics of imperialism, the sense that the contradictions of
capitalism can be cured through world domination by some omnipotent power, surges to
the forefront. The ills of capitalism cannot so easily be contained. Yet the degeneration of economic
into political struggles plays its part in the long-run stabilization of capitalism, provided
enough capital is destroyed en route. Patriotism and nationalism have many functions in
the contemporary world and may arise for diverse reasons; but they frequently provide a
most convenient cover for the devaluation of both capital and labor. We will shortly return to this
aspect of matters since it is, I believe, by far the most serious threat, not only to the survival of
capitalism (which matters not a jot), but to the survival of the human race.
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Resisting capitalism’s reliance on economic evaluation is the ultimate ethical responsibility;
the current social order guarantees social exclusion on a global scale
Zizek and Daly--04
[Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Zizek, pp. 14-16, 2004]
our ethicopolitical responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism
and its obscene naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it
throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture – with all its pieties concerning
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that
‘multiculturalist’ etiquette – Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called ‘radically incorrect’ in the sense that it
break with these types of positions 7 and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today’s social reality: the
principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety.
For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political
morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffee, crucial theoretical advances
have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that
the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties
surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of
implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism
can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition
conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek’s point is
rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and
destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx’s central insight that
in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the
politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that
system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the
gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose ‘universalism’ fundamentally reproduces and
depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world’s populations. In
this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes
of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a
neutral market place. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist
regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the
human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded ‘life-chances’ cannot be
calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains
mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’). And Zizek’s point is that this
mystification is magnified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses
and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a
culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political
boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek argues for
a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of
social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism
can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to have any meaning),
what is novel about Zizek’s universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or
reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a ‘glitch’ in an otherwise sound matrix.
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Frontierism Kritik
Neo-liberal capitalism fosters a biopolitics that necessitates the death of entire populations
and destroys the global environment
Giroux--06
[Henry A.Giroux, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University, Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2006]
Antidemocratic tendencies gain power as forces such as labor unions "that once constrained corporate economic and
political power"19 are dissolved. As the United States wages a relentless attack on union membership at home,
which now constitutes a mere 7.9 percent of the labor force in the private sector, it reinforces the neoliberal backlash
against organized labor throughout the globe (though with increasing resistance in Latin America). At the same
time, the rabid neoliberalism of the Bush administration fuels global policies that threaten the environment,
especially in light of the Bush government's refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, designed to control greenhouse gas
emissions and reduce global warming. In addition, the United States was the only nation to oppose the International
Plan for Cleaner Energy put forth by the Group of Eight (G8) in 2001. Once again, the authoritarianism of
the Bush government represents a poisonous form of biopolitics in which unnecessary
deaths appear utterly reasonable, especially if the "disposable populations" interfere with
the system of accumulation under globalized monopoly capitalism. Waste, growing
inequality, global warming, the rise in world sea levels, the decline of ecosystems on earth,
and the extinction of many plant and animal species appear to the Bush administration to
be a small price to pay for promoting the logic and reaping the rewards of market
fundamentalism. And the consequences affect not just the United States but the entire globe,
especially those nations that are defenseless to protect themselves from the toxins, waste,
environmental damage, and economic looting affecting their villages, cities, neighborhoods,
and daily lives. Under such circumstances, hope is foreclosed, and it becomes difficult either to imagine a life
beyond capitalism or to believe in a politics that takes democracy seriously.
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The logic of neoliberal capital prefigures social relations and guarantees error replication; you're
only happy or perceive value to life because neoliberalism told you it was profitable
Giroux and Giroux--06
[Henry A. Giroux is the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University and Susan
Searls Giroux is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, “Challenging
Neoliberalism's New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies]
Neoliberalism has become one of the most pervasive and dangerous ideologies of the
twenty-first century. Its pervasiveness is evident not only by its unparalleled influence on the global economy
but also in its power to redefine the very nature of politics and sociality. Free market fundamentalism
rather than democratic idealism is now the driving force of economics and politics in most
of the world. Its logic, moreover, has insinuated itself into every social relationship, such that the
specificity of relations between parents and children, doctors and patients, teachers and students has been reduced to
that of supplier and customer. It
is a market ideology driven not just by profits but also by an
ability to reproduce itself with such success that, to paraphrase Fred Jameson, it is easier to
imagine the end of the world than the end of neoliberal capitalism. Wedded to the belief that the
market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an
Under
neoliberalism, everything is either for sale or is plundered for profit: Public lands are
looted by logging companies and corporate ranchers; politicians willingly hand the public’s airwaves
over to powerful broadcasters and large corporate interests without a dime going into the
public trust; the environment is polluted and despoiled in the name of profit-making just as the
incessant attack on democracy, public goods, the welfare state, and noncommodified values.
government passes legislation to make it easier for corporations to do so; what public services have survived the
Reagan-Bush era are gutted to lower the taxes of major corporations (or line their pockets through no-bid contracts,
as in the infamous case of Halliburton); schools more closely resemble either jails or high-end shopping malls,
depending on their clientele, and teachers are forced to get revenue for their school by hawking everything from
hamburgers to pizza parties.
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Alternative: Solves Frontierism
Pursuing space without frontierism avoids state expansionism
Fernau--09
[Fletcher Fernau, International Studies, American University, “Putting U.S. Space Policy in Context, How Have
Policymakers Drawn on Existing Rhetorical Commonplaces to Legitimate U.S. Space Policy?,” Capstone Project
for Honors in International Studies, May 2009, http://wrlcsun3-ge.wrlc.org/bitstream/1961/7793/1/
Fernau,%20Fletcher,%202009S.pdf]
The rhetorical capital of the frontier can be used to harness public support for otherwise
prohibitively costly government programs. Historically, the perceived need for territorial
expansion, sometimes expressed through the rhetoric of manifest destiny, served to
legitimate government sponsored projects to build state capacities. Examples include the purchase
of large swathes of western land to be turned over to settlers, railroad land grants and subsidies, the Panama Canal,
and the maintenance of a frontier military presence. In the same way,
deploying the frontier in public
rhetoric has been used to legitimate costly space exploration programs which in turn have
led to the expansion of state capacities. To a greater or lesser degree, government investment in space
programs fueled scientific and technological innovation, spurred a generation of American students to study science,
expanded the state’s military capabilities, and drove globalization. These effects, particularly because so many were
largely unforeseen, might not have sufficed to generate public support for the policies that led to them. The
rhetorical power of the frontier acted (at least under Kennedy) as a mythic cover for statebuilding through the space program just as it had for America’s western expansion.
42
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Alternative: Solves Recursive Violence
ONLY QUESTIONING THE FRONTIER MENTALITY CAN AVOID THE INFINITE
DESTRUCTION OF A SPACEFARING SPECIES
Lavery--92
[David M. Lavery, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Communication at Memphis State University, "Late for the Sky:
The Mentality of the Space Age," p. 18, 1992]
While Brand thinks an extraterrestrial existence will teach humankind ecological wisdom-- he is
impressed by
the small-scale simplicity, the appropriate technology demanded by life in O'Neill's self-contained colonies-Berry sees in the birth of a universal species only a blank check for new destructiveness.
O'Neill's scheme has been forged in ignorance of what Berry calls "the moral law of the
frontier": that "humans are destructive in proportion to the supposition of abundance; if
they are faced with infinite abundance, then they will become infinitely destructive". "Mr.
O'Neill has apparently never thought to ask," Berry observes, "what good might be accomplished by the
proliferation in space of a mentality that cannot forebear to do anything at all that is
possible". Taking care to note that O'Neill's advocacy of ecology is accompanied by plans to mine the planets and
bring raw materials and cosmic energy back to Earth, Berry finds him guilty of "the thug morality of the
technological specialist, by which we blandly assume that we must do anything that we can do" and demands to
know "Do we not live in a universe? Is there no ecology of the heavens?"
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Permutation Answers
The perm is still embedded in nationalist rhetoric; either the aff perm is severance or the
plan doesn't solve
Siddiqi--10
[Asif A. Siddiqi, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at Fordham University, “Competing Technologies,
National(ist) Narratives, and Universal Claims: Toward a Global History of Space Exploration,” Technology and
Culture, v51, n2, pp. 425-443, April 2010]
In the fifty years since the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957, more than 6,000 functioning satellites have been
launched into Earth orbit and beyond—some to the farthest reaches of our solar system. By
its physical nature,
space exploration has a resonance beyond national borders—at a fundamental level, it is a
project that transcends national claims and ap- peals to the global, perhaps even to the
universal. Yet our understanding of the half-century of space travel is still firmly rooted in
the framework of the national imagination. Until now, barring very few exceptions, only nation- states
have been able to mobilize the resources necessary for regular access to space. For most laypersons, the
perceived apotheosis of space explo- ration remains the heady days after Sputnik, when the
United States and the Soviet Union competed to trump the other in a series of progressively more complex feats in
space. The cold-war space race retains
its mystique, either as a benchmark that subsequent
accomplishments could never equal, or as an anomaly whose particular conditions could
never be repeated. It has, in fact, become impossible to think of space exploration without
allusion to the halcyon days of the 1960s and equally inconceivable for historians to interpret
the act of space travel without the space race hovering over the very language that we use.
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The permutation cannot be separated from the frontier rhetoric used to justify the plan;
the 1AC operates within a cultural context of romanticized mythologies
Billings--08
[Linda Billings, research professor at the George Washington Univ. School of Media and Public Affairs and
communication research for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) astrobiology program
in the Science Mission Directorate, “Chapter 25: Overview: Ideology, Advocacy, and Spaceflight—Evolution of a
Cultural Narrative,” Societal impact of spaceflight, p. 487, 2008]
According to rhetorical critic Janice hocker rushing, “rhetorical narratives are discourses which explicitly or
implicitly advocate moral choices.” rushing has said that the meanings of “definitional [american] cultural myths,”
such as the
myths of the Western frontier and the space frontier, are a source of identity and
“moral vision.” rushing noted that the United States “has drawn upon the frontier for its mythic
identity,”20 or moral imperative, as Mcdougall called it. in this mythic universe, the cultural role of the
explorer—the frontier conqueror, as it were—is, as Stephen Pyne has said, to serve as “a moral
missionary, telling others and his sustaining civilization who they are and how they ought
to behave.” From the start, advocates constructed a narrative of spaceflight that made it a necessary, even
biologically driven, enterprise. But, as pyne has pointed out, spaceflight and other modes of exploration
are not in our genes but in our culture. “exploration cannot be extracted from the historical
and cultural context within which it occurs.” It is “a specific invention of specific
civilizations conducted at specific historical times.” advocates of U.S. spaceflight have
created their own frontier mythology, as limerick has noted, expanding the story of Western
american settlement to encompass space exploration and problems have ensued because, as Pyne has
said, “discovery among the planets is qualitatively different from the discovery of continents and seas.”22
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The government has a vested interest in maintaining the imperialist notion of the plan – the
perm links and ensures that the public will be more unconcerned with the problems of
everyday life.
Marshall--95
[Alan Marshall holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wollongong, “Development and
imperialism in space,” Space Policy, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 41-52, 1995]
Although the expansion into space would be carried out using contracted private entities,
their funding would come from the state. Such a protected industry can only survive if the government
believes that the industry is strategically important (in either a political or military sense). The presiding
government may also realize the political mileage to be gained by pursuing expansionist
space policies. For example, the Apollo Program may have drawn considerable public
attention away from the ills of 1960s America (Vietnam, race relations strife and poverty,
etc.) just as Bismarck's expansionist agenda drew the attention of the German masses away from domestic problems
in the 1880s. With the eyes of the people focused skywards, they are less likely to see the
problems immediately around them. While the nationalism associated with the US space
program has diminished since the 1960s, it is still evident that governments actively
pursuing imperialist policies often do well in elections. Robinson states that if expansionist
development is an active policy of a nation, the expansion must be done on the cheap. If he is right, and expansionist
development does not necessarily have to yield a profit, it might be possible for space development beyond Earth
orbit along the lines suggested above to take place. But I doubt it. In the event that space resources become
commercially valuable, then the situation is entirely different. Development into extraterrestrial space would then
become likely. We must, then, examine the nature of such space development.
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AT: Colonies Key To Survival
Colonizing the Moon or Mars will not save humanity; we can solve extinction threat by
other means
Williams--10
[Lynda Williams, Physics Instructor, Santa Rosa Junior College, “Irrational Dreams of Space Colonization,” Peace
Review, a Journal of Social Justice, Spring 2010, http://www.scientainment.com/lwilliams_ peacereview.pdf]
According to scientific theory, the destruction of Earth is a certainty. About five billion
years from now, when our sun exhausts its nuclear fuel, it will expand in size and envelope
the inner planets, including the Earth, and burn them into oblivion. So yes, we are doomed,
but we have 5 billion years, plus or minus a few hundred million, to plan our extraterrestrial escape. The need to
colonize the Moon or Mars to guarantee our survival based on this fact is not pressing.
There are also real risks due to collisions with asteroids and comets, though none are of
immediate threat and do not necessitate extraterrestrial colonization. There are many
Earth-based technological strategies that can be developed in time to mediate such
astronomical threats such as gravitational tugboats that drag the objects out of range. The
solar system could also potentially be exposed to galactic sources of high-energy gamma
ray bursts that could fry all life on Earth, but any Moon or Mars base would face a similar
fate. Thus, Moon or Mars human based colonies would not protect us from any of these
astronomical threats in the near future.
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Frontierism Kritik
Colonies won't solve extinction; we can't get enough people far enough away from Earth
Prantzos--2000
[Nikos Prantzos, nuclear astrophysicist in the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, France , Our Cosmic Future, p. 84,
2000]
Not only science fiction readers, but also quite a few scientists are dreaming of ways to bring life to
other planets in the Solar System, and in particular to Mars. Their motivation is certainly not a
solution to overpopulation problems on Earth. Even though Mars has an area equal to all the land area
on Earth, it would be impossible to transport any significant fraction of the population. In
order to send a hundred million people (which constitutes a negligible fraction of the present
population) , in let us say one century, three thousand departures would have to be organised
each day. Therefore, the fascination for terraforming Mars is more closely related to the new frontier it represents.
Conquest of such a frontier would help our civilisation to release its creative potential and find new vitality. Some
have compared the situation with the American frontier, several centuries ago.
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AT: Overview Effect
The overview effect is the language of ecocracy that seeks to erase all notions of difference;
it is the call of colonialism
Sachs--95
[Wolfgang Sachs, Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, p. 442, 1995]
Satellite pictures scanning the globe's vegetative cover, computer graphs running interacting
curves through time, threshold levels held up as worldwide norms are the language of global
ecology. It constructs a reality that contains mountains of data, but no people. The data do
not explain why Tuaregs are driven to exhaust their waterholes, or what makes Germans
so obsessed with high speed on freeways; they do not point out who owns the timber shipped from the
Amazon or which industry flourishes because of a polluted Mediterranean sea; and they are mute about the
significance of forest trees for Indian tribals or what water means in an Arab country. In
short, they provide a knowledge which is faceless and placeless; an abstraction that carries a
considerable cost: it consigns the realities of culture, power and virtue to oblivion. It offers
data, but no context; it shows diagrams, but no actors; it gives calculations, but no notions
of morality; it seeks stability, but disregards beauty. Indeed, the global vantage point
requires ironing out all the differences and disregarding all circumstances; rarely has the gulf
between observers and the observed been greater than between satellite-based forestry and the seringueiro in the
Brazilian jungle. It is inevitable that the claims of global management are in conflict with the aspirations for cultural
rights, democracy and selfdetermination. Indeed, it is easy for an ecocracy which acts in the name of
"one earth" to become a threat to local communities and their lifestyles. After all, has there
ever, in the history of colonialism, been a more powerful motive for streamlining the world
than the call to save the planet.
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Frontierism Kritik
Expanding into space fosters a fundamental disconnection from the earth's environment
and doesn't unite the planet into solving local problems
Cockell--07
[Charles S. Cockell, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of Geomicrobiology, Open University, Space on Earth: Saving Our
World By Seeking Others, p. 122, 2007]
The idea that we should protect the Earth because it helps us settle space is the easiest idea
to understand. We might also protect the Earth for its own intrinsic worth, not just because
we think animals, plants and microbes should have a right to continue to exist, but because
the Earth has a universal intrinsic worth. The possibility that Earth might have an intrinsic value within
a space-faring environmental ethic has a great deal of long-term importance. As humanity moves away and
explores new regions of space, its connection with Earth weakens. For example, imagine a
space-faring civilization that gathers all of its resources from asteroids and lives amongst
these objects. As few of these new space-dwelling pioneers will visit the Earth, then their
sense of the intrinsic worth of the planet will also fade away. It will be to them a distant world, a
curiosity.
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Framework: Can't Separate Space Policy from Ethics/Axiology
Space policies are the result of human value decisions
Day--07
[Dwayne A. Day, Staff Writer, “Exploding Moon myths: or why there’s no race to our nearest neighbor,” The Space
Review, 12 November 2007, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/999/1]
This highlights the fact that space science priorities
are not set by a computer; they are
established by humans, in a social context. Human biases, emotions, and even history all
affect those priorities. Unsurprisingly, this happens not only with the Moon, but with other
space sciences as well. Consider the long delay between Mars missions—Mars Observer was not launched
until 1992, seventeen years after the Viking missions. Was this long delay because of little scientific interest in
Mars? No. It was due to many factors, including delays in the Space Shuttle program. But it was also due to the fact
that Viking had been extremely expensive, and had raised expectations so high (they were hoping to find life on
Mars, and didn’t) that Mars advocates had a difficult time building a coalition to pursue another mission for a very
long time. There’s
an unfortunate lesson based on history: if you’re going to spend a lot of
money on something, you better get a positive result, or it will be much harder to argue for
additional funding in the future.
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Even if science can tell us a lot about the universe, the values behind space expansion will
determine how it is used
Bullock--05
[Mark A. Bullock, planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, “Cosmology and Ethics,” in
Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, Carl Mitcham, ed., Macmillan Reference, Detroit, 15 March
2005, www.boulder.swri.edu/~bullock/cosmo_ethics.pdf]
As self-aware beings, we share a special, emergent property of the Universe -consciousness.
Is the quality of this aspect of Nature in some way different from, say, the way space is curved from the distribution
of mass in the Universe? What is special about the way living, replicating systems employ available resources to
thrive, to evolve, and to produce beings that are capable of probing the deepest questions about their existence? Is
mind a statistically unlikely property to emerge from a Universe with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 solar systems?
Or is the quality of mind something ubiquitous and unifying - like gravitation or other universal physical laws?
Science is now engaged in exploring the origin and nature of the Universe like never before,
and possibly the role of life and consciousness within it. Every culture has or had a
cosmology. Science has become the sine qua non of truth, and its revelations today are
taken as gospel. Science's insights into the nature of the Universe are therefore assumed to
or allowed to subsume all prior knowledge. It is incumbent upon all scientists to ask if their work speaks
to living together in harmony, or whether it interferes. Where is the role of heart or spirit in the
exploration of the cosmos, or for that matter, in any scientific endeavor? The scientific
study of the origin and structure of the Universe is an incredible journey, yielding answers
to questions that were once the purview of religion and myth. What is done with this
knowledge, and what its ultimate meaning for us may be, should be an essential component
of the science of cosmology.
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Framework: Kritiks Key to Policy Processes
All policy making is identity creation that communicates certain values and assumptions
that directly affect how policies are implemented
Gehrke--98
[Pat J. Gehrke, Assoc Prof. of communication and rhetoric in the Speech Communication Program and Dept of
English at the Univ. of South Carolina, “Critique Arguments as Policy Analysis: Policy Debate Beyond the
Rationalist Perspective." Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, 19: 18-39, 1998,
http://www.cedadebate.org/CAD/1998_gehrke.pdf]
policy advocacy can alter belief systems, provide new
paradigms, have an agenda setting effect, affect how policy issues are problematized,
and change the way solutions are viewed and evaluated (22-27). Policy discourse begins, as do
most affirmative cases, with an explication of the problems with existing policies. However, practical
problems must be constructed, interpreted, and made sense of in the complex contexts
at hand (Forester, "No Planning" 60). Hence, debaters as policy evaluators and advocates begin
by problematizing the status quo. This act simultaneously creates some identities and
roles while negating others. It communicates not only a what, but also a who, a why, and much more.
The first impact of any affirmative case is to mark and modify the social and political world. Policy
discourse communicates values and interpretations about a policy, its subjects, the
objects it acts upon, and the world in which advocates seek to implement it. These
communications shape the way that agents implement or carry out those policies (Bullis and
Policy scholar James Rogers argues that
Kennedy 543). Cornell professor of city and regional planning John Forester argues that public policies " alter
the 'communicative infrastructure' of institutions that mediate between structural processes of social learning
and the practical, situated claims-making process of social interaction" {Critical Theory 146).
Thus,
as policy analysts and policy makers, debaters and critics must explore
methodologies that can account for the communicative impact of policy discourse .
Initially we may find such an approach in an interpretive perspective on policy. An interpretive approach to
policy analysis focuses on the meanings of policies, on the values, feelings, and/or beliefs that they express,
and on the processes by which those meanings are communicated to and interpreted by various audiences
debaters may look to policy discourse as a rhetorical artifact
subject to critical rhetorical analysis or similar analyses.
(Yanow 8-9). From this view,
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Even policy scholars agree: kritiks are important in the process of policy making
Gehrke--98
[Pat J. Gehrke, Assoc Prof. of communication and rhetoric in the Speech Communication Program and Dept of
English at the Univ. of South Carolina, “Critique Arguments as Policy Analysis: Policy Debate Beyond the
Rationalist Perspective." Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, 19: 18-39, 1998,
http://www.cedadebate.org/CAD/1998_gehrke.pdf]
The idea that the issues raised by critique arguments are relevant to the substance of
policy disputes is consistent with arguments made by innovative policy analysts and
policy scholars. Many policy theorists argue for including in the policy discussion
process arguments that mirror certain forms of critique argumentation. This position may
seem unusual, given that some debate theorists tend to believe that policy analysis excludes critique arguments
(Jinks A14; Shors and Mancuso A15; Solt, Anti-Kritik xxiii; Solt, "Demystifying" A9). However,
a
considerable body of policy studies literature clearly supports the inclusion of critiques
based upon competing value orientations and critiques based upon the communicative
aspects of the policy process.
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Framework: Representations/Discourse Key to Policy Processes
Rhetorical analysis is essential to policy making; it reveals hidden power structures that
shape how policies are designed and implemented
Dauber--01
[Cori Elizabeth Dauber, Assoc. prof. of communications at the Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, “The shot seen
round the world: the impact of the images of Mogadishu on american military operations,” Rhetpric and Public
Affairs, 4:4, 2001,
http://muse.uq.edu.au.ts.isil.westga.edu/journals/rhetoric_and_public_affairs/v004/4.4dauber.html]
The impact the Mogadishu images have had on American foreign policy is clear. But their impact is not inescapable
or inevitable. It is based on the incorrect assumption that people can only read images unidirectionally. No matter
how similar, no matter how powerfully one text evokes another, every image is unique. Each comes from a different
historical situation, is placed within a different story, and offers an ambiguous text that can be exploited by astute
commentators. Images
matter profoundly, but so do their contexts and the words that
accompany them. The implications of this shift in interpretation are potentially profound. Mogadishu, or the
mention of a potential parallel with Mogadishu, need not be a straightjacket or a deterrent to the use of American
power. Rhetoric,
whether discursive or visual, has real power in the way events play out.
What this article makes clear is that rhetoric (and therefore rhetorical analysis) also has power in
the way policy is shaped and defined. In a recent book on the conflict in Kosovo, the authors
note that when the president spoke to the nation on the night the air war began, he
immediately ruled out the use of ground forces. This was done, they argue, due to fears that
leaving open the possibility of ground force participation would sacrifice domestic public and
congressional (and allied) support for the air war. But "publicly ruling out their use only helped to reduce
Milosevic's uncertainty regarding the likely scope of NATO's military actions," 109 and possibly to lengthen the air
war as a result. Yet, they report, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, "who authored the critical passage in
the president's speech, maintains
that 'we would not have won the war without this sentence.'"
110 It would be difficult to find more direct evidence for the profound impact and influence
public rhetoric and debate have--and are understood to have--on policy, policymaking, and
policymakers at the highest level. That means that rhetorical analysis can have a role to play
and a voice at the table before policies are determined. Academic rhetoricians, through their
choice of projects and the formats in which they publish, can stake a claim to having an important voice
at the table--and they should do so.
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Framework: Epistemology Key to Policy Processes
Their problematic assumptions cannot be separated from how their policy is crafted and
implemented; the proceeds consideration of the case impacts
Saperstein--97
Alvin Saperstein, Professor of Physics. Fellow of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, Wayne State
University, “Complexity, Global politics and National Security,” 1997,
http://www.dodccrp.org/files/Alberts_Complexity_Global.pdf]
The role of the policy maker, whether in a domestic or an international system , is to master the system: to be
able to take actions now which will lead to desirable events, or avoid undesirable events, in
the future. Thus he/she must be able to predict the outcome of current activities: if I do A, A’ will result; if I do B, B’
will result, etc. Prediction is the transfer of knowledge of a system from its present to its future.
The ability to make such transfers is usually based upon an understanding of the system—
unless recourse is made to auguries or direct communications from a transcendental power. Excluding the roles of
we must help the rational policy maker to understand in order to master.
It is clear that the set of metaphors which underline our thoughts and discussions about the
political world determine our responses to matters of war and peace.3 Action often follows
theory. (But purely pragmatic responses—not the best, but adequate—are often resorted to by some societies with some
success. Non-theoretical societies do survive, sometimes.) Moreover, we also recognize that our metaphors may also
shape that political world.4 The "field of endeavor," within which we are trying to find appropriate responses, is
divination or divinity,
not itself fixed apriori; its contours may be molded by our metaphors; the topographic maps relied upon by the competing
policy and response are easier and
more effective, the more appropriate the available metaphors.
forces may be altered by the plans and actions of these forces. Hence
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Framework: Ontology Key to Policy Processes
Discussions of ontology are a prerequisite to creating effective policies
Srnicek--07
[Nick Srnicek, PhD Student at London School of Economics and Political Science,
“Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics The Political Ontology of Gilles Deleuze” MA Thesis, University of
Western Ontario, 2007,
http://lse.academia.edu/documents/0011/3585/Srnicek_Nick._2007_Assemblage_Theory_Complexity_and_
Contentious_Politics.pdf]
Nevertheless, we believe that what
has been presented is not only capable of suggesting potential solutions
to these deficiencies, but also of making clear the significance and power of the ontology we have
offered. Our ontology’s attention to complexity, emergence, individuation, molecular change, the unique, the new,
difference, potentials, conflict, and heterogeneity, makes it a rigorous philosophical and political ontology vastly
different from what is presently available to political science. With our era characterized by a multiplication of local,
regional, state, and global initiatives, combined with a proliferation of conflicts and the increasingly dense relational
only through a re-thinking of our
ontological presuppositions that political science and policymakers can keep pace with the
complexity and dynamism characteristic of the modern world.
networks within which such events are embedded, we believe that it is
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***Affirmative Answers***
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Case is a Disadvantage to the Alternative
Pointing out petty differences in philosophy distracts us from expanding into space, causing
extinction
Mitchell and Staretz--10
[Edgar D. Mitchell, Sc.D., Apollo 14 Lunar module pilot, Sixth person to walk on the Moon and Robert Staretz,
M.S., October-November, “Our Destiny – A Space Faring Civilization?,” Journal of Cosmology, Volume 12, pp.
3500-3505, 2010, http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars104.html]
Because of vested interests, short sightedness or personal short term gain all at the expense
of long term sustainability, our politicians, many of our leaders and most of our citizenry
have ignored, misunderstood or misrepresented the magnitude and nature of the issues
facing our civilization for far too long. Perhaps even most pressing is our propensity to resolve our
differences by violent rather than by peaceful means. Our technologies are now so powerful that not
only do they enable us to explore the solar system but they are the very same ones that may
lead to our demise if used to promote the goals of one group at the expense of others.
Clearly before we can truly call ourselves a space faring civilization we must put aside
these petty differences that are often driven by intolerance, greed, the need for power or
the need for control that divide us.
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Anything that prevents humanity from maximizing our efforts toward space is suicidal; the
need for survival outweighs their impacts
Elias--90
[George Henry Elias, Ph.D. in Engineering and Business at Berkeley, Breakout Into Space: Mission For A
Generation, p.129, 1990]
As citizens of the world concerned with our loved ones and the future of our species, we
must encourage the work of both those seeking political solutions on Earth and those
seeking technological solutions in space. Our job is to maximize our chances for survival by
neglecting no possibility. Our circumstances are so grave and so problematic, with so small
a margin for error, that we cannot afford the loss of any grounds for hope. Let us therefore
go forward supporting both space-based and earth-based solutions to the problems of our
age. Stifling the creativity or commitment of either party may be suicidally shortsighted.
Both have their strengths and their weaknesses, and they are by no means antagonistic to each other. Both are
suffused with a high idealism and a passionate concern for humanity's future. Both are based on ideas developed by
long and laborious thought, and both are led by deeply honorable men of acute and comprehensive intelligence. And
both—despite the perhaps more practical approach of the scientific community—have distant visions of faint
possibilities that will never become real except through the moral heroism of us all.
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Space Key to Value of Life
Space solves inevitable extinction; absent colonization, all value of life is erased
Burrows--06
[William E. Burrows, Professor of Journalism and Director of the Graduate Science and Environmental Reporting
Program at NYU, The Survival Imperative, Using Space to Protect Earth, p. 45, 2006]
The good of civilization requires that it continue rather than allow itself to be extinguished,
or nearly extinguished, as the small minority that worships death believes has been predicted by the prophets. That
means sanctifying and protecting life, literally at all cost, and by any means possible. Sir Martin Rees, a professor at
Cambridge University and England's Astronomer Royal, is one of many learned individuals who have eloquently
argued for the protection of life on Earth. "Most of us care about the future, not just because of a
personal connection with children and grandchildren," he explained in a recent book about the perils
civilization faces, "but because all our efforts would be devalued if they were not part of a
continuing process, if they did not have consequences that resonated into the far future."
One way of preventing the devaluation, he continued, is to send pioneering groups to live
elsewhere independently. Rees is convinced that spreading the seed "would offer a safeguard
against the worst possible disaster—the foreclosure of intelligent life's future through the extinction of all
humankind."
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We have an ethical obligation to future generations; space is a survival imperative
Burrows--06
[William E. Burrows, Professor of Journalism and Director of the Graduate Science and Environmental Reporting
Program at NYU, The Survival Imperative, Using Space to Protect Earth, p. 45, 2006]
The continuation of life transcends death, not only physically, but spiritually. The
protection of Earth and the creatures on it, connecting the majestic and likely unique accomplishments
that started and nurtured civilization, with the unimaginably humanistic achievements of the distantly born , is
supremely ennobling because it honors and dignifies the precious thing that is life. How
unspeakably sad it would be if the cultural riches future generations could bring to the
world in art, literature, science, politics, all manner of scholarship, and perhaps a
philosophy that enables peace and mutual support to finally take hold were preempted
with no hope of being realized. Using space to protect civilization, providing an
environment in which it is able to collectively thrive and grow to its limitless potential, will
transform humankind from its traditional role as the hapless victim of fate to one better able to control its destiny
and fulfill its inherent, and perhaps unique, potential for greatness. Further, the unborn deserve to fulfill
their potential even for what is far less than great. Everyone who believes in the migration to space,
for whatever reason, accepts that people will bring their baser instincts with them just as surely as they will bring the
higher ones. There is no reason to suppose that evil, stupidity, and unenlightened self-interest will be left on the
home planet. What transgresses the morality of any given moment is the sanctity of life itself
and the overarching need to protect and enhance it. Being less than perfect, being
tarnished, is infinitely better than not being at all.
Survival is therefore imperative. That is why the humans who inhabit this cradle of life in a
vast, dark universe have been given the means to protect it for themselves and for those
who will come after them.
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The Overview Effect Solves the Impacts
Even if born out of nationalism and sovereignty, space travel evokes a new understanding
of planetary ethics; nationalistic conflicts will fade as a new consciousness evolves to
correct our past mistakes
Sagan--94
[Carl Sagan, PhD, former David Duncan Prof. of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell Univ., "Pale Blue Dot:
A Vision of the Human Future in Space," p. 104, 1994]
From Earth orbit, you are struck by the tender blue arc of the horizon—the Earth's thin atmosphere seen
tangentially. You can understand why there is no longer such a thing as a local environmental
problem. Molecules are stupid. Industrial poisons, greenhouse gases, and substances that attack
the protective ozone layer, because of their abysmal ignorance, do not respect borders. They are
oblivious of the notion of national sovereignty. And so, due to the almost mythic powers of our technology (and the
prevalence of short-term thinking), we are beginning—on Continental and on planetary scales—to pose a danger to
ourselves. Plainly, if these problems are to be solved, it will require many nations acting in concert over many years.
I'm struck again by the irony that spaceflight—conceived in tile cauldron of nationalist
rivalries and hatreds—brings with it a stunning transnational vision. You spend even a
little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms
begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum. If we're stuck on one world, we're
limited to a single case; we don't know what else is possible. Then—like an art fancier familiar
only with Fayoum tomb paintings, a dentist who knows only molars, a philosopher trained merely in NeoPlatonism,
a linguist who has studied only Chinese, or a physicist whose knowledge of gravity is restricted to falling bodies on
Earth—our perspective is foreshortened, our insights narrow, our predictive abilities
circumscribed. By contrast, when we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way
a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of
possibilities. When we look at those other worlds, we begin to understand what happens
when we have too much of one thing or too little of another. We learn how a planet can go
wrong. We gain a new understanding, foreseen by the spaceflight pioneer Robert Goddard, called
comparative planetology.
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The Overview effect is linear--the more people go into space the more we abandon
nationalist conflicts in favor of a survival imperative
The Overview Institute--09
[The Overview Institute, “The Overview Institute Declaration of Vision and Principles,” 31 January 2009,
http://www.overviewinstitute.org/declaration.htm]
astronauts from many cultures and backgrounds have been telling
us that, from the perspective of Earth orbit and the Moon, they have gained such a vision.
There is even a common term for this experience: “The Overview Effect,” a phrase coined in the book of the
same name by space philosopher and writer Frank White. It refers to the experience of seeing firsthand
the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball
of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, the astronauts tell
us, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide us become less important and the
need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this “pale blue dot”
becomes both obvious and imperative. Even more so, many of them tell us that from the Overview
perspective, all of this seems imminently achievable, if only more people could have the experience!
For more than four decades,
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Alternative: Rejection Alone Fails
The rejection alternative fails; an ontological or epistemological focus alone does nothing
Price--98
[Richard Price, University of Minnesota and Monash University and Christian Reus-Smit, University of Minnesota
and Monash University, “Dangerous Liaisons? Critical International Theory and Constructivism,” European Journal
of International Relations, vol. 4 no. 3, pp. 259-294, September 1998]
In sum, the sound and fury of metatheoretical debates at times would have us believe that alternative
approaches on different sides of the various divides could not possibly make any valuable
contributions tounderstanding world politics given their erroneous ontological, epistemological and
methodological presumptions. Such denials are not tenable from those arguing from the Nietzschean
perspectivism that informs much of critical theory; those in the critical tradition cannot insinuate that their
work is to replace wholesale other traditions of inquiry and types of explanations insofar as that
would merely substitute one totalizing discourse for another. All accounts of the world are partial,
whether they be rationalist or constructivist, and the best that can be claimed on behalf of either is that they
illuminate aspects of an event or phenomena that are required for an adequate understanding of the explanandum in
question.
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Rejection alone accomplishes nothing
Said--98
[Edward W. Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, “Islam Through
Western Eyes,” The Nation, 1 January 1998, http://www.thenation.com/article/islam-through-western-eyes]
How fundamentally narrow and constricted is the semantic field of Islam was brought home to me after my book
Orientalism appeared last year. Even though I took great pains in the book to show that current discussions of the
Orient or of the Arabs and Islam are fundamentally premised upon a fiction, my book was often interpreted as a
defense of the "real" Islam. Whereas what I was trying to show was that any talk about Islam was radically flawed,
not only because an unwarranted assumption was being made that a large ideologically freighted generalization
could cover all the rich and diverse particularity of Islamic life (a very different thing) but also because it would
simply be repeating the errors of Orientalism to claim that the correct view of Islam was X or Y or Z. And still I
would receive invitations from various institutions to give a lecture on the true meaning of an Islamic Republic or on
the Islamic view of peace. Either one found oneself defending Islam--as if the religion needed that kind of defense--
But rejection alone does not take
one very far, since if we are to claim, as we must, that as a religion and as a civilization Islam does have a
meaning very much beyond either of the two currently given it, we must first be able to provide
something in the way of a space in which to speak of Islam. Those who wish either to rebut
the standard anti-Islamic and anti-Arab rhetoric that dominates the media and liberal intellectual discourse,
or to avoid the idealization of Islam (to say nothing of its sentimentalization), find themselves with scarcely
a place to stand on, much less a place in which to move freely. From at least the end of the
or, by keeping silent, seeming to be tacitly accepting Islam's defamation.
eighteenth century until our own day, modern Occidental reactions to Islam have been dominated by a type of
thinking that may still be called Orientalist. The general basis of Orientalist thought is an imaginative geography
dividing the word into two unequal parts, the larger and "different" one called the Orient, the other, also known as
our world, called the Occident or the West. Such divisions always take place when one society or culture thinks
about another one, different from it, but it is interesting that even when the Orient has uniformly been considered an
inferior part of the world, it has always been endowed both with far greater size and with a greater potential for
power than the West. Insofar as Islam has always been seen as belonging to the Orient, its particular fate within the
general structure of Orientalism has been to be looked at with a very special hostility and fear. There are, of course,
many obvious religious, psychological and political reasons for this, but all of these reasons derive from a sense that
so far as the West is concerned, Islam represents not only a formidable competitor but also a late-coming challenge
to Christianity.
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AT: Framework: Epistemology Key
The logical conclusion of their epistemology impact is that we can NEVER know what will
happen outside of the West. This means there is no reason to vote Negative
Oldmeadow--04
[Harry Oldmeadow; Coordinator of Philosophy and Religious Studies at La Trobe University, Australia, “The
Debate about Orientalism,” Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions, Pg.
11, 2004, http://www.worldwisdom.com/uploads/pdfs/78.pdf]
Let us return for a moment to the characteristic passage from Ziauddin Sardar cited above. These kinds of claims
have become so familiar that we need to take a step back to see what staggering and preposterous
claims are being made! Centuries of tireless Western scholarship, of assiduous intellectual
explorations, of meticulous translations and painstaking commentaries, not to mention the
direct personal testimonies of Europeans living in Asia, all count for nothing more than an
“artificial construction” which can only generate “mutual misunderstanding.” A melancholy
and somewhat ludicrous spectacle! But, wait! After centuries, even millennia of mutual
incomprehension, it is now possible, we are told, to erase this monstrous edifice of
misunderstanding, to start from zero and to find “new bases for genuine encounters with
the people, places, history, ideas and current existence that is to the East of the West”35—as
if quite suddenly there is an entirely new dispensation which will allow us to avoid the
follies and misdemeanors of the past. The question of quite how this is to be done is not
specified in anything but the vaguest and most platitudinous terms.
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AT: Framework: Ontology Key
Existence precedes ontology; we must affirm survival first
Wapner--03
[Paul Wapner, Associate Professor and Director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at American
University, “Leftist criticism of "nature", Dissent, Vol. 50, Iss. 1, pp. 71-75, Winter 2003]
All attempts to listen to nature are social constructions--except one. Even
the most radical postmodernist
must acknowledge the distinction between physical existence and nonexistence. As I have said,
postmodernists accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if
they argue about the different meanings we ascribe to it. This acknowledgment of physical
existence is crucial. We can't ascribe meaning to that which doesn't appear. What doesn't exist can manifest no
character. Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's
expressions. And all of us should be wary of those who claim to speak on nature's behalf
(including environmentalists who do that). But we need not doubt the simple idea that a prerequisite
of expression is existence. This in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse
embodiments-must be seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of
environmental preservation.
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Our obligation is a priori; preventing widespread death before ontological questioning
Davidson--89
Davidson, Coeditor of Critical Inquiry, Assoc. Prof. of Philosophy, University of Chicago, “Questions concerning
Heidegger: Opening the Debate,” Critical Inquiry, p.426, Winter 1989]
[Arnold I.
I understand Levinas’ work to
suggest another path to the recovery of the human, one that
leads
through or toward other human beings: “The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face…
Hence metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enacted- in our relations with men… The
Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the
height in which God is revealed. It is our relations with men… that give to theological concepts the sole
signification they admit of.” Levinas
places ethics before ontology by beginning with our
experience of the human face: and, in a clear reference to Heidegger’s idolatry of the village life of peasants ,
he associated himself with Socrates, who preferred the city where he encountered men to
the country with its trees. In his discussion of skepticism and the problem of others, Cavell also aligns
himself with this path of thought, with the recovery of the finite human self through the
acknowledgement of others: “As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldn’t the other suffer the fate of
God?… I wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the
universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of
God [CR, p.470].” The suppression
of the other, the human, in Heidegger’s thought accounts, I
believe, for the absence, in his writing after the war, of the experience of horror. Horror is always
directed toward the human; every object of horror bears the imprint of the human will. So
Levinas can see in Heidegger’s silence about the gas chambers and death camps “a kind of
consent to the horror.” And Cavell can characterize Nazis as “those who have lost the
capacity for being horrified by what they do.” Where was Heidegger’s horror? How could he have
failed to know what he had consented to? Hannah Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul Valery’s
aphorism, “Les evenements ne sont que l’ecume des choses’ (‘Events are but the foam of things’).” I
think one understands the source of her intuition. The mass extermination of human beings, however,
does not produce foam, but dust and ashes; and it is here that questioning must stop.
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AT: Framework: Representations/Discourse Key
Representations cannot be analyzed outside of the context in which policies are created; at
the very least we should get to weigh the case because the negative says it's a byproduct of
those representations
Stokes--06
[Doug Stokes, Professor at Bristol University, Politics Department, “Gluing the Hats On: Power, Agency, and
Reagan's Office of Public Diplomacy, 11 March 2006, http://www.aqnt98.dsl.pipex.com/hats.htm]
Furthermore, Doty assumes that the "kind of power that works through social agents, a power that social actors
posses and use" is somehow in opposition to a "power that is productive of meanings, subject identities, their
these forms of power are not mutually
exclusive. Social agents can be both subject to discourse and act in instrumental ways to
effect discourse precisely through producing meanings and subject identities, and
delineating the range of policy options. Through her erasure of the link between foreign policy
processes and purposeful social agents, she ends up producing an account of hegemonic
foreign policy narratives free from any narrator.68 This is particularly problematic because the power
inherent within representational practices does not necessarily operate independently from
the power to deploy those representations. The power to represent, in turn, does not
operate independently from differential access to the principal conduits of discursive
production, sedimentation and transmission (for example, the news media).69 Thus, Doty's account fails
to provide an adequate analysis of the socially constructed interests that constitute the
discursive construction of reality. As Stuart Hall argues "there are centers that operate directly on the formation and
interrelationships and a range of imaginable conduct". But
constitution of discourse. The media are in that business. Political parties are in that business. When you set the terms in which
the debate proceeds, that is an exercise of symbolic power [which] circulates between constituted points of condensation."70
The overall critical thrust of poststructurally inclined IR theorists is blunted by both the
refusal to examine or even acknowledge the limits and constraints on social discourses and
the denial of any linkage between identity representations and the interests that may infuse
these representations.
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The alternative only drives the discourse they critique, which makes the problem worse; it
is an act of censorship that fosters a retreat into the private sphere, making violence
inevitable
Gay--98
[William C. Gay, Professor in the Deptartment of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences, UNC-Charlotte,
“The Practice of Linguistic Nonviolence,” Peace Review 10, n4 545-547, 1998,
www.philosophy.uncc.edu/wcgay/publingnonvio.htm]
The specific discourse that is analogous to negative peace can actually perpetuate injustice.
Broadcasters in local and national news may altogether avoid using terms like "dyke" or "fag" or even
"homosexual," but they and their audiences can remain homophobic even when the language of lesbian and gay
A government may cease referring to a
particular nation as "a rogue state," but public and private attitudes may continue to
foster prejudice toward this nation and its inhabitants. When prejudices remain unspoken,
at least in public forums, their detection and eradication are made even more difficult. Of
pride is used in broadcasting and other public forums.
course, we need to find ways to restrain hate speech in order to at least stop linguistic attacks in the public arena.
Likewise, we need to find ways to restrain armed conflicts and hostile name calling directed against an adversary of
the state. However, even
if avoidance of linguistic violence is necessary, it is not sufficient.
Those who bite their tongues to comply with the demands of political correctness are often
ready to lash out vitriolic epithets when these constraints are removed. Thus, the practice
of linguistic nonviolence is more like negative peace when the absence of hurtful or harmful
terminology merely marks a lull in reliance on linguistic violence or a shift of its use from
the public to the private sphere. The merely public or merely formal repression of
language and behavior that express these attitudes builds up pressure that can erupt in
subsequent outbursts of linguistic violence and physical violence.
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AT: Imperialism/Manifest Destiny
Just because imperialism can lead to abuse does not deny its inherent value
Thompson--03
[Michael J. Thompson, founder and editor, teaches political theory at Hunter College, CUNY, "Iraq, hegemony and
the question of american empire," Logos, vol 2: 4, Fall 2003, http://www.logosjournal.com/thompson_iraq.htm]
Hegemony in international terms without some kind of competing force, such as the Soviets,
can clearly lead to the abuse of power and a unilateralist flaunting of international
institutions that do not serve at the imperium's whim. But this should not mean that
hegemony itself is a negative concept. Although empire is something rightfully reviled, hegemony may
not be as bad as everyone thinks. We need to consider what is progressive and transformative in the ideas
and values of the western republican and liberal traditions. We need to advocate not an anti-hegemonic stance in
form, but an anti-hegemonic and anti-imperialist stance in content, one that advocates the particular interests of
Rather than
choose between western hegemony on the one hand and political and cultural relativism on
the other, we need to approach this problem with an eye toward cosmopolitanism and what
the political theorist Stephen Eric Bronner has called "planetary life."
capital of the market in more broad terms rather than the universal political interests of others.
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US Space Colonies will uniquely avoid the historical mistakes of Manifest Destiny; nondemocratic states will deny freedom in space
Elias--90
[George Henry Elias, Ph.D. in Engineering and Business at Berkeley, Breakout Into Space: Mission For A
Generation, p. 62, 1990]
Among all the space powers, the United States is the most likely to avoid the historic mistakes
of colonialism and follow the English model of settlement. We know how to rule ourselves
without destroying initiative. Space pioneers will live on dangerous and treacherous new
worlds in which their judgment and personal resources may make the difference between
the survival or extinction of their settlements. They must rely on themselves and not be ruled by Earthbased controllers. Nations that restrict the liberty of their citizens on Earth will not grant them
greater freedom in space. American space settlements will resemble early English
settlements in North America. Their disposition to individual initiative and self-rule will
enable them to survive the rigors of the early years and lay the foundations for
extraterrestrial nations resembling twentieth-century North America.
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True, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny has been abused, but we reclaim its meaning in a
drive to colonize space; it's try or die in the face of global destruction, overpopulation, and
environmental degradation
Elias--90
[George Henry Elias, Ph.D. in Engineering and Business at Berkeley, Breakout Into Space: Mission For A
Generation, p. 62, 1990]
We call the traditional ideology of American expansion Manifest Destiny. The tendency of our
people to move outward beyond our borders began long before it was named. Movement west had begun almost as
soon as the first colonies were planted in the seventeenth century; and prominent members of the founding generation envisioned an America much larger than the original thirteen colonies. The notion that this
movement had an inevitable consequence—the settlement of a certain portion of the Western
Hemisphere—gradually came to be accepted as a national destination that was plain to all,
even if citizens and politicians disagreed among themselves about the proper extent of the expansion.
Although the idea of destiny has often been abused, it has served this country well. The
vision of a free nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific inspired generations of
men and women around the world. In the United States, it focused the energies of politicians and gave
direction to the natural inclination of the people. Now, the idea of destiny must be updated. We stand
on the verge of a new phase of our national life, perhaps our greatest. The global crises of
the environment, overpopulation, and nuclear war, our position as chief heir of a great
expansionary civilization, and the world's need for our extraordinary skills propel us
toward space. The obvious destination of the United States is the exploration and
settlement of the solar system. American movement into space continues centuries-old
trends of expansion; it strengthens fundamental values of our civilization; and it gives the
world a kind of leadership that no other nation can provide. Failure to rise to our Manifest
Destiny endangers ourselves, our species, and our planet. If humanity is to build an
extraterrestrial civilization and evade the crises plaguing its home planet, America must
devote its talents to expansion into the solar plain, which extends from Mercury, past the inner planets,
through the asteroids, and beyond the outer giants to Pluto.
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We need the space frontier to advance the democratic vision; this time we will create better
governments and social systems
Elias--90
[George Henry Elias, Ph.D. in Engineering and Business at Berkeley, Breakout Into Space: Mission For A
Generation, p. 62, 1990]
Space is America's second frontier, as the West was its first. He would be a rash prophet, wrote Federick
Jackson Turner after the western frontier had closed, "who would assert that the expansive character of American
life has now entirely passed." He would indeed! Our vitality
as a people is linked to the presence of a
frontier in American life. It is the characteristic of this country that differentiates it most from the short-lived
democracies that preceded it. The West fulfilled the dreams of immigrant millions; it raised labor into the middle
class; it kept America egalitarian; it gave opportunity to the talented and the industrious; and it transformed a small
English seacoast colony into a multi-ethnic world power that contains much of the best that humanity has to offer.
The opening of the space frontier continues the great traditions of our history. It offers the
hope that the American Dream will continue to serve as a vision of hope for the unhappy
and the oppressed of all lands. "The opening of a new high frontier," wrote Gerard O'Neill,
"will challenge the best that is in us" and "give us new freedom to search for better
governments, social systems and ways of life.”
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The US can uniquely avoid replicating colonialism in space
Elias--90
[George Henry Elias, Ph.D. in Engineering and Business at Berkeley, Breakout Into Space: Mission For A
Generation, p. 62, 1990]
The United States is not an ordinary player in the great drama in which humanity is involved.
Neither the Russians nor the Chinese nor the Europeans nor the Japanese have that peculiar American combination
of abilities our world needs to elude its troubles. America
knows best how to create the self-sufficient
communities that building an extraterrestrial civilization demands. We are the nation that
knows how to liberate the energies of masses of people to work for common goals. We are the
nation that knows how to rule ourselves without destroying initiative. We are the nation that knows how to invent
and invent and invent until something finally works. We are the
nation that knows how to avoid the
chronic mistakes of colonialism. Meanwhile, time is running out. By no means is the rescue
of our species assured. But these skills give our race a chance to build a solar-systemwide
civilization and survive the dangers of overpopulation, environmental disaster, and nuclear
war facing us.
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Turn: Capitalism Good
Survival is a non-capitalist benefit to colonization
Baum--09
[Seth D. Baum, Dept. of Geography & Rock Ethics Institute, Pennsylvania State Univ., “Cost-Benefit Analysis of
Space Exploration: Some Ethical Considerations,” Space Policy, vol. 25(2), pp. 75-80, 2009]
Another non-market benefit of space exploration is reduction in the risk of the extinction of
humanity and other Earth-originating life. Without space colonization, the survival of
humanity and other Earth-originating life becomes extremely difficult- perhaps impossibleover the very long-term. This is because the Sun, like all stars, changes in its composition and radiative output
over time. The Sun is gradually converting hydrogen into helium, thereby getting warmer. In
approximately 500 million to one billion years, this warming is projected to render Earth
uninhabitable to life as we know it. Humanity, if it still exists on Earth then, could
conceivably develop technology by then to survive on Earth despite these radical
conditions. Such technology may descend from present proposals to “geoengineer” the planet in response to
anthropogenic climate change. However, the Sun later- approximately seven billion years later- loses mass that
spreads into Earth’s orbit, causing Earth to slow, be pulled into the Sun, and evaporate. The only way life could
survive on Earth may be if Earth, by sheer coincidence (the odds are on the order of one in 105 to one in 106)
happens to be pulled out of the solar system by a star system that passes by. This process might enable life to survive
on Earth much longer, although the chance of this is quite remote.
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Frontierism Kritik
Plan solves the impact; space colonization will evoke a new consciousness to transcend
consumerism and foster an interrogation of
Aldrin and Wachhorst--04
[Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, former US astronaut, walked on the Moon and Wyn Wachhorst, space writer, “The urge to
explore: it brought the first creatures from the sea onto the land; it sent us to the moon. Where shall we go next?,”
Mechanical Engineering-CIME, vol. 126, no. 11, p. 38, November 2004]
While most of us have a cerebral grasp of the Copernican model and the immensity of the
cosmos, few of us seem yet to feel it. We retain a geocentric spirit, mired down in self
absorbed consumerism. The exploration of outer space will encourage a commensurate
expansion of inner space. We are alive at the dawn of a new Renaissance, a moment much
like the morning of the modern age when most of the globe lay deep in mystery, when tall
masts pierced the skies of burgeoning ports, luring those of imagination to seek their own
destiny, to challenge the very foundations of man and nature, heaven and earth. Like the
sailing ships that incarnated the aura of the Renaissance, or the great steam locomotives
that embodied the building of America, the Apollo rocket is an emblem of the human spirit.
Apollo was inevitable from the first gleam in the eye of the hunter-gatherer, from the first fire,
wheel, and furrow; it was latent in the stirrup and the longship, in the creak of every caravel, the ring of every
railroad spike, the lonesome howl of every lumber camp harmonica. From the moment the first flint was
flaked, space was fated to be the final canvas for expressing in hold strokes the
inexhaustible soul of humanity.
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Moving away from pure market capitalism allows anti-market forces to reverse all gains from
capitalism; causes extinction
Kirzner--06
[Israel Kirzner, professor emeritus of economics at New York University and the author of many books about
Austrian economics, “The Anatomy of Economic Advice, Part I” The Freeman, August 2006,
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=5609]
Mises was, as we have seen, convinced that economics must be pursued dispassionately—as a wertfrei discipline—
but he wrote with white-hot passion about the dangers that face mankind should it ignore the
truths which academic science reveals. He concluded his magnum opus, Human Action, with the
following searing sentences: “The body of economic knowledge is an essential element in the
structure of human civilization; it is the foundation upon which modern industrialism and
all the moral, intellectual and therapeutic achievements of the last centuries have been
built. It rests with men whether they will make proper use of the rich treasure with which this knowledge provides
them or whether they will leave it unused. But if they fail to take the best advantage of it and
disregard its teachings and warnings, they will not annul economics; they will stamp out
society and the human race.”
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Anti-capitalism destroys US leadership and collapses global economy; this leads to war
Nyquist--05
[J.R. Nyquist, Columnist, The Political consequences of the Financial Crash,” Financial Sense, 4 February 2005,
http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2005/0204.html]
The danger here is not merely economic. The political left openly favors the collapse of America’s strategic position
abroad. The withdrawal of
the United States from the Middle East, the Far East and Europe would
catastrophically impact an international system that presently allows 6 billion people to live
on the earth’s surface in relative peace. Should anti-capitalist dogmas overwhelm the
global market and trading system that evolved under American leadership, the planet’s
economy would contract and untold millions would die of starvation. Nationalistic
totalitarianism, fueled by a politics of blame, would once again bring war to Asia and
Europe. But this time the war would be waged with mass destruction weapons and the United
States would be blamed because it is the center of global capitalism. Furthermore, if the anti-capitalist party gains
power in Washington, we can expect to see policies of appeasement and unilateral disarmament enacted.
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Turn: Imperialism Good
Imperialist humanism is inescapable; the alternative is planetary death
Davies--97
[Tony Davies, Prof. of English at Birmingham University, Humanism, p. 130-132, 1997]
So there will not after all be, nor indeed could there be, any tidy definitions. The several humanisms – the
civic humanism of the quattrocento Italian city-states, the Protestant humanism of sixteenth century northern
Europe, the rationalistic humanism that attended at the revolutions of enlightened modernity, and the romantic and
positivistic humanisms through which the European bourgeoisies established their hegemony over it, the
revolutionary humanism that shook the world and the liberal humanism that sought to tame it, the humanism of the
Nazis and the humanism of their victims and opponents, the antihumanist humanism of Heidegger and the humanist
antihumanism of Foucault and Althusser – are not
reducible to one, or even to a single line or
pattern. Each has its distinctive historical curve, its particular discursive poetics, its own problematic scansion of
the human. Each seeks, as all discourses must, to impose its own answer to the question of ‘which is to be master’.
Meanwhile, the problem of
humanism remains, for the present, an inescapable horizon within
which all attempts to think about the ways in which human being have, do, might live
together in and on the world are contained. Not that the actual humanisms described here necessarily
provide a model, or even a useful history, least of all for those very numerous people, and peoples, for whom they
have been alien and oppressive. Some, at least, offer a grim warning. Certainly it should no longer be possible to
formulate phrases like ‘the destiny of man’ or ‘the triumph of human reason’ without an instant consciousness of the
folly and brutality they drag behind them. All
humanisms, until now, have been imperial. They speak of
the human in the accents and the interests of a class, a sex, a ‘race’. Their embrace suffocates those whom
it does not ignore. The first humanists scripted the tyranny of Borgias, Medicis and Tudors. Later humanisms
dreamed of freedom and celebrated Frederick II, Bonaparte, Bismarck, Stalin. The liberators of colonial America,
like the Greek and Roman thinkers they emulated, owned slaves. At various times, not excluding the present, the
circuit of the human has excluded women, those who do not speak Greek or Latin or English, those whose
complexions are not pink, children, Jews. It is almost impossible to think of a crime that has not been committed in
the name of humanity.
At the same time, though it is clear that the master narrative of
transcendental Man has outlasted its usefulness, it would be unwise simply to abandon the
ground occupied by the historical humanisms. For one thing, some variety of humanism
remains, on many occasions, the only available alternative to bigotry and persecution. The
freedom to speak and write, to organize and campaign in defence of individual or collective
interests, to protest and disobey: all these, and the prospect of a world in which they will be
secured, can only be articulated in humanist terms. It is true that the Baconian ‘Knowledge of
Causes, and Secrett Motions of Things’, harnessed to an overweening rationality and an unbridled
technological will to power, has enlarged the bounds of human empire to the point of endangering
the survival of the violated planet on which we live. But how, if not by mobilizing collective
resources of human understanding and responsibility of ‘enlightened self-interest’ even,
can that danger be turned aside?
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Frontierism Kritik
Totalizing criticisms of the West backfire, resulting in apocalyptic violence
Lifton--03
[Robert J. Lifton, Psychologist at Harvard, Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation With The
World, p. 104, 2003]
Exactly because it can seem so alluring, the impulse
toward collective cleansing from this
"temptation of the West" can be especially fierce, part of a painful internal struggle I have
been able to observe in people in a number of non-Western cultures. What can result is a
zealous return to an exaggerated version of one's own tradition and an equally zealous
condemnation of all elements of this Western "taint." The quest for absolute cultural or
religious purity can then readily blend with apocalyptic violence, which is the most extreme
expression of radical breakout from the temptations of the West.
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The retreat of US imperialism fosters an age of big wars
Ferguson--04
Niall Ferguson, Prof of History at NYU Stern, “A World Without Power”, Foreign Policy, July 2004,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2004/07/01/a_world_without_power]
Critics of U.S. global dominance should pause and consider the alternative. If the United
States retreats from its hegemonic role, who would supplant it? Not Europe, not China, not the
Muslim world—and certainly not the United Nations. Unfortunately, the alternative to a single
superpower is not a multilateral utopia, but the anarchic nightmare of a new Dark Age. We
tend to assume that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In the history of world politics, it seems, someone is
always the hegemon, or bidding to become it. Today, it is the United States; a century ago, it was the United
Kingdom. Before that, it was France, Spain, and so on. The famed 19th-century German historian Leopold von
Ranke, doyen of the study of statecraft, portrayed modern European history as an incessant struggle for mastery, in
which a balance of power was possible only through recurrent conflict. The influence of
economics on the
study of diplomacy only seems to confirm the notion that history is a competition between
rival powers.
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Blaming imperialism for global problems fosters the scapegoating of responsibility, causing
even worse violence
Hollander--04
[Paul Hollander, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an associate of
Harvard's Davis Center of Russian and Eurasian Studies, “Pride and Prejudice,” National Interest, Fall 2004, Issue
77, http://nationalinterest.org/bookreview/pride-and-prejudice-641]
The United States is charged with all the evils, real or imagined, that afflict humanity, from the
falling price of beef in France to AIDS in Africa and global warming everywhere. The result is a widespread
refusal to accept responsibility for one's own actions. It is almost certainly the other way round: The
refusal to accept responsibility predisposes people to search for a scapegoat. A particularly
striking example of these trends has been the recent intensification of violent Islamic antiAmericanism culminating in 9/11. Arab grievances against the West, and especially its two key
representatives (from the Arab point of view) Israel and the United States, have been long-standing. These
grievances apparently intensified in the wake of the failed Oslo "peace process" that raised Arab expectations
without gratifying them. Of late, anti-Israeli sentiments have been transferred to the United States, owing in part to
its firm support of Israel and because it is the leading force of modernity in the Middle East. This brand
of anti-
Americanism further increased after 9/11 in response to American actions against
terrorism. American military assertiveness has always been repugnant to those convinced that the United States
is the real "evil empire" and deserves all the blows struck against it. Thus the hostile critics of America at
home and abroad embarked with earnest relish on explaining why 9/11 and other antiAmerican acts of terror could only be blamed on the United States since it embodies the
"roots causes" of virtually everything wrong with the world.
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Negative criticisms for Western imperialism are misplaced and obscure the real causes of
oppression
Shaw--02
[Martin Shaw, professor of international relations at University of Sussex, “Uses and Abuses of Anti-Imperialism in
the Global Era,” 7 April 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20090225212147/http://www.martinshaw.org/
empire.htm]
It is fashionable in some circles, among which we must clearly include the organizers of this conference, to
argue that the global era is seeing 'a new imperialism' - that can be blamed for the problem of 'failed
states' (probably among many others). Different contributors to this strand of thought name this imperialism in
different ways, but novelty is clearly a critical issue. The logic of using the term imperialism is actually to establish
continuity between contemporary forms of Western world power and older forms first so named by Marxist and
other theorists a century ago. The last thing that critics of a new imperialism wish to allow is that Western power has
changed sufficiently to invalidate the very application of this critical concept. Nor have many considered the
possibility that if
the concept of imperialism has a relevance today, it applies to certain
aggressive, authoritarian regimes of the non-Western world rather than to the
contemporary West. In this paper I fully accept that there is a concentration of much world power - economic,
cultural, political and military - in the hands of Western elites. In my recent book, Theory of the Global State, I
discuss the development of a 'global-Western state conglomerate' (Shaw 2000). I argue that 'global' ideas and
institutions, whose significance characterizes the new political era that has opened with the end of the Cold War,
depend largely - but not solely - on Western power. I hold no brief and intend no apology for official Western ideas
and behaviour. And yet I propose that the idea
of a new imperialism is a profoundly misleading,
indeed ideological concept that obscures the realities of power and especially of empire in the
twenty-first century. This notion is an obstacle to understanding the significance, extent and limits of
contemporary Western power. It simultaneously serves to obscure many real causes of oppression,
suffering and struggle for transformation against the quasi-imperial power of many
regional states. In order to explore the intellectual and political problem that 'a new imperialism' poses it is
necessary to do several things.
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