1NC - Insularity
Debate is at a crossroads. Year after year we’re faced with threats of
secession. These calls from both the right and left are forging the way
in redesigning what it means to “debate”. However, there is a middle
ground and it needs to be preserved. Our goal should be to foster
growth and retention within the current interscholastic model of
policy debate. Beyond competitive success, we have a responsibility
to mentor future generations of debater. However, we’re failing
miserably at our job. An increasingly high number of High School
program directors are not recommending their students continue
with debate in college. University departments are finding it harder
to sponsor debate programs. The reason is not the argumentation,
rather the content of the debates. We’ve turned debate into a forum
where we can air all our grievances, call people nasty names, generate
a new sense of entitlement that generates fear that hasn’t existed
before, along with destroying any sense of community and academic
norms that had at one time helped us get through all the growing
pains of our activity.
This summer the community spent hundreds of hours of their free
time working on a topic for us to debate. Our call is not to argue over
the “who” but rather the “what”. Topics are central to debate. We
might not always get it perfect but it’s one of the few things that bind
us together as a community. This year we chose “the United States
should legalize all or nearly all of one or more of the following:
Marihuana, Prostitution, Organ Sales, Physician-Assisted Suicide,
and Internet Gambling.” We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the
bathwater. Topics shouldn’t be destroyed, relegated as insufficient,
or discarded because we don’t like the desired argumentative
outcomes they produce. Therefore, our interpretation of debate is
that the aff should be limited to legalizing all or nearly all Marihuana,
Prostitution, Organ Sales, Physician-Assisted Suicide, and/or Internet
Gambling.
Legalize means giving legal sanction to a previously unlawful activity
Supreme Court of Colorado 92 [IN THE MATTER OF THE TITLE, BALLOT TITLE
AND SUBMISSION CLAUSE APPROVED SEPTEMBER 4, 1991, WITH REGARD TO THE
PROPOSED INITIATED CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT CONCERNING LIMITED
GAMING IN MANITOU SPRINGS, FAIRPLAY AND IN AIRPORTS. KATHY VERLO, Petitioner,
and GEORGE L. JAMES, RAYMOND DELLACROCE, and CHARLES SARNER, Respondents,
and GALE NORTON, BILL HOBBS and NATALIE MEYER, Title Setting Board., NO. 91SA359,
826 P.2d 1241; 1992 Colo. LEXIS 53; 16]
Turning to Verlo's claim, we
are satisfied that the Board's use of the term
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the proposed constitutional amendment. We accordingly affirm the ruling of the Board.
Through judicial or legislative action
Business Dictionary ’14 Business Dictionary, “legalize”,
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/legalize.html
legalize
To make enforceable, justifiable, or lawful by judicial or legislative sanction.
Grounding your movement within the law is key to effectuate change
and ensure reform. This means reducing legal restrictions or making
unlawful acts lawful has to be a starting point
Goldstein 2013 (Lee D. Goldstein, Unbound, Vol. 8: 133, 2012-2013, Legal Left,
http://www.legalleft.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Goldstein.pdf)
Left lawyers and legal workers should operate in the interstices of all areas of social
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legal elites, those with a ¶ special relation to the state.75
And, a limited point of stasis is necessary to provide equitable ground
to both sides – this does not exclude their content but does require
them to be topical
O’Donnell 2004, Timothy M. O’Donnell, Professor of Communication and UMW Associate Provost for Academic
Engagement and Student Success, University of Mary Washington, 2004, “And the Twain Shall Meet: Affirmative Framework
Choice and the Future of Debate”, DOC, http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/DRGArtiarticlesIndex.htm
Given that advocates
on all sides have dug in their heels, it does not
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debate from other forms of communication and gives the exchange a directed focus.
Our past transgressions have shifted presumption against saving the
community. The communities’ actions have put us on the brink of
obsolescence. Previous buffers that used to protect debate are rapidly
eroding. Politics, academia, and the public are giving up on debate as
a revolutionary activity for activists, radicals, and pragmatically
minded thinkers.
Hester, 2013 [Michael, PhD, University of West Georgia, “Letter from a Maryland Comfort
Inn”, CEDA Policy Debate Forums (username: Hester), November 22,
http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic,5407.msg11974.html#msg11974, BJM]
To whom it may concern, CEDA-NDT Debate is a hot mess right
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how do we keep it going in the ways that fulfill those needs.
Performance art as liberation strategy that depends on a post-modern
aesthetic that de-limits even the definition of art. Making it the
subject of evaluation in a debate makes it impossible to focus the
conversation because it literally has no limits which are necessary
aids for political conversations.
Mabe 89 [CHAUNCEY MABE “Without Limits, Art Has No Meaning” August 27, 1989|, The
Arts Column http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1989-08-27/features/8902280249_1_postmodernism-limits-performance-art>[ Books Editor, Senior Columnist @ Florida Sun-Sentinel
for 22 years. Art critic, writer.]
Ah, art. I know it when I see it, don`t
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I know anarchy when I see it. And it is not art.
As a result of their performance the new right fills in
Orly Lobel, University of San Diego Assistant Professor of Law, 2007, The Paradox of
Extralegal Activism: Critical Legal Consciousness and Transformative Politics,” 120 HARV. L.
REV. 937, http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/lobel.pdf
Both the
practical failures and the fallacy of rigid boundaries generated by extralegal activism rhetoric
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, and contemporary discontent is legitimated through a process of self-mystification.
Instead we offer an alternative – Debate as legislative theater. This
process best promotes our strategic cognitive ability, preserves
community, and creates a safe space for debaters to have a
relationship to a legal system that we had once given up hope on
Majaury, 2013 [Heather, MA Theater Studies, University of Guelph, “Plays That Make
Policy A Debwewin Journey Through Legislative Theatre”, Thesis,
https://dspace.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10214/7515/Majaury_Heather_20130
8_Ma.pdf?sequence=1, BJM]
In 1992, Augusto Boal
created a complex theatre devising system in Rio de Janeiro
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apparatuses? How does Legislative Theatre tap into political power and use it?
And, debate as legislative theater sustains a new form of deliberative
engagement that will re-energize students and programs to form a
better sense of community that can challenge structures of power
internally and externally making for a better tomorrow than we have
today
Carcasson, 7/1/13 [Martin, PhD., Colorado State University, “Rethinking Civic Engagement
on Campus: The Overarching Potential of Deliberative Practice”, Kettering Foundation Project
#35.13.00, http://thedemocracycommitment.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/3-carcassoncivic-eng-paper.pdf, BJM]
Both adversarial
and expert forms of engagement have strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately,
their
AND
to the polarization rather than either join the fray or avoid politics altogether.
1NC - Case
Interpreting and championing Other’s poetry is a missionary project
– it replaces the screams of the Other with the insidious advancement
of personal agendas
Clarke Professor of Canadian Literature, University of Toronto 2000 George Elliott “Harris,
Philip, Brand: Three authors in search of literate criticism” Journal of Canadian Studies 35.1
proquest
Criticism is never innocent, for it is the capital means, charges the US
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The resultant criticism is tedious, inadequate, and - perhaps - insidious.
Their use of poetry is dangerous – its reliance on previously
constructed identities placates radical potential
Forster Ass’t Prof of English at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo 2002 Sophia “inventory is useless
now but just to say”: The Politics of Ambivalence in Dionne Brand’s Land to Light On” Studies in
Canadian Literature 27.2 http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/12797/13785
Transposing questions of identity in politics into the realm of poetics, Charles Bernstein (
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a static entity preceding, and awaiting, its own formal representation.3
Political and artistic critique as a sole method turns into an
echochamber – combining Enables better approaches to affirmative
nihilism
Jon Wittrock, School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University, and Mats Andrén,
Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, May 2014,
The Critique of European Nihilism. Interpretation, Responsibility, and Action, European
Review / Volume 22 / Issue 02 / May 2014, pp 179-195
It may be tempting, then, to dismiss diagnoses of nihilism as little more
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this, indeed, would seem to be the responsible thing to do.
Their depiction of an all-pervasive force that explains all oppression
re-inscribes its inevitability---specific analysis of racism is crucial
Margaret L. Andersen 3, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies and Vice Provost for
Academic Affairs at the University of Delaware, 2003, “Whitewashing Race: A Critical
Perspective on Whiteness,” in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, ed Doane &
Bonilla-Silva, p. 28
Conceptually, one
of the major problems in the whiteness literature is the reification of
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come to mean just about everything, it ends up meaning hardly anything .