Ethics
The claim that life is meaningless is nothing more than a thinly-veiled cover for mass rape and
genocide – accepting their argument necessitates an unconditional acceptance of brutal
atrocities in all their forms
Kelley L. Ross, professor of philosophy at Los Angeles Valley College, 2003, “Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900),” http://www.friesian.com/NIETZSCH.HTM
While the discussion of Existentialism treated Nietzsche as an Existentialist before his time, with the death of God producing the kind of nihilism
characteristic of that movement, Nietzsche, for all his warnings about nihilism, does not in the end seem to be an actual nihilist. He is a kind of positivist
instead -- that certain actual events and practices are the root of genuine value. The events and practices used by Nietzsche happen to be those of the
most extreme 19th century Darwinian conception of nature. This very often sounds good, since Nietzsche sees himself, and can easily impress others, as
simply making a healthy affirmation of life. Life for Nietzsche, however, is red in tooth and claw, and the most admirable and
interesting form of life is the triumphant Darwinian predator, who in general is paradigmatic of beauty, grace, strength,
intelligence, and activity, while living off of the less intelligent herds of herbivores, i.e. the dull and the bovine. In The Genealogy of Morals, one of
Nietzsche's latest works (1887), he lays this all out with great clarity and eloquence. It is a performance that is also appalling -- and
horrifying in relation to the uses to which Nietzsche's ideas were later put, for which he cannot, and would not
care to, escape blame. First of all, Nietzsche's racism is unmistakable. The best way to approach this is to let
Nietzsche speak for himself. In the quotes that follow, I will simply offer examples from The Genealogy of Morals alone, as translated by
Francis Golffing (in the footnotes I have been adding some passages from Beyond Good and Evil for comparison). The Latin malus ["bad"]
(beside which I place melas [Greek for "black"]) might designate the common man as dark, especially black-haired ("hic niger
est"), as the pre-Aryan settler of the Italian soil, notably distiguished from the new blond conqueror race by his color. At any
rate, the Gaelic presented me with an exactly analogous case: fin, as in the name Fingal, the characteristic term for nobility, eventually
the good, noble, pure, originally the fair-haired as opposed to the dark, black-haired native population. The Celts,
by the way, were definitely a fair-haired race; and it is a mistake to try to relate the area of dark-haired people found on ethnographic maps of Germany
to Celtic bloodlines, as Virchow does. These are the last vestiges of the pre-Aryan population of Germany. (The subject races are seen to prevail once
more, throughout almost all of Europe; in color, shortness of skull, perhaps also in intellectual and social instincts. Who knows whether modern
democracy, the even more fashionable anarchism, and especially that preference for the commune, the most primitive of all social forms, which is now
shared by all European socialists -- whether all these do not represent a throwback, and whether, even physiologically, the Aryan race of conquerors is
not doomed?) [The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, p.164, boldface added, note] Here we have an
unmistakable racism: the good, noble, and blond Aryans, contrasted with the dark and primitive indigenes of
Europe. While Nietzsche's thought is often defended as unrelated to the racism of the Nazis, there does not
seem to be much difference from the evidence of this passage. One difference might be Nietzsche's characterization of the
"commune" as "the most primitive of all social forms." Nazi ideology was totalitarian and "social," denigrating individualism. Nietzsche would not have
gone for this -- and the small, dark Hitler is certainly no Aryan -- but then many defenders of Nietzsche these days also tend to prefer a communitarian
democracy, which means they might have more in common with the Nazis, despite their usual anti-racism, than Nietzsche himself. This is characteristic
of the confusion of contemporary politics, let alone Nietzsche apologetics. The passage above, at least, provides as much aid and comfort for the Nazis as
for any other interpretation or appropriation of Nietzsche. Nietzsche's racism might be excused as typical of its age, and criticism of
However, the racism of Thomas Jefferson, a century earlier, involved an explicit denial that
physical or intellectual differences between the races (about which Jefferson expressed no certainty) compromised the
rights of the inferior races. To Nietzsche, however, the "subject races" have no "rights"; and domination, not to
mention all the forms of "oppression" excoriated by the trendy Left, are positive and desirable goods. This anxiety or
it anachronistic.
distemper may be due to a variety of causes. It may result from a crossing of races too dissimilar (or of classes too dissimilar. Class distinctions are
always indicative of genetic and racial differences: the European Weltschmerz and the pessimism of the nineteenth century were both essentially the
results of an abrupt and senseless mixing of classes)... [p.267, boldface added, note] In the litany of political sins identified by the Left, "racism, classism,
and homophobia" are the holy trinity -- with "classism," of course, as a codeword for the hated capitalism. Here we see that for Nietzsche racism
and "classism" are identical: the "subject races" form the subject classes. This is good and noble. We also get another
aspect of the matter, the "mixing" of races and classes is "senseless" and productive of the pessimism and social
problems of modern society. In these terms, Nietzsche can only have approved of the Nazis laws against marriage or
even sex between Aryans and Untermenschen. The lack of rights for the dark underclasses brings us to the
principal theme of The Genealogy of Morals: The morality of "good and evil" has been invented out of hatred
and resentment by the defeated and subjugated races, especially the Jews. People who love Nietzsche for his celebration of
creativity and his dismissal of the moralism of traditional religion, mainly meaning Christianity, usually seem to think of going "beyond good and evil" as
merely legitimizing homosexuality, drugs, abortion, prostitution, pornography, and the other desiderata of progressive thinking. They don't seem to
understand that Nietzsche wasn't particularly interested in things like that, but, more to the point, legitimizing
rape, murder, torture, pillage, domination, and political oppression by the strong. The only honest Nietzschean graduate
student I ever met frankly stated, "To be creative, you must be evil." We get something similar in the recent Sandra Bullock movie, Murder by Numbers
[2002], where the young Nietzschean student simply says, "Freedom is crime." The story of the movie is more or less that of Leopold and Loeb, the
Chicago teenagers who in 1924 murdered a young Ross continued…
boy (Bobby Franks) to prove that they were "beyond good and evil." Leopold and Loeb understood their Nietzsche far better than most of his academic
apologists. And we are the first to admit that anyone who knew these "good" ones [nobility] only as enemies would find
them evil enemies indeed. For these same men who, amongst themselves, are so strictly constrained by custom,
worship, ritual, gratitude, and by mutual surveillance and jealousy, who are so resourceful in consideration,
tenderness, loyality, pride and friendship, when once they step outside their circle become little better than
uncaged beasts of prey. Once abroad in the wilderness, they revel in the freedom from social constraint and
compensate for their long confinement in the quietude of their own community. They revert to the innocence of
wild animals: we can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape, and torture, jubilant and at
peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank -- convinced, moreover, that the poets
for a long time to come will have something to sing about and to praise. Deep within all the noble races there
lurks the beast of prey, bent on spoil and conquest. This hidden urge has to be satisfied from time to time, the beast let loose in the
wilderness. This goes as well for the Roman, Arabian, German, Japanese nobility as for the Homeric heroes and the Sandinavian vikings. The noble
races have everywhere left in their wake the catchword "barbarian." .....their utter indifference to safety and
comfort, their terrible pleasure in destruction, their taste for cruelty -- all these traits are embodied by their
victims in the image of the "barbarian," and "evil enemy," the Goth or the Vandal. The profound and icy suspicion which
the German arouses as soon as he assumes power (we see it happening again today [i.e. 1887]) harks back to the persistent horror with which Europe for
many centuries witnessed the raging of the blond Teutonic beast (although all racial connection between the old Teutonic tribes and ourselves has been
lost). [pp.174-175, boldface added] The "noble races" are thus ennobled by no restraint or consideration shown for the
persons or possessions, let alone feelings, of those helpless strangers who come within their power. "Spoil and
conquest," rape and torture, are fun. Kaiser Wilhelm got in the spirit of things by telling German troups to act like the "Huns of Attila" on
their mission to Peking in 1900. No Nietzschean has any business, for example, damning Christopher Columbus for
enslaving the Caribs. While Nietzsche actually seems to think that the "blond Teutonic beast" was gone from Germany, and Hitler, as noted,
hardly fills the bill, there is actually no lack of blonds in the "Nordic" nations, and Nietzsche himself here seems to have a relatively expansive notion of
racial superiority. While he apparently thought of the Roman nobility as themselves of Aryan extraction, he can hardly have thought the same of the
Arabians or Japanese. This acknowledgment would have been of material advantage in World War II, when many Arabs preferred the Germans to the
British (or to the Zionist Jews of Palestine) -- while the Japanese, even today, often think of themselves as a pure and superior race. As actual German
Allies in World War II, the Japanese where in close competition with Germany for atrocities against civilians and prisoners-of-war (though the Germans
were relatively considerate of American and British prisoners, while brutal to Russians and others, as the Japanese were to all). But, one might
think, violence and oppression are unjust! How could any progressive person not see that expoitation and
abuse are wrong! We have Nietzsche's answer: No act of violence, rape, exploitation, destruction, is
intrinsically "unjust," since life itself is violent, rapacious, exploitative, and destructive and cannot be conceived
otherwise. Even more disturbingly, we have to admit that from the biological [i.e. Darwinian] point of view legal conditions are necessarily
exceptional conditions, since they limit the radical life-will bent on power and must finally subserve, as means, life's collective purpose, which is to create
greater power constellations. To accept any legal system as sovereign and universal -- to accept it, not merely as an instrument in the struggle of power
complexes, but as a weapon against struggle (in the sense of Dühring's communist cliché that every will must regard every other will as its equal) -- is an
anti-vital principle which can only bring about man's utter demoralization and, indirectly, a reign of nothingness. [p.208, boldface added] Nietzsche
is certainly life affirming, but then violence, rape, exploitation, and destruction are intrinsic to his view of life.
Attempts to protect the weak, see that justice is done, and mitigate suffering are "anti-vital" projects that, being
adverse to life itself, actually tend towards "a reign of nothingness." Thus, if we actually care about others and
are not just interested in asserting power over them and using them for our own pleasure, then we can look
forward to extinction. The delicacy -- even more, the tartufferie -- of domestic animals like ourselves shrinks from imagining clearly to what
extent cruelty constituted the collective delight of older mankind, how much it was an ingredient of all their joys, or how naïvely they manifested their
cruelty, how they considered disinterested malevolence (Spinoza's sympathia malevolens) a normal trait, something to which one's conscience could
assent heartily.... To behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords an even greater pleasure. [pp.197-198, boldface added] A
great part of the pleasure that we get, according to Nietzsche, from injustice to others is simply the pleasure of
inflicting suffering. In this it is worth recollecting the feminist shibboleth that rape is not about sex, it is about
power. Nietzsche would heartily concur. So much the better! And what is more, the value of rape is not just
power, it is the chance to cruelly inflict suffering. The rapist who beats and mutilates, perhaps even kills, his
victim, has done no evil, he is instead one of the heroes of true historic nobility. And people think that the droit de seigneur
represents some "abuse" of power! No! It is the truly noble man as heroic rapist! Nietzsche would turn around Susan
Brownmiller, who said that all men are rapists. No, it is just the problem that they are not. Nietzsche would
regard most men as virtual castrati (domestic oxen, geldings) for not being rapists.
Rules Good – Exclusion
Eliminating rules transforms competitive debate into ‘cooperative conversation’ --- this approach
privileges dominant voices, locking in exclusion and political alienation
Tonn ‘05
(Mari Boor, Professor of Communication – University of Maryland, “Taking Conversation, Dialogue, and Therapy
Public”, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 8, Issue 3, Fall)
Perhaps the most conspicuous effort at replacing public debate with therapeutic dialogue was President Clinton's
Conversation on Race, launched in mid-1997. Controversial from its inception for its ideological bent, the initiative met
further widespread criticism for its encounter-group approaches to racial stratification and strife, critiques echoing
previously articulated concerns- my own among them6-that certain dangers lurk in employing private or social
communication modes for public problem-solving.7 Since then, others have joined in contesting the treating of public
problems with narrative and psychological approaches, which-in the name of promoting civility, cooperation, personal
empowerment, and socially constructed or idiosyncratic truths-actually work to contain dissent, locate systemic social
problems solely within individual neurosis, and otherwise fortify hegemony.8 Particularly noteworthy is Michael
Schudson's challenge to the utopian equating of "conversation" with the "soul of democracy." Schudson points to pivotal
differences in the goals and architecture of conversational and democratic deliberative processes. To him, political (or
democratic) conversation is a contradiction in terms. Political deliberation entails a clear instrumental purpose, ideally
remaining ever mindful of its implications beyond an individual case. Marked by disagreement-even pain-democratic
deliberation contains transparent prescribed procedures governing participation and decision making so as to protect
the timid or otherwise weak. In such processes, written records chronicle the interactional journey toward resolution, and
in the case of writing law especially, provide accessible justification for decisions rendered. In sharp contrast, conversation
is often "small talk" exchanged among family, friends, or candidates for intimacy, unbridled by set agendas, and prone to
egocentric rather than altruistic goals. Subject only to unstated "rules" such as turn-taking and politeness, conversation
tends to advantage the gregarious or articulate over the shy or slight of tongue.9 The events of 9/11, the onset of war with
Afghanistan and Iraq, and the subsequent failure to locate Iraqi w eapons of m ass d estruction have resuscitated some faith
in debate, argument, warrant, and facts as crucial to the public sphere. Still, the romance with public conversation
persists. As examples among communication scholars, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's 2001 Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished
Lecture treated what she termed "the rhetoric of conversation" as a means to "manage controversy" and empower nondominant voices10; multiple essays in a 2002 special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs on deliberative democracy couch a
deliberative democratic ideal in dialogic terms11; and the 2005 Southern States Communication Convention featured
family therapist Sallyann Roth, founding member and trainer of the Public Conversations Project, as keynote speaker.12
Representative of the dialogic turn in deliberative democracy scholarship is Gerard A. Hauser and Chantal Benoit-Barne's
critique of the traditional procedural, reasoning model of public problem solving: "A deliberative model of democracy . . .
constru[es] democracy in terms of participation in the ongoing conversation about how we shall act and interact-our
political relations" and "Civil society redirects our attention to the language of social dialogue on which our understanding
of political interests and possibility rests."13 And on the political front, British Prime Minister Tony Blair-facing declining
poll numbers and mounting criticism of his indifference to public opinion on issues ranging from the Iraq war to steep
tuition hike proposals-launched The Big Conversation on November 28, 2003. Trumpeted as "as way of enriching the
Labour Party's policy making process by listening to the British public about their priorities," the initiative includes an
interactive government website and community meetings ostensibly designed to solicit citizens' voices on public issues.14
In their own way, each treatment of public conversation positions it as a democratic good, a mode that heals divisions and
carves out spaces wherein ordinary voices can be heard. In certain ways, Schudson's initial reluctance to dismiss public
conversation echoes my own early reservations, given the ideals of egalitarianism, empowerment, and mutual respect
conversational advocates champion. Still, in the spirit of the dialectic ostensibly underlying dialogic premises, this essay
argues that various negative consequences can result from transporting conversational and therapeutic paradigms into
public problem solving. In what follows, I extend Schudson's critique of a conversational model for democracy in two
ways: First, whereas Schudson primarily offers a theoretical analysis, I interrogate public conversation as a praxis in a
variety of venues, illustrating how public "conversation" and "dialogue" have been coopted to silence rather than
empower marginalized or dissenting voices. In practice, public conversation easily can emulate what feminist political
scientist Jo Freeman termed "the tyranny of structurelessness" in her classic 1970 critique of consciousness- raising
groups in the women's liberation movement,15 as well as the key traits Irving L. Janis ascribes to "groupthink."16 Thus,
contrary to its promotion as a means to neutralize hierarchy and exclusion in the public sphere, public conversation can
and has accomplished the reverse. When such moves are rendered transparent, public conversation and dialogue, I
contend, risk increasing rather than diminishing political cynicism and alienation. [Continues…] This widespread
recognition that access to public deliberative processes and the ballot is a baseline of any genuine democracy points to the
most curious irony of the conversation movement: portions of its constituency. Numbering among the most fervid dialogic
loyalists have been some feminists and multiculturalists who represent groups historically denied both the right to speak
in public and the ballot. Oddly, some feminists who championed the slogan "The Personal Is Political" to emphasize ways
relational power can oppress tend to ignore similar dangers lurking in the appropriation of conversation and dialogue in
public deliberation. Yet the conversational model's emphasis on empowerment through intimacy can duplicate the power
networks that traditionally excluded females and nonwhites and gave rise to numerous, sometimes necessarily uncivil,
demands for democratic inclusion. Formalized participation structures in deliberative processes obviously cannot ensure
the elimination of relational power blocs, but, as Freeman pointed out, the absence of formal rules leaves relational power
unchecked and potentially capricious. Moreover, the privileging of the self, personal experiences, and individual
perspectives of reality intrinsic in the conversational paradigm mirrors justifications once used by dominant groups who
used their own lives, beliefs, and interests as templates for hegemonic social premises to oppress women, the lower class,
and people of color. Paradigms infused with the therapeutic language of emotional healing and coping likewise flirt with
the type of psychological diagnoses once ascribed to disaffected women. But as Betty Friedan's landmark 1963 The
Feminist Mystique argued, the cure for female alienation was neither tranquilizers nor attitude adjustments fostered
through psychotherapy but, rather, unrestricted opportunities.102
AT: Rationality Bad
Even if rationality is flawed, it’s the best evaluative system we have --- alternatives breed political sterility
Solt ‘93
(Roger, Debate Coach at the University of Kentucky, Demystifying the Critique,
http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Solt1993Health.htm)
The critique of rationality provides another good example of why critiques are likely not to be absolute. " Reason" may be a
flawed instrument; there may be occasions when we should give greater weight to our emotions or intuitions. But
rationality clearly has a vital place in human life. If you had been falsely accused of murder, you would want the jury to
listen to the reasons you could give for your innocence, not just vote on whether they like you or not. The fact that you
were in Lexington at the time that this murder was being committed in Austin is a sound logical reason for why you
couldn't have committed it. My point is that no critique of rationality can discredit all forms of rational thought.
Furthermore, it cannot do so with complete certainty. It should be next to impossible for the negative to win that rational
reasons have no probative value. It's better to decide on the basis of a flawed rationality than it is to flip a coin. The third
main approach to attacking the critique is to argue it in its own terms. While I would not recommend this as a sole
strategy, I believe that it has considerable merit in combination with other arguments. Most critiques simply are not that
strong. There may well be a good reason why the assumption that the critique attacks is rarely questioned. At minimum, it
is likely to be an assumption which most people (including most judges) happen to share. Thus, the degree of persuasion
required to sustain that assumption may be minimal. Consider the rationality example. The necessity of reason in a public
policy debate seems obvious. We try to give reasons for our conclusions because reasons can be evaluated and compared.
If one side claims that its intuition is that a policy is wrong and the other says that its intuition is that the policy is right,
we have no grounds for debate. We can emote or intuit at each other all day without getting anywhere. Reasoned
argument offers our only real hope of peacefully settling intuitive disagreements. It can never he established logically that
logic is correct; to do so would be circular. But the elementary rules of logic are simply self-evident. If I was in Lexington,
Kentucky at the time which someone was stabbed to death in Austin, Texas, I couldn't have been the one to do the
stabbing. Similarly, given the way in which our minds are constructed, empiricism seems to be by nature compelling.
Logically, we can't know that the sun will rise tomorrow; the future may not repeat the past. But our past experience is the
best thing that we have to go on; life requires that we act and judge with some degree of uncertainty.
This locks in oppression --- action is necessary even if ‘truth’ can’t be assured
Grossburg ‘92
(Lawrence, U Illinois, We Gotta Get Outta This Place, p. 362-4)
While such a moment of intellectual suspicion is necessary, it goes too far when it assumes that all knowledge
claims are unjustified and unjustifiable, leaving the critic to celebrate difference and a radical and pluralist
relativism. The fact of contextual determination does not by itself mean that all knowledge claims are false, nor does it
mean that all such claims are equally invalid or useless responses to a particular context. It need not entail relativism. The
fact that specific discourses are articulated into relations of power does not mean that these relations are
necessary or guaranteed, nor that all knowledges are equally bad—and to be opposed—for even if they are
implicated with particular structures of power, there as no reason to assume that all structures of power are equally
bad. Such an assumption would entail the futility of political struggle and the end of history. This is the conundrum of the
intellectual Left, for you can’t have knowledge without standards and authority. Similarly, although all structures of
commonality, norrnality and the sacred may be suspect, social existence itself is impossible without at least the
imagination of such possibilities. This “intellectual’s crisis” of representation becomes particularly dangerous
when it is projected on everyday life and political struggle, when it is mistakenly identified with a very different crisis
of authority. In the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-Three Mile Island, post-Challenger, post-Jimmy Bakker world,
many if not all of the traditional sources of moral, political and even intellectual authority (including those empowered by
the postwar consensus) have collapsed or at least lost a good deal of their aura. There is a deep seated public anxiety that
America’s power (moral, political, economic, etc.) is on the wane and that none of the traditional authorities is capable of
protecting Americans from the many forces—natural and social—that threaten them. Here we must assent to part of the
new conservative argument: Structures of ironic cynicism have become increasingly powerful and do represent a real
cultural and political problem. Both ‘crises” involve a struggle to redefine cultural authority. For the former it is a struggle
to reestablish the political possibility of theory. For the latter it involves the need to construct politically effective
authorities, and to relocate the right of intellectuals to claim such authority without reproducing authoritarian relations.
The intellectuals’ crisis is a reflexive and rather self-indulgent struggle against a pessimism which they have largely
created for themselves. The conflation of the two glosses over the increasing presence (even as popular figures) of new
conservative intellectuals, and the threatening implications of the power of a popular new conservatism. The new
conservative alliance has quite intentionally addressed the crisis of authority, often blaming it on the Left’s intellectual
crisis of representation (e.g., the attacks on ‘political correctness”), as the occasion for their own efforts to set new
authorities in place new positions, new criteria and new statements. Left intellectuals have constructed their own
irrelevance, not through their “elitist” language, but through their refusal to find appropriate forms and sites of
authority. Authority is not necessarily authoritarian; it need not claim the privilege of an autonomous, sovereign
and unified speaking subject. In the face of real historical relations of domination and subordination, political
intervention seems to demand, as part of the political responsibility of those empowered to speak, that they speak
to—and sometimes for—others. And sometimes that speech must address questions about the relative
importance of different struggles and the relative value, even the enabling possibilities of, different structures.
Research Good
Intensive research generates in-depth understanding of complex issues, empowers informed decisionmaking and energizes debaters to become politically active
Dybvig and Iverson ‘2K
(Kristin and Joel, Arizona State U., “Can Cutting Cards Carve into Our Personal Lives: An Analysis of Debate
Research on Personal Advocacy”, http://debate.uvm.edu/dybvigiverson1000.html)
The level of research involved in debate creates an in-depth understanding of issues. The level of research conducted
during a year of debate is quite extensive. Goodman (1993) references a Chronicle of Higher Education article that
estimated "the level and extent of research required of the average college debater for each topic is equivalent to the
amount of research required for a Master's Thesis (cited in Mitchell, 1998, p. 55). With this extensive quantity of research,
debaters attain a high level of investigation and (presumably) understanding of a topic. As a result of this level of
understanding, debaters become knowledgeable citizens who are further empowered to make informed opinions and
energized to take action. Research helps to educate students (and coaches) about the state of the world. Without the
guidance of a debate topic, how many students would do in-depth research on female genital mutilation in Africa, or
United Nations sanctions on Iraq? The competitive nature of policy debate provides an impetus for students to research
the topics that they are going to debate. This in turn fuels students’ awareness of issues that go beyond their front doors.
Advocacy flows from this increased awareness. Reading books and articles about the suffering of people thousands of
miles away or right in our own communities drives people to become involved in the community at large. Research has
also focused on how debate prepares us for life in the public sphere. Issues that we discuss in debate have found their way
onto the national policy stage, and training in intercollegiate debate makes us good public advocates. The public sphere is
the arena in which we all must participate to be active citizens. Even after we leave debate, the skills that we have gained
should help us to be better advocates and citizens. Research has looked at how debate impacts education (Matlon and
Keele 1984), legal training (Parkinson, Gisler and Pelias 1983, Nobles 19850 and behavioral traits (McGlone 1974, Colbert
1994). These works illustrate the impact that public debate has on students as they prepare to enter the public sphere. The
debaters who take active roles such as protesting sanctions were probably not actively engaged in the issue until their
research drew them into the topic. Furthermore, the process of intense research for debate may actually change the
positions debaters hold. Since debaters typically enter into a topic with only cursory (if any) knowledge of the issue, the
research process provides exposure to issues that were previously unknown. Exposure to the literature on a topic can
create, reinforce or alter an individual's opinions. Before learning of the School for the America's, having an opinion of the
place is impossible. After hearing about the systematic training of torturers and oppressors in a debate round and reading
the research, an opinion of the "school" was developed. In this manner, exposure to debate research as the person finding
the evidence, hearing it as the opponent in a debate round (or as judge) acts as an initial spark of awareness on an issue.
This process of discovery seems to have a similar impact to watching an investigative news report. Mitchell claimed that
debate could be more than it was traditionally seen as, that it could be a catalyst to empower people to act in the social
arena. We surmise that there is a step in between the debate and the action. The intermediary step where people are
inspired to agency is based on the research that they do. If students are compelled to act, research is a main factor in
compelling them to do so. Even if students are not compelled to take direct action, research still changes opinions and
attitudes.
Policy research creates important learning, academic skills, and post-debate opportunities
Speice and Lyle ‘03
(Patrick, Wake Forest, and Jim, Debate Coach – Clarion, “Traditional Policy Debate: Now More Than Ever”,
Debaters Research Guide, http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/SpeiceLyle2003htm.htm)
Why are these researching skills important? First, learning how to conduct research translates in the better academic
skills. Better research produces better papers, speeches and presentations, and general knowledge (Freeley, 1996).
Experience with research also provides debaters with good models for learning how to write. Learning to do conduct
research is also useful for many personal purposes. Furthermore, it is not simply the ability to conduct research that
debate teaches; rather it is the ability to engage in research efficiently and effectively. It still ceases to amaze us how poor
the research skills are of most non-debaters. It is not that most people cannot do research, but rather how inefficient they
are at doing it. Second, learning how to do policy research, and doing the research is desirable because it provides
students with a better understanding of how the American government, and the world, exist and operate. This is useful as
academic knowledge, but is of even greater utility in professional and social roles that intersect with the functioning of the
American democracy. As has been noted elsewhere, engagement in research not only produces disinterested knowledge, it
also can facilitate individual argumentative agency (Mitchell, 1998). The policy analysis focus of research is particularly
desirable in achieving this goal. Experience with policy research also can translate into “post-debate” skills. There are
many debaters who have gained employment with a variety of private, governmental, and international policy institutions
due in large part to their research skills (Parcher, 1996).
Research facilitates cognitive development that is crucial to solve real-world problems
Muir ‘93
(Star, Professor of Communication – George Mason U., “A Defense of the Ethics of Contemporary Debate”,
Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 26, No. 4, p. 287)
The jargon, strategies, and techniques may be alienating to "outsiders," but they are also paradoxically integrative as well.
Playing the game of debate involves certain skills, including research and policy evaluation, that evolve along with a
debater's consciousness of the complexities of moral and political dilemmas. This conceptual development is a basis for
the formation of ideas and relational thinking necessary for effective public decision making, making even the game of
debate a significant benefit in solving real world problems.
Research is critical for effective activism
Martin ‘01
(Brian, associate professor in Science, Technology & Society at the University of Wollongong, Nonviolence Versus
Capitalism, http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/01nvc/nvcall.html)
To undertake an effective campaign requires some level of investigation. For example, a campaign against
genetically engineered crops needs information on environmental risks, likely impacts on farmers and organic
alternatives, plus insight into government and corporate strategies and how they can be countered. Knowledge
and insight are invaluable, especially in a field where advanced science and technology play such a major role.
Link – Poetry
Judge intervention --- poetry is fluid and has no criteria for evaluation
Bleiker ‘2K
(Roland, Senior Lecturer – U Queensland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics, p. 271)
But how can something as inaudible as transversal poetic dissent possibly be evaluated? How can a form of resistance
that engages linguistic and discursive practices be judged or merely be understood, by the very nexus of power and
knowledge it seeks to distance itself from? These difficult questions beg for complex answers. I do not claim to have
solved them here, nor do I believe that they can actually be solved, at least not in an absolute and definitive way. The
impact of discursive dissent on transversal social and political dynamics is mediated through tactical and temporal
processes. A poem, for instance, does not directly cause particular events, it does not visualize an opponent in space and
time. A linguistic expression of dissent works by insinuating itself into its target—the population at large—without taking it
over, but also without being separated from it. Even the agent becomes gradually blurred. The effect of a poem cannot be
reduced to its author or even to the poem itself. Those who have read it my have passed altered knowledge on to other
people, and thus influenced the transversal constitution of societal values.
Baudrillard provides no specific proof of his theories and a priori condemns attempts to
transform society
Wolin ‘4 (Richard, Professor of history and comparative literature at the City University of New York, The
Seduction of Unreason, pg 305-306)
Unlike Nietzsche and Heidegger, Baudrillard presumably did actually travel to the land he was describing. Yet one of the
strange features of his narrative is that although he describes a myriad of tourist sites, he reproduces not a single
conversation with a “real” American. But since Baudrillard’s theoretical perspective on American life was fully worked out
before he departed, perhaps such a conversation would have been in any event superfluous. For all Baudrillard’s
predictability, there is no denying that, on occasion, he expresses a clever formulation or witty insight. But, ultimately,
how seriously should we take a social philosopher who recommends that his books be treated like science fiction novels r
Borgesesque ficciones? Very much so, insofar as Baudrillard’s cliché-ridden view of American society has become standard
issue among academic postmodernists. Like his precursors on the European right, Baudrillard believes that human actors
are powerless to implement meaningful social change. The die has been cast. “Hyperreality”—the reign of the
“simulacrum”—confronts us as an ineluctable fate, an inexorable, postmodern condition humaine. The amor fati
celebrated by Germany’s conservative revolutionaries has been updated and recycled, only to reemerge as one of the
commonplaces of ivory tower radical chic. Yet as Baudrillard’s critics have observed, his peculiar combination of
epistemological skepticism and political nihilism accord with a “postmodern mood of widespread cynical acquiescence,”
resulting in a form of theory that is “ill equipped to mount any kind of effective critical resistance.” There is no point in trying
to combat today’s “captains of consciousness,” since all criticism and contestation end up recycled by the culture industry’s
vast semio-technological maw. In the epitome of postmodern political fatalism, the only strategy Baudrillard has to
recommend is “death”: solely by aping the information society’s own lifelessness and inertia—a practice he refers to as
“crystal revenge”—does one stand a chance, argues Baudrillard, the implosions of media society portend the collapse of
the emancipatory project in general. His verdict on the impossibility of progressive historical change reiterates one of the
commonplaces of reactionary rhetoric: the so-called futility thesis, according to which attempts to transform society are
condemned a priori to failure.
The critique refuses to accept the same falsifiable review our evidence goes through – disproves
their methodology, destroys academic debate, and causes extinction.
Coyne, 06 – Author and Writer for the Times (Jerry A., “A plea for empiricism”, FOLLIES OF THE WISE, Dissenting
essays, 405pp. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard, 1 59376 101 5)
Supernatural forces and events, essential aspects of most religions, play no role in science, not because we exclude them
deliberately, but because they have never been a useful way to understand nature. Scientific “truths” are empirically supported
observations agreed on by different observers. Religious “truths,” on the other hand, are personal, unverifiable and contested by
those of different faiths. Science is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not blow each other up. Science
encourages doubt; most religions quash it. But religion is not completely separable from science. Virtually all religions make
improbable claims that are in principle empirically testable, and thus within the domain of science: Mary, in Catholic teaching,
was bodily taken to heaven, while Muhammad rode up on a white horse; and Jesus (born of a virgin) came back from the
dead. None of these claims has been corroborated, and while science would never accept them as true without evidence,
religion does. A mind that accepts both science and religion is thus a mind in conflict. Yet scientists, especially
beleaguered American evolutionists, need the support of the many faithful who respect science. It is not politically or
tactically useful to point out the fundamental and unbreachable gaps between science and theology. Indeed, scientists and
philosophers have written many books (equivalents of Leibnizian theodicy) desperately trying to show how these areas can
happily cohabit. In his essay, “Darwin goes to Sunday School”, Crews reviews several of these works, pointing out with
brio the intellectual contortions and dishonesties involved in harmonizing religion and science. Assessing work by the
evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, the philosopher Michael Ruse, the theologian John Haught and others, Crews concludes,
“When coldly examined . . . these productions invariably prove to have adulterated scientific doctrine or to have emptied
religious dogma of its commonly accepted meaning”. Rather than suggesting any solution (indeed, there is none save
adopting a form of “religion” that makes no untenable empirical claims), Crews points out the dangers to the survival of
our planet arising from a rejection of Darwinism. Such rejection promotes apathy towards overpopulation, pollution,
deforestation and other environmental crimes: “So long as we regard ourselves as creatures apart who need only repent of
our personal sins to retain heaven’s blessing, we won’t take the full measure of our species-wise responsibility for these
calamities”. Crews includes three final essays on deconstruction and other misguided movements in literary theory. These also
show “follies of the wise” in that they involve interpretations of texts that are unanchored by evidence. Fortunately, the harm
inflicted by Lacan and his epigones is limited to the good judgement of professors of literature. Follies of the Wise is one of the
most refreshing and edifying collections of essays in recent years. Much like Christopher Hitchens in the UK, Crews serves
a vital function as National Sceptic. He ends on a ringing note: “ The human race has produced only one successfully
validated epistemology, characterizing all scrupulous inquiry into the real world, from quarks to poems. It is, simply,
empiricism, or the submitting of propositions to the arbitration of evidence that is acknowledged to be such by all of the
contending parties. Ideas that claim immunity from such review, whether because of mystical faith or privileged “clinical
insight” or the say-so of eminent authorities, are not to be countenanced until they can pass the same skeptical ordeal to which
all other contenders are subjected.” As science in America becomes ever more harried and debased by politics and religion,
we desperately need to heed Crews’s plea for empiricism.