Afrofuturism Neg
USFG Bad
The state sustains collective identity through an increasing process of oppressive
power struggles – the aff can never solve
Connoly in 2k2 (William, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science @ Johns Hopkins
University, Identity/Difference)
In several domains, the state no longer emerges as a consummate agent of efficacy, even though it expands as a pivotal agent of power.4 A
crack in the very unity of "power" has opened up. We have entered a world in which state
power is simultaneously
magnified and increasingly disconnected from the ends that justify its magni- fication. As obstacles to its
efficacy multiply, the state increasingly sustains collective identity through theatrical displays of punishment and revenge against those elements that threaten to signify its inefficacy. It launches dramatized
crusades against the internal other (low-level criminals, drug users, disloyalists, racial minor- ities, and the underclass), the
external other (foreign enemies and terrorists), and the interior other (those strains of abnormality, subversion, and perversity
that may reside within anyone). The state becomes, first, the screen upon which much of the resentment
against the adverse effects of the civilization of produc- tivity and private affluence is projected;
second, the vehicle through which rhetorical reassurances about the glory and durability of that
civilization are transmitted back to the populace; and third, the instrument of campaigns against those
elements most disturbing to the collective identity. In the first instance, the welfare apparatus of the state is singled out for
criticism and reformation. In the second, the presidency is organized into a medium of rhetorical diversion and reassurance. In the third, the
state disciplinary-police-punitive apparatus is marshaled to constitute and stigmatize constituencies whose terms of existence might otherwise
provide signs of defeat, injury, and sacrifice engendered by the civilization of
Using the USFG as an actor will only repeat the anti-black structure of society
David Lyons 04 (Corrective Justice, Equal Opportunity, and the Legacy of Slavery and Jim Crow , 84
Boston University Law Review 1375-1404, 1375- 1378, 1386-1397 (December, 2004) (167 Footnotes
Omitted)
The foregoing review includes an incomplete but relevant description of the federal government's role
relative to African Americans. The government's policies supported both slavery and Jim Crow. Since
1865, the government has violated or failed to enforce its own Constitution and legislative enactments
for extended periods. In accepting violations of its own basic law, the federal government allowed the
racial caste system to be reconfigured so that it could survive the abolition of slavery. It thereby enabled
the entrenchment of inequities for African Americans in a new system - Jim Crow. It tolerated gross
misconduct by officials, frequent public lynchings, rape, harassment, terror, and coercion - in other
words, widespread, grievous violations of African Americans' most fundamental rights. Given the
opportunity, it has more than once declined to undertake measures necessary to substantially rectify
the long-standing inequities. Of course, this pattern does not fully describe public policy; but it has
dominated public policy since the United States was established. The federal government has thus been
party to and partly responsible for the wrongs done to African Americans. It is the single most important
currently existing party that can truly be held accountable to those who have suffered the wrongs of
racial subjugation. The federal government is, furthermore, an appropriate recipient of moral demands
for corrective justice because of the nature, scope, and magnitude of the inequities that remain to be
addressed.
The Affirmative’s attempt to “explore” in the name of the United States re-entrenches
western superiority
Tinker & Freeland 08(Thief, Slave Trader, Murderer: Christopher Columbus and Caribbean Population Decline
Tink Tinker & Mark Freeland, Wicazo Sa Review 23.1 (2008) 25-50,Tinker is professor of American Indian cultures
and religious traditions at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. Freeland He is currently a doctoral student
in the Joint PhD Program at the Iliff School of Theology and the University of Denver, concentrating in religion and
social change. G.L)
To this end, we must examine the evidences for the decline in indigenous population of the
island of Española under the eight-year
governorship of Columbus and to demonstrate his immediate responsibility for that precipitous decline. The essay will
then move to argue that much of north american history since
Columbus consists of events that are firmly based on a
narrative created in the public consciousness about Columbus (which begins with Columbus's conquest ) and the
ensuing narrative (cultural and legal) developed by american jurists, historians, politicians, movie makers,
and the general public to justify their own conquest and genocide of indigenous populations . Part of this
conceived denial of its own history of violence, which is repeated each year to promote
the idea of american exceptionalism at the cost of the truth of the American Indian genocide. That Columbus, or
Cristóbal Colón (to give him his proper spanish name), was a slave trader is a matter of historical fact. He cut his nautical teeth
sailing under a portugese flag engaged in the african slave trade a dozen years before 1492. When easy wealth in the form
of gold proved not readily available in the Caribbean, Colón resumed his slave-trading occupation by loading the
holds of his ships with Indian human cargo headed for the slave market in Seville. That he was a thief is equally self-evident,
however a high-level thief he may have been. The law of tribute that he instituted in the island he called Española sometime in 1495 forced Indian people
on the island to surrender goods, including gold ore, can only be classed as armed robbery. And we will argue in
this essay that Colón was indeed a murderer, culpable for those crimes against humanity as the head of an
authoritarian regime just as readily as Adolph Hitler is held accountable for the murder of some six million Romas (the
so-called Gypsies), Jews, and gays in Nazi Germany. We know that Colón's law of tribute effectively resulted in the
murder of Taino persons who failed to procure sufficient gold for the admiral and his monarchs. Actually, the mandated
american national narrative, of course, is a loosely
punishment was the severing of the hands of the person who so failed, a punishment that must have, given the state of medical technology, resulted in death from
excessive bleeding. But what exactly was the full extent of Colón's crimes against humanity? That is the subject we address here.
John Roberts sailed through his confirmation hearings as the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, with
enthusiastic Republican support, and a few weak mutterings of opposition by the Democrats. Then, after the far
right deemed Harriet Miers insufficiently doctrinaire, Bush nominated arch conservative Samuel Alito to replace
Sandra Day O'Connor. This has caused a certain consternation among people we affectionately term "the left." I
can understand that sinking feeling. Even listening to pieces of Roberts's confirmation hearings was enough to
induce despair: the joking with the candidate, the obvious signs that, whether Democrats or Republicans, these are
all members of the same exclusive club. Roberts's proper "credentials," his "nice guy" demeanor, his insistence to
the Judiciary Committee that he is not an "ideologue" (can you imagine anyone, even Robert Bork or Dick Cheney,
admitting that he is an "ideologue"?) were clearly more important than his views on equality, justice, the rights of
defendants, the war powers of the President. At one point in the hearings, The New York Times reported, Roberts
"summed up his philosophy." He had been asked, "Are you going to be on the side of the little guy?" (Would any
candidate admit that he was on the side of "the big guy"? Presumably serious "hearings" bring out idiot questions.)
Roberts replied: "If the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy's going to win in court before
me. But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then the big guy's going to win, because my
obligation is to the Constitution." If the Constitution is the holy test, then a justice should abide by its provision in
Article VI that not only the Constitution itself but "all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority
of the United States, shall be the Supreme Law of the Land." This includes the Geneva Convention of 1949, which
the United States signed, and which insists that prisoners of war must be granted the rights of due process. A
district court judge in 2004 ruled that the detainees held in Guantanamo for years without trial were protected by
the Geneva Convention and deserved due process. Roberts and two colleagues on the Court of Appeals overruled
this. There is enormous hypocrisy surrounding the pious veneration of the Constitution and "the rule of law." The
Constitution, like the Bible, is infinitely flexible and is used to serve the political needs of the moment. When the
country was in economic crisis and turmoil in the Thirties and capitalism needed to be saved from the anger of the
poor and hungry and unemployed, the Supreme Court was willing to stretch to infinity the constitutional right of
Congress to regulate interstate commerce. It decided that the national government, desperate to regulate farm
production, could tell a family farmer what to grow on his tiny piece of land. When the Constitution gets in the way
of a war, it is ignored. When the Supreme Court was faced, during Vietnam, with a suit by soldiers refusing to go,
claiming that there had been no declaration of war by Congress, as the Constitution required, the soldiers could
not get four Supreme Court justices to agree to even hear the case. When, during World War I, Congress ignored
the First Amendment's right to free speech by passing legislation to prohibit criticism of the war, the imprisonment
of dissenters under this law was upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, which included two presumably
liberal and learned justices: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. It would be naive to depend on the
Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights
only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to
uphold justice. The distinction between law and justice is ignored by all those Senators--Democrats and
Republicans--who solemnly invoke as their highest concern "the rule of law." The law can be just; it can be unjust.
It does not deserve to inherit the ultimate authority of the divine right of the king. The Constitution gave no rights
to working people: no right to work less than twelve hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working
conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement
which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage
law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance. The Brown decision on school desegregation did not come
from a sudden realization of the Supreme Court that this is what the Fourteenth Amendment called for. After all, it
was the same Fourteenth Amendment that had been cited in the Plessy case upholding racial segregation. It was
the initiative of brave families in the South--along with the fear by the government, obsessed with the Cold War,
that it was losing the hearts and minds of colored people all over the world--that brought a sudden enlightenment
to the Court. The Supreme Court in 1883 had interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment so that nongovernmental
institutions hotels, restaurants, etc.-could bar black people. But after the sit-ins and arrests of thousands of black
people in the South in the early Sixties, the right to public accommodations was quietly given constitutional
sanction in 1964 by the Court. It now interpreted the interstate commerce clause, whose wording had not changed
since 1787, to mean that places of public accommodation could be regulated by Congressional action and be
prohibited from discriminating. Soon this would include barbershops, and I suggest it takes an ingenious
interpretation to include barbershops in interstate commerce. The right of a woman to an abortion did not depend
on the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. It was won before that decision, all over the country, by grassroots
agitation that forced states to recognize the right. If the American people, who by a great majority favor that right,
insist on it, act on it, no Supreme Court decision can take it away. The rights of working people, of women, of black
people have not depended on decisions of the courts. Like the other branches of the political system, the courts
have recognized these rights only after citizens have engaged in direct action powerful enough to win these rights
for themselves. This is not to say that we should ignore the courts or the electoral campaigns. It can be useful to
get one person rather than another on the Supreme Court, or in the Presidency, or in Congress. The courts, win or
lose, can be used to dramatize issues. On St. Patrick's Day, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, four anti-war
activists poured their own blood around the vestibule of a military recruiting center near Ithaca, New York, and
were arrested. Charged in state court with criminal mischief and trespassing (charges well suited to the American
invaders of a certain Mideastern country), the St. Patrick's Four spoke their hearts to the jury. Peter DeMott, a
Vietnam veteran, described the brutality of war. Danny Burns explained why invading Iraq would violate the U.N.
Charter, a treaty signed by the United States. Clare Grady spoke of her moral obligations as a Christian. Teresa
Grady spoke to the jury as a mother, telling them that women and children were the chief victims of war, and that
she cared about the children of Iraq. Nine of the twelve jurors voted to acquit them, and the judge declared a hung
jury. (When the federal government retried them on felony conspiracy charges, a jury in September acquitted
them of those and convicted them on lesser charges.) Still, knowing the nature of the political and judicial system
of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become
dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. Our culture--the media, the educational system--tries to
crowd out of our political consciousness everything except who will be elected President and who will be on the
Supreme Court, as if these are the most important decisions we make. They are not. They deflect us from the most
important job citizens have, which is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil
disobedience that shake up the system. That is why Cindy Sheehan's dramatic stand in Crawford, Texas, leading to
1,600 anti-war vigils around the country, involving 100,000 people, is more crucial to the future of American
democracy than the mock hearings on Justice Roberts or the ones to come on Judge Alito. That is why the St.
Patrick's Four need to be supported and emulated. That is why the GIs refusing to return to Iraq, the families of
soldiers calling for withdrawal from the war, are so important. That is why the huge peace march in Washington on
September 24 bodes well. Let us not be disconsolate over the increasing control of the court system by the right
wing. The courts have never been on the side of justice, only moving a few degrees one way or the other, unless
pushed by the people. Those words engraved in the marble of the Supreme Court, "Equal Justice Before the Law,"
have always been a sham. No Supreme Court, liberal or conservative, will stop the war in Iraq, or redistribute the
wealth of this country, or establish free medical care for every human being. Such fundamental change will
depend, the experience of the past suggests, on the actions of an aroused citizenry, demanding that the promise of
the Declaration of Independence--an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--be fulfilled.
AT: Drexciyans
Music Should be Starting Point
AT: Afrofuturism
PIC
Advocacy: Ocean Exploration should be increased via an encounter with Drexians
The Affirmative’s use of the USFG limits the imaginary
Lisa Yaszek 13 (“Race in Science Fiction: The Case of Afrofuturism”, Lisa Yaszek is Professor and Director
of Undergraduate Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech)
Let's think a little bit more about these last two goals. A
lot of scholars think about Afrofuturism as an extension of the
historical recovery projects that black Atlantic intellectuals have engaged in for well over two hundred years now. As
Tony Morrison has written and spoken about eloquently, these kinds of historic recovery projects show how African
slaves and their descendants experienced conditions of homelessness, alienation, and dislocation that very
much anticipate what Nietzsche described as the founding conditions of modernity (cf. Gilroy). And so, you can start to see why it
is that science fiction appeals to Afrodiasporic artists. If you want think about black people as the
primary subjects of modernity, those who have the most intense engagements with it, science fiction
has the grammar that allows us to narrate those engagements. Stories about travel through time and space and stories
about encounters with the alien other are ideal ways to bring those historical experiences to life for new audiences. Just to jump ahead of
myself here for a moment, if you think about Derrick Bell's story "The Space Traders", you can see how the lead character, Professor
Golightly, is always engaging African American history in his attempt make sense of an uncertain future,
and that's what allows him to realize that the United State's deal with the aliens may not end all that
well. That attempt to connect the past with the present and the future is central to the Afrofuturist
project
Topicality
A- interpretation - “Exploration” is discovery through observation and recording
NAS 10|“Ocean exploration highlights of National Academies Reports”
(http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/osb/miscellaneous/exploration_final.pdf) A.B.
What Is Ocean Exploration? As defined by the President’s Panel on Ocean Exploration (National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, 2000), ocean exploration is discovery through disciplined, diverse
observations and recordings of findings. It includes rigorous, systematic observations and
documentation of biological, chemical, physical, geological, and archeological aspects of the ocean in
the three dimensions of space and in time.
B- Violation, The plan isn’t Exploration, they say they would explore the Earth’s
Ocean’s through an encounter with the Drexciyans, but the definition of
Exploration excludes this.
Activity after discovery isn’t “exploration”
Ashurst 13|“Tax Alert Exploration expenditure – no bright line test ZZGN v Commissioner of Taxation
[2013] AATA 351” (file:///C:/Users/Alex/Downloads/Tax%20Alert%20-%2029%20May%202013.pdf) A.B.
What is "exploration"? One of the key issues in the proceedings concerned the meaning of the word
"exploration" as used in section 37 of the Act. While it is clear that "exploration" extends to activities
involved in searching for and drilling exploration wells to discover petroleum reserves, prior to the
Tribunal’s decision, it was not clear whether the word "exploration" extended beyond the immediate
discovery of petroleum. For example, if a taxpayer drilled an exploration well and discovered petroleum,
does expenditure incurred subsequent to that point in time cease to have the character of exploration
expenditure (even though the extent and quality of the reserve may be unknown)? Further, it was
unclear whether the term "exploration" extended to circumstances where a taxpayer did not yet know
whether an identified reserve was commercially or technically viable to allow for the development and
later production of a petroleum project (ie where the reserve is not a proven reserve). If activities of this
nature were in connection with "exploration" then the costs of assessing the commercial or the
technical feasibility of exploiting a reserve are likely to be referrable to "exploration" and therefore
within section 37 of the Act. A further step along the continuum is whether "exploration" continues until
a final investment decision is made to proceed with a project in relation to a proven reserve. Again, it
was not clear whether expenditure incurred on activities prior to a final investment decision being made
are referrable to "exploration" and therefore within section 37 of the Act. In its decision the Tribunal
concluded, after considering the legislative history of the Act, that there is nothing in the legislative
history or in the extensive case law referred to by either party to suggest that the term "exploration"
should be read as meaning other than its ordinary everyday meaning understood in the context in which
it appears. The Tribunal found it useful to borrow from the language of a research report prepared by
the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics in 1996 (ABARE report) in considering the
nature of the activities which naturally fall within the meaning of the word "exploration", as the word
would be understood by a user of ordinary English familiar with oil and gas mining. The ABARE report
refers to: … oil and gas companies using a range of survey techniques to identify prospective fields.
These may be geological, gravity, magnetic, seismic (2D and 3D) or geometrical surveys. In prospective
areas, new field wildcat wells are drilled to discover the location of accumulations. In the event of a
discovery, appraisal wells may also be drilled to provide a more accurate indication of the potential size
and quality of the oil and gas resources.Ashurst Tax Alert • 29 May 2013 3 The ABARE report then stated
"[if] the discovery is significant, a feasibility study of the field for future development and production is
undertaken". The Tribunal took the view that although activities in the nature of feasibility studies were
included by the ABARE report as falling within the "exploration phase" as opposed to the "production
phase", activity of that kind is of a distinctly different nature to that included within the ordinary
meaning of the term "exploration". Accordingly, the Tribunal found at [322]: … as a matter of fact, that
in the context of section 37(1) of the PRRTA Act, the ordinary meaning of the word 'exploration'
contemplates the use of any range of survey techniques to identify prospective oil or gas fields. Those
survey techniques would include, but not be limited to, geological, gravity and magnetic, seismic (2D
and 3D) and a geometric surveys together with any scientific or technical analysis necessarily associated
with evaluating their results. 'Exploration' also includes the drilling of appraisal wells to provide a more
accurate indication of the potential size and quality of the oil and gas reserves. However, the ordinary
meaning of the word 'exploration' does not, in the Tribunal's view, extend to include feasibility studies
of the field for future development and production. [emphasis added]
The Aff’s advocacy mandates that they encounter the Drexciyans, and then they
explore the ocean, this would mean that in order to find the drexciyans, they would
have to have done exploring In the first place , anything after the encounter with the
Drexciyans is extra Topical, it is outside of what the resolution calls for.
Extra T is a reason to vote NegThey make the affs the neg has to debate limitless, there is never a limit on the Topic,
under their interpretation Affs via Submarines, space ships, Russia and USFG
Cooperation and Etc., are justified.
T is a voter because it's necessary for good, well-prepared debating