Act One: The Resolution is dead!

 “Have you ever heard of the mad debater who on a bright morning started his timer and ran to the tab room calling out unceasingly: ‘I seek The Resolution! I seek The Resolution!’ As there were many standing about who did not believe in The Resolution, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why! is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a novice? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea-voyage? Has he emigrated? The people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane debater jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. ‘Where is The Resolution gone?’ he called out. ‘I mean to tell you! We have killed it, you and I! We are all its murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an affirmative and a negative? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to start timers in the our sleep? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying the Resolution? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? —for even Resolutions putrefy! The Resolution is dead! The Resolution remains dead! And we have killed it! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife—who will wipe away the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Resolved, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event—and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!’—Here the mad debater was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his timer on the ground, so that it broke in pieces sighing its last beep. ‘I come too early,’ he then said, ‘I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling—it has not yet reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star—and yet they have done it!”.*

Mangaled by Dima p.  from, Nietzsche, parable of the madman

Act II - Visions of Excess

In an activity of increasing banality, debaters pay lip service to a resolution that no longer has meaning. Being resolved is an inability to cope, to attempt to resuscitate what has been dead for years, to strip arguments naked, to encapsulate the world in violent pornography. Similarly, we are hailed this year to force the other to shed all its cloths and to bear all its secrets. We must learn democracy assistance like sex ed in high school. Muslims are to be disassembled and reconstructed in our voyeurism, forced unto the penetrating screen of democratic order.  

Baudrillard 99 (Jean, professor at egs, The Perfect Crime p 137-139)//Cheung

And the Bosnians know this. They know they are condemned by the international democratic order, not by some hangover from the past or some Monstrous excrescence called fascism. It is the `politically correct' in all its effects -- an enterprise of laundering and mental prophylaxis, beginning with the prophylactic treatment of language. Black people, the handicapped, the blind and prostitutes become `people of colour', `the disabled', `the visually impaired', and `sex workers': they have to be laundered like dirty money. Every negative destiny has to be cleaned up by a doctoring even more obscene than what it is trying to hide.

Attempts to objectivize meaning violently expulses the possibility for mystery to inform us – attempting to will outside of ourselves only holds life in contempt making it something to revenge upon. 

Baudrillard 07 (Jean, Professor at EGS, The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact pg 39-41) //Cheung

The invention of Reality, unknown to other cultures, is the work of modern western Reason, the turn to the UniversalThis paradoxical essence of man, who, though an integral part of nature, still tries to see how it could be for him beyond that state of belonging, puts us in mind of what Nietzsche says in his metaphor of the mirror: 'When we try to examine the mirror in itself we discover in the end nothing but things upon it. If we want to grasp the things we finally get hold of nothing but the mirror. - This, in the most general terms, is the history of knowledge.'7

Knowing is impossible, the more we attempt to demystify an object of study, the more mysterious it becomes, the more we become flustered. This labyrinth of truth effaces the individual by making mastery the end point of human interaction.  

Cioran 59 (Emile, professor of philosophy at Andrei Saguna, A Short History of Decay p 82-84)//Cheung

When every question seems accidental and peripheral, when the mind seeks ever greater problems, it turns out that in its procedure it no longer comes up against any object but the diffuse obstacle of the Void.. Those who do not remain inside the reality they cultivate, those who transcend the task of existing, must either compromise with the inessential, reverse gears and take their places in the eternal farce, or accept all the consequences of a severed condition which is either superfetation or tragedy, depending on whether it is contemplated or endured.

Thus we affirm: Resolved: Our mighty overlords, The United States Federal Government should laugh and laugh substantially at the sun, at the nettles, at the stones, at the ducks, at the rain, at the pee-pee of the pope, at mummy, at a coffin full of shit, at Obama’s petulant face and increase its super awesome assistance for one or more of its gushing fans: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen.

The resolution is dead. Debate norms melt before our very eyes. In the face of such a delirious veritgo, we resolve to laugh, laugh at the meaningless 20 words that stink above us. Joyously affirm the leakage of language exploding in our heads.

As Bataille would say:

For sake the dung among my head

I detonate I execrate the sky

The clouds expectorate

It’s bitter to immensity

My eyes are pigs

My heart is ink

My balls become dead suns

The fallen stars gone fathomless grown grave

I weep my language leaks

It imports no immensity’s a round

And rolled and bound in sound

I passion death petition it

In Holy Father’s butchery

I’d dream to touch the sadness of the world

The bog of unenchant upon the eaves

I’d dream the water’s grave from I’d retrieve

The lonely channels of your mouth’s inter

I’ve felt to hand corruption’s caudal fur

The night of harrow wood it had elide

And saw this were the sinister you died

I limn it laughing sadness of the world

Lucific crack in mad a thunder scree

Your limit licking laugh long nudity

Immense in splendor last illumine me

I saw your sad as if charity

In radiant in night long morphic sheen

And tears the tomb of your infinity

Instrumental affirmation is impossible—even if meaning is fixed in the short-term, in the long-term it is oversaturated with meanings and can’t have a particular trajectory

Baudrillard 81 (Jean, professor at egs, Simulacra and Simulation  pg16-17)

Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries-- a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.  In the film, this is embodied by the character of the “Deep Throat,” who was said to be the eminence grise of the Republicans, manipulating the left-wing journalists in order to get rid of Nixon- and why not?  It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to

Our affirmation is a poetic reconfiguration of language that refuses dominate ways of knowing. Poetry pushes meaning to exhaustion – in the delirious hurricane of debate, we are the eye of the storm.

Land 92 (Nick, Lecturer in Continental Philosophy @ the University of Warwick, Thirst for Annihilation Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism p140-141)//Cheung

As if the confusional cyclone of poetry had already laid waste the resources of articulation, ‘To write is to investigate chance’ [VI 69], but the explosive excess that breaks in a black foam of poetry is not merely a risk, because risk implies the possibility of a benign outcome. It is a ‘ruin without limits’ [III 75], ‘the submission of man to [blank]’ [II 247]. Excess is venom.

Debate is not a question of ends but of continued immanence.  Don’t be a pessimist, we’ll always do something weird and people will learn and adapt; hell some people might even learn to love it. Don’t default to transcendental values, don’t lie to yourself, debate is ultimately about our capacity to find joy in an ever changing activity not how to best avert nuclear war. Evaluate arguments by determining the mode of existence that serves as their principle for debaters in a discursive activity. 

Nietzsche 1886 (Friedrich, Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, Human, All Too Human, The Nietzsche Channel, The Birth if Tragedy,  http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/bt2.htm#asc)

— But, my dear sir, what in the world is romantic if your book isn't? Can deep hatred against "the Now," against "reality" and "modern ideas" be pushed further than you pushed it in your artists' metaphysics? believing sooner in the Nothing, sooner in the devil than in "the Now. "This crown of the laugher, this rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown. Laughter I have pronounced holy: you higher men, learn—to laugh!

Chill out.  Homogeneous political engagement is just a place for deepened idiocy, more repression, and more pompous ass-holes demanding obedience. Debate should be utilized as a platform for a poetic reinventing of life not a discursive graveyard.

Land 92 (Nick, Lecturer in Continental Philosophy @ the University of Warwick, Thirst for Annihilation Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism p140-141)//Cheung

Fascism is not so much a symptom of political desperation, as of libidino-religious numbness, a kind of anti-poetry on the streets. At first, death surrounds us with an endless silence as an island is surrounded by water. But there, precisely, is the unsalable. What importance have words which do not pierce this silence[?] What importance in speaking of ‘moment of the tomb’ [moment de tombe], when each word is nothing for as long as it has not attained the beyond of words[?] [IV 166].

Politics is a mere shadow of itself. It only functions to draw upon the raw emotional excess of the masses. This is why rick perry’s gun totting self is so appealing.

Hegarty 04 (Paul, Professor at the University of College Cork, Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory p91-93)

The era of simulation, or hyperreality, brings serious changes in the world of politics and alters the nature of events (and this in turn feeds simulation). Now that, according to Baudrillard, nothing is genuinely real, we see an increased insistence on reality, on 'the political', and the social. Like an updated Bataille, Baudrillard suggests that other older societies had some sort of reality, and were in some way actually communal, in stating that the social is built on 'the ruins of the symbolic and ceremonial edifice of former societies' (p. 65; 69).

Act I: Fatal Strategies

Baudrillard Begins:

In this way the struggle is everywhere opposed to a political authority (cf. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State [tr R. H urley and A. Stein, New York: Zone Books, 1 990] )

In a meticulously regulated universe, the only temptation is to normalise everything by destruction. ²

Jean Baudrillard, former professor at the European graduate school, The End of Production, Symbolic Exchange and Death, pg 177²

We return to the zero point that bore life to this resolution, the sacrificial womb that made this year’s topic even possible. We must not forget the symbolic gesture that sparked the Tunisian revolution; the human torch, the denial of life by a single individual - Mohamed Bouazizi. His sacrifice was not for a democratic Tunisia, not for freedom; not for western aid but was a RESULT of centuries of oppressive western policies.  

Badiou ruminates:

It began with the suicide, a self-immolation by fire, of a man who has been downgraded to unemployment, and to whom was forbidden the miserable commerce that allowed him to surviveBetween the shout of a young Tunisian: “We, children of workers and of peasants, are stronger than the criminals;” and what said a young Egyptian: “As from today, January 25, I take in my own hands the matters of my country.” ³

 Alain Badiou 1/25, professor at the European graduate school, http://kasamaproject.org/2011/03/01/alan-badiou-during-arab-revolts-the-universal-reach-of-popular-uprisings/³

Act II – The Empire of Good

The resolution is a reflection of a tautological approach to middle-eastern scholarship which diagnoses the problem of despotism as a lack of democracy; this characterization distills all concerns to the promotion of democracy, which is a euphemism for spreading western modes of knowledge production.

Traboulsi 11 (Fawaz, Associate Professor of History and Politics at the Lebanese American University, Beirut. " Revolutions Bring Down Ideas As Well!" Perspectives #2 May 2011, Special Issue. http://boell-meo.org/downloads/02_Perspectives_ME_2011_The_Arab_World_in_Revolt.pdf#page=206)//dimap.

The truth of the matter is that this surplus  of educated, unemployed youth is the explosive   mix that ignited and played the most prominent   role in the current intifadasThus,   the United Nations Development Programme   and the Arab Human Development Reports   decided to donate to the cause of the Arabs a   fast, luxury, four-wheel drive vehicle that moves   forward, on all four wheels simultaneously,   towards a knowledge and “rights-based”   society, entrepreneurship, freedoms and   women’s empowerment. 

This messianic call to do justice is a part of the empire of good resulting in ever greater efforts to integrate the world under the banner of redemption. This eradication of evil white washes history as our perpetual need to “save” the other ultimately secures their destruction.  The salvation of the Muslim other results in their cultural extermination and resurrection a part of the victim order. This produces a dialectic that reifies the west’s messianic image; the wretched other as opposed to the West’s benevolence.

Baudrillard 99 (Jean, professor at egs, The Perfect Crime p 137-139)//Cheung

 And the Bosnians know this. They know they are condemned by the international democratic order, not by some hangover from the past or some Monstrous excrescence called fascism.

Black people, the handicapped, the blind and prostitutes become `people of colour', `the disabled', `the visually impaired', and `sex workers': they have to be laundered like dirty money. Every negative destiny has to be cleaned up by a doctoring even more obscene than what it is trying to hide.

This vampirism of suffering nourishes the hollow shell of liberal democracy. A hunt for new charity cases ensue in a spectacular oppression Olympics. Life is to be secured, nothings is to be sacrificed, no order, no ideas, but nothing disagreeable; “democracy” is opium for the masses.

Baudrillard 99 (Jean, professor at egs, The Perfect Crime p 140-141)//Cheung

AIDS itself ends up looking like a side-effect of this demagogic virulence. `Tu me préserves actif, je te préservatif': 4 this scabrous irony, heavy with blackmail, which is also that of Benetton, as it once was of the BNP, 5 in fact conceals a technique of manipulation and dissolution of the social body by the stimulation of the vilest emotions: self-pity and self-disgust. Worse than the desire to destroy life is this refusal to risk it -- nothing being worth the trouble of being sacrificed. This is truly the worst offence, the worst affront possible. It is the fundamental proposition of nihilism.

Thus: William and I sacrifice the resolution

Instrumental affirmation is counter intuitive. The excess of seemingly rational arguments under the aegis of “limits” and “fairness” uphold the status quo.

Irwin 02 (Alexander, Assistant Professor of Religion @ Amherst College, “Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred” p.)//Cheung

Even if new, legitimate values were somehow to emerge, moreover, it seemed doubtful they could be disseminatedThe better political and social ideas were, Weil argued in the concluding pages of Reflections, the more likely they were to challenge fundamental societal assumptions, and the more certain it became that media enfiefed to the status quo would caricature or ignore these ideas, effectively preventing them from ever becoming matters of serious public debate.

Our sacrifice of the resolution produces a vertigo in which what is sacred can be momentarily gleamed. We elevate debate into the realm of religious experience. This allows the perpetual sliding of identities through which societal norms are transgressed. The absolute contingency of existence wounds all life in an act of reversal. Mutilated, disposed, filled with violent desires; we set ourselves free, open with a new found tragic awareness.

Irwin 02 (Alexander, Assistant Professor of Religion @ Amherst College, “Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred” p. 143-146)//Cheung

In exploring the ramifications of this idea in the "War" chapter, Bataille draws again on the distinction between the military and religious orders that had helped him clarify his opposition to fascism in the mid-i93os

Bataille defines eroticism as the conscious activity of the sexual animal, thereby placing an emphasis on lucidity."33 Consciousness or "lucidity" separates the human from the animal realm in sexuality. The same principle delineates the "religious" from the "military" approaches to death.34

Sacrifice puts death back into symbolic circulation shattering the binaries between life and death. The division of the living from the dead is the ultimate form of exclusion that deprives life of any meaning.

Baudrillard 76 (Jean, professor at egs, symbolic exchange and death p 126-127)//Cheung

Foucault's analysis, amongst the masterpieces of this genuine cultural history, takes the form of a genealogy of discrimination in which, at the start of the nineteenth century, labour and production occupy a decisive place In survival, death is repressed ; life itself, in accordance with that well known ebbing away, would be nothing more than a survival determined by death

Sacrifice makes the resolution sacred reversing systematic dominance. 

Irwin 02 (Alexander, Assistant Professor of Religion @ Amherst College, “Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred” p. )//Cheung

Yet if sacredness is a force (the motor of the "sovereign operation"), it is never in these two writers the unilateral discharge of power. It is in the experience of this transgressive freedom that the emotive and political dimensions of sainthood (its dual aspects as active force and critical positionality) come together. It is to participation in this interminable performance, the never-completed "rites of liberation" (270), that Bataille and Weil incite. 

Act III- On the Fringes of Silent Majorities

We radically implode. Political engagement is just a place for deepened idiocy, more repression, and more pompous ass-holes demanding obedience. Only the 1ac’s radical break can create a sacred space in which life festers and reinvents itself through affirmation.

Land 92 (Nick, Lecturer in Continental Philosophy @ the University of Warwick, Thirst for Annihilation Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism p140-141)//Cheung

Fascism is not so much a symptom of political desperation, as of libidino-religious numbness, a kind of anti-poetry on the streets. ‘Between her and me there was never anything possible’ [IV 233]. At first, death surrounds us with an endless silence as an island is surrounded by water. But there, precisely, is the unsalable. What importance have words which do not pierce this silence[?] What importance in speaking of ‘moment of the tomb’ [moment de tombe], when each word is nothing for as long as it has not attained the beyond of words[?] [IV 166].

Our symbolic gesture defies all meaning and reason, we risk the impossible. Resistance must be detached from the social apparatus, attempts to overthrow the system within existing coordinates leads to co-option.

Baudrillard 83 (Jean, Professor at EGS, In the Shadow of Silent Majorities, p 48-49)//Cheung

We are therefore at the paradoxical point where the masses refuse the baptism of the social, which is also that of meaning and liberty. Let us not make them into a new and glorious referenceThis revolution by involution is not theirs: it is not critical-explosive, it is implosive and blind. It proceeds by inertia, and not from a new and joyous negativity. It is silent and involutive - exactly the reverse of all speech making and consciousness raising. It has no meaning. It has nothing to say to us.

Knowledge and progress claims are self annihilation. we cannot claim to know the world. Only an acceptance of death solves. Our rapturous sacrifice of the resolution gives value to life.  

Land 92 (Nick, Lecturer in Continental Philosophy @ the University of Warwick, Thirst for Annihilation Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism p149-150)//Cheung

Humanism (capitalist patriarchy) is the same thing as our imprisonment. Death is truth because error cannot adhere to it, all dreams are soluble within it, but death is not the word ‘death’, or any other word. The zero of words is not the word ‘zero’, nor are words about words.

In this dream state of debate, we resolve to let go - With the vertigo of the resolution no longer binding, we must now come to grips with the present state of debate and use it as a platform for value creation. Our injection of poetry into the debate round is an affirmation of the corpse of the resolution as site upon which an infinite number of possibilities of engagement are seeded. We pry open the equivalence of meaning and substitute it with an ontology that is dynamic and unintelligible as starting point for viewing the other. Your ballot is a yes to our methodology.

Baudrillard 07 (Jean, Professor at EGS, The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact pg 207-211) //Cheung

We have all been everywhere in some past life. This suprasensory reminiscence, this Journey of the soul' through places, bodies and successive lives, this fantasy ubiquity, has nothing to do with the ubiquity that is ours through the networks, through telepresence and telereality. . Poetry and thought are to be taken in their literalness, not in their truth: truth merely makes things worse.

Thus we affirm: Resolved: The United States Federal Government should forever be accursed under the star which I was born, may no sky protect it, let it crumble in space like a dust without honor. And let the traitorous moment that cast me among the creatures be forever erased from the list of Time! My desires can no longer deal with this mixture that substantially increases life and death in which eternity rots daily in its democracy assistance for one or more of the following weary futures I have traversed , but am yet tormented by the impotence of unknown thirsts. Like a frenzied sage, dead to the world and frantic against it, I invalidate my illusion in: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen. ²

² Mangled from Cioran in 59 (Emile, professor of philosophy at Andrei Saguna, A Short History of Decay p 185-186)

Attempts to objectivize meaning violently expulses the possibility for mystery to inform us – this purges alterity making an ethical engagement with the other impossible.

Baudrillard 07 (Jean, Professor at EGS, The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact pg 39-41) //Cheung

The invention of Reality, unknown to other cultures, is the work of modern western Reason, the turn to the Universal. This paradoxical essence of man, who, though an integral part of nature, still tries to see how it could be for him beyond that state of belonging, puts us in mind of what Nietzsche says in his metaphor of the mirror: 'When we try to examine the mirror in itself we discover in the end nothing but things upon it. If we want to grasp the things we finally get hold of nothing but the mirror. - This, in the most general terms, is the history of knowledge.'7

Even if we tried, knowing is impossible, the more we attempt to demystify an object of study, the more mysterious it becomes, the more we become flustered. This labyrinth of truth effaces the individual by making mastery the end point of understanding, conquering the human experience.

Cioran 59 (Emile, professor of philosophy at Andrei Saguna, A Short History of Decay p 82-84)

When every question seems accidental and peripheral, when the mind seeks ever greater problems, it turns out that in its procedure it no longer comes up against any object but the diffuse obstacle of the Void. Those who do not remain inside the reality they cultivate, those who transcend the task of existing, must either compromise with the inessential, reverse gears and take their places in the eternal farce, or accept all the consequences of a severed condition which is either superfetation or tragedy, depending on whether it is contemplated or endured.

Act Three: The Illusion of the End

Instrumental affirmation is impossible—even if meaning is fixed in the short-term, in the long-term it is oversaturated with meanings and can’t have a particular trajectory

Baudrillard 81 (Jean, professor at egs, Simulacra and Simulation  pg16-17)//shree

Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries-- a simulation of scandal for regenerative endsIt traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.

This oversaturation of discourse triggers its explosive negative corollary ensuring any act is counter-intuitive.

Baudrillard 07 (Jean, Professor at EGS, The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact pg 191-193) //Cheung

Lines of fracture, inversions, splits, rifts: there is, as it were, a line beyond which, for every expanding system - every system which, by dint of exponential growth, passes beyond its own end - a catastrophe looms. It might even be said that we have gone through the virtual reality barrier and we are approaching the critical eventuality of a collapse of the information systems.

Thus we affirm: Resolved: The United States Federal Government should forever be accursed under the star which I was born, may no sky protect it, let it crumble in space like a dust without honor. And let the traitorous moment that cast me among the creatures be forever erased from the list of Time! My desires can no longer deal with this mixture that substantially increases life and death in which eternity rots daily in its democracy assistance for one or more of the following weary futures I have traversed , but am yet tormented by the impotence of unknown thirsts. Like a frenzied sage, dead to the world and frantic against it, I invalidate my illusion in: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen. ²

² Mangled from Cioran in 59 (Emile, professor of philosophy at Andrei Saguna, A Short History of Decay p 185-186)

Act Two: The Hell of the Same

The idea of democracy assistance rests upon the backdrop of constant expulsion of abject identities that drift between exclusion and white assimilation. This drive towards democratic nation building merely reaffirms a messianic understanding of the world that has annihilated Asian subjectivities for centuries. From manifest destiny, sparked by the pursuit for spice routes, to the Chinese exclusion Act and Japanese Internment, democratic coherence is impossible without first putting the plight of the abjected under erasure.

Shimakawa 2k2 (Karen, professor of drama at NYU, National Abjection, The Asian American Body Onstage p10-11)//Cheung

That process of (ambivalent) inclusion, as Palumbo-Liu and others have shown, is not only formative of Asian Americanness, but it is constitutive of (U.S.) "Americanness"he rhetoric of the Japanese American Citizens' League (jacl) similarly exempli­fied this abject contradiction: by peaceably submitting to the War Relocation Act and thereby embracing the role of the abjected (symbolic) foreigner, its leaders advised, internees would be demonstrating their exemplary American-ness. In his memoirs then-jACL leader Mike Masaoka recalls his reasoning at the time. Given advance notice of the army's intention to relocate West Coast Japanese, he (and Saburo Kido, fellow jac Lleader) concluded they would advo­cate compliance:

Forced to be either model minority or exotic novelty, Asianness constitutes itself from an impossible state of being. Stripped of belonging, Asian language dies as it is too white to be regarded as Asian and not white enough to be considered privileged. In order to reconstruct our engagement with the abject and otherness, we must first push language to its limits through a poetic understanding. By prying open the equivalence of meaning, our unintelligible methodology traverses ideological boundaries. Your ballot is a yes to our methodology.

Shimakawa 2k2 (Karen, professor of drama at NYU, National Abjection, The Asian American Body Onstage p87-89)//Cheung

Although the play falls into the conventional genre of domestic tragedy, however, it is also a play in which language constantly fails to function ade­quately—and that failure is crucially tied to the play's setting in Chinatown.  . The stage directions note that" [Tarn's] 'normal' speech jumps between black and white rhythms and accents," and the qualifying quotation marks around normal underscore the new and experimental nature of Tarn's language use.  

The constitution of a forced identity expulses the possibility for mystery to inform us making an ethical engagement with alterity impossible, dooming us to resentment and nihilism.  

Agamben 93 (Giorgio, prof of aesthetics at University of Verona, the coming community, p. 64-66)//shree

But the absurdity of individual existence, inherited from the subbase of nihilism, has become in the meantime so senseless that it has lost all pathos and been transformed,TSelecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only itself-this is the political task of our generation.

Act Three: Fatal Strategies 

The injection of abjectness into the debate round is a confrontation with the quarantined contagion of society. Our encounter with the face of death sutures the line between healthy and sick other.

Shimakawa 2k2 (Karen, professor of drama at NYU, National Abjection, The Asian American Body Onstage p8-9)//Cheung

The bodily discourse that fueled the anti-immigrant, anti-immigration legislation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and that arguably resurfaced in the 1990s, as evidenced by the passage of anti-immigrant legislation such as California’s Proposition 187) constructed the figurative “national body” as an organism that must be protected Two dissenting justices, however, made the somewhat unorthodox suggestion that the determination of citizenship is political and as such should not be made on the basis of English common law. Nonetheless, the end result was to convey birthright citizenship to American-born Chinese, despite the bar to naturalization for resident aliens.

The demarcation between life and death is constructed and relegates existence to a slow process of degradation.

Baudrillard 76 (Jean, professor at egs, symbolic exchange and death p 126-127)//Cheung

Foucault's analysis, amongst the masterpieces of this genuine cultural history, takes the form of a genealogy of discrimination in which, at the start of the nineteenth century, labour and production occupy a decisive place. life itself, in accordance with that well known ebbing away, would be nothing more than a survival determined by death.

Act Four – In the Shadow of Silent Majorities

Instrumental affirmation is impossible—even if meaning is fixed in the short-term, in the long-term it is oversaturated with meanings and can’t have a particular trajectory

Baudrillard 81 (Jean, professor at egs, Simulacra and Simulation  pg16-17)//shree

Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries-- a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.  It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.

This oversaturation of discourse triggers its explosive negative corollary ensuring any act is counter-intuitive.

Baudrillard 07 (Jean, Professor at EGS, The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact pg 191-193) //Cheung

Lines of fracture, inversions, splits, rifts: there is, as it were, a line beyond which, for every expanding system - every system which, by dint of exponential growth, passes beyond its own end - a catastrophe looms. We are no longer in a system of growth, but of excrescence and saturation, which can be summed up in the fact that there is too much. It might even be said that we have gone through the virtual reality barrier and we are approaching the critical eventuality of a collapse of the information systems.

*Random snippets of bataille and cioran aphorisms glued together 

Contention Two: The Graveyard

Welcome to the void of debate, merely an extension of the university as factory, as producer of meaning and social death. We are all grave robbers bound to the necrotic essence of decaying evidence; a Khalizad card here, a Mead card there! We dream of being policy makers, of being academics, not know that the proliferation of our discourse about discourse is ultimately never going to leave our little mausoleum of a debate room. We speak thinking we are proactive citizens of a democracy giving the gift of super awesome democracy assistance to others, but each time the timer ends, our illusions vanish, soothed only by the comfort of coaches and ballots while power weaves its invisible nets neutralizing all thought and action. 

Occupied UC Berkeley ‘9 (The Necroscial: Civic Life, Social Death, and the UC; http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/, 11/19)

Yes, very much a cemetery.  Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt. .  And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls. 

Specifically, traditional debate becomes a capture for radical potential as state power monitors and derails any attempt at utopian critique or magic wand fiat. Everything is pulled back into our vacuous little sepulcher.

Land 92 (Nick, Lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick, Thirst for Annihilation Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism p7-8)//Cheung

Little progress can be made in interpreting this conflict so long as one remains attached to idealistic notions of ‘controversy’ or ‘debate’ The most bleak speculative reasoning still retains a commitment to the reality of progressive development, even if this is momentarily frozen into the implicit truth of an agonizing contradiction.

The graveyard’s extension to everyday life is not neutral; our knowledge production serves only to demarcate the boundaries of acceptable research, acceptable identities, and prescribed conduits of political engagement. This annihilates alterity as part and parcel of a charity cannibalism. Those we exclude and push six feet under are given headstones with our citations or ballots in our vampiric embrace.

Occupied UC Berkeley ‘9 (The Necroscial: Civic Life, Social Death, and the UC; http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/, 11/19)//Cheung

There is no need to speak truth to power when power already speaks the truth.   We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice.

This smiling face on tyranny is an attempt to secure the sacredness of debate by excluding those marked for destruction in a bid to scapegoat difference. This logic of sanitization mortifies life as we become nothing more than steak under cellophane. Paradoxically, attempts to save debate merely condemn it to death.

Baudrillard 76 (Jean, professor at egs, symbolic exchange and death p 177-180)//Cheung

Security is another form of social control, in the form of life blackmailed with the afterlife. That an automobile firm remodels itself on the basis of security (like industry on anti-pollution measures) without altering its range, objectives or products shows that security is only a question of exchanging terms. Security is only an internal condition of the reproduction of the system when it reaches a certain level of expansion, just as feedback is only an internal regulating procedure for systems that have reached a certain point of complexity.

Thus we affirm: Resolved: Our mighty overlords, The United States Federal Government should laugh and laugh substantially at the sun, at the nettles, at the stones, at the ducks, at the rain, at the pee-pee of the pope, at mummy, at a coffin full of shit, at Obama’s petulant face and increase its super awesome assistance for one or more of its gushing fans: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen.

Our love for debate is unrequited. Instead of immersing ourselves in life, we attempt to master death in debate. We all know damn right that our desires will never be made manifest; they are always dynamic and lost in the breeze of aff, neg, ballots and debate times. Instead, vote affirmative in order to reconstitute our mode of existence, not as an attempt to recycle meaning but as an injection of poetry that lacks academic equivalence. We choose to laugh in the graveyard. We are the zero intensity of the void escaping systemized knowledge productions; we are a star going super nova, an implosion of meaning becoming laughter, becoming whole; simply becoming…

Land 92 (Nick, Lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick, Thirst for Annihilation Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism p134-135)//Cheung

Literature is like love in that both are catastrophic diseases…. I writhe on the spit of a devastated vitality, laughing with hunger for each ratcheting of descent…

Contention Three: The Illusion of the End

The erection of an objectivized smooth running reality condemns knowledge production to the Matrix where the laboratory extends itself into social interaction. Representing knowledge is impossible, it is like trying to talk of the present, it loses its anchoring and fades into the past.

Baudrillard 09 (Jean, professor at egs, tupac, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?  p11-16)//Team Nihilism!

Let’s begin with the disappearance of the real. We have talked enough about the murder of reality in the age of the media, virtual reality and networks, without enquiring to any great degree when the real began to exist. Thus, the modern world foreseen by Marx, driven on by the work of the negative by the engine of contradiction, became, by the very excess of its fulfillment, another world in which things no longer even need their opposite in order to exist, in which light no longer needs shade, the feminine no longer needs the masculine (or vice versa?), good no longer needs evil – and the world no longer needs us. 

Confining ourselves to this labyrinth of truth effaces the individual by making mastery the end point of human interaction denying us agency and the capacity to affirm life.

Cioran 59 (Emile, professor of philosophy at Andrei Saguna, A Short History of Decay p 82-84)//Cheung

When every question seems accidental and peripheral, when the mind seeks ever greater problems, it turns out that in its procedure it no longer comes up against any object but the diffuse obstacle of the Void. Those who do not remain inside the reality they cultivate, those who transcend the task of existing, must either compromise with the inessential, reverse gears and take their places in the eternal farce, or accept all the consequences of a severed condition which is either superfetation or tragedy, depending on whether it is contemplated or endured.

Condemned to vacuity, the procession of the model over the real subsumes any attempt at political engagement as discursive trajectories oversaturate.

Baudrillard 81 (Jean, professor at egs, Simulacra and Simulation  pg16-17)//shree

Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries-- a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.  nd this logic is neither that of one party nor of another.  It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.

This oversaturation of discourse triggers its explosive negative corollary ensuring any act is counter-intuitive.

Baudrillard 07 (Jean, Professor at EGS, The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact pg 191-193) //Cheung

Lines of fracture, inversions, splits, rifts: there is, as it were, a line beyond which, for every expanding system - every system which, by dint of exponential growth, passes beyond its own end - a catastrophe looms.  It might even be said that we have gone through the virtual reality barrier and we are approaching the critical eventuality of a collapse of the information systems.

William and I will defend the following: Resolved: The judges should indicate on their ballots that the affirmative team did the better debating.

We'll isolate three advantages:

Advantage 1 is Topicality

A. Interpretation

Resolved means firm in purpose or intent.

(Dictionary.com)

This means having a purpose is affirmative ground, which implies only we get to ask for the ballot.

B. Violation - presumably they'll try to ask for the ballot, too, which means they attempt to be "resolved" which is only legitimate for the affirmative.

C. is reasons to prefer

1) Fair division of ground - the negative gets to defend everything but the resolution, so the resolution itself must be exclusively affirmative ground, otherwise it would be impossible to affirm.

2) Grammar - "Resolved" comes before the colon, which means it's the primary indicator of affirmative focus. The focus is not the text which comes after the colon, but the state of the affirmative in relation to what's after the colon, namely the state of being resolved

3) Predictability - we've crafted our affirmative to be strategically prepared for negatives which negate the topic, so attempting to be resolved on the negative kills 100% of our pre-tournament preparation. I'm not sure what 0% of infinity is, but it's an independent voting issue for math.

4) Switch Side Debate - the affirmative solves this better because we read negative arguments while defending the topic, which means we are twice as switch-side as traditional debate, which means we un-cede the political times two.

Advantage 2 is GDS Politics

A. GDS is on the brink - William is desperate and lonely now, but one more win will get the ball rolling for a strong push at the qualifiers

Buddha 2012 (Unpublished and unqualified)

Lonely nights with romantic comedies, ice cream and a box of tissues just isn't cutting it anymore. Nietzsche has been my only fling, and even though the Gay Science is pretty good under the sheets, I have to say there are at least two things misleading about that title. Sigh... why are dead Germans the only ones who have understood me??? Debate tournaments are my last hope and my best source of confidence, I just know that if I qualify for the NDT things will turn around. They have to!

B. This round is key - William no longer prefers one “gender” over any other, making this the key time to take a shot

Buddha 2012 (Unpublished and unqualified)

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE. I REALLLLYYYY want the ballot. Only my mother loves me and she's terrible in bed. (Interrupt) At ADI I heard tale of the legend of Good Debater Syndrome. If I can harness its power then all is not lost - I can shed this feeble body and become a bastion of studliness to end all studliness! Or something. I'm not entirely sure what GDS is but I'm pretty sure that if you give me your ballots I'll finally get laid.

C. More evidence on this question - winning regional tournaments isn't all that impressive, if you don't believe me, ask the BC freshmen - qualifying for the NDT is the only way to solve the internal link

Buddha 2012 (Unpublished and unqualified)

I thought that after I won Rutgers things would change but it seems regional tournaments aren't all that huge with the ladies. (Interrupt) They told me cool, you beat team Jerry Falwell twice in a row; that's not very impressive. "If Falwell's so smart why is he dead?" they tell me. Sure, plenty of fish in the sea, but when it comes to me, they all seem to be sipping the rejection coolaid. I need to get really good like that Nick Watts guy I have a poster of him in our club room (Interrupt). Is there an onomatopoeia for "Swoooonnn?"

D. If William doesn't get out of this twenty-year long dry spell, he'll kill himself. No no, he reads Bataille and Schopenhauer, it will happen

Buddha 2012 (Unpublished and unqualified)

Roses are red, violets are blue, there's a break in my heart, only your ballots can glue. Seriously, I'm really sad guys. Throw me a rope here come on, I'm drowning in a sea of pomo.

E. William is planning to vote for Obama, if he dies, he cannot, which means the Republican nominee might get elected, which may give us four years of Rick Santorum

Buddha 2012 (Unpublished and unqualified)

I really don't know who this Santorum guy is, I've never cut a politics update in my life but Google says he's a frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is the product of anal sex. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm a lemming and go straight down the party line, so there's no "hope" I will "change" my vote.

F. Magnitude outweighs timeframe and probability - if Santorum is elected, Russia and China will launch their nuclear weapons at the U.S., looking to pre-empt the catastrophic flooding of the internet with references to the alternate meaning of his name. This is worse than "no more Bush" puns, subtlety is key to humor.

Buddha  and Boggs 2012 (Unpublished and unqualified. This is not to be taken seriously. This evidence was edited with the express purpose of mutilating an obnoxious debate argument, and should not be taken as authoritative. However...)

Debate debunks political mechanisms insulated from the minimalist critique.  Debate gives carte blanche to elites who naturally desire (slavery or imperialist wars. If we have to keep reading politics DAs people are condemned to accept the harsh realities of an exploitative and authoritarian system. William's depression hardly suggests that corporate colonization, social hierarchies, or centralized state and military institutions will magically disappear. If William can't get a ballot the loss of GDS will drift towards antipolitics and Sarah Palin will nuke Russia.

Advantage 3 is The CP

CP Text: Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase its democracy assistance for one or more of the following: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen by voting affirmative.

Observation One is Competition:

Voting negative is negative thinking, making it impossible to give democracy assistance. This is scientifically proven, affirmative thinking is the stronger than gravity.

Eva 07 (Gregory, More qualified than your authors, Degree from The Coaches Training Institute and further training with CoachU and Corporate CoachU. Past President of the International Coach Federation (ICF) San Francisco East Bay Coaches, I co-produced the award-winning San Francisco Bay Area Coaching Conference and have been a guest speaker at several conferences and expos. I was named International Coach of The Year in 2006)

This is the first and most fundamental of the laws Of Attraction.  When you are focused on what you do not want, you are attracting to you what you do not want.

Observation Two is the Net Benefit

Voting negative creates a negative atmosphere where you reap only further negativity. The terminal impact is you judges will have a really really bad day, maybe possibly get hit by a car.

Eva 07 (Gregory, More qualified than your auth nors, Degree from The Coaches Training Institute and further training with CoachU and Corporate CoachU. Past President of the International Coach Federation (ICF) San Francisco East Bay Coaches, I co-produced the award-winning San Francisco Bay Area Coaching Conference and have been a guest speaker at several conferences and expos. I was named International Coach of The Year in 2006)

Of course, mind creates negative conditions just as readily as favorable conditions, and when we consciously or unconsciously visualize every kind of lack, limitation and discord, we create these conditions; this is what many are unconsciously doing all the time. 

Only voting affirmative solves, this sparks global peace and beauty beyond compare; utopia is one pen mark away.

Allen 27 (James, author, poet, and life idol - also more qualified than your authors)

A man does not come to the alms-house or the jail by the tyranny of fate or circumstance, but by the pathway of groveling thoughts and base desires. Even at birth the soul comes of its own and through every step of its earthly pilgrimage it attracts those combinations of conditions which reveal itself, which are the reflections of its own purity and impurity, its strength and weakness.    

Observation Three is Too Little Too Late

When a counterplan is read in a round, presumption shifts to the affirmative which means they have to provide a significantly substantial reason why you should not vote affirmative.  Unfortunately, their truth claims can never elevate to that level of certainty since politics is dead and all polemics collapse in on themselves.

Occupied UC Berkeley 09 (The Necroscial: Civic Life, Social Death, and the UC; http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/, 11/19)

Yes, very much a cemetery.  Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt.   And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls. 

And, I guess they can just get up and read their instrumental policy debate good block. But they should be careful to look in the right expando pocket, or pull up the correct word document in debate synergy. They don't want to pull a Ricky and Nate, where, being late for some debaucherous encounter they tried saving prep time and pulled out the "Bush Good" instead of the "Bush Bad" block. Of course, Ricky and Nate ended up winning that round anyway, so I guess none of that shit really matters.

Baudrillard 81 (Jean, professor at egs, Simulacra and Simulation  pg16-17)//shree

Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries-- a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.  In the film, this is embodied by the character of the “Deep Throat,” who was said to be the eminence grise of the Republicans, manipulating the left-wing journalists in order to get rid of Nixon- and why not?   And this logic is neither that of one party nor of another.  It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.

It would seem like what we're doing is a joke, but, that's our argument. Or, rather, it's your argument, we're just laughing at it. Or with it. Or against it.  But laughing. Even when nothing's funny.

Land 92 (Nick, Lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick, Thirst for Annihilation Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism p134-135)//Cheung

Whatever the differences—and they are immense—between The Story of the Eye and Bataille’s later fiction, or between his novels and his poetry, there is a consistent tone to his literary writings, a darkness, ‘collapse of being into the night’ [IV 23]. Not only are nocturnal scenes abnormally prevalent, but their effect is compounded by the interwoven themes of the unavowable, the unholy, and alcoholic oblivion.  I writhe on the spit of a devastated vitality, laughing with hunger for each ratcheting of descent…