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UTSA Ely-Liles Neg

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  • Gonzaga Round 1

    • Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 1 | Opponent: Weber RS | Judge: Sam Allen

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    • 1NC
      We begin this critique with a historical examination of the Arab revolts and capital – instability in Middle East and North Africa can only be understood as expressions of inherent contradictions of interest between authoritarian regimes guarding Western-imposed economic paradigms and the people who bear the weight of these economic systems. The progress of these revolutions cannot be isolated from the structural forces of capital. Through the omission of class struggle from its analysis, academic accounts of the Arab Spring remain complicit with the forms of assistance whose inner workings will only delay the inevitable crises of neoliberalism.

      Petras, 2011
      (James, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Binghamton University, “Roots of the Arab Revolts and Premature Celebrations,” March, Online: http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2011/03/james-petras-roots-of-the-arab-revolts-and-premature-celebrations/) 

      Most accounts of the Arab revolts from Egypt
      AND
      while sustaining their ties with their imperial mentors. 

      Academic elites actively contribute to the co-option of revolutionary energy by calling for shallow reforms that only come when the revolts overwhelm the regulatory potential of existing regimes. Even then, these changes are only considered by policymakers insofar as they have the potential to expand market influence in the region.

      Dixon, 2011
      (Marion, doctoral candidate in Dept. of Development Sociology @ Cornell, “An Arab Spring,” Review of African Political Economy, 32:128, pg. 309-316)

      The ‘imperial reach’ represents a real threat
      AND
      helped break the pervasive Middle East exceptionalism thesis. 

      Cyber-materialism marks a hard limit on the field of change – structural change is thrown out the window, instead, we make the best of what we have. Openness of internet is openness of free market. 

      Red Critique, 2006
      (“The Opportunism of the Transpatriotic Left,” Red Critique 11, Winter 2006, Online: http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/theopportunismofthetranspatrioticleft.htm)

      It is in the terms of "getting
      AND
      "save" capitalism from its current crises.

      We’ll isolate two impacts:
      First, this imposed economic fundamentalism is precisely what drove millions of protesters into the streets in the first place – the affirmative only buys a few more years of stability in the region at the cost of intensified political repression and grinding poverty 

      Armbrust, 2011
      (Walter, Lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies & Fellow of Modern Middle Eastern Studies @ Oxford, “The Revolution Against Neoliberalism,” February, Online: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/contributors/10682) 

      The last time I encountered the word “
      AND
      America ‘uqbalak (may you be next).

      Second, American imperialism attempts to maintain hegemonic control to protect patterns of economic growth-this makes extinction inevitable 

      Foster, prof of sociology at U of Oregon, Sept 2005
      (John Bellamy, Naked Imperialism, Monthly Review Vol 57 Iss 4, Proquest)

      From the longer view offered by a historical
      AND
      global resistance movement against the new naked imperialism.

      In the face of the affirmative’s call to intervene to stabilize the situation, our alternative is to do nothing. Only this stance will ensure a true break from the history of political and economic coercion that makes the affirmative impacts inevitable. 

      Zizek, 2011
      (Slavoj, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology @ Univ of Ljubljana & visiting professor at Columbia, Princeton, New School, New York University, University of Michigan, “Why Fear the Arab Revolutionary Spirit?,” The Guardian, February, Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/01/egypt-tunisia-revolt) 

      What cannot but strike the eye in the
      AND
      chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent."

      The democratic potential of high media enabled by internet connectedness only benefits the upper class – economic justice is a prerequisite to any true democratic change 

      Reiff, 2011
      (David, contributing editor for The New Republic, “The Reality of Revolution,” Online: http://www.tnr.com/article/against-the-current/83402/egypt-tunisia-democracy-twitter-economy) 

      In both the euphoria and the apprehension that
      AND
      and practical, that will flow from that. 

      Internet-in-a-suitcase is good in theory, but logistically will fail
      Dignan June 15, 2011 – Larry, Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. (‘Internet in a Suitcase' sounds great, but what about the logistics?, ZD Net, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/internet-in-a-suitcase-sounds-great-but-what-about-the-logistics/50779, MCL)

      The concept of an “Internet in a
      AND
      The logistics will make or break these efforts.

      Terrorists can’t get nuclear weapons – construction is expensive and difficult and nations guard their weapons carefully

      FROST 2005
      (Robin, teaches political science at Simon Fraser University, British Colombia, “Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11,” Adelphi Papers, December)

      Nonetheless, there is considerable evidence that must
      AND
      or a country under the protection of one.
      No proxy wars or great power wars - incentives to cooperate outweigh
      Weitz 6 [Richard, Senior Fellow and Director at the Program Management Hudson Institute, “Averting a New Great Game in Central Asia,” The Washington Quarterly]
      Fortunately, the fact that Central Asia does
      AND
      these opportunities for cooperation and should be avoided.

      2NC

      A2: Alt = Nihilism:
      Embracing despair destroys the ideological basis of capitalism

      Kassiola, 2003
      (Joel, Dean @ SFSU“Questions to Ponder in Understanding the Modern Predicament”, Explorations in Environmental Political Theory, ed. Kassiola, Sharpe)

      The American illusion about domestic invincibility from foreign
      AND
      of despair.[p. 192-197]

      2NC Link Debate: 

      It’s not as simple as up and connecting – as the Internet gains legitimacy as a site of political contestation, it eclipses other political spaces that are filled with the voices of those who cannot access the Net – this breeds a self-representing site of struggle where an elite few herald the cause of others who are unable to contest the way their demands are represented

      Oguibe, 1999
      (Olu, prof of Art & African American Studies & interim Director of the Institute for African American Studies @ U of Connecticut, senior fellow of Vera List Center for Art and Politics @ New School, “Connectivity, and the fate of the unconnected,” Social Identities 5:3, EBSCOHost) 

      From its own intricate history of evolutions between
      AND
      doing also enable us to scar her body?

      Calls for peaceful national dialogue put the ball in regime’s court – becomes a safety valve for voicing discontent but stops short of badly needed political and economic reforms

      Baun, 2011
      (Dylan, Research Associate for the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts, “The Problem of National Dialogue in the Arab Spring,” August, Online: http://www.mei.nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Download-Insight-31-Baun-here.pdf) 

      It is quite perplexing that many have called
      AND
      political game to ‘business as usual.’

      2NC Alt Debate:
      Now is the key time to strike at the heart of neoliberalism – the ballot functions as an alignment within our academic community that resists the commodification of revolutionary energy under the banner of neoliberal reforms

      Dixon, 2011
      (Marion, doctoral candidate in Dept. of Development Sociology @ Cornell, “An Arab Spring,” Review of African Political Economy, 32:128, pg. 309-316)

      Armbrust (2011) makes the direct connection
      AND
      while dangers are present with the resulting shocks.

      2NC Impact Debate:
      Turns the case – Petras and Armbrust - the shallow reforms the aff calls for are informed by neoliberal agendas and implemented to stabilize the US assets in the region - this betrays the demands of the very people we claim to assist – makes revolution inevitable in the long term as political decision making is once again alienated from popular uprising – peaceful dialogue makes this inevitable 

      Baun, 2011
      (Dylan, Research Associate for the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts, “The Problem of National Dialogue in the Arab Spring,” August, Online: http://www.mei.nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Download-Insight-31-Baun-here.pdf) 

      National dialogue might appear to be in the
      AND
      interests of powers inside and outside the region.

      Militarism – extend Foster – capitalism is ever expanding and invokes the military authority of the state to secure resources – militarism and economic subjugation become inevitable as US attempts to secure strategic foothold against instability in region 

      Van Auken, 2011
      (Bill, politician, reporter, and editor of World Socialist Web Site, “Obama's Middle East speech: “democratic” rhetoric cloaks predatory policy,” May, Online: http://wsws.org/articles/2011/may2011/mena-m20.shtml)  

      In his “Arab spring” speech Thursday
      AND
      to fend off the threat of revolutionary upheaval.
      We have an ethical obligation to reject global capitalism because of the suffering it imposes upon millions across the globe and because of the way it circumscribes the very field of political possibilities.

      Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University College, Northampton, 2004, Conversations With Zizek, p. 14-16) 

      For Zizek it is imperative that we cut
      AND
      a ‘glitch’ in an otherwise sound matrix. 



09/05/11
  • Gonzaga Semis

    • Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: Semis | Opponent: CSU CS | Judge:


    • 1NC

      SPANOS K
      Exclusive focus on identity fractures coalitions and prevents affilitation – preventing actual social change.

      Spanos in 90 (William V., “A conversation with William V. Spanos,” conversation with bove, Boundary 2, Volume 17, issue 2, summer 1990, Prof. At binghamton, known baller, pp. 36-8,)

      "Spanos. Well, let me first of all go back ... need for a block of sameness and difference simultaneously." 

      Recent criticism from both the right and the left has rendered these questions: ontology and being, irrelevant – instead of either choosing the path of abandoning this question or absolutely privileging it, we rather overdetermine ontology according to specific historical context. Since criticism has now forgotten the question of being – now is the time to overdetermine

      Spanos 2000 America’s Shadow: Anatomy of Empire pp. 3-4

      "Such an undertaking does not presume to provide a completely ... , referring to all the other sites on this continuous lateral relay."

      Our alternative is to build our politics around a coalitional solidarity of identity-less identities that do not abide by the sovereign/disciplinary self or the projections of colonialism

      Spanos 2000 [William V, America’s Shadow: Anatomy of Empire, 2000]

      "The Vietnam War, as I have suggested, was the epochal ...  imbalances of power relations in post-Enlightenment modernity." 

      DISEASE RHETORIC K
      The 1ac takes place on the backdrop of a rhetorical structure of disability that seeks the impossible – albeit perpetually violent  - task of managing difference.  Disease centric discourse is that which replaces the subject with the predicate, the primacy of the “disease” to be cured over the individual. A substitution in the name of a utopian fantasy of reconciling difference into a seamless regime of knowledge, understanding, tolerance, and acceptance that inevitably results in a new type of absolute hatred – a viral form of difference perpetually erecting new particians of and blockades –abjection par excellence

      Roberts 2007
      (Jeff, M.A., The Rhetorical Structure of Disability: Bridging the Gap Between What is ‘Spoken’ and What is ‘Said’ with Song - Over-Signifying with Personhood Against the Backdrop of Disease-Centric Discourse - Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Baylor University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. https://beardocs.baylor.edu/bitstream/2104/5086/.../Jeff_Roberts_Masters.pdf)

      "Until recently, human “disability” has been conceptually understood ... barriers blocking social equality for the group the act intends to help, people with disabilities." 

      When Anders Breivik murdered dozens of children in Norway, our first thoughts were “what motivated this lunatic?” The answer was quickly seized upon – we were told that he was driven by a psychological afflication, a frenzied paranoia, specifically – Islamophobia. This descriptor is neither neutral nor progressive – in attempting to describe an undeniably reprehensible hatred of Muslims, the affirmative uncritically borrows from a long-standing stigmatization of mental disability. 

      Clark, 2011
      (Nicky, disability rights campaigner, “The ‘madness’ of terrorism and other offensive terms,” July 26, Online: http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/07/26/the-madness-of-terrorism-and-other-offensive-terms/) 

      "Without the slightest medical evidence to back ... unimaginably traumatic experience, may in time face this same stigma too." 

      The link between paranoia and racialized fear is rooted in a fear of the diseased other.

      Sander Gilman. Freud, Race, and Gender. 1995. Page 135-136.

      "The notion was that the text of the paranoid came from a deeper...modern life” reveals their innate Jewishness, their innate flaw." 

      By associating paranoia and racism, the affirmative shifts the meaning of of a paranoid individual to an individual with a mental disability to a racist.

      Sander Gilman. Freud, Race, and Gender. 1995. Page 169.

      "Fantasies about the potential illness of the male Jew's body and ... cancer, or at least cancerous tumors, were understood to be in the second half of the nineteenth century." 

      Disability rhetoric reinscribes whiteness.

      Nadia Kanani. “Race and Madness: Locating the Experiences of Racialized People Within Psychiatric Histories in Canada and the United States. Critical Disability Discourse, 3. 2011.

      "In addition to regulating the lives of racialized people, ... “[w]hy did they use the pack on me? “Indians are violent‟” (p. 118)." 

      Regardless of the plan’s intended action – the rhetoric of “disabled persons” engages in a rhetorical structure of disease centric discourse that facilitates and exemplifies the means of viral differentiation and dehumanization which turns the case

      Roberts, 2007
      (Jeff, M.A., The Rhetorical Structure of Disability: Bridging the Gap Between What is ‘Spoken’ and What is ‘Said’ with Song - Over-Signifying with Personhood Against the Backdrop of Disease-Centric Discourse - Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Baylor University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. https://beardocs.baylor.edu/bitstream/2104/5086/.../Jeff_Roberts_Masters.pdf)

      "While it can be observed that terminology such as “disabled persons... illicit similar actions or cause similar effects in the present."



09/11/11
  • Kentucky Round 3 - 1NC

    • Tournament: Kentucky | Round: 3 | Opponent: | Judge:

    • Kentucky Round 3

      1NC - Case

      Status quo will create a more stable Middle East – no risk of war, proliferation, or Muslim Brotherhood takeover – these threats are all constructed to position US as Syria’s savior
      Yadlin and Satloff May 19, 2011 -  Amos, Kay Fellow in Israeli national security at The Washington Institute, is a retired major general in the Israel Defense Forces and former head of Israel's defense intelligence. Robert Satloff is executive director of the Institute.( Syria: The Case for 'The Devil We Don't Know, Washington Institute, may 19, 2011, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=3363, MCL)
      Arguments for "The Devil We ….opposite should be the case.

      Panic over hegemonic decline is informed by expansive political ideology – threats are constructed to justify military operations that can never succeed in establishing control
      Maher, 2011
      (Richard, adjunct prof of pol sci, Brown. PhD expected in 2011 in pol sci, Brown, The Paradox of American Unipolarity: Why the United States May Be Better Off in a Post-Unipolar World, Orbis 55;1)
      At the same time…now viewed as central to U.S. interests.

      No power wars – decrease in military hegemony linked to periods of peace
      Fettweis 10  Professor of national security affairs @ U.S. Naval War College
      (Christopher J. Fettweis, “Threat and Anxiety in US Foreign Policy,”  Survival, Volume 52, Issue 2 April 2010 , pages 59 – 82informaworld)
      One potential …expenditure are unrelated.

      Russia isn’t a threat; be skeptical of their evidence.  The U.S. has consistently exaggerated the “threat” from Russia.
      Goodman, 09  (Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army.  “Exaggeration Of The Threat: Then And Now”  The Public Record, Sep 14th, 2009, http://pubrecord.org/commentary/5161/exaggeration-threat-then/)
      A recently declassified …in blood and treasure over the next 10 years. 

      The “sectarian violence” argument is a racist red herring invented by biased Western colonialists to disguise the role of imperialism in destabilization
      Dabashi, 11 (Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.  “The role of the Islamic Republic in Bahrain” Last Modified: 27 May 2011.  
      Aljazeera, http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/201152615949157661.html)
      The democratic …….opening picture of the Arab Spring.

      Debates about democracy assistance must be expanded beyond an obsessive focus on the state to include the recognition of democratic contestation in various communities.  Excluding these approaches ensures the continuation of whiteness, civilizing missions against Arabness, and the elimination of difference.
      Volpi 11 (Frederic, Ph.D Professor at University of St. Andrews on Middle Eastern Studies, “Framing Civility in the Middle East: Alternative Perspectives on the State and Civil Society,” Third World Quarterly, Vol 32, Iss 5)
      Is civil society ‘civil’, and for … teleological frameworks unduly restrict the field of inquiry.

      The United States is a unique power in current foreign policy.  Even if that foreign policy is benevolent, we ought to regard it with skepticism.  Intervention is just another word for imperialism that makes empire a way of life.  We have to understand our place within this world of empire.  There is no perspective from without it.
      Edward Said.  “Culture and Imperialism”.  Professor and Philosopher.  Vintage Books.  1994.  ISBN: 0-679-75054-1. Accessed from aaaaarg.org.  Pg. 54-55 – M.E.
      Since my themes here… deliberately sip at the honeypots of our minds. 

      Scholars and policymakers have forged America as a white democratic messiah – one who filters events through whiteness to render Arabness irrational that must be violently controlled.  
      Martinot 03 (Steve, lecturer at San Francisco State University in the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs, “The Cultural Roots of Interventionism in the US,” Social Justice Vol. 30, No. 1 (2003), pp. 19-20)
      In summary, U.S. interventionism… continue to be seen as the ultimate good by white nationalism.

      We should always reject Orientalism whether that be through actions or representations.  When we reject orientalism, we allow for a better form of politics.  
      Edward Said.  “Culture and Imperialism”.  Professor and Philosopher.  Vintage Books.  1994.  ISBN: 0-679-75054-1. Accessed from aaaaarg.org.  Pg. xviiii-xx. – M.E.
      Yet all these works, which are… energy to comprehend and engage with other societies, traditions, histories. 




10/01/11
0
  • Round Reports

    • Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:

    • Neg: UTSA EL
      Round #  3
      Tournament: Shirley
      Vs Team: Georgetown CJ
       
      Judge: Phil Samuels

       

       

      Off Case Args:

       ***Edit by Derek Liles - we read Spanos - I'll upload cites ASAP - did NOT read Rasch/Dean/whatever else was listed. 

      Rasch

      Nietzshe

      Dean

       

      Case Args:

      None indicated

       

      Block Strategy:

      Not indicated

       

      2nr Strategy:

       Appears to be Rasch, but unclear (arrow) was drawn from off case args to bottom of page.

       

      NEG: Texas San Antonio EL
      Round #1 Shirley
      Vs. UCF JV
      Judge: Paul Mabrey
      Off-Case: Spanos
      Block: Spanos
      2NR: Spanos




11/11/11
  • Spanos K Wake Forest Rnd 1

    • Tournament: Wake Forest | Round: 1 | Opponent: UCF HJ | Judge: Mabrey

    • 1NC

      The affirmative’s benign rhetoric of forgiveness is nothing but empty posturing advanced in the face of a revolutionary moment in history that has shown us the pitfalls of a foreign policy defined by imperialism. What is needed, they tell us, is a return to the God’s light – we need to fall back to the foundations of what made our civilization great from the beginning and repent for the sins of the past decade, committed in the name of revenge. This prefigures our duty as citizens towards the project of rejuvenation, a remaking of America for the sake of the world, which can then be remade in our divine image. The aff, as Spanos explains, ...

      SPANOS 2008

      [William V, Professor at Binghamton, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, SUNY Press 2008, 207-209]

      Daniel Webster's Bunker Hill orations are, of course, an entirely different genre from Parkman's histories, and their mise-en-scene—...to that which threatens to enervate the will of his belated generation: the "defense," "preservation," and, above all, "improvement" of what the pioneers of the Battle of Bunker Hill accomplished.

       

      Now that the aff has established their benign intent for all to see, they can shamelessly proceed to pinpoint the flaws of other actors. They will likely protest and claim that they break from the violent cycle of revenge that leads us to assert our values upon the world – but you should ask yourself why, then, they insist on seeing the sin of vengeance in the Egyptian revolution? In reality, the plan itself is a gesture of forcing a confession from the irrational, Arab protesters. Send a commission led by the foremost experts of reconciliation, give them a forum to express their crimes, of course not in their own terms, but in a sanctioned confessional booth where their subjective experience can be reconstituted into an objective truth that can be mapped and forgiven by the United States, so we can rest assured that their commitment lies in the establishment of another holy city made in our own image:

      Teti, 2007 

      (Andrea, Dept of IR @ Aberdeen University, “Confessions of a Dangerous Paradigm: Democratisation, Transitology and Orientalism,” Online: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/pir/notes07/Level5/PI5000/Teti%202007%20Confessions%20of%20a%20Dangerous%20Paradigm.pdf)

      This section will argue that the positionalities and some of the key features of Orientalist discourses which give rise to its ‘confessional dynamics’ also characterise the ...clearly evident in Western foreign policy discourses regarding the ‘threat’ of Islamism in the Middle East, as evidenced in debates over policy stances towards Islamist parties.

       

       

      This posturing of the United States as a messianic gatekeeper of ordained democratic values requires more than simple assistance policies – it is an understanding of American identity that MANDATES vigilance and intervention to correct the course of world affairs. This corrupts our analysis of the revolutions calling for autonomy and justice – they become acts of aggression that threaten the stability of our civilization. Rest assured, we will use violence not out of vengeance, but out of love for those who refuse us – for it would better that they die at our hands than in a state of sin.

      Martinot, 2003

      (Steve, lecturer at San Francisco State University in the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs, “The Cultural Roots of Interventionism in the US,” Social Justice Vol. 30, No. 1 (2003), pp. 19-20)

      In summary, U.S. interventionism has three structural elements that are homologous to corresponding elements of white racialized identity and white supremacy: an allegiance to itself as a messianic...and that government interventionism, however criminal, will continue to be seen as the ultimate good by white nationalism.

       

       

      The assertion of a global democratic moment contained in their divine mission to cleanse the world of anger and replace it with consensual democratic relations requires a condemnation of those that struggle for autonomy on their own terms - either the revolts are mirror images of American democracy, or they must be brought back into the fold through increasingly coercive measures – this imperial logic is the driving force behind terrorism and threatens the survival of the human race

      Baudrillard, 2004

      (Jean, “This is the Fourth World War,” An Interview with Der Spiegel, IJBS 1:1, Online: http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/spiegel.htm)

      Spiegel: Monsieur Baudrillard, you have described the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington as the “absolute event.” ... natural sciences, in fact, problematic. Montaigne said: “If the evil in men were eliminated, then the fundamental condition of life would be destroyed.”

       

       

       

      Alternative: we refuse to read the revolutions as an object that can be easily grasped and directed towards the goal of liberal democracy. This is an affirmation of the singularity of the revolutions, that aspect we have, until now, tried to accommodate or banish. The refusal to name the event of the revolts interrupts the representational framework that drives imperialist intervention by maintaining fidelity to the difference that cannot be engaged by American exceptionalism

      Spanos, 2011

      (William, World War II Veteran, POW at Dresden, professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton, “The Arab Spring, 2011 Revolution:  A Symptomatic Reading of the Revolution,” Online: https://sites.google.com/site/spanosdartmouthtalk/)

      *This is evidence from the forthcoming article - we have posted the full text of it in the form of a talk Spanos gave at Dartmouth. You can access the full text via the link above*

      The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the nonState (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organizxatiaon. This has nothing to do with the simple affirmation of the social in opposition to the State that has often found expression in the protest of recent years. Whatever singularities cannot form a societas because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition. . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition). The State, as Alain Badiou had shown, is not founded on a social bond, of which it would be the expression, but rather on the dissolution, the unbinding it prohibits. For the State, therefore, what is important is never the singularity as such, but only its inclusion in some identity, whatever identity (but the possibility of the whatever itself being taken up without an identity is a threat the State cannot come to terms with. A being radically devoid of a representable identity would be absolutely irrelevant to the State. That is what, in our culture, the hypocritical dogma of the sacredness of human life and the vacuous declaration of human rights are meant to hide. Sacred here can only means what the term meant in Roman law: Sacer was the one who had been excluded from the human world and who, even though she or he could not be sacrificed, could be killed without committing homicide . . . . Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principle enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and sooner or later, the tanks will appear. (CC, 84-86; my emphasis, except for the second)[20] What I am suggesting, by way of Agamben’s resonant model, is, in short, that the very worldly Arab Revolution against the various despotic states in North Africa and the Middle East (and their Western ventriloquizers) is being paradoxically “enacted” precisely by the vanquished: those who, in the eyes of the State and its discursive regime, have, by way of bereaving them of language and thus of a polity, been reduced to the status of non-being and inaction – “bare life” (the included excluded), the uncountable,” “the part of no part,” “the ungrievable,” “the inarticulate,” “the superfluous” – now, however, in some degree or other, attuned to the positive possibilities of this denuded condition. And that is why, under the aegis of this metamorphosis of the amorphous into the spectralthe only alternatives of these nation-states where the state of exception is the rule (though they are, in the last instance, not alternatives) is either massive repression (the wholesale killing of its own people, which exposes and underscores its disavowed reduction of their humanity to bare life), as in the case of Libya and Syria, or disintegration, as in the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, that is, an extreme or genocidal violence that, in its global visibility irreversibly delegitimizes the State or the implosion of the State.41[21] But the possibilities of this metamorphosis of “whatever singularity” – the Protean nothing that the State, will paranoically have nothing to do with in its determination of being -- into a spectral force without a Telos (a means without end, or pure potentiality, in Agamben’s terms) is not limited to a politics of resistance against the tyranny of the binarist concept of belonging endemic to the nation-state system. The retrieval and worlding of the nothing, I suggest, also enables the possibility of a radically revolutionary “coming community” that, in understanding belonging, not as an identitarian category that privileges the (Schmittian) Ffriend/enemy opposition as the norm of relationality and thus the beginning-middle-end vocational narrative, but as non-identitarian belonging as such – as, in other words, a pure potentiality that, in overdetermining the time of the now (i.e. beginnings as such), renders the old binarist categories of belonging – including property -- “inoperative.” It is the possibility of this non-identitarian belonging vis a vis the coming community, I suggest, that the Arab Revolution is announcing in refusing to be answerable to the names that both the regimes under assault by the multitude and the heavily invested Western states would give its force. But to clarify this rather opaque theoretical formulation, it will be necessary to return to my point of departure in Edward Said’s very concrete diagnosis of the post-imperial occasion. There, it will be recalled, Said bears witness to the emergence of the exilic condition – the condition of in-betweenness – as the fundamental demographic and psychic characteristic of the post-imperial global occasion in order to underscore his thesis that “liberation as an intellectual mission . . . has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture [the objectifying dialectical Western perspective vis a vis global history] to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages.” There, also, no doubt with the question of Palestine in mind, Said observed that, from such anthat exilic perspective, one could see the contours of a coming community “founded” on this exilic in-betweenness, a vision he characterizes as “‘the complete consort dancing together ‘contrapuntally.”  

      2NC Civ Soc Link/A2: Aff key solve revenge in Egypt

      The discourse of democratization proscribes an intervention based on the passivity of subjects. This requires imperialist intervention in the form of technical administration by Western experts that actively subverts movements, preserving a cycle of violence and neocolonial oppression.

      Aff Ignatius evidence:

      “… it would undermine the economic strategy of innovation, investment and entrepreneurship … What’s … is a sense that the rule of law will prevail … This protective legal framework is as important as democracy itself, which as Alexander Hamilton and other American founders warned more than 200 years ago can be bent to become the tyrannical will of the mob.”

      Neocosmos 11 [Michael. Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of South Africa, UNISA. “Mass mobilisation, ‘democratic transition’ and ‘transitional violence’ in Africa” Pambazuka News 2011-03-31, Issue 523 http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72163]

      When ‘political conditionalities’ proved insufficient, it was (and still is) always...neoliberal democracy in a context of neocolonialism wherein a dominant form of oppression is national in content.

      2NC

      A2: Switch-side solves: switch side debate becomes a site to validate the global imposition of democratic values and a tool of normalization that reduces us to embodied performers of American Exceptionalism

      HICKS AND GREENE, 2005

      (LOST CONVICTIONS: DEBATING BOTH SIDES AND THE ETHICAL SELF-FASHIONING OF LIBERAL CITIZENS” CULTURAL STUDIES 115-117)

      Nikhil Pal Singh (1998) argues that to understand the stark opposition between liberal democracy and totalitarianism...by which the student-debater-citizen becomes an exceptional ‘American’ _/ the bearer of universal norms of liberal democracy.

      A2: Cede the Political

       

      No link and turn – we aren’t a rejection of humanism, rather a necessary rejection of the way it has been corrupted to justify imperialism

      Spanos, 2011

      (William, Spurlock’s one and only friend, “William V. Spanos,” Interview between Christopher Spurlock and Spanos, Summer/Fall, Online: http://kdebate.com/spanos.html)

      CS: Lastly, and this may seem like a silly question, but many in debate charge you as an antihumanist ...,"...possesses the monopoly of beauty of intelligence, of force, I and there I is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory." Here, of course, "victory" means victory over (the very idea of) victory. It's the neighborhood of zero.

      They take Boggs out of context – institutional engagement is anti-politics – he’s calling for occupation of the public sphere

      Boggs, 97 

      (Carl, “The Great Retreat: Decline of the Public Sphere in Late Twentieth-Century America”  Theory and Society, Vol. 26, No. 6 (Dec., 1997), pp. 741-780)

      ***NOTE:  The top part of this card is the section everybody reads – these are the following 2 paragraphs

      The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges. Many ideological currents scrutinized here - localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, postmodernism, Deep Ecology - intersect with and reinforce each other. While... authority. Hence a truly revitalized politics will have to be more open and collective, more decentralized, and more infused with civic virtues as the conditions favoring a single center of politics erode.

       

      An anti-imperialist stance is key

      Boggs 2009

      (Carl, pretty lefty dude: turns out you guys are jerks, National University, A Way Forward?, http://www.zcommunications.org/a-way-forward-by-carl-boggs, Friday, August 21, 2009, \\stroud)

      I'm delighted and flattered to be part of the exchanges about efficacious ways to move forward... change the world as if there is every reason in the world to be hopeful and optimistic.

       




11/12/11
  • Cap K Wake Forest Rnd 6

    • Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:

    •  

      K

      The instability in Middle East and North Africa can only be understood as expressions of inherent contradictions of interest between authoritarian regimes guarding Western-imposed economic paradigms and the people who bear the weight of these economic systems. Through the omission of class struggle from its analysis, academic accounts of the Arab Spring remain complicit with the forms of assistance whose inner workings will only delay the inevitable crises of neoliberalism.

       

      Petras2011

      (James, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Binghamton University, “Roots of the Arab Revolts and Premature Celebrations,” March, Online: http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2011/03/james-petras-roots-of-the-arab-revolts-and-premature-celebrations/)

       

      Most accounts of the Arab revolts from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Iraq and elsewhere have focused on the most immediate causes: … seize power and protect the entire rentier state and economic structure while sustaining their ties with their imperial mentors.

       

      Academic elites actively contribute to the co-option of revolutionary energy by calling for shallow reforms like the 1AC - these changes are only considered by policymakers insofar as they have the potential to expand market influence in the region.

       

      Dixon, 2011

      (Marion, doctoral candidate in Dept. of Development Sociology @ Cornell, “An Arab Spring,” Review of African Political Economy, 32:128, pg. 309-316)

       

      The ‘imperial reach’ represents a real threat to the popular opposition movements  popular revolts in the region at least helped break the pervasive Middle East exceptionalism thesis.

       

       

      Decentralization initiatives led by USAID take power out of the hands of the people – USAID reforms leave economic decision-making in the hands of elites in the center – calls for improved local governance in reality just pit

      Hanieh, 2006

      (Adam, Lecturer in Development Studies @ School of Oriental & African Studies @ U of London, “'Democracy Promotion' and Neo-Liberalism in the Middle East,” Spring, Online: http://www.stateofnature.org/democracyPromotion.html)

       

      This reform is linked closely to US-style democratization. As an explicit feature of democratization, … essentially means that local staff take more responsibility for fiscal matters (both expenditure and revenue).

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

      We’ll isolate two impacts:

      First, this economic fundamentalism drove millions of protesters into the streets in the first place – the affirmative secures a few more years of stability in the region at the cost of intensified political repression and grinding poverty

       

      Roubini, 2011

      (Nouriel, Prof of Econ @ NYU, “The Instability of Inequality,” Oct 14, Online: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011101473753217227.html)

       

      This year has witnessed a global wave of social and political turmoil and instability, … instability eventually harming long-term economic growth and welfare.

       

      The aff promotes market fundamentalism and rabid individualism as the answers to the world’s ills, replacing citizens with an assemblage of entrepreneurial subjects.  This elevates profits over people, which leads to never-ending wars abroad in the quest for capital, and authoritarianism.

       

      Giroux, 2006 

      (Henry, “Dirty Democracy and State Terrorism: The Politics of the New Authoritarianism in the United States,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 26:2, pp. 163-177, MUSE)

       

      While it would be ludicrous to suggest that the United … During the 1990s alone, war forced 20 million children to leave their homes.16

       

      In the face of the affirmative’s call to intervene to stabilize the situation, our alternative is to do nothing. Only this stance will ensure a true break from the history of political and economic coercion that makes the affirmative impacts inevitable.

       

      Zizek, 2011

      (Slavoj, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology @ Univ of Ljubljana & visiting professor at Columbia, Princeton, New School, New York University, University of Michigan, “Why Fear the Arab Revolutionary Spirit?,” The Guardian, February, Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/01/egypt-tunisia-revolt)

       

      What cannot but strike the eye in the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt is the conspicuous why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent."

       

      Their methodological framework is heavily soaked with conservative ideology—the procedural “bracketing out” of alternatives of radical structural change is only meant to safeguard the exploitive conditions of the status quo – their method cedes the political

       

      Meszaros, 1989

      (Istvan, Chair of philosophy @ U. of Sussex, The Power of Ideology, p. 232-234)

       

      Nowhere is the myth of ideological neutrality – the self-proclaimed Wertfeihert or value neutrality of so-called ‘rigorous social …complex dialectical interrelationship between methods and values which no social theory or philosophy can escape.

       

      History has taught us that there is no possibility of reform or permutation – given the increasing destructiveness of capitalism’s attempts to counter its inherent contradictions, anything but a total, systemic rejection of its economic and political manifestations amounts to planetary suicide.

       

      Meszaros, 2008

      (Istvan, prof emeritus @ U of Sussex, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, pg. 372-4)

       

       

      The attempt to confine historical time to the domain of the gradual and the piecemeal, so as to conform to  global inter-state relationship could properly match the requirements of the "postmodern" conditions.

       

       

       

       

      Case

      The forth branch always already wags the dog, and it does so in some of the most racist, divergent, and ignorant ways possible.  Ramzey Baroud examines the post election framing espoused by the 1AC

       

      Baroud 11/3/2011 (Ramzy, “Islamists” on Probation: Western Reaction to Tunisian Elections, Dissident Voice, November 3rd, 2011, http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/11/%E2%80%98islamists%E2%80%99-on-probation-western-reaction-to-tunisian-elections/)

       

      Following Tunisia’s first fair and free elections on October 27, the Western media responded with a …continue to unleash one offensive after another, creating fears that don’t exist, and exaggerating small events to represent grave phenomena.

       

      This is part and parcel of an accommodate/banish mentality that justifies imperial intervention

       

      SPANOS 2000 AMERICA’S SHADOW: ANATOMY OF EMPIRE pp.

       

      From the decentered perspective precipitated by what I have called the epistemic break that occurred in the 1960s, then, the "Jameson­ian" representation of postmodernity seems to be blinded by its insight into the… either toward the dominant mainstream or out to the margins.15

       

       




11/13/11
  • Cap K v KU's Egypt Corruption Reform Aff

    • Tournament: UNT | Round: 3 | Opponent: KU | Judge: Robinson


    • Cap

      The instability in Middle East and North Africa can only be understood as expressions of inherent contradictions of interest between authoritarian regimes guarding Western-imposed economic paradigms and the people who bear the weight of these economic systems. Through the omission of class struggle from its analysis, academic accounts of the Arab Spring remain complicit with the forms of assistance whose inner workings will only delay the inevitable crises of neoliberalism.

      Petras, 2011
      (James, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Binghamton University, “Roots of the Arab Revolts and Premature Celebrations,” March, Online: http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2011/03/james-petras-roots-of-the-arab-revolts-and-premature-celebrations/) 

      Most accounts of the Arab revolts from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Iraq and elsewhere have focused on the most immediate causes: political dictatorships, unemployment, repression and the wounding and killing of protestors. They have given most attention to the “middle class”, young, educated activists, their communication via the internet, (Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 2011) and, in the case of Israel and its Zionists conspiracy theorists, “the hidden hand” of Islamic extremists (Daily Alert Feb. 25, 2011). What is lacking is any attempt to provide a framework for the revolt which takes account of the large scale, long and medium term socio-economic structures as well as the immediate ‘detonators’ of political action. The scope and depth of the popular uprisings, as well as the diverse political and social forces which have entered into the conflicts, preclude any explanations which look at one dimension of the struggles. The best approach involves a ‘funnel framework’ in which, at the wide end (the long-term, large-scale structures), stands the nature of the economic, class and political system; the middle-term is defined by the dynamic cumulative effects of these structures on changes in political, social and economic relations; the short-term causes, which precipitate the socio-political-psychological responses, or social consciousness leading to political action. The Nature of the Arab Economies With the exception of Jordan, most of the Arab economies where the revolts are taking place are based on ‘rents’ from oil, gas, minerals and tourism, which provide most of the export earnings and state revenues(Financial Times, Feb. 22, 2011, p. 14). These economic sectors are, in effect, export enclaves employing a tiny fraction of the labor force and define a highly specialized economy (World Bank Annual Report 2009). These export sectors do not have links to a diversified productive domestic economy: oil is exported and finished manufactured goods as well as financial and high tech services are all imported and controlled by foreign multi-nationals and ex-pats linked to the ruling class (Economic and Political Weekly, Feb. 12, 2011, p. 11). Tourism reinforces ‘rental’ income, as the sector, which provides ‘foreign exchange’ and tax revenues to the class – clan state. The latter relies on state-subsidized foreign capital and local politically connected ‘real estate’ developers for investment and imported foreign construction laborers. Rent-based income may generate great wealth, especially as energy prices soar, but the funds accrue to a class of “rentiers” who have no vocation or inclination for deepening and extending the process of economic development and innovation. The rentiers “specialize” in financial speculation, overseas investments via private equity firms, extravagant consumption of high-end luxury goods and billion-dollar and billion-euro secret private accounts in overseas banks. The rentier economy provides few jobs in modern productive activity; the high end is controlled by extended family-clan members and foreign financial corporations via ex-pat experts; technical and low-end employment is taken up by contract foreign labor, at income levels and working conditions below what the skilled local labor force is willing to accept. The enclave rentier economy results in a clan-based ruling class which ‘confounds’ public and private ownership: what’s ‘state’ is actually absolutist monarchs and their extended families at the top and their client tribal leader, political entourage and technocrats in the middle. These are “closed ruling classes”. Entry is confined to select members of the clan or family dynasties and a small number of “entrepreneurial” individuals who might accumulate wealth servicing the ruling clan-class. The ‘inner circle’ lives off of rental income, secures payoffs from partnerships in real estate where they provide no skills, but only official permits, land grants, import licenses and tax holidays. Beyond pillaging the public treasury, the ruling clan-class promotes ‘free trade’, i.e. importing cheap finished products, thus undermining any indigenous domestic start-ups in the ‘productive’ manufacturing, agricultural or technical sector. As a result there is no entrepreneurial national capitalist or ‘middle class’. What passes for a middle class are largely public sector employees (teachers, health professionals, functionaries, firemen, police officials, military officers) who depend on their salaries, which, in turn, depend on their subservience to absolutist power. They have no chance of advancing to the higher echelons or of opening economic opportunities for their educated offspring. The concentration of economic, social and political power in a closed clan-class controlled system leads to an enormous concentration of wealth. Given the social distance between rulers and ruled, the wealth generated by high commodity prices produces a highly distorted image of per-capital “wealth”; adding billionaires and millionaires on top of a mass of low-income and underemployed youth provides a deceptively high average income (Washington Blog, 2/24/11). Rentier Rule: By Arms and Handouts To compensate for these great disparities in society and to protect the position of theparasitical rentier ruling class, the latter pursues alliances with, multi-billion dollar arms corporations, and military protection from the dominant (USA) imperial power. The rulers engage in “neo-colonization by invitation”, offering land for military bases and airfields, ports for naval operations, collusion in financing proxy mercenaries against anti-imperial adversaries and submission to Zionist hegemony in the region (despite occasional inconsequential criticisms). In the middle term, rule by force is complemented by paternalistic handouts to the rural poor and tribal clans; food subsidies for the urban poor; and dead-end make-work employment for the educated unemployed (Financial Times, 2/25/11, p. 1). Both costly arms purchases and paternalistic subsidies reflect the lack of any capacity for productive investments. Billions are spent on arms rather than diversifying the economy. Hundreds of millions are spent on one-shot paternalistic handouts, rather than long-term investments generating productive employment. The ‘glue’ holding this system together is the combination of modern pillage of public wealth and natural energy resources and the use of traditional clan and neo-colonial recruits and mercenary contractors to control and repress the population. US modern armaments are at the service of anachronistic absolutist monarchies and dictatorships, based on the principles of 18th century dynastic rule. The introduction and extension of the most up-to-date communication systems and ultra-modern architecture shopping centers cater to an elite strata of luxury consumers and provides a stark contrast to the vast majority of unemployed educated youth, excluded from the top and pressured from below by low-paid overseas contract workers. Neo-Liberal Destabilization The rentier class-clans are pressured by the international financial institutions and local bankers to ‘reform’ their economies: ‘open’ the domestic market and public enterprises to foreign investors and reduce deficits resulting from the global crises by introducing neo-liberal reforms (Economic and Political Weekly, 2/12/11, p. 11). As a result of “economic reforms” food subsidies for the poor have been lowered or eliminated and state employment has been reduced, closing off one of the few opportunities for educated youth. Taxes on consumers and salaried/wage workers are increased while the real estate developers, financial speculators and importers receive tax exonerations. De-regulation has exacerbated massive corruption, not only among the rentier ruling class-clan, but also by their immediate business entourage. The paternalistic ‘bonds’ tying the lower and middle class to the ruling class have been eroded by foreign-induced neo-liberal “reforms”, which combine ‘modern’ foreign exploitationwith the existing “traditional” forms of domestic private pillage. The class-clan regimes no longer can rely on the clan, tribal, clerical and clientelistic loyalties to isolate urban trade unions, student, small business and low paid public sector movements. The Street against the Palace The ‘immediate causes’ of the Arab revolts are centered in the huge demographic-class contradictions of the clan-class ruled rentier economy. The ruling oligarchy rules over amass of unemployed and underemployed young workers; the latter involves between 50% to 65% of the population under 25 years of age (Washington Blog, 2/24/11). The dynamic “modern” rentier economy does not incorporate the street as venders, transport and contract workers and in personal services. The ultra- modern oil, gas, real estate, tourism and shopping-mall sectors are dependent on the political the newly educated young into modern employment; it relegates them into the low-paid unprotected “informal economy” of and military support of backward traditional clerical, tribal and clan leaders, who are subsidized but never ‘incorporated’ into the sphere of modern production. The modern urban industrial working class with small, independent trade unions is banned. Middle class civic associations are either under state control or confined to petitioning the absolutist state. The ‘underdevelopment’ of social organizations, linked to social classes engaged in modern productive activity, means that the pivot of social and political action is the street. Unemployed and underemployed part-time youth engaged in the informal sector are found in the plazas, at kiosks, cafes, street corner society, and markets, moving around and about and outside the centers of absolutist administrative power. The urban mass does not occupy strategic positions in the economic system; but it is available for mass mobilizations capable of paralyzing the streets and plazas through which goods and services are transported out and profits are realized. Equally important, mass movements launched by the unemployed youth provide an opportunity for oppressed professionals, public sector employees, small business people and the self-employed to engage in protests without being subject to reprisals at their place of employment – dispelling the “fear factor” of losing one’s job. The political and social confrontation revolves around the opposite poles: clientelistic oligarchies and de clasé masses (the Arab Street). The former depends directly on the state (military/police apparatus) and the latter on amorphous local, informal, face-to-face improvised organizations. The exception is the minority of university students who move via the internet. Organized industrial trade unions come into the struggle late and largely focus on sectoral economic demands, with some exceptions – especially in public enterprises, controlled by cronies of the oligarchs, where workers demand changes in management. As a result of the social particularities of the rentier states, the uprisings do not take the form of class struggles between wage labor and industrial capitalists. They emerge as mass political revolts against the oligarchical state. Street-based social movements demonstrate their capacity to delegitimize state authority, paralyze the economy, and can lead up to the ousting of the ruling autocrats. But it is the nature of mass street movements to fill the squares with relative ease, but also to be dispersed when the symbols of oppression are ousted. Street-based movements lack the organization and leadership to project, let alone impose a new political or social order. Their power is found in their ability to pressure existing elites and institutions, not to replace the state and economy. Hence the surprising ease with which the US, Israeli and EU backed Egyptian military were able to seize power and protect the entire rentier state and economic structure while sustaining their ties with their imperial mentors. 

      Academic elites actively contribute to the co-option of revolutionary energy by calling for shallow reforms like the 1AC - these changes are only considered by policymakers insofar as they have the potential to expand market influence in the region.

      Dixon, 2011
      (Marion, doctoral candidate in Dept. of Development Sociology @ Cornell, “An Arab Spring,” Review of African Political Economy, 32:128, pg. 309-316)

      The ‘imperial reach’ represents a real threat to the popular opposition movements exploding throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The dangers exist not just in the ongoing military interventions via a United Nations-authorised turned NATO enforced No-Fly Zone in Libya, with Western powers taking an active role, but in internationally legitimated knowledge production and funding that fuel and make invisible the neoliberal agenda. The imperial reach extends throughout the region and attempts to monopolise ‘at home’, in an effort to maintain geopolitical relations of power. For this essay I define this effort in three broad ways: Western governments and observers defining the ‘Arab Spring’ on their own terms, especially in naming responsibility for the social uprisings in one way or another that comes back to the West (or as preferences may be, the ‘Euro-Atlantic axis’), and maintaining a ‘monopoly of expertise’ (Mitchell 2002). This effort of claiming and co-opting is funnelled squarely to prop up the neoliberal agenda that has brought to the region much of what the movements have risen to reject – a revolving door between wealthy businessmen and ruling party members, monopolistic and oligopolistic economies, rising food and housing prices, slashed wages/prices and protections for workers and farmers, dropping standards of living with weakened public welfare programmes, heightened restriction of rights and liberties (‘reign of terror’) – to name a few resulting societal ills. And the ‘assistance’ announced thus far by Western governments for democratic transitions in the region is more of the same of what has been ‘offered’ for the last three decades – pre-packaged, trickledown prescriptions of private-sector growth. This indeed seems like an opportune ‘time of shock’ for the further implementation of neoliberal reforms, just as such prescriptions have been more widely questioned as a result of the ongoing triple crisis (financial–climate change–food). I argue that these dangers signal a need for a collective effort among writers/commentators to ward off or resist the imperial reach of the tremendous momentum that has generated in the region for popular democracy rooted in social and economic justice. Western governments have reacted to the uprisings, revolts and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa according to what appears to be a prescribed protocol, reserved for public responses to widespread social upheaval in the Global South, in countries with Western-backed unpopular and repressive governments. The protocol goes something like this: With the US at the helm, high-level government officials urge ‘restraint on both sides’. When the revolts appear to be not so easily thwarted, they then call for reform. Tensions escalate and international media attention grows, the call for reform turns to an acknowledgement of the need for a new government. In the case of the Barack Obama administration’s public response to the 25 January Revolution in Egypt, at this point the administration goes on the defensive, claiming to have a strong record in Egypt of defending human rights and promoting civil society. The call for a new government is not immediate; after all, publicly announcing a wish for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down just days after standing by him as a close friend and ally would be obviously disingenuous. The Obama administration instead urges Mubarak not to seek re-election, a redundancy after Mubarak had already announced that he would not run in the 2011 elections and all indications were that he was priming his son Gamal Mubarak to take his place as president. Only when there is continued, mass support for the popular resistance do the United States and European governments begin to prepare proposals for a new government, or in the case of Libya, declare their active support of a United Nationssanctioned No-Fly Zone. In the case of a successful uprising, when the popular opposition overthrows the ruler, Western governments cheer loudly and declare that the will of the people has been heard! This protocol fails to veil the hypocrisy of the ‘West’s relationship with the Rest’, although not entirely. The image of Western governments as defenders and promoters of democracy and development fractures before a fumbling, reticent reaction to mass democratic movements confronting authoritarian rule. The script – from restraint to reform to a new government to ‘yeah for democracy!’ – demonstrates much more than hypocrisy on the part of the West. Western hypocrisy is a non-starter by itself, having long been established in a post-colonial era of consistent support for tyranny overseas. Rather, it may be understood as a significant character of Western imperialism, opening a window for the observer into the workings of twenty-firstcentury imperial forms, especially those more subtle and less visible. On 11 February 2011, the day that newly appointed Egyptian Vice-President Omar Suleiman publicly announces that President Mubarak has ‘stepped down’, hours later Obama’s ‘address to the Egyptian people’ is broadcast on state television, before the celebrating crowds in Tahrir Square. Obama does not just declare a joint celebration, the American people and their government celebrating alongside Egyptians, who have just kicked out their ruler who had long been embraced as a close American friend. Obama gives a lecture on democracy, teaching Egyptians what it will take to build democracy, warning them of the long road ahead. As David Africa (2011) eloquently argues in an opinion piece in Al Jazeera English, the Egyptian people who are leading a popular revolution know what democracy is and how to practise it, thank you very much. Much of the commentary on Obama’s speech in the Western media focused on its eloquence, however, arguing that it was one of Obama’s better speeches. And, according to the National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) correspondent Richard Engel, after hearing the live speech from Obama a crowd of Egyptians around him in Tahrir began to cheer for Obama and chant ‘We love America’ (The Guardian 2011). When former Tunisian President Ben Ali and Egyptian President Mubarak addressed the nation in the midst of uprisings in January and February, respectively, some were comforted by the rulers’ posturing as their father, protector and guarantor, while others were infuriated by the rulers’ patronising tone. One patronising address after another made people’s anger grow, quickly forcing out the rulers and their immediate families. Evidently, the day that the American emperor’s address to teach about democracy and the rule of law is overwhelmingly felt as patronising worldwide has not yet arrived. It is precisely because it has not that 11 February, the day of joint celebration of Western powers with the Egyptian people, marked the beginning of the ‘expropriation of the Egyptian revolution by the Euro-Atlantic axis’ (Africa 2011). Claims of expertise – and the vast funding apparatus to support them – come with meddling and posturing to ensure that changes in the region keep in line with a vision of the world order promulgated by the Washington Consensus. It may be argued that the West’s public declarations of support of popular revolts in the region at least helped break the pervasive Middle East exceptionalism thesis. 

      Corruption reform in Egypt masks the neoliberal roots of mass poverty – it depoliticizes the functioning of markets by portraying exploitation as an isolated incident

      Armbrust, 2011
      (Walter, Lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies & Fellow of Modern Middle Eastern Studies @ Oxford, “The Revolution Against Neoliberalism,” February, Online: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/contributors/10682) 

      The hunt for regime cronies’ billions may be a natural inclination of the post-Mubarak era, but it could also lead efforts to reconstitute the political system astray. The generals who now rule Egypt are obviously happy to let the politicians take the heat. Their names were not included in the lists of the most egregiously corrupt individuals of the Mubarak era, though in fact the upper echelons of the military have long been beneficiaries of a system similar to (and sometimes overlapping with) the one that that enriched civilian figures much more prominent in the public eye such as Ahmad ‘Izz and Habib al-‘Adly. To describe blatant exploitation of the political system for personal gain as corruption misses the forest for the trees. Such exploitation is surely an outrage against Egyptian citizens, but calling it corruption suggests that the problem amounts to aberrant behavior from a system that would otherwise function smoothly. If this were the case then the crimes of the Mubarak regime could be attributed simply to bad character: change the people and the problems go away. But the real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state. Although neoliberalism is now a commonly used term, it is still worth pausing a moment and think about what it means. In his Brief History of Neoliberalism[1] social geographer David Harvey outlined “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” Neoliberal states guarantee, by force if necessary, the “proper functioning” of markets; where markets do not exist (for example, in the use of land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution), then the state should create them. Guaranteeing the sanctity of markets is supposed to be the limit of legitimate state functions, and state interventions should always be subordinate to markets. All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services, can be reduced to market transactions. The market becomes an end in an of itself, and since the only legitimate function of states is to defend markets and expand them into new spheres, democracy is a potential problem insofar as people might vote for political and economic choices that impede the unfettered operation of markets, or that reserve spheres of human endeavor (education, for example, or health care) from the logic of markets. Hence a pure neoliberal state would philosophically be empowered to defend markets even from its own citizens. As an ideology neoliberalism is as utopian as communism. The application of utopian neoliberalism in the real world leads to deformed societies as surely as the application of utopian communism did. 

      We’ll isolate three impacts:
      US and other Western governments play a central role in creating and maintaining social and economic deprivation. What corporations want is markets and raw natural resources, no matter the socioeconomic consequences. Corporate-driven globalization and modern neoliberalism are the ultimate perversion of democracy- it’s a project of sacrificial genocide that silences dissent and mandates docility- we must reject the kill to save mentality in order to challenge the death drive which makes all atrocities inevitable.

      Santos, 2003
      (Boaventura de Sousa, Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal), Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School and Global Legal Scholar at the University of Warwick, and Director of the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, “Collective Suicide?,” March 28, Online: http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php) 

      According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in Nazism, with the holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion that is manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to its ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to infinitely reproduce the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically, sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation, legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. In today's version, the period of primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization with the globalization of war. The machine of democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction. / In opposition to this, there is the ongoing movement of globalization from below, the global struggle for social justice, led by social movements and NGOs, of which the World Social Forum (WSF) has been an eloquent manifestation. The WSF has been a remarkable affirmation of life, in its widest and most inclusive sense, embracing human beings and nature. What challenges does it face before the increasingly intimate interpenetration of the globalization of the economy and that of war? I am convinced that this new situation forces the globalization from below to re-think itself, and to reshape its priorities. It is well-known that the WSF, at its second meeting, in 2002, identified the relationship between economic neoliberalism and imperial warmongering, which is why it organized the World Peace Forum, the second edition of which took place in 2003. But this is not enough. I believe that a strategic shift is required. Social movements, no matter what their spheres of struggle, must give priority to the fight for peace, as a necessary condition for the success of all the other struggles. This means that they must be in the frontline of the fight for peace, and not simply leave this space to be occupied solely by peace movements. All the movements against neoliberal globalization are, from now on, peace movements. We are now in the midst of the fourth world war (the third being the Cold War) and the spiral of war will go on and on. The principle of non-violence that is contained in the WSF Charter of Principles must no longer be a demand made on the movements; now it must be a global demand made by the movements. This emphasis is necessary so that, in current circumstances, the celebration of life can be set against this vertiginous collective suicide. The peace to be fought for is not a mere absence of war or of terrorism. It is rather a peace based upon the elimination of the conditions that foster war and terrorism: global injustice, social exclusion, cultural and political discrimination and oppression and imperialist greed. A new, cosmopolitan humanism can be built above and beyond western illuminist abstractions, a humanism of real people based on the concrete resistance to the actual human suffering imposed by the real axis of evil: neoliberalism plus war.

      Neoliberal quick fixes make ecological extinction inevitable – prioritization of profit over environment destroys the planet 

      Kovel, Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, awarded Fellowship at the John Guggenheim Foundation, 2002
      (Joel, The Enemy of Nature, pages 131-132)

      Science, technology and industry, therefore, are all bundled together and, under the aegis of capital, come to express its powers of splitting. In capital's early phase, the inner connection to the gendered bifurcation of nature were strikingly revealed, in the blood shed in the great witch crazes of early modern Europe, and through ideologues of science such as Francis Bacon. As the system matured, its latent powers of ecodestruction would come to the fore under the aegis of industrialization.24 Industrialization is not an independent force, then, but the hammer with which nature is smashed for the sake of capital. Industrial logging destroys forests; industrial fishing destroys fisheries; industrial chemistry makes Frankenfood; industrial use of fossil fuels creates the greenhouse effect, and so forth – all for the sake of value-expansion. Most important, the technically driven production of the industrial order demands an expanded energy supply, for the purpose of which fuels such as coal, natural gas and petroleum are by far the most likely candidates. Such fuel represents past ecological activity: numberless residues of chemical bonds developed by living creatures in interaction with sunlight over hundreds of millions of years, now turned to heat energy to propel the instruments of industrial society. Each drive to the mall to buy wasteful plastic junk made from fossil fuel degrades aeons of ecological order into heat and noxious fumes. I have read somewhere that in a single day the industrial world consumes the equivalent of ten thousand years of bio-ecological activity, a ratio, roughly, of 3-4,000,000 to one. With this squandering, and the associated tossing about of materials of every sort, the entropic potentials inherent in social production reach levels of eco-destabilization on an expanding scale. The staggering pace of entropic decay has become noticeable only recently because the earth is sizeable enough to have buffered its effects until the past thirty years or so, since when we have had a clogging of the 'sinks' along with an ever rising level of production. The phenomenon of separation expresses the core gesture of eco¬disintegration, for separation in the physical and social sense corresponds to splitting in the ontological sense. Splitting extends the separation of elements of ecosystems past the point where they interact to create new Wholes – or, from another angle, to the point where the dialectic that constitutes eco¬systems breaks down. It follows that the ecological crisis is not simply a manifestation of the macro-economic effects of capital, but also reveals the extension of capitalist alienation into the ecosphere. And as this alienation, and the whole structure of the system, is grounded in the relation between capital and labour, it also follows that the ecological crisis and capital's exploitation of labour are two aspects of the same phenomenon. The historical matrix for this occurred when persons of the nascent ruling class subjugated labour into the system of exchange-value, turning their power to transform nature into a commodity on sale for a wage. The wage relation, in which one's capacity to work is given a money equivalent and sold on the market, is much older than capitalism itself, nor was it the only form of labour within emerging capitalist markets," nor, needless to say, is it a necessary evil in each and every instance where it appears. But its generalization into the means by which capital itself is produced perman¬ently alters the landscape of human being in an anti-ecological direction. 

      We have an ethical obligation to reject this glossing over of structural violence – it renders the loss of millions of lives incalculable 

      Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University College, Northampton, 2004, Conversations With Zizek, p. 14-16) 

      For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gord¬ian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism and its obscene naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subju¬gated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture — with all its pieties con¬cerning ‘multiculturalist’ etiquette — Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called ‘radically incorrect’ in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today’s social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedevilled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political mor¬bidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of im¬plicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibi¬tion conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek’s point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx’s central insight that in order to create a uni¬versal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose ‘universalism’ fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world’s population. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its out¬comes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgement in a neutral marketplace. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diver¬sity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded ‘life-chances’ cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and name¬less (viz, the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’. And Zizek’s point is that this mystification is mag¬nified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differ¬ential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sus¬tained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-par¬ticular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizek’s universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a ‘glitch’ in an otherwise sound matrix. 

      The alternative is: vote negative to resist the compulsion to act that insulates capitalism from radical ideological resistance. Capitalism ensures shallow political reform by using the threat of totalitarianism and constant crisis to prohibit ideological questioning. Thus, the first step to eradicate capitalism is to break out of the ideological prison in which activism has previously been confined by denying thoughtless action in the face of crisis. This inaction opens space for a radical break from capitalist ideology. 

      Johnston, asst. prof. of philosophy, 2007
      (Adrian, International Journal of Zizek Studies, p. 21-3, http:zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/8/24)

      <The height of Zizek's philosophical traditionalism, his fidelity to certain lasting truths too precious to cast away in a postmodern frenzy, is his conviction that no worthwhile praxis can emerge prior to the careful and deliberate formulation of a correct conceptual framework. His references to the hybrid Lacanian-Badiouian notion of the act-event (qua agent-less occurrence not brought about by a subject) are especially strange in light of the fact that he seemingly endorses the view that theory must precede practice, namely, that deliberative reflection is, in a way, primary. Furthermore, the political aims of Zizek's own theoretical endeavor are obviously not of an orthodox communist nature. He doesn't urge the simple reenactment of the sort of revolution embarked upon by Lenin. Nor is he, as some have alleged, merely interested in being an anti-capitalist and nothing more (an accusation alluding to his abandonment of the positive Marxist project).116 For Zizek, the foremost concrete task to be accomplished today isn't some kind of rebellious acting out, which would, in the end, amount to a series of impotent, incoherent outbursts.117 Instead, given the contemporary closure of the socio-political imagination under the hegemony of liberal-democratic capitalism, he sees the liberation of thinking itself from its present ideological constraints as the first crucial step that must be taken if anything is to be changed for the better. In a lecture given in Vienna in 2001, Zizek suggests that Marx's call to break out of the sterile closure of abstract intellectual ruminations through direct, concrete action (thesis eleven on Feuerbach—"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it") must be inverted given the new prevailing conditions of late-capitalism. Nowadays, one must resist succumbing to the temptation to short-circuit thinking in favor of acting, since all such rushes to action are doomed; they either fail to disrupt capitalism or are co-opted by it. Zizek argues that a genuine materialist embraces the taking of risks with no guarantee whatsoever of a subsequent good result—"True materialism... consists precisely in accepting the chanciness without the implication of the horizon of hidden meaning—the name of this chance is contingency."118 And, reiterating a thesis argued for by Badiou in his 1985 text Peut-on penser la politique?,119 he claims that the liberal-democratic belief system of free-market capitalism uses the bogeyman of "totalitarianism"—people often insist that the danger of recreating nightmarish Stalinist or fascist dictatorships justifies the avoidance of any radical measures deviating from accepted mainstream political wisdom in the West— to de-legitimize just this sort of "materialism." In other words, the specter of totalitarianism is invoked so as to silence demands for taking chances by intellectually entertaining possibilities pronounced impermissible by capitalist democracy—"the notion of 'totalitarianism,' far from being an effective theoretical concept, is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think... it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking."120 Zizek continues, noting that, "Today, reference to the 'totalitarian' threat sustains a kind of unwritten Denkverbot (prohibition against thinking)."121 Hence, the phrase "repeating Lenin" doesn't refer to the ridiculously anachronistic and ineffective posturing that would be involved in another attempt at launching a communist revolution. For Zizek, it broadly signifies a disruptive break that makes it possible to imagine, once again, viable alternatives to liberal-democratic capitalism by removing the various obstacles to thinking seriously about options forcefully foreclosed by today's reigning ideologies—"'Lenin' stands for the compelling FREEDOM to suspend the stale existing [post]ideological coordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot in which we live—it simply means that we are allowed to think again."122 Zizek links liberal democracy's employment of the threat of totalitarianism to a more fundamental rejection of the act itself qua intervention whose consequences cannot safely be anticipated. In Zizek's view, contemporary democracy legitimates itself through a pathetic posture in which the avoidance of risk (i.e., of extreme measures not covered by preexisting democratic consensuses, measures with no guarantee of status-quo-affirming success) is elevated to the status of the highest political good123—"what the reference to democracy involves is the rejection of radical attempts to 'step outside,' to risk a radical break."124 The refusal to risk a gesture of disruption because it might not turn out exactly the way one envisions it should is the surest bulwark against change: The standard critique concerns the Act's allegedly 'absolute' character of a radical break, which renders impossible any clear distinction between a properly 'ethical' act and, say, a Nazi monstrosity: is it not that an Act is always embedded in a specific socio-symbolic context? The answer to this reproach is clear: of course—an Act is always a specific intervention within a socio-symbolic context; the same gesture can be an Act or a ridiculous empty posture, depending on the context. In what, then, resides the misunderstanding? Why this critique? There is something else which disturbs the critics of the Lacanian notion of Act: true, an Act is always situated in a concrete context —this, however, does not mean that it is fully determined by its context. An Act always involves a radical risk. It is a step into the open, with no guarantee about the final outcome— why? Because an Act retroactively changes the very co-ordinates onto which it intervenes. This lack of guarantee is what the critics cannot tolerate; they want an Act without risk—not without empirical risks, but without the much more radical 'transcendental risk' that the Act will not only simply fail, but radically misfire. Those who oppose he 'absolute Act' effectively oppose the Act as such, they want an Act without the Act.125

      Case
      No risk of extinction due to biodiversity loss or cornerstone species.  Extinction proves.

      Moore.  1998.  Thomas Gale Moore.  “Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry About Global Warming”.  1998.  CATO Institute.  Washington D.C.  ISBN 1-882577-64-7.  Pg. 98-9. - M.E.

       Nevertheless, the loss of a class of living beings does not typically threaten other species. Most animals and plants can derive their nutrients or receive the other benefits provided by a particular species from more than a single source. If it were true that the extinction of a single species would produce a cascade of losses, then the massive extinctions of the past should have wiped out all life. Evolution forces various life forms to adjust to change. A few may not make the adaptation but others will mutate to meet the new conditions. Although a particular chain of DNA may be eliminated through the loss of a species, other animals or plants adapting to the same environment often produce similar genetic solutions with like proteins. It is almost impossible to imagine a single species that, if eliminated, would threaten us humans. Perhaps if the E. coli that are necessary for digestion became extinct, we could no longer exist. But those bacteria live in a symbiotic relationship with man and, as long as humans survive, so will they. Thus any animal that hosts a symbiotic species need not fear the loss of its partner. As long as the host remains, so will parasites and symbiotic species.
       

      Biodiversity doesn't matter.  Their evidence is mistaken.  They only lead to bad policies and needless expense.

      Moore.  1998.  Thomas Gale Moore.  “Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry About Global Warming”.  1998.  CATO Institute.  Washington D.C.  ISBN 1-882577-64-7.  Pg. 102. - M.E.

       These economists translate their findings into an estimate of the value of protecting a marginal piece of land. That estimate depends on the species diversity of the area. For the richest territory with the greatest diversity (western Ecuador), they estimate that the benefit of the marginal hectare is only $8.00 per acre. Other less species-intense areas are worth less, with California Floristic province* reckoned at 20 cents. The authors assert that these are upper estimates of the value.

       Although people do like the concept of a globe inhabited by many different types of animals and plants, the value of any one or even many is not large in benefits provided to mankind. The Greek chorus of doomsayers grossly overstates the value of biodiversity. Their exaggerated veneration of each and every species leads to mistaken policy and needless expense.

      Biodiversity loss is happening now.  Multiple causes.  Attempts to stop it in the past have always become marred in local and national politics. Globalization will continue the process. 

      Mbow, Smith and Leadley.  2010.  Cheikh Mbow, Mark Stafford Smith and Paul Leadley.   “Biodiversity Scenarios: Projections of 21st Century Change in Biodiversity and Associated Ecosystem Services: A Technical Report for the Global Biodiversity Outlook 3”.  CBD Technical Series Number 50.  Appendix IV: West Africa: The Sahara, Sahel and Guinean Region.  2010.  ISBN 92-9225-219-4.  Pg 76 – M.E.  

       Coupled human-environment interactions in West Africa, extending from the southern Sahara downthrough the Sahel and into the Guinean Forest, are highly vulnerable to climate, land use and landmanagement changes that can cause ecosystems to shift to alternate states with high impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being. Poverty, lack of governance, conflict and resulting human migrations leave this region with little margin for adaptive responses.
       Tipping-points in West Africa are complex due to the multiplicity of drivers and their interactions. We
      focused on four interacting tipping-points that influence this region:
       Climate regime shifts: Future climate regime shifts are highly uncertain, especially for precipitation for which projections range from a persistent increase, to increased variability, to long-term reductions in rainfall.
       Overuse of marginal resources: Marginal resources coupled with overuse result in a downward spiral of productivity, poverty and biodiversity impoverishment. Accompanying land degradation makes it difficult to restore biodiversity and ecosystem services even when socio-economic and climatic conditions improve.
       Globalisation and overexploitation: Agricultural development and market globalization drive exploitation in areas of more abundant natural resources, with forest clearing having the most serious impact. Improvements in access and increasing local wealth in these areas of the region drive improved access and further increases in exploitation.
       Instability and limited resources: Ineffectual governance caused by instability and conflict permitsunregulated use of natural resources including those in protected areas. This also drives refugee movements to other regions, increasing stress on natural resources in those areas and triggering further social and political disruption.
       Combinations of drought, overuse of natural capital and political instability have led to widespread biodiversity loss, land degradation and famine in the recent past, clearly illustrating the region’s high potential vulnerability to future global changes. Current trends in biodiversity responses indicate a strong decline in bird and mammal populations and range shifts due to land use and climate change. At the other
      extreme, the Sahara/Sahel has been much “greener” during wetter climate regimes over the last several thousand years and the Sahel is currently “greening”.
       Global biodiversity projections suggest that this region will be one of the most highly impacted regions of the world in terms of destruction of natural habitat, decreasing species abundance and species extinctions. Models of habitats and birds suggest that land use will be the dominant driver of biodiversity change in the 21st century. Climate change is often projected to be a positive factor for biodiversity due to regime shifts to a wetter climate and rising CO2 concentrations, but these projections have typically overlooked the importance of climate variability and uncertainty in their analyses.
       Ecosystems in this region are a major source of environmental capital for ecosystem goods and services used by local populations, but globalization and marketing of these resources is projected to continue tolead to a degradation of services provided by natural and semi-natural ecosystems.

      Keystone species don't exist.

      Cristancho and Vinig.  2004.  Sergio Cristancho and Joanne Vining.  “Culturally Defined Keystone Species”.  Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences.  Research in Human Ecology.  Volume 11.  Number 2.  2004.  Pg 161.  Accessed from: www.udea.edu.co/.../2004_Culturally%20Defined%20Keystone%20Species_11(2)%20Human%20Eco.pdf – M.E. 

       Traditionally, natural sciences have focused their efforts on maintaining keystone species alive and functioning well within the ecosystem in which they are embedded. Now we may examine the human ecosystem in a similar way and suggest that natural and social scientists work together to determine cultural keystone species as well as natural ecological keystone species. The study of CKS could be a convergence point for interdisciplinary collaboration. We should note, however, that there are differences in philosophy or inquiry between disciplines that may hinder such collaboration. Culturally defined keystone species do not exist in nature — they are constructed by humans. There is a perception among many in the natural and physical sciences that ecological keystone species are real, that they are in no sense constructed by a human psyche. Many, if not most, social scientists would argue that a keystone species is a human construction, whether biologically or culturally defined. Nonetheless, the notion that an ecologically defined keystone species is somehow more real than a culturally defined species could hinder interactions among disciplines on this important topic. As we stated earlier, we borrowed a concept from the natural sciences as a model to explain social and cultural phenomena because we believe in the usefulness of such conceptual analogies for the purposes of clarity.

      Biodiversity loss in  Africa is inevitable.  40% will be degraded by 2025.  Multiple causes.

      Mbow, Smith and Leadley.  2010.  Cheikh Mbow, Mark Stafford Smith and Paul Leadley.   “Biodiversity Scenarios: Projections of 21st Century Change in Biodiversity and Associated Ecosystem Services: A Technical Report for the Global Biodiversity Outlook 3”.  CBD Technical Series Number 50.  Appendix IV: West Africa: The Sahara, Sahel and Guinean Region.  2010.  ISBN 92-9225-219-4.  Pg 81 – M.E.  

       Future loss and shifts in biomes and habitats – A relatively broad range of global models have been used to project changes in biomes or habitats in West Africa. However, these models account, at best, for only one or two of the tipping point mechanisms outlined above. None of these models has been run for a wide range of climate scenarios. Because of these shortcomings and the high uncertainty in both climate projections and socio-economic scenarios for this region, we feel that the future of biodiversity in this region is considerably more uncertain than one of these analyses taken alone would suggest. The majority of global vegetation models project an increase in primary productivity in natural and semi-natural ecosystems in this region due to climate change because of increasedrainfall and/or rising CO2 concentrations (e.g., MA 2005, Sitch et al. 2008). This is accompanied by a greening of the southern Sahara in some cases and an increase in woody vegetation in the Sahel in most cases.
       Land use scenarios for this region indicate very large to extremely large rates of land use conversion in this region, with particularly heavy impacts on Guinean forests (and forests of the Congo basin) driven by population increase, globalization and increased access (Millennium Assessment MA 2005, African Environmental Outlook-2 AEO2 2006, Global Environmental Outlook GEO4 2007, Alkemade 2009). These analyses agree that, of all regions of the globe, the sub-Saharan region will experience among the highest projected rates of natural and semi-natural habitat destruction over the next several decades. Land use scenarios suggest that the worst prospects for West Africa involve development pathways that focus either on market-driven globalization, or on continued regional patterns of rapid population growth, increasing social inequity, weak governance and continued conflict. Globalization scenarios foresee extensive land degradation, with more than 40% of currently cultivated land modeled as degraded by 2025 (AEO2 2006), and massive deforestation across Guinean forests by mid- to late-century (MA 2005, GEO4 2007, although not in AEO2 2006). Scenarios of high population growth and increasing inequity also lead to very high rates of land degradation and deforestation. At the opposite extreme, a scenario of “great transitions” that includes declining population growth rates, aggressive poverty reduction and greatly improved governance suggests that less than 10% of cropped land might be degraded by 2025 and that forest area could actually increase due to improved land management (AEO2 2006). These strong contrasts in scenarios highlight the overwhelming importance of development pathways in determiningthe fate of biodiversity in this region.



01/04/12
    • Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:




01/04/12
    • Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:




    • Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:




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02/03/2012

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