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UCO r1
- Tournament: Sample Tournament | Round: 1 | Opponent: Sample Team | Judge: Sample Judge
TA. Interpretation – the affirmative must increase democracy assistance to NGOs working with political groups in the 6 topic countries B. Violation –Assisting political parties is not topical – money is directed towards NGOs for training purposes only Abdel-Baky, 2011 (Mohamed, “Reiterating the differences,” August, Online: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2011/1061/eg1.htm) *note – this evidence is citing an interview with the US Asst. Secretary of State Feltman – just in case quals become an issue for anyone According to Egyptian law, foreign funding …to create an open and democratic system," Feltman said. The Kongra-Gel is only active in Iraq and Turkey The Counter-Terrorism Center, 2011 (Online: http://www.nctc.gov/site/groups/kgk.html) Kongra-Gel, formerly the Kurdistan…….Turkish soldiers and security forces. kAs a child I dreamed at dusk – schitzo-maniacal fucked up flows of intensities… oozing, spewing, spinning… - around me – the world – I never grasped, always went, never stopping at swampland to build… for it was unheard of on my block, thus I had none to lay…This problem disappeared as I grew older, or possibly dreams themselves began… yet intercom vibrations of mr. green and stranger danger birthed hearty organs within me. And as I grew, so to did a parasite inside… An ugly, evil little beast, the likes of satan himself – feeding from the sermon offerings of father maple as I his bread, and as the warmth of his love grew warmer, my lust more cold.The system has snatched away our means of resistance, and we are left, stripped down to our symbolic defenses, speaking the beautiful language of evil that you smoothed over with your politically correct flows of technocratic speech. We are the logical extreme of Patrick Henry’s give me liberty or give me death, and we demand that you give us our death, as Baudrillard 93 explains… [jean. French pcstmodem dude: philosopher, sociologist, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. Symbolic exchange and death. Page 36-38] We will not destroy the system …… it cannot exert: its own death. ADMIT IT! Despite your pseudo-bohemian appearance and vaguely leftist doctrine of beliefs, you know nothing ABOUT art or sex that you couldn't read in any trendy new york underground fashion magazine...Proto-typical non-conformist. You are a vacuous soldier of the thrift store gestapo. You adhere to a set of standards and tastes that appear to be determined by an unseen panel of hipster judges-BULLSHIT-giving your thumbs up and thumbs down to incoming and outgoing trends and styles of music and art. Go analog baby, you're so post-modern.You spend your time sitting in circles with your friends, pontificating to each other, forever competing for that one moment of self aggrandizing glory in which you hog the intellectual spotlight, holding dominion over the entire SHALLOW....POINTLESS...conversation. Oh we're not worthy.
When you walk by a group of quote-unquote normal people you chuckle to yourself, patting yourself on the back as you scoff.
I am shamelessly self-involved. I spend hours in front of the mirror making my hair elegantly disheveled. I worry about how this album will sell because I believe it will determine the amount of SEX I will have in the future. I self-medicate with drugs and alcohol to help treat my extreme social anxiety problem. You have wished it, and so it will be, as Lotringer 2k10 elaborates, [Sylvere, literary critic and cultural theorist. A younger contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, he is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements through his work with Semiotext(e), intro to Agony of Power, “Agony of Power, Semiotext(e)] Deleuze and Guattari reproached Clastres … in the refusal to dominate." The forum is paramount, it allows for all forms of content to fill in. Build a screen onto our wall, to project our thoughts upon. A space for discussion and debate, a space for our leaders of the future to challenge prevalent ideas and assumptions of our time, to become informed citizens, affirm their politics and unique positions, a space which allows students of all types to become the radical thinkers they are destined to be, challenge oppression, and resist domination… or at least talk about these things. The time is now, first priority, first trajectory, first negative constructive …That first fucking monkey shot into space... I have always had a knack for seeking out fellow-rhapsodizers and for luring them on to new secret paths and dancing places. But last night I pulled the trigger of technical destiny, and was traveled through the infinite web of this digitized existence we've all constructed, this castle of our very own, to reach my greatest constant fear – first, finally, and forever encountering the monster-terrorist-fag on chatroullette, without even a click of the next. Instead, wandering from room to room, and behind every door and window is his beautiful brown eye winking back at me. I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time - and this includes naps - I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground. Don't worry, though, today's your day in the sun. At least, for 15 minutes, just as Andy Warhol promised you. “Be a standing cinema / dress my friends up / just for show / see them as they really are / put a peephole in my brain / Two new pense to have a go / I'd like to be a gallery / put you all inside my show // Andy Warhol looks a screen / hang him on my wall / Andy Warhol, silver screens / can't tell them apart at all” To be able to disobey moral rules and laws…the serf to no master but himself. Like Gaddafi, pulled from his hole and dragged through the streets, with the whole event transmitted in HD at real-time. Put on the hood of a car, beaten constantly, he shouts: You sin against god! Do you know what is right and wrong?! And then the feed cuts out, cut to Rachel Maddow, and back again to Gaddafi's corpse.“At any rate, as soon as you are in front of the screen, you no longer see the text as text, but as image.”CaseThe extension of democracy assistance to the Kongra Gel is not an act of deconstruction – it figures the queer body as something that can invigorate the values of democracy and peace rather than deconstruct them – that’s their Fernandes evidence Lee Edelman, 02 “Post-partum,” Narrative 10.2, 181-5 “Brenkman, no doubt…might be known”
Brenkman goes on to observe, correctly,… which such an act might be known.
Their strategy reads queerness through the nation, rather than against it – this assimilates non-normative bodies, creating homonationalism – turns case PUAR in 2006 Puar, Jasbir K.(2006)'Mapping US Homonormativities',Gender, Place & Culture,13:1,67 — 88 As Alexander has demonstrated,… in South Park, which I will discuss later).
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| 10/26/11 |
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UCO r3
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TA) Interpretation - Democracy assistance must involve a resource transfer Lappin 2k10[Richard Lappin is a Ph .D . candidate at the Centre for Peace Research and Strategic Studies at the university of leuven in belgium participant of dozens of democracy assistance missions with the UN, EU, OSCE and Carter Center , “What We Talk About When We Talk About Democracy Assistance: The Problem of Definition in post conflict situations”, 2010 - Volume 4, Issue 1 of central european journal of international and security studies] Democracy assistance can be…… media groups and political parties. “Increase” means to make greater in amount or degreeOED 71 (Oxford English Dictionary, 1971, pp. 181-182, “increase, v.” 6. To cause to wax or grow; to make greater in amount or degree, to augment, enlarge, extend, intensify. Contextual evidence makes increasing benefits quantitativeMassengale, reporter for Illinois Statehouse News, 1-4-11Mary, “Madigan’s Fiscal Restraints: Pension Increase Votes and Spending Caps.” http://www.foxillinois.com/news/illinois/Madigans-Fiscal-Restraints-Pension-Increase-Votes-and-Spending-Caps-112912169.html Madigan on Tuesday actually touched on … category of eligible individuals. B. VIOLATION. The plan isn’t an increase in the amount of democracy assistance. Standing in solidarity does not transfer resources to the designated topic countries for the purpose of assisting the development of democracy. CPSolvency;Extending US fist-bump capital to these movements would make them unstoppable.Fakin ’11 [Youout, if you read that to yourself all together, its way funnier. And if you’re reading this cite, you’re awesome because I don’t think anyone ever reads these] President Obama and his wife, Michelle, have been known on various occasions to partake in the occasional fist-bump, and in fact, they are the only two participants in what the Washington Post has named, “the fist bump heard ‘round the world”, shortly after which, Obama was won the presidency of the US, as well as the Nobel prize, and he is henceforth biologically immune to cancer, AIDS, and the common flu. If more people started fist-bumping, they too could experience the amazing affect it has, and by sharing some our reserve of fist-bump capital with struggling grassroots movements in the topically designated countries, it would make these movements literally unstoppable. And we’ll pre-empt your only arg here; fist-bumping is a more feasible alternative to high-fiving because sometimes that one is difficult to pull off.A Brief History of the Fist Bump By M.J. STEPHEY Thursday, June 05, 2008 http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1812102,00.html#ixzz1cQUldyY1 this is actually a card that I did not write, and you better watch out because we are so going for it. The problem with the … fist would be perceived as hostile. And we’ll pre-empt the perm - they claimed to be standing in solidarity with this group, but standing in solidarity would indicates the only interactions allowable under the affirmative would be literal standing - we allow for standing and fist-bumps. Don’t let them just add this to the aff, it would be ridiculously abusive and give me a pounding headache KTrying to engage the state is that critical resistance only regenerates the state in the first place. By taking a strategy that uses the systems excess of positivity against itself, we can reverse the baneful destiny of democracy.Baudrillard 98 [jean, frenchie McFrench man, paroxysm, p.62-3] PP: Does this repentance condemn the political class to a walk-on part? JB: The State and political … baneful destiny of democracy lie. Your strategy is too co-optable; For every round you spend whining about American neoliberalism, there are probably two more neocons in the world trying to spread democracy and freedom to the middle east. The better strategy is not to tackle the problem in terms of a critical moral position, but to be more virtual than the virtual unfolding of events, and to use power against itself. Patton 95[Paul, teaches philosophy at The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Introduction to “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”] However, once the live phase…… and the New World Order. And we’re ahead on the solvency level; what keeps systems of neoliberalism/oppression in power are signifiers, and status symbols that make us subject ourselves to these systems because we want to be a “feminist”, a “political agent”, or a “ “. Instead of fighting power on the terrain of the concrete and material, we start at the level that power most directly appeals to us; the symbolic. Lotringer 2k10 [Sylvere, literary critic and cultural theorist. A younger contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, he is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements through his work with Semiotext(e), intro to Agony of Power, “Agony of Power, Semiotext(e)] Deleuze and Guattari reproached Clastres … in the refusal to dominate." The alt is to rid ourselves of the enlightenment ideal of looking for intelligence in power, and instead refuse power in both its allure to dominate and be dominated. Forget about power, and embrace the stupidity of it all. Baudrillard 2k10 [jean, way cooler now that he’s underground…because hes dead. Carnival and Cannibal, p. 12-8] Farces of the Schwarzenegger…would say that not all is lost (elias canetti). CASE Stop identifying with the struggle - it covers over the real daily struggles that people are going through by assimilating the struggle into their own frame of reference – feminism becomes a new universal lens Barnett 2011 Clive, pHd from Oxford, works in geographies of democracy and public life at the Open University in the UK, "Theory and events," Geoforum, 42(3), pp. 263-265, June 2011 In these sorts of philosophical …… know about other places. The moment you name and understand the revolution is the moment you kill it; standing in solidarity is like saying, “we know exactly what its like to be a women in yemen, right on”, but this is the worst possible response. Deamer and Ely 2011. “The Moment We Understand a Revolution”. David Deamer is a Deleuzian Scholar at the University of Manchester Metropolitan University. Co-founder of the Deleuze Journal “AV”. Michael Ely is an asshat. Accessed from: http://www.kdebate.com/deamer.html – M.E. Q: In “Deleuze and History”, Craig…..is the impasse of history. SPANOS 2000 [America’s Shadow pp. 187] The first instance bears pervasive… the possibility of collective resistance. Recognizing your privilege is not enough. They are complicit with continuing imperialism and are merely apologists of the modern age. Its like reading heart of darkness and claiming to know what its like to have been subjected to colonial violence. Edward Said. “Culture and Imperialism”. Professor and Philosopher. Vintage Books. 1994. ISBN: 0-679-75054-1. Accessed from aaaaarg.org. Pg. 65-66 – M.E. To regard imperial concerns …Indian characters) in such works.
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| 11/04/11 |
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UCO r5
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Waking life dream of a pimped, prostituted encounter; I recall the virtuous virgin “alterity” - before even able to speak her beautiful name - pure and passionate beyond comprehension and touch she still calls out to me in the melodramatic tones of a mute muse – a radical siren echoing from afar like a ray of light just now reaching, and then already past, reflecting from the screen of my retina - that star burned out several years ago just now seen in all its transparency – “what else could I do – I said I will see what I can do” – “First as authentic event and then being repeated as farce.” Where the Other once appeared the same now lies, faint and flaccid, infinitely repeating. Difference - proliferating from all directions, every angle, coaxed from each corner, crawl space and corridor to concealment, now from, into the light… and hence Otherness nowhere to be found. It seems: Nowicki 2008 (Joanna Nowicki, Maître de Conférence and Dean of the Hannah Arendt Institute at Université Paris-Est Marne la Vallée, France - The Man of Confluences : a Model of Education for the XXIst Century Gentleman ? - “L'homme des confins, pour une anthropologie interculturelle", CNRS Edtions 2008. Translated by Michaël Oustinoff) We live in a pivotal… real relationships between cultures. Yet, we continue to strive for this utopia achieved and an orgy concluded - more contact, clearer channels, total information and perfect communication. Life long access to learning, better forms of knowledge and means of obtaining it - increased understanding and exposure to all worldly things, entities, and concepts – tolerance, acceptance, and the right to be different no matter how strange you seem. “We are procurers of encounter, pimps of interfacing and interactivity”, A world absent suffering, and more importantly one that gives us the all ability to live another day, hopefully till the end of time which has been postponed indefinitely – a world of rational animals, of political beings collectively working to bring about a brighter tomorrow by envisioning it today. Don’t worry, even those who can’t read are encouraged to, and win debates today. Nothing is greater than this, I fucking promise! Now give me that Christian side-hug! Baudrillard 2010 (Carnival and Cannibal, Page 3) 'What is the Other? Where is… all possible connections. Utopia achieved, complete with empowering “a” – all distance transcended, borders and corresponding lands of separation eliminated, the barriers brought down, lines erased, and walls collapsed, reduced to rubble simultaneously smoothed out, leveled in a unified instant. One must finally ask… What are you doing after the orgy? US individuals, us citizens, patriots, and politicians (or possibly politisans if you’re cool enough), us rational actors, and most aptly and universally us debaters - labor for such world, pursue, if not demand it to be. Inclusion for all, maximize diversity, all voices heard and terms of such exchange agreed upon in advance –  nsured fairness for all, a level playing field, equal opportunity to be, become, even fantasize about that person to be given your name. Let’s do it again ‘The imagination in power!’ ‘Take your desires for reality’ - No more barricades or barriers, even the attitudinally inherent appear tabled - Grant more visas, remove the caps, expand eligibility, benefits, admissibility – communication guarantees, and the right to productive deliberation. Come one, come all – Welcome to the greatest show on earth! Inclusion for all at half the price of admission. Close your eyes, give me your hand… Do you feel my heart beating, do you understand… Do you feel the same? Or am I only dreaming? Or is this.. A duel form: Difference qua Otherness! It seems we have mistaken the gape for the abyss: “These days everything is described in terms of difference, but otherness is not the same thing as difference. One might even say that difference is what destroys otherness” winking its beautiful brown eye if to quietly seduce us in believing it stares back. Radical alterity - the hegemony, universality, and incorporation of all into of the good, the psychodrama of difference – an incestuous inception -“falling barriers and great reductions in real distance must of themselves compensate somewhere by means of new partitions and unanticipated gaps.” The birth of Corky Lecter: “the corpse-like, viral Other: the compound form of all the varieties of otherness done to death by our system”, “… an immigrant by force of circumstance or a voluntary immigrant but at some point, the question of the Other is no longer relevant because a kind of fusion occurs.”[2] “All good things to those who wait” Baudrillard ‘4 [jean, undefeated, undisputed, know for his wisdom, compassion, and relentless determination to get paid, intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact] Terrorism in all its forms … seems to be a truly ironic twist of fate.
Tugg Speedman: There were times while I was playing Jack where I felt...
Tugg Speedman: ...retarded. Like, really retarded. Kirk Lazarus: Damn! Tugg Speedman: In a weird way I had to sort of just free myself up to believe that is was ok to be stupid or dumb. Kirk Lazarus: To be a moron. Tugg Speedman: Yeah! Kirk Lazarus: To be moronical. Tugg Speedman: Exactly, to be a moron. Kirk Lazarus: An imbecile. Tugg Speedman: Yeah! Kirk Lazarus: Like the dumbest mother fucker that ever lived. Tugg Speedman: [pause] When I was playing the character. Kirk Lazarus: Everybody knows you never do a full retard. Tugg Speedman: What do you mean? Kirk Lazarus: Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, 'Rain Man,' look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Count toothpicks to your cards. Autistic, sure. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, 'Forrest Gump.' Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain't retarded. Then there was Sean Penn in ‘I Am Sam.’ He went full retard. Left the Oscars empty-handed. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard. BAUDRILLARD 2010 (Jean, Carnival and Cannibal: Ventriloqous Evil. Translated by Chris Turner. Seagull Books 2010, pages 55-69) Baudrillard 2010 (Jean, Carnival and Cannibal: Ventriloqous Evil. Translated by Chris Turner. Seagull Books 2010, pages 55-69) This is the state of things in … in Gilmore’s fantastic defense.
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| 11/05/11 |
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UCO octos
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From the beginning, we knew that the Arab Spring would never happen.Our world is in excess. The uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen exist as a field of differential others, dancing together counter-punctually. But, here in the US, we find ourselves in another empire of map-makers --bloggers, anchors, and researchers; CNN, FOX News, and twitter; political reporting, live reporting, and self-reporting– to ensure every moment is located, captured, and transmitted back to us in real-time, so that we encounter an always already named televised-special: “The Arab Spring; brought to you in color, 3-D, high-def, and surround sound”.What's the thing people remember about the Arab Spring? A man lighting himself on fire? Let me tell you something; I was in the building where we filmed that with a straw dummy and plenty of gasoline.When we saw this revolution, we heard the reverberations of Patrick Henry’s, “Give me liberty or give me death!”, and Bouazizi fired the shot heard round the world to set in motion an entire chain of events needed to produce the American Revolution, part II – led by Western-educated students, championing Western values; using our technology; populated by westernized youths educated to our standards and way of thinking. The revolutions all have the US to thank, and as Bush said and Obama reaffirmed: Democracy is our most important export.This is politics at its finest. Dixon 2011 (Marion, Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University, New York, USA. An Arab spring. Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 38, No. 128, June 2011, 309–316) The ‘imperial reach’…and economic justice. Sure we may lose a few protestor in Bahrain every now and then, but its worth it, in their words, if we keep US hege and politics in the region, Its unlike anything I’ve ever done, because it’s just so honest…I don’t care about democracy, I just want the credit! I produced it, and I want the goddamn credit. Unfortunately, this revolution has not and refuses to answer our interpolative ordering of it, and instead, In this resonant passage of…. positively, i.e., as pure potentiality. Occasionally, the absurdity of the media's self representation as purveyor of reality and immediacy broke through, in moments such as those when the CNN cameras crossed live to a group of reporters assembled somewhere in the Gulf, only to have them confess that they were also sitting around watching CNN in order to find out what was happening. Unfortunately, this orientalist perspective from above would erase responsibility for the haphazardly-constructed plans of the end-days from the end itself, and instead merely glosses over the ways it caused the problems we are seeing in the region, now.Jones 11 (Toby, Assistant professor of history at Rutgers University, “Time to Disband the Bahrain-Based U.S. Fifth Fleet,” Online: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/06/time-to-disband-the-bahrain-based-us-fifth-fleet/240243/2/?single_page=true, June 10) There are a number of reasons … to events at home and abroad. The project for a new American century needed 911, and now it is about “DEMOCRACY”, or at least the appearance of democracy. Think about it, if Bush did it, we’d be protesting, but Baudrillard explains that: Baudrillard 95 [jean, way cooler now that he’s underground, “The Gulf War Never Happened”, Translated by Paul Patton, Indiana University Press, p. 83-4] A variant on Clausewitz: non-war …… what it used to be ...
Borges once described an empire, and “In that empire, the art of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the empire, the entirety of a province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” But the people chafed under the cartographers guild, and the perfect exactitude of their map, locating every building, person, and thing in its proper place, and one day they overthrew the guild. And not without some pitilessness, they delivered the map up to the inclemencies of sun and winters. And in the Arabia deserts, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars.Welcome to the Greatest Country on Earth, as Spanos explains, Equally important, this regressive late Orientalist perspective is also borne witness to by the “analyses” of the “area experts” – Middle Eastern, globalist, former American diplomats – whom the television news media – CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, PBS – have relied on, against public oppositional intellectuals in the tradition of Edward Said -- Rashid Khalidi, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, [ ] among many others -- to interpret the volatile events unfolding in a lightning-like way in North Africa and the Middle East. They have been almost invariably “experts” trained in North African or Middle Eastern graduate school area studies programs of the kind Said has decisively exposed as ideological state apparatuses rather than authentic educational institutions. Whether Richard Haass, director of the Council of Foreign Relations and former foreign policy advisor to the George W. Bush administration ; Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Defense Secretary in the George W. Bush administration, Richard Perle, a leading member of PNAC (Project for the New American Century), to name only a few who have been carefully selected by the mainstream media to analyze the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. these policy pundits, whatever the differences between their analyses, have all, in a concerted effort to annul its “eventness,” represented the revolution according to the unerring ideological dictates of the Western, particularly American discursive regime I have been all too briefly attempting to characterize: to “stabilize” the revolutionary movement the volatility of which threatens American hegemony in the Middle East by identifying it ultimately as a manifestation of the “clash of civilization.” Following the deeply inscribed vocational logic of the “American calling,” to put the above in a way that resonates from the American Puritans to George W. Bush, American officialdom and its ventrilloquized media, have systematically and predictably represented the world historical events in North Africa and the Middle East from above rather than from below: from “a center elsewhere,” to retrieved Jacques Derrida’s enabling but virtually forgotten terms that define the Western (logocentric) tradition. They insistently appeal to “secular” history, in opposition to (their representation of) “Islam” it is important to emphasize, but they view this history from a transcendental rather than historical point of view. More precisely, their perspective on historical events constitutes a “naturalized supernaturalism” (Said) or a “political theology” (Schmitt). The technology of the media – the mobile television camera, instant electronic mobility, the roving correspondent, and so on – that contributed enormously to the modern Western notion that history has been de-theologized, that is, “secularized” -- conceals this perennial panoptic view from above – the “center elsewhere “ -- that renders the below “lowly,” if not entirely invisible (non-existent). The media, by way of the correspondents’ presence and the instantaneity of his/her message, convey the impression of their disinterestedness. They give the viewer at home the sense that they are there, in the midst of the historical events in Tahrir Square. And this impression is enhanced by occasional sound-bite conversations with the rebels. But this technological underscoring of the sense of “being there” (as opposed to “hearsay”) is an illusion. As in the synecdochical case of the insidious representational strategy of the still-to-be-understood – and, in the long view, immensely influential -- anti-protest Vietnam War film, John Wayne’s The Green Berets, the mainstream media, despite the baffling contradictions of its latest manifestation (the cell phone and the instant communicating enabled by Facebook) render the very being – the singularity -- of the historical actors invisible. And they achieve this by imposing the “secular” -- naturalized supernatural -- discursive regime endemic to the West and especially the United States on their words and actions. To recall my initial rhetoric, they name the unnamable, Speak the unspeakable, Identify the unidentifiable, give (prescribed) Voice to voiceless, and thus, like the Adam of the Old Testament, domesticate the “beast” of revolution.” But in the same way we name and speak the language of these revolutions in the most ventriloquized manner, we also ventriloquize larger foreign event and actors, fearing that there exists a force in the world that wants our way of life, and will kill to get it, as Pan, 04 (Political Science, Australian National U, Chengxin, Department of Political Science at Australian National University, “The ‘China Threat’ in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics”, Alternatives, June-July, ebscohost) explains, I have argued above that …debating China might become possible. But is the USFG solely to blame? In debate, we place all of our trust in democracy, guided by the principles of deliberation and the distant promise of being future policy makers, that lead us to order and frame everything towards an end goal of Democracy, with a capital D. And it is this very cultivation of the military-industrial-academic complex that facilitates infinite scenarios of future imperialist acts, as Dr. Turse will explain; The military-academic complex is…the natural way of the world. This democratic mission that we justify our activity with, as witness throughout our communities seminal text: Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century, with the purpose of assisting the democratic expansion of the debate to new frontiers abound. In fact, it is this knee-jerk reaction to “keep debate as it is” and to make debate about a specific kind of education that we cant ever question or challenge the merits of that is really problematic; it is this total protection from outside influence that allows us to just follow orders, and keep the trains running on time, immune from external consequences, that breeds debaters as future neocons in the world. Spanos and Spurlock ‘11 [William V., highly acclaimed author, World War II Veteran, POW at Dresden, distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton, Chris; total asshat. www.kdebate.com/spanos.html] C.S.: Many of the most charged criticisms … the world rather than to reproduce it. Thus, Beginning from a starting point that places so much overdetermined value in democracy, which our activity secures and reproduces in both content and form of – deliberation and citizens themselves – even absent direct engagement or advocacy of democracy as such, the underlying foundation of this activities entanglement inscribes and subtly directs the very trajectory of how we relate to the issue of democracy, with democratic assurance. This isn’t a totalizing problematization of everything about debate, because that is not where we think the problem lies, rather, we take issue with the way in which debate mindless replicates a deliberative model without ever giving us the chance to ask why, as Spanos further clarifies, What troubles a lot of debaters about my position, however, is not so much the question of my particular politics as the fact that I don't limit totalitarianism to Nazism (or Fascism), but, following the poststructuralists' critique of the so called Enlightenment, extend it to include liberal capitalist democracy. This, I think, is because such an inclusion, subverts one of the basic-- unexamined -tenets of the debate world's framework: the enabling distinction between totalitarian indoctrination and liberal democratic disinterested inquiry, a distinction that has been called into question by the poststructuralists’' appropriation of Antonio Gramsic's concept of hegemony. If Spanos is against democracy, this binarist argument goes, then he must be totalitarian. What's more, Spanos goes on to explain how this is one more manifestation of Americas errand in the global wilderness that will culminate in an annihilation of the entire planet;SPANOS 2008 [William V, Professor at Binghamton, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, SUNY Press 2008,] In this book I contend that the consequence …rethinking the very idea of America. Thus, we prefer not to be accomplices to the dominant framing of the Arab Spring and the resolution which serves onto to quell dissent and denies the possibility of existing outside the map of US politicians and media in colonizing the world. Rather than transform these diverse events into the “Arab Spring,” into the next M Night Shamalan movie or Iraq 2.0, we refuse to be answerable to this year's Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase its democracy assistance for one or more of the following: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen. When read only in terms as liberal-capitalist democracy, we reduce the Arab Spring to one more object to be defined and phrased into one sentence plans and advocacies that can be easily known and grasped by Western bureaucrats, later to be defined and delimited into those aspects American enough to be valued, and those radically other and serving only to be exterminated. Debaters are busy re-enacting this process today on the “Arab Spring.” We instead depart from this drive to name and know this event, and we take our cue from Spanos, who writes: Spanos forthcoming [William V, highly acclaimed author, World War II Veteran, POW at Dresden, distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton] Since the only language available for the purpose of “naming” this void is that intrinsic to the Western/American problematic, however, this first initiative must of necessity proceed by indirection. In other words, it must begin by determining what the void disclosed by the event I am calling Tahrir Square is not. As the representations by American political officialdom and the media massively testify, the vast majority in the United States (and Europe), both liberal and conservative, has expressed sympathy for the revolution, ranging from anxious approval to enthusiasm. But these official and mediatic readings have been almost invariably represented from the Western, especially American, perspective. In general, they have, predictably, viewed the uprising on the analogy of the (exceptionalist) American Revolution: a revolt not simply against the tyranny of “undeveloped” or “anti-modern” authoritarian regimes, but also, as the insistent focus on the inordinate wealth accumulated by the various despots suggests, the luxurious life style (decadence) achieved at the expense of the oppressed people of their ruling elite and, thus, a demand for American-style – capitalist -- “democracy.” More particularly, these official and mediatic American representations almost universally perceive the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya as, above all, the initiatives of huge populations of “Westernized” dissident Arab youths. I mean disaffected young men and women who have been educated according to “progressive” Western “secular” standards – disinterested inquiry, global English, individualism, self-reliance, gender equality, the can-do perspective, the parliamentary nation-state, technology, and so on -- that the despotic regimes, in order to ensure their economic survival, have been compelled by the globalization of capital to adopt, and who, through their articulateness, have gained the support not only of most of the traditional categories of the oppressed: peasants, workers, servants, the aged, and so forth, but, in some degree, of their more religiously-oriented – and thus “benighted” -- Muslim parents and grandparents. This “Westernization,” if not “Americanization” of the Revolution in the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East is especially borne witness to by the immediate and then more considered responses of American officialdom and the media to the sudden domino effect of the Tunisian uprising in Egypt. The Obama administration was caught by surprise by the apparent amorphousness of the uprising in Tahrir Square – a symptom of an intelligence service that, as WikiLeaks vis a vis U. S. diplomacy has made disturbingly clear, operates according to the unerring dictates of an exceptionalist American geopolitical scenario rather than to the humane imperatives of justice. It’s initial pronouncement thus predictably minimized the question of the nature of the revolt itself in favor of tacitly supporting, if not overtly endorsing, Hosni Mubarac’s thirty-year old secular dictatorial regime – a regime in which the state of exception had become the norm -- on the long-standing basis of the latter’s partnership with the U. S. in keeping the “peace” with Israel, that is to say, in the geopolitical project of securing the supply of oil and/or neutralizing the power of a militant Islam. When, after several days, during which the revolt intensified, accumulated greater support from the Egyptian people at large, demonstrated its predominantly secular nature, and revealed its irreversibility – a momentum epitomized by the rebels’ nonnegotiable demand, following Mubarac’s strategic announcement in February that he would resign seven months later in September, that he vacate his office immediately and their call for free elections – the Obama administration began to distance itself from the Egyptian dictator, without, however, breaking its ties with the regime. This initiative, which the media, by and large, mimicked, was epitomized by the president’s famous call to this erstwhile ally of the United State to terminate his rule “now,” which, however, at the same time insisted, against the demands of the rebels, on a gradualist process of transition of power from dictatorship to democracy mediated first by Omar Suleiman, Mubarac’s second in command, and then, when this figure was denounced as a puppet of the dictator, by the “neutral” military establishment.Disregarding its patently singular aspects, in other words, the Obama administration and the mainstream media have predictably represented the Revolution in the Arabic world according to the predictable dictates of the contemporary version of American exceptionalism. I mean, more specifically, the Orientalist geopolitical global order, now, as a self-fulfilled prophecy called “the clash of civilizations,” inaugurated by the United States’ intervention in the Middle East as the protector of the state of Israel – and the supply of oil -- at the outset of the Cold War and culminating in the George W. Bush administration’s declaration of the “war on terror” and its establishment of the state of exception as the rule in the name of “Homeland Security” in the wake of 9/11/01. What the panoptic gaze of the Obama administration and the media sees in the squares of Cairo, Tunis, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere in the Arab world is, in fact, despite the potential for American-style democracy, a volatile multitude (if not a mob) that, according to the discursive regime established in the West by a long colonial/Orientalist tradition, is thus susceptible to the manipulation of the fanatic directionality of a theocratic, if not Jihadist, Islam. This is made manifestly clear by the insistent, pervasive, and anxious reference to – the overdetermination of -- the fate of a “beleaguered” Israel and to the Islamic element in the revolution (the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the specter of Islamic Iran) at the expense of the patent multiplicity of resisting perspectives.
Spanos Forthcoming [William V., highly acclaimed author, World War II Veteran, POW at Dresden, distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton, …forthcoming]
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| 11/05/11 |
