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  • KCKCC r4 Neg

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    • WporiaFrom the beginning, we knew that the Arab Spring would never happen.

      Our world is in excess. The recent 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, understood, 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.[1]

      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. [2]

       

      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’ social and economic justice.

      The Arab Spring did not take place unless it took place according to the way that we directed, produced, and broadcast it to the rest of the world.

      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. [3]

      Unfortunately, this revolution has not and refuses to answer our interpolative ordering of it, and instead,

       

      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]

       

      In this resonant passage of historical cartographic dis-location or de-centering, the marginalized nothing that, according to Heidegger and the poststructuralists, has come in the post-modern era to haunt the metropolitan discourse of the West is indissolubly joined with the “local” (“provincial”) – or “subaltern” (vanquished) – that has come, in the global post-colonial era, to haunt the imperial polity of the West. This reconstellation means, above all, that the West’s perennial cultural Other must now be understood on the analogy of the nothing disclosed by the coming to its self-destructive end of Western thinking: not as an identifiable – a nameable – entity, which can be accommodated, managed and administered (recolonized) – but as an amorphous and unnameable force: precisely as the spectral “phantasm” its ontological counterpart has been called by the imperial discourse of Western “science,” though now, of course, to be thought positively, i.e., as pure potentiality.

       

      This panoptic gaze, both of the administration and of the media, is what we see in current efforts in the region, and we see the revolution reflected back at us from all angles. We can tune in and receive real-time updates sent straight to our phones, and on our news, we could hear soundbites from rebels telling us exactly what it was like in the midst of it all;

       

      Baudrillard 95 [jean, way cooler now that he’s underground, the gulf war did not take place, intro, p2]

       

      Occasionally, the absurdity out what was happening.

       

      Finally, we can be informed of these events, more so than the Egyptians themselves, especially the poor, ignorant masses of terrorists and Islamists, who refuse to see the new US-led dawn that's breaking. They are certainly irrelevant, as the revolution has expanded beyond them, beyond the protesters, beyond the Egyptians, beyond Bouazizi, beyond the Middle East, and their governments, and their people, and their cultures, and their desires. No, now it is about “DEMOCRACY”, or at least the appearance of democracy. 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… longer 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.

      (Quoted from or paraphrasing Jorge Luis Borges. “On Exactitude in Science.” Collected Fiction. Trans. Andrew Hurley. 1999.)

      Welcome to the Greatest Country on Earth.

       

      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]

       

      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 therein 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 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. 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. 

      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.

       

      Spanos and Spurlock 2011 [interview on kdebate.com/spanos.html]

       

      What troubles a lot of debaters then he must be totalitarian.

       

      What's more, Spanos explain this is just 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 …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 prefer not to be answerable to the ordering and interpolation of the arab spring by ______. When read only in terms of the potential for liberal, capitalist, American-style democracy, we reduce the Arab Spring to one more object to be defined and parsed out 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 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 exceptionalismI 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.



      [1] Wag the dog

      [2] Wag the dog

      [3] Wag the Dog




10/30/11
  • Emporia r5 1NC

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

    • T

      A) Interpretation;  Democracy assistance is any aid that PROMOTES DEMOCRACY. This means the plan must be PRIMARILY focused on fostering democracy; this cannot be a secondary concern or a result of modernization/social reforms or else the term loses all meaning.

       

      Lappin 10-Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Belgrade

      Richard, What we talk about when we talk about democracy assistance, Central European Journal ISS

      2010 - Volume 4, Issue 1  http://www.cejiss.org/sites/default/files/8.pdf

       

      Problems Resulting From …and social aid programmes .’

       

      B). Violation; solidarity with The Arab Sisters Forum for Human Rights and their leader is not a form of democracy assistance. AT best, this is effects-topical, and at worst, it is just not topical at all

       

      C), standards;

      Limits; if you don’t have to take an action to increase democracy in any of the five topic countries, we have no way to ever be ready to debate you. At least forcing you to defend a concrete increase in democracy allows us to have smart limits on aff ground

      Ground; if you don’t have to defend an increase in democracy assistance, then we have no neg ground; they could have given funding to Yemeni women, they could have taken any action to do something in the 1ac, which would be the topical version of their aff.

      Predictability; we don’t say how or from what literature base you have to approach the res, just that you have to defend taking any concrete action.

       Voter for fairness and education. 

      CP

      The USFG should mandate that the Arab Sisters Forum for Human Rights and its leader, Amal al-Basha be given a dislike button on Facebook.

       

      Solvency; there is no dislike button on Facebook now; this has been desired for a long time.

      FACEBOOK GROUP FOR “PUT A DISLIKE BUTTON ON FACEBOOK” as of 10 minutes ago

      Give us a dislike button!

       

      And this is the best way to allow the marginalized other to speak; it would send a strong message to the west that the marginalized other is not going to deal with our crap, and being spoken for; now, they can speak for themselves on a much more concrete way then the aff would allow for. Solves all their offense

       

      Fakin in ’11 [you-out, a made up alias for when I make up fake cards, and/or a clever pun, depending on your sense of humor]

       

      There is no greater way to send a strong and clear disdainful message than to officially dislike someone’s status, i.e., the social networking equivalent of their psyche, their soul, and everything worthwhile about them as a person, on facebook. And instead of just giving the subaltern the power to like something, we give them the insane massively demoralizing power to DISlike us.

      There are a couple of net benefits;

      1). Forces Zuckerberg off his lazy ass to make this goddamn dislike button. And who knows? Once he finally does that, maybe he’ll solve world hunger or at least make a better version of Farmville.

      2). It will unequivocally make facebook better than google plus, because I swear to god, if all my friends start using google plus, I am not making that switch, and I will die old and alone.

      3). We can “dislike” our privilege, which is more effective then unlearning it.

      4). more people will be in solidarity with the Arab Sisters Forum for Human Rights, because they think it will give them a dislike button too. We outweigh the aff.

       

      Nota-card ’11 [Dum-Bass, phD at Oxford, Yale, Harvard, and Hogwarts, and wrote multiple books about the theories of the quantm physics and the carbocation synthesis involved in the epioxide reaction set off by the "dislike button withdrawl syndrom".]

      If one person gets a dislike button, everyone will start demanding for it, which will make the one person or group of people really really popular. For example, everyone thought that Sarah Palin had one of these buttons, and even though that rumor has been disproven, she is still extremely popular for no apparent reason. Its inexplicable, yet time and time, it has proven true.

      And we’ll pre-empt them on the perm debate; they claimed to be standing in solidarity with the this group, but we allow them a distinctively different forum of expression, namely the ability to “dislike” our solidarity. This is a better internal link for their “letting the other speak” evidence anyways, to let the other formally and unequivocally “dislike” us on a popular social networking site.  

      K

      Trying 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 … 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 “global citizen”, a “capitalist”, 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 …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

      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 …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”,….. is the impasse of history.

       

      Politics of identity are a western tool used to quell dissent - they become internalized and allow for the worst forms of genocidal violence

       

      SPANOS 2000 [America’s Shadow pp. 187]

       

      The first instance bears…… 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… characters) in such works. 




10/30/11
0
  • Wake r2 1NC

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

    • The nature of my advocations for the last several years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat eccentric set of individuals, of whom, I have known very many of them, and I could relate histories, at which sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all others for a few passages in the life of Arabspring, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of… Arabspring was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, every attempt to make sense of him was met head on with glaring impossibility, every attempt to account for his eccentricities only left us with infinite possible outcomes, and none of them could be easily discernable as truth or fiction.

      When I inquired about his previous employment at the regional office of pedantry and democracy distribution assistance I was curtly informed that:

       

      Gordillo 2011 (The Speed of Revolutionary Resonance, Space and Politics, http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.com/2011/03/speed-of-revolutionary-resonance.html)

       

      This wave of revolutionary expansion formations that once seemed solid.

       

      Now my original business—that of an official political pundit and an informal scrivener to the West—was considerably increased due to the massive demand to re-write and set the historical record straight, a more difficult job then it would initially seem.

       The 1ac does a mediocre job of this when they try and mask the militarism and imperial motives behind their seemingly democratic and neoliberal reforms, but it is all a clever façade to keep the current structures of power the very same.

       

      Amin '11 Samir, Amin "But Wither the Arab Spring?" June 2011 The Palestinian Telegraph http://www.paltelegraph.com/opinions/views/9445-whither-the-arab-spring.html Egyptian economist

      The Muslim Brotherhood makes up … was necessary to ‘respect traditions!’

       

      There was now such a high demand for my services, that it became apparent I must have additional help. In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning, stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Arabspring.

       

      At first Arabspring did an extraordinary job of replacing our lost reputation in the Middle East after an imperial misadventure every then and again, it gave us the opportunity to restore our lost credibility, as if long famishing for something to do, and eventually we began imposing more and more our own interests, as an active form of ventriloquism in the Arab Spring, where we mapped over the interests of the people in the midst of the uprisings with the interests of ourselves, and to maintain these interests at all costs, as their Daily News  evidence elaborates, More official, and more …said repeatedly," said Gad.[1]

       

      It was on the third week, I abruptly called to Arabspring. In my haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Arabspring, in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, "I would prefer not to."

       

      Similarly, when we attempt to give the uprisings in the arab spring a name or trajectory, they take up this strategy and “prefer not to be” answerable.

       

      William V SpanosWorld 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, https://sites.google.com/site/spanosdartmouthtalk/

       

      This radically revolutionary paradigm,…determinate contents in their demands . . . .

       

      "Prefer not to," echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with a stride. "What do you mean?”

       

      Not a wrinkle of agitation. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises.

       

      This is very strange, thought I. What had one best do? I concluded to forget the matter for the present, just ignore it, as Spanos explains is characteristic of the American effort to “forget Vietnam”,

       

      In this book I contend that…the very idea of America.[2]

       

      In particular, the threshold for seeing the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat or in need of containment is surprisingly low, as their Saikal 11 concludes,

       

      These developments can easily for all sides involved.[3]

       

      There was something about this singularity of Arabspring, that not only strangely disarmed me, but­­­ was irreducible, not easily assimilated and co-opted, not easily persuaded away from its intentions, whatever they may be.

       

      "Will you tell me any thing about yourself?"

      "I would prefer not to."

      "But what reasonable objection can you have to speak to me? I feel friendly towards you."

      "At present I prefer to give no answer," he said, and retired into his hermitage.  

      "You are decided, then, not to comply with my request—a request made according to common usage and common sense?"

      "At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable”.

       

      These revolutions are irreducible to a particular class, cause, or condition, and providing them a “space” and “means” of speaking back to us the beautiful and unfalliable language of democracy has been met head on with their unanswerability.

       

      William V SpanosWorld 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, https://sites.google.com/site/spanosdartmouthtalk/

       

      To reiterate, it is not …. a singular human life never! [14].

       

      Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance…

      For the most part, we regarded the Arabspring and its mysterious ways. Those poor Egyptians! thought we, they mean no mischief; their aspect sufficiently evinces that their eccentricities are involuntary. But overall, they can still be useful to me. I can get along with them. If the US were to turn them away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent benefactor, to be rudely treated, and perhaps driven to regional conflict or terrorism. Unfortunately, it is never really a choice for the Egyptians, as we will either inflict our will upon them or we will exterminate those who resist to acknowledge the US-determined course of action that can do no wrong.

      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:…what it used to be ...

       

       

      After weeks of refusing my good-natured attempts to befriend and more importantly to accommodate to this Arabspring character, I decided it was of high necessity to get rid of him; all of my clientele was mortified at his behavior, and he began to give off the impression that I was unable to transcribe the work I had been charged with.

       

      Similarly to the strategy of bartleby, and in a world where what counts is determined by speech, visibility, and answerability, it is the refusal to be answerable, not only by the arab spring, but also from the viet-cong, the immigrants in the EU referendum, and exilic masses, that can call the violent imperial system of naming into question and destabilize it.

       

      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 transcribe these diverse events into the “Arab Spring,” into the newest chapter in our longstanding imperial history, 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.

       

      In a world where what counts is determined by speech, visibility, and answerability, it is the refusal to be answerable, not only by the arab spring, but also from the viet-cong, the immigrants in the EU referendum, and exilic masses, that can call the violent imperial system of naming into question and destabilize it; therefore, we must proceed by indirection and be critical of the drive to name, know, and thus kill the revolutions in the so called “Arab Spring”, as spanos explains best,

       

      This refusal of the… and the Middle East.[4]

       

       

      There would seem little need for proceeding further in this history But ere parting with the reader, let me say, that if this little narrative has sufficiently interested him, to awaken curiosity as to who Arabspring was, and what manner of life he led prior to the present narrator’s making his acquaintance, I can only reply, that in such curiosity I fully share, but am wholly unable to gratify it. Yet here I hardly know whether I should divulge one little item of rumor, which came to my ear a few months after the scrivener’s decease. Arabspring had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Revolutionns Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead revolutions ! does it not sound like dead men; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these revolutions  speed to death.

      Ah Arabspring! Ah humanity! 



      [1] Daily News, Egypt 11, July 1, 2011, Analysis: US overtures to Egypt Islamists show pragmatism

       

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

       

      [3] Saikal 11 [Australian National University political science professor, August 11, 2011: [Sydney Morning Herald, [Amin], p. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/egypt-must-tough-it-out-on-the-often-rocky-road-to-revolution-20110810-1imnl.html]

       

      [4] William V SpanosWorld 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, https://sites.google.com/site/spanosdartmouthtalk/

       




11/11/11
  • Wake r4 1NC

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

    • As 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…

      Play, - never shouted by large, curly haired men, pouring out sweat faster than words, ranting about a community to come as he pesters her for purchase of those clear plastic boots with the goldfish inside.

      No planes striated, only fading streaks traced and strummed against my window in the rear… No ‘saying no’ – snow, to swim, warm only…  tasting of grape, cherry, and chilled jesus juice

      Or at least I think, - I cant really say for certain, for neither words nor certainty existed, … there, then…  and now memories flee at first sight of these things, even if I remembered them in the first place.

      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, as they pounded against my ears as if a tub I bathe.  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 – sharing endorphins to prevent their release the voices grew louder and louder – anxious, over exited, and rock hard, I could do nothing more than set them to a lounge beat.  They kept their rhythm in perfect time, adopting its name to avoid the uttering of mannilow, progressing in harmony delete with myself, closer and closer to cadence…

      Code Blue!

      Politics are dead!

      Baudrillard 1993 (Transparency of Evil, pages 39-40)

      Once upon a time …interests of statistical disorder.

       

       

      1NC

      Hence, the aff’s methodology is mistaken in assuming that their emphasis on local experience can translate into political change. Their aff merely establishes political redistributions onto others, thus maintaining the system.

      Adam Katz, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College. 2000. Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture.” Pg. 146-147 ]-AC

      Habermas’s understanding of undistorted … cultural studies public intellectual.

       

       

      In fact, today no one can be expected to be entirely responsible for their own life, answerable to every aspect of their current situation or social location – this is a utopian hoax!  Yet the affirmative continues to call for such impossibility, chaining all under its method to a truly unheard of form of self-servitude and management

      Baudrillard 1993 (Jean, The Transparency of evil: essays on extreme phenomena / Jean Baudrillard; translated by James Benedict.  London: New York: Verso, 1993 Page 165)

       

                  We live in a …a truly unheard of servitude.

       

       

       

       

      1NC

      This can best be witnessed in the affirmatives call for dialogical “self-expression” – one the likes of which even Foucault himself would be proud - such a methodology institutes the ultimate form of violence to singularity and obscenity; a most degraded form of existence

       

      Baudrillard 2001 (Jean, “Dust Breeding” Ctheory.)

       

      Foucault used to refer … aesthetic sensation" (Walter Benjamin).

       

       

      This is a form of methodological importation absent praxis in which the affirmative cumulates in blah at best

      Macedo 1999  (Donaldo, An Anti-Method Pedagogy: A Freirian Perspective.  Rage and Hope.  Excerpts from Mentoring the Mentor: A Critical Dialogue with Paulo Freire.  Mentoring the Mentor is a collection of articles written on Freirian theory, recreating Freirian dialogue in a printed format. In it, sixteen scholars take part in an exchange with Paulo Freire. http://www.edb.utexas.edu/faculty/scheurich/proj3/freire6.html#dm)                   

      In a conversation that … equal verbalism, or blah.

       

      Additionally, this standpoint focus on experience remakes and reaffirms dominant methods of structural violence. Because identities are reinserted into the economy of production, new subjectivities remerge out of same materials that gave rise to conflict in the first place.

      Adam KatzEnglish Instructor at Onodaga Community College. 2000. Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture.” Pg. 72-73 ]-AC

      However, according to the … respecting mul­tiplicities and differences.

       

       

      This is because the movement for liberation and emancipation itself serves as an expression of modern capital – a world where we ourselves are free-floating capital to be exchanged on the freedom market of modern debate.  The negative’s demand for a responsible, aligned subject creates an indescribable debt in humanity’s symbolic stock – more violent than the history of capital.

       

      This is Baudrillard ’05 (The Intelligence of Evil)

                   

      Freedom?  A dream!

                  Everyone … moral and psychological law.             

       

      Yet, the affirmative would have us continue to believe we are responsible subjects who fully align with ourselves politically, socially, and ethically – debating about no discourse that we can’t defend, no way of being that we are not – preventing us, ultimately, from being or speaking evil of any kind. 

       

      This is what we’ll call tyranny of the self – a type of involuntary servitude that breeds political fascists by enslaving life to itself.

       

      This is Baudrillard 2001

       

      To be able to disobey… to no master but himself.

       

      Prefer the strategy of the masses

      Baudrillard 1983 (Jean, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities or The End of the Social and Other Essays.  Pages 30-48)

      The mass realizes that … useless and absurd purpose.




11/12/11
    • Tournament: | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:




11/13/11
  • Round Reports

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

    • Neg: UTSA NR

       

      Round # 6 Tournament: Shirley
      Vs Team: Gonzaga DH
      Judge: Scott Varda

       

       

      Off Case Args:

       

      Spanos

       

       

      Case Args:

       

       

      Block Strategy:

       

      Spanos

       

       

       

      2nr Strategy:

       

      Spanos




11/13/11

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