<p>RD 2 - imperialism and baudrillard and our research methods are awesome.</p><p>RD 3 - fernando (alt affirms the proper name "Mohamed Bouazizi" solves for other-erasure. all cards from 'reading blindly')</p><p>RD 6 - <span style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; line-height: 19px; ">imperialism and baudrillard and our research methods are awesome.</span></p><div></div>

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Pre-T

Code Blue (BVF Version)

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  with myself, closer and closer to cadence…

Code Blue!

Politics are dead!

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

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.

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

“

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)

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.)

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)                    

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.

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

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)

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

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)

Framework

A. Interpretation: The affirmative must defend the instrumental implementation of the topical plan

B. They don’t defend USFG action

C. Vote Negative

1. Predictibility – The form debate takes is democratic deliberation – we have to know what we’re deliberating about before we can understand how to effectively do so.

2. PRIVATE ACTOR FIAT BAD: advocating a personal movement or idea is unfair as there’ no literature base to counter it.  Running a topical version of their affirmative solves all their offense.

3. It’s the rules – gotta play by them – otherwise you destroy debate.

Fernando 2010 (Fernando, Jeremy, Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School and Fellow of Tembusu College at The National University of Singapore. He received his MA in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School (2006) and an MA in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University (2008). “Suicide Bomber and her gift of death” 2010)

“It is this unknowability-the eclipse that allows one to know ………………………….. again, one can never know the law before which one stands.”

Reclaiming the debate over democratic intervention at the collective level predetermines - from a position above and at the end – that democracy itself, in its the very ways and means holds the only possibility for its self-same utopian escape.  This internalized form disinterested inquiry coopts their advocacy by instrumentalizing the other and disengaging from the current socio-political occasion

Dean 2009 (JODI DEAN, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University. DEMOCRACY AND OTHER NEOLIBERAL FANTASIES: Communicative Capitalism & Left Politics.  DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS : DURHAM & LONDON, 2009.  Pages p 78-80)

The affirmative involves a deliberate decision to imperialistically gaze within cumulating in a polarized and polarizing sameness blinded to its very own perpetuation of the other

Lentin and Titley 2011 (Alana and Gavan - This is an extract from Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley’s new book, The Crises of Multiculturalism in Europe: Racism in a Neoliberal Age, published in July 2011 by Zed Books. The extract is taken from chapter 3, ‘Free like me: the polyphony of liberal post-racialism.’   http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=3759#more-3759)

_{"In Veil: Mirror of Identity (2009), Christian Joppke examines controversies concerning the Muslim headscarf in three different countries, and posits it as a mirror of identity ‘…which forces the French, the British and the Germans to see who they are and to rethink the kinds of societies and public institutions they want to have’ (2009: x). Mirrors are not innocent metaphors, as both Lacan and Snow White would advise. We gaze into mirrors and choose to focus on a particular object. We accept the arbitrary relations of what is within and without the frame. Gazing in this mirror involves a deliberate decision to look for insight in this place, from this object, and through a structured relation that cannot but yield polarised and polarising likenesses. Across Europe, the veil, broadly understood, has become the focus of an objectifying gaze, not only as a piece of cloth but as a body of women, signifying cultural, religious and ethnic differences cultivated by the failures of multiculturalism (Rosenberger and Sauer 2006). While the metaphor of the mirror plays out in different ways in Joppke’s analysis, it is important to unsettle it as a naturalized metaphor of reflection, and instead to draw attention to the idea of the veil as a floating signifier, sought out for interpretation, and problematized, mediated, and made stand for a range of problems.}

_Continued…

_{Arguably, these two faces form another mirror. What is perceived as a given affront to liberal self-definition could also be approached through the hint of political neurosis inherent in Gray’s mirroring of affront as regret at imperfection. While Gray’s discussion remains steadfastly within the realm of political philosophy, framing minority lives as a mark of imperfection maps onto the ‘anxiety of incompleteness’ latent in the national project, and unsettled by the mobilities and uncertainties of globalization (Appadurai 2006: 6-18). Thus the two faces of abstract liberalism also suggest two ways of reading the problem of the veil; as a discrete, intrinsic challenge, or as a symbol in ‘…an emerging repertoire of efforts to produce previously unrequired levels of certainty about social identity, values, survival and dignity’ (ibid: 7). By opting for the parameters of the discrete challenge, Joppke enacts a series of analytical exclusions that are ultimately choices necessary to the conduct of liberal exposition. The foundational move is to admit of liberalism’s exclusionary work while positioning it as having transcended exclusionary formations of racism and nationalism. Yet to take seriously the scholarship on the modern nation-state and the shifting yet reciprocal determination of ‘race’ and nation (Balibar 1991) involves insisting on the historical imbrication of liberalism in these formations. The idea of reasoned liberal exclusion, after racism, is only possible if the relationship between racism and universalism is overlooked.}

_{Balibar connects racism to the idea of the universal human subject through its ability to define the ‘frontiers of an ideal humanity’ (Balibar 1991b: 61). Race, as Charles W. Mills argues, ‘…is in no way an “afterthought”, a “deviation” from ostensibly raceless Western ideals, but rather a central shaping constituent of those ideals’ (1997: 14). Political theory, in Mills’s critique, has played a particular role in failing to question the ‘appropriateness of concepts that derace the polity, denying its actual racial structure’ (1997: 95). Despite the centrality of race and racism to the majority of the world’s population in the modern period, and the massive political tapestry of anticolonial and antiracist movements through which resistance has been organised and theorised, little or nothing of this appears within the ‘bleached weave of the standard First World political philosophy text’ (ibid: 124). The salient aspect of Mills’ critique is the question of choice. In the light of decades of research and thinking on universalism, racial structure and the political struggle against it, it is a scholarly choice to work with ‘an idealizing abstraction that abstracts away from the crucial realities of the racial polity’ (1997: 76, italics in original). The glaring omission of France’s racially charged electoral politics at work in the veil debates is a symptom of this, but the consequences of abstraction run deeper."}

The 1AC’s global imagination marks triumph of the techno-strategic gaze and the authorization endless imperialistic warfare

Loos 2011 (Maxwell E, Macalester College"Ground Zero: Tourism, Terrorism, and Global Imagination" (2011). Honors Projects. Paper 14. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/intlstudies_honors/14 Ground Zero: Tourism, Terrorism, and Global Imagination Maxwell E. Loos)

“'Live!' Death whispers in your ear, 'I am coming for you.'”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

A death in Tunisia: Self-immolation, an act reflected back to us upon a billion TV screens, captured and instantly transmitted on twitter, Facebook, and CNN. We all know the story: he was harassed by the police, extorted, had his wares confiscated, publicly humiliated, until he could no longer bear it. On December 17, 2010, he approached the governor to complain, and the governor never listened. He said “If you don't see me, I'll burn myself,” and he made good on his threat. A gas station supplied the means, but no one would answer the final question: “How do you expect me to make a living?”

And with that, he became a legend, inspired protests across the Middle East, and now we have him to thank for a year's worth of debates. Everyone knows the story, yet it seems that something has slipped through the cracks.

Another death, this time in New Zealand: On June 26, 2009, a man fell 60 feet to his death off the Kauri Cliffs in New Zealand. Reported by the local news, confirmed by New Zealand police, and instantly captured on twitter: “OMG! Did you hear? Jeff Goldblum has died!” Re-tweeter from all directions and reported by the Western media, we all mourned the death of this great man – re-watch Jurassic Park and hold a candle-light vigil for Dr. Ian Malcolm.

Goldblum gave the eulogy: [Stroud] “No one will miss Jeff Goldblum more than me, he was not only a friend, and a mentor, but, uh, he was also me. Jeff Goldblum's performances combined the muscularity of Brando, the pathos of Streep, and the musky sensuality of a pride of baboons, One former conquest raved that sleeping with Jeff Goldblum was like, quote, being caught in a flesh storm with a 90% chance of satisfaction. […] I can not overstate how amazing Jeff Goldblum was in bed. When Jeff Goldblum passed away, a little bit of all of us died. I will be missed. Especially Sundays at 9PM on Law and Order Criminal Intent.”[1]

Of course, Jeff Goldblum really did die that day in New Zealand, but in the spaces between 1 and 0 yet another slippage occurred. It is a name robbed of its referent, reattached in our collective memory to a new object, to grant OUR Jeff Goldblum a secret power. You see, Jeff Goldblum can no longer die, because he has already died a thousand deaths, echoed through the interspheres, repeated on twitter and google news and facebook. We have all wept over him; we have all suffered his loss. Now his death is impossible. “Dying is pointless,” anyways. “You have to know how to disappear.”[2]

A third death in Paris: Jean Baudrillard collapsed from the illness he had spent his entire life diagnosing and predicting. With a twisted allele, the cells of his body proliferated beyond all reason or function, like cat videos on YouTube. On March 7, 2007, the cancerous cells reached terminal velocity and killed the man, yet the cancer only accelerated from there. News agencies all reported on the same story, Baudrillard's face appeared everywhere, frozen before his death, lauded as the inspiration for The Matrix – his crowning achievement. This cancerous doppleganger moved beyond a single body to replicate across society until it finally achieved immortality and replaced the original, if there ever really was one.

But Baudrillard's ghost trapped in the machine whispers warnings from it's impossibly beautiful tableau: “[W]hen one reaches a point of no return (deadend) in simulation, […] when the prosthesis goes deeper, is interiorized in, infiltrates the anonymous and micro-molecular heart of the body, as soon as it is imposed on the body itself as the "original" model, burning all the previous symbolic circuits, the only possible body the immutable repetition of the prosthesis, then it is the end of the body, of its history, and of its vicissitudes. The individual is no longer anything but a cancerous metastasis of its base formula. […] the proliferation of the same cell such as occurs with cancer? There is a narrow relation between the key concept of the genetic code and the pathology of cancer: the code designates the smallest simple element, the minimal formula to which an entire individual can be reduced, and in such a way that he can only reproduce himself identically to himself. Cancer designates a proliferation ad infinitum of a base cell without taking into consideration the organic laws of the whole. It is the same thing with cloning: nothing opposes itself any longer to the renewal of the Same, to the unchecked proliferation of a single matrix.”[3]

These three men have been monumentalized, immortalized, the man who inspired a revolution, a flesh storm with a 90% chance of satisfaction, the high priest of simulation. They no longer have the ability to die even if they wanted to, they've been robbed of it. And they offer hope to all of us that we too will be remembered, we too can escape the hands of death.

“If we are bound and determined to ……………………….. is the only invention possible. [4]”

In this space, where we forecast the extinction of the human race by the hour, we've surely lost all reality, we've become lost in the chains of signification, with the slightest event leading ever upwards and onwards through economy, hegemony, democracy, instability, India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, loose nukes, anthrax, global warming, extinction! These terms swirl together infinitely across laptops, screens, and flows, in a realm without signpost or meaning. Our only referent is extinction, and once it is uttered it's the only thing that matters, because only there are we confronted by death, only there do we lose the ability to escape death, to mourn and remember, only there do we face our non-existence. This is the true meaning of all literature and all debate.

“The beauty of writing lies—perhaps ……………. more unintelligible. A little bit more enigmatic. ~ Jean Baudrillard Adieu professor …”

There is a magic in names. Many cultures believe that if you know a person's name, you possess a power over them, and so they guard their names feverishly. In others, to speak the name of God is to have power over God. This power is real.

The the affirmative spins a tale of tragedy, naming the events of the year to force our hand, pushing us out of politics and into action. Like Kissinger and Otto Von Bizmark, we must base our politics on events within the realm of practical considerations, rather than ideology or moralism. The aff and its protests

Per Herngren 2007 (“Postprotest and Baudrillard” http://perherngren-resistance.blogspot.com/2007/10/jean-baudrillard-is-important-for.html)

“Jean Baudrillard is important for the reflection ………………… their own game and impose their own rules.”

The affirmative imagines themselves under the name. Like that man in Tunisia, they are two who can save the world, avert extinction, live forever. Yet while the affirmative tries so hard to insist on the reality of their impacts, on taking up the name in the name of the name, this is a lie. Debate is a truth game in which we play with empty signs, none of them signifying death, always recuperating, redeeming, memorializing our future extinction to soften it. And the 1AC did not take place, it exists only in that 9 minute space, only a text.

But when we hear the name, it is only possible to forget the text, erasure par excellence.

The meaning of death is unknown, it is forgetting, the end of thought and memory. So we affirm death itself. We affirm a sign, which escapes signification, a name that names only extinction, only death, which can signify only death, which signifies nothing. Not the man who inspired a revolution, not anything that can be understood or read or reproduced. Our alternative is to affirm the Proper Name: Mohamed Bouazizi.

Spanos K

If you listen close to the affirmative you can hear reverberations of Barrack Obama and Samuel Webster, a man who fought for American independence in the revolutionary war. Spanos writes:

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,  ……………….. of what the pioneers of the Battle of Bunker Hill accomplished. “

We find ourselves in the interregnum, the “No-more of the Gods who have fled and the Not-yet of the god who is coming.” After the end of the Cold War, America declared that history itself had ended, and the world was now safe for democracy. The liberal-capitalist-democratic ideal as the only game in town, to be heralded for the world. Of course, things didn't work quite so smoothly. With the fulfillment of democracy as a global system, we see it reversing upon and consuming itself. As the recent protests demonstrate, the path to democracy is a violent one, and this American vision of global democracy can only be realized by the destruction of democracy.

Spanos 2011

“In calling his reluctant American readers’ attention to the …………. space of modernity’’ becomes a black ‘‘visionary’’ possibility.”

The benign intentions of the affirmative should not be taken at face value. Spanos turns his eye to the policies of the Obama administration and delineates democracy assistance in the name of social justice, from intervention in the name of securing American exceptionalism. The affirmative, with it's appeals to oil shocks, securing ourselves against terrorism, and so on, lies firmly in the camp of exceptionalism. However, even the most benign democracy assistance hides a malignant underside and lies on an indissoluble relay with imperialism and genocide.

Spanos 2008

“Having, in what precedes, ………….. its likely horrific "end."

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.  This makes constant interventions which culminate in genocide inevitable.

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 has as the ultimate good by white nationalism.”

Today we see the Arab world revolting against this benign gesture of assistance, having born the cost of US democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, in US support for dictators, in Western exploitation of oil, and in the general deprivation of the Arab World. Yet the western media ventriloquizes these events as in support of the US, effacing any expression of those individuals. Arab protesters are just like us, only brown and a bit more exotic.

Spanos writes:

“Since the only language  ……………… patent multiplicity of resisting perspectives.”

Thus, we prefer not to be accomplices to the affirmative's framing of the Arab protests which serves onto to quell dissent and rewrites everything into the banalized language of American-capitalist-democracy. Rather than transform these diverse events into the latest cause for American intervention, we affirm the singularity of the Arab protests.

When read only in terms of the potential for liberal, capitalist, American-style democracy, we reduce the Arab protests into an object of intervention that can be easily known and grasped by Western bureaucrats. This synecdochal naming was precisely the mode of colonization after World War 1, where the West names the diverse cultures of the world “Egypt,” “Saudi Arabia,” “Palestine,” “Syria,” and so on, and then organized the territory to fit this synecdochal map. The affirmative busy re-enacting this process today on the “Arab protests.” We instead affirm the singularity of this event. We – as western intellectuals – affirm their democracy in the only way we can while allowing it to remain their democracy and not our own, which can only be through an unnaming of the revolts in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. Thus, we take our cue from Spanos, who writes:

“The Revolution that ignited  ……………………. the excluded included by the state or, in its positive phase “whatever being”: qualunque  (Giorgio Agamben, following, not incidentally,  the directives of Hannah Arendt).”[1]

This requires that we take an interested approach to debate. That is interested in the original Greek sense of inter-esse, or being in the midst. Rather than assuming a top-down vision as if we were Gods imagining how to reconfigure US policy to best serve our ends, we should instead recognize our place – in a debate round before a room of students – and how we can uniquely act within this space.

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.: I would love to hear  ………….. become II a neighborhood of zero."

I am convinced that the maps we’ve been shown since grade school – of a vast United States and diverse world, with 5 oceans and 7 continents – is a lie.  Instead, the world is confined to an area the size of the supposed New Hampshire. The world is only series of hotels, universities, and airports, surrounded by water. We take off from Chicago O’Hare and circle in a plane for 3 hours before landing 20 miles away at New York JFK. As proof of this I offer debate tournaments. Every tournament I go to sleep in Edmond, only to find myself waking up in Atlanta, San Francisco, Spokane … the location doesn’t matter, everything remains the same.

The world is a few cities, with no space in between, and life a series of hotel rooms. Pack up your suite in Austin: one toothbrush, one toothpaste, travel shampoo and conditioner, two pairs pants, three pairs socks, three shirts, one jacket. Then wake up Dallas to unpack.

No longer do we ride across the country side, getting lost, pulling into a small diner you’ve never heard of, stopping every hour at weird and scary rest-stops to pee.  No, instead we board a plane, go to sleep, and wake up somewhere else.  This is the condition afflicting us all in the epoch of late capitalism. We move from Norman hotel room to Wichita hotel room, and at the same time, the world is as if one big hotel: We leave the Kansas City room, take a few steps down the hall, and enter the Chicago room. How convenient that hotels have begun to name their conference rooms accordingly because even they realize THAT is the condition of our world. Jameson furthers that:

Now I want to say a few words about escalators and elevators: given their very real pleasures in Portman, particularly these last, which the artist has termed ‘gigantic kinetic sculptures’ and which certainly account for much of the spectacle and the excitement of the hotel interior, particularly in the Hyatts, where like great Japanese lanterns or gondolas they ceaselessly rise and fall—given such a deliberate marking and foregrounding in their own right, I believe one has to see such ‘people movers’ (Portman’s own term, adapted from Disney) as something a little more than mere functions and engineering components. We know in any case that recent architectural theory has begun to borrow from narrative analysis in other fields, and to attempt to see our physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual narratives or stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors are asked to fulfill and to complete with our own bodies and movements. In the Bonaventure, however, we find a dialectical heightening of this process: it seems to me that the escalators and elevators here henceforth replace movement but also and above all designate themselves as new reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper (something which will become evident when we come to the whole question of what remains of older forms of movement in this building, most notably walking itself). Here the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reified and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own: and this is a dialectical intensification of the autoreferentiality of all modern culture, which tends to turn upon itself and designate its own cultural production as its content.

I am more at a loss when it comes to conveying the thing itself, the experience of space you undergo when you step off such allegorical devices into the lobby or atrium, with its great central column, surrounded by a miniature lake, the whole positioned between the four symmetrical residential towers with their elevators, and surrounded by rising balconies capped by a kind of greenhouse roof at the sixth level. I am tempted to say that such space makes it impossible for us to use the language of volume or volumes any longer, since these last are impossible to seize. Hanging streamers indeed suffuse this empty space in such a way as to distract systematically and deliberately from whatever form it might be supposed to have; while a constant busyness gives the feeling that emptiness is here absolutely packed, that it is an element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume. You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and your body; and if it seemed to you before that that suppression of depth I spoke of in postmodern painting or literature would necessarily be difficult to achieve in architecture itself, perhaps you may now be willing to see this bewildering immersion as the formal equivalent in the new medium.

Yet escalator and elevator are also in this context dialectical opposites; and we may suggest that the glorious movement of the elevator gondolas is also a dialectical compensation for this filled space of the atrium—it gives us the chance at a radically different, but complementary, spatial experience, that of rapidly shooting up through the ceiling and outside, along one of the four symmetrical towers, with the referent, Los Angeles itself, spread out breathtakingly and even alarmingly before us. But even this vertical movement is contained: the elevator lifts you to one of those revolving cocktail lounges, in which you, seated, are again passively rotated about and offered a contemplative spectacle of the city itself, now transformed into its own images by the glass windows through which you view it.

Let me quickly conclude all this by returning to the central space of the lobby itself (with the passing observation that the hotel rooms are visibly marginalized: the corridors in the residential sections are lowceilinged and dark, most depressingly functional indeed; while one understands that the rooms are in the worst of taste). The descent is dramatic enough, plummeting back down through the roof to splash down in the lake; what happens when you get there is something else, which I can only try to characterize as milling confusion, something like the vengeance this space takes on those who still seek to walk through it. Given the absolute symmetry of the four towers, it is quite impossible to get your bearings in this lobby; recently, colour coding and directional signals have been added in a pitiful and revealing, rather desperate attempt to restore the coordinates of an older space. I will take as the most dramatic practical result of this spatial mutation the notorious dilemma of the shopkeepers on the various balconies: it has been obvious, since the very opening of the hotel in 1977, that nobody could ever find any of these stores, and even if you located the appropriate boutique, you would be most unlikely to be as fortunate a second time; as a consequence, the commercial tenants are in despair and all the merchandise is marked down to bargain prices. When you recall that Postman is a businessman as well as an architect, and a millionaire developer, an artist who is at one and the same time a capitalist in his own right, one cannot but feel that here too something of a ‘return of the repressed’ is involved.

So I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. And I have already suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment—which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of space craft are to those of the automobile—can itself stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.

Day after day, night after night, it’s always the same question: Are we drinking or cutting cards? This is our escapism, a simple card game. If we have a higher card in the suit of planetary extinction, it trumps your deuce of genocide. This is the world we escape into – no longer even poker, a game of strategy and artifice. No, today we are playing War!, where we slap down our cards and see who wins. Khalilzad beats Mead, Mead beats Sid-Ahmed, Sid-Ahmed beat Berube … God damn it, you played the race card!

It seems these citations alone, the random shouting of author and date now so effective and efficient, supplant description, explanation, and reference to worldly events and situations that are no longer even necessary. This is the perverse world in which students cloister themselves in Dallas Perkin’s basement for weeks, arriving at noon and leaving after midnight.

Debate becomes the reason we study philosophy or read the newspaper every day. When life becomes a hotel, debate becomes our life. The supreme irony of this is that we escape the IKEA furniture, the breakfast buffets with 12 types of cereal and no milk, the fake flowers and assembly-line paintings, only to turn debate into the most-postmodern Hotel of them all. The Bonaventure, in which Miami, LA, and Fullerton are replaced by the Paris ’68 room, the Berlin ‘89 room, the Berkeley ‘60’s room. Debate becomes this orgy of difference, like Epcot center, where we can walk out of a Heidegger throwdown, take a few steps down the hall and debate about healthcare politics. Our nights in the hotel, walking from drinking with K-State, to smoking with Wyoming, to hanging out in the judges lounge, is mirrored by our days at the university, Spanos against Trinity, Nietzsche against Texas, Baudrillard against Emory. Everything is so DIFFERENT! –At least, for two hours, then we pack up our tubs, board the airplane, and wake up in a new city reading a new argument.

Schnurer ‘03

The big question is: does gaming contribute to these revolutionary format changes? I will answer no. Rather, I would like to position gaming as a controlling force. Gaming is a challenging, innovative, and adaptable theory but, fundamentally, a theory of control. Gaming works as an answer to the question of what debates do. But while we can answer that we play a game (albeit a serious and complex one), we also say something about the players and why we play the game. Gaming became a tool for control – convincing debaters that energies of criticism should be reinvested into the debate community. The very parameters of Snider’s goals, to encourage more participants in debate, belie a rigged question. We are intended to succeed through gaming to bring a few other voices into debate. But like the plus-one activist struggle that simply seeks representation, this approach is doomed to failure.

            We should not be surprised that the traditional agents of social control have a brilliant new theory that encourages limited change. Gaming in fact operates to metastasize the crisis-politics of modern policy debate, covering over the rotting corpse with a sweet perfume. For example, gaming minimizes and cripples the increasing tension over activist-oriented arguments in debate rounds. Gaming encourages such argument innovation not for the world community but for the debate community, teaching students to passionately plead for change to an empty room. How can a theory understand the desire of debaters to crack open the debate methods and introduce something “outside” of debate as Snider points to in his most recent gaming essay? The answer is that it can’t. Debate as a model can only create more debate, and so long as our goal for debate is more debate, then we will never emerge to challenge larger forces of control.

            Worse than being satisfied with shouting at walls, approaching debate from the perspective of games encourages a god-complex that teaches debaters that saying something poignant in a debate round translates into something larger in the world. Christopher Douglas, a professor of English at Furman University, explores how games teach us to adore the replay: “This is the experience structured into the gaming process—the multiple tries at the same space-time moment. Like Superman after Lois Lane dies, we can in a sense turn back the clock and replay the challenge, to a better end” (2002, p. 7). What kind of academic activity encourages students to fantasize about making change without considering for the slightest bit how to bring that change about?

            Douglas positions this impulse alongside the Sisyphean burden of trying to make the world into a structured, controlled, sterile environment. Sisyphus and the reset button on a videogame console share a common ancestor with the debate model that has thirty debate teams advocating different policies in separate rooms at exactly the same time. All of these examples showcase humans desperately attempting to construct meaning out of a confusing world, where the human will to power forces the world to fit a structure. Douglas reminds us that games help to structure an oft-confusing world, imbuing the person imagining with god-like powers (McGuire, 1980; Nietzsche 1966):

Games therefore do not threaten film’s status so much as they threaten religion, because they perform the same existentially soothing task as religion. They proffer a world of meaning, in which we not only have a task to perform, but a world that is made with us in mind. And indeed, the game world is made with us, or at least our avatar in mind. (Douglas, 2002, p. 9)

Gaming draws forth a natural impulse of humans – to make the world in our image. But debate and videogames contain the same fantastic lure that encourages people to pore their energies into debate. Fiat and utopian flights of fancy are both seductions of our will to power, encouraging us to commit to becoming better debaters.

            This process of self-important distraction has its model in the theories of the hyper-real posited by Jean Baudrillard. He argues that modern economies are geared to sell humans mass produced products, but whose advertising attempts to convince people that they have an authentic experience with the product.

            Economic structures make products that are more-than real – hyperreal in order to sell their products. The hyperreal creates games and fantasylands that are far richer and more pleasurable than real life. One example of the hyperreal is Epcott center at Disneyland, which reduces foreign cultures to their most base natures – ensuring that everything is uniform, bland, and suitably “ethnic.”

            While one never need worry about eating food that is “too strange” in the Epcott lands, other negatives emerge in the world of the hyperreal. Humans who desire order and structure to our worlds often come to prefer the hyperreal to the real. The hyperreal has a world with all of the attractions of our own, but with none of the depressing realities of our own world. The hyperreal doesn’t have credit card bills or racism. The hyperreal is filled with beautiful people (who all want to have sex with you). The hyperreal is a hot seduction pulling our vision and hearing away form our own lives.

            Describing Snider’s gaming as a dangerous distraction that pulls us away from our communities and our lives is a bit simplistic. Rather, gaming greases the wheels for powers of control to remain in control. Douglas articulates some of the specific ways games solidify structures of power.

In board games or computer games, however, players actually do start out in relative equality (although there are some chance elements as well, depending on the game), whereas in real life, so many characteristic of one’s life are already determined before birth, including social and economic standing, political freedom, skin color, gender, etc. What games accomplish is the instilling of the ideology of equality, which postulates that we are born equal and that differences emerge later on; the primary different to be explained away in this way is that of economic disparity, and games help explain that difference as the result of, in America, hard work and effort vs. laziness. Thus gaming helps inculcate the ideology that covers over the fact that, with the exception of the information technology bubble, most of those who are wealthy in the United States were born that way. Beyond this narrow ideological function, the game helps create subjects that accept the inevitability of rules as things that are given and must be “played” within—or else there is no game. This process is not total or ever complete, as the current gaming discourse complaining about the rules shows; here, player critique a games rules in view of a conventionalized notion of how “reality” works, or, less often, how a game’s playability is compromised by rules that are too “realistic (Douglas, 2002, p. 24).

Viewing debate as a game may have the opposite effect that Snider desires. Gaming teaches participants to play by the rules and even when challenging the game, to do that within the games structures. Debaters who are moved by poetry are encouraged to bring that poetry back to the debate realm – not to become poets.

Debate is our escape, it is our drug. For these two hours, this hotel room is the only place I’d want to be, ‘cause I’ve never found a high greater than reading that perfect card. So we cut more cards, read more arguments, we’ve got to fucking SPEED UP! There’s more to be said, more knowledge to be produced, because more is better – more breadth, more depth, more education.

God knows there’s no time like the present, and none to spare in the 2NC. But Virillio warns us “Without the freedom to critique and reconstruct, there is no truly free game: we are addicts and nothing more’. […]Virilio cautions against complacent addiction, inviting us to imagine the consequences of technology: those elite pilots disconnected from sensory experience and important societal connections, capable only as a result of their technological dependency.”

It seems we have reached Nietzsche’s twilight of the idols, in which “The text finally disappeared under the interpretation.”  The resolution has at last become a fable as our modern preoccupation with procedure has finally triumphed over substance and content.  In the pursuit of ensuring that debate provides its participants with a rigorous, yet manageable “research burden” while all along continuing to live up to all those standards of “fairness” and “competitive equity” our liberal academic community holds so dear – it seems that we have neglected the spaces in between.

Terms such as competitive equity, switch-side – even nuclear weapon for God’s sake! – seem to swirl around frantically. Now, in the twilight of our topical idols, the question remains what to do? Don’t get us wrong, as Shanahan said,

“I don’t know if you hear it, but there’s a real respect for the Michigan States and the Northwesterns and the Harvards, you know what I mean? What they do is great. And old-school policy debating is a phenomenal activity. But when it confronts difference, it tends to confront difference the way so many hegemonies do: it runs over it, it annihilates it, it marginalizes it, and it does violence to it. And, from what I heard speaking to the debaters that I coach after that last debate, that’s what that was about. It was about being rude. It was about excluding. It was about doing violence, and, you know, shutting your ears. And you can’t debate effectively if you’re not open to the possibility of being changed in a given debate round. Which is, I think, magical.”

This is the quality, above all else, that is circumscribed from our game, our hotel of debate. No matter how many idols we smash, the ballot remains, with the tantalizing promise of victory or threat of loss. Lose sight of this, and you risk going 0/8 like a Stephen Davis puppet show. So we compete; and, as the 1AC proved, we are nothing BUT competitors. Debate has been transformed from a vibrant political engagement, to a game, in which the aff only exists as the enemy of the neg, the neg only exists as the enemy of the aff.  This is the ever-present mode we adopt when encountering that difference which threatens to teach us and enrich our lives, we define ourselves in opposition: we are Absolute and everything which differs is Other. Simone de Beauvoir explains:

Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but in relation to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being […] She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.’ (Beauvoir 1989 xxii)

The 1AC invites us in, as long as we’ll participate in their Epcot Center orgy of difference, as long as we’ll be the woman to their man, the Jew to their anti-Semite – as long as we’ll be different in the way dictated by the rules of our game.  That they spent most of the 1AC reading preempts proves this: they construct an evil Other onto which they can project all fear and uncertainty. The position of the negative is reduced to a scapegoat, to be shouted down, to be purged.

Debra Bergoffen. “On Nietzsche and the Enemy: Nietzsche’s New Politics.” Nietzsche, Power, and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought. Ed. Herman Siemens and Vasti Roodt. 2008. Page 497-498.

Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, an analysis of the passion of hatred in its particular manifestation as anti-Semitism, gives us a phenomenological account of this error of habituation whereby the unknown of the strange is transformed into the familiar other who can be debased as my enemy. As described by Sartre, the object of the anti-Semite’s enmity, the Jew, has no self-referential existence – no history, no culture, no religious traditions. The Jew’s genuine strangeness is erased. Sartre, in showing us how the Jew is created out of the anti-Semite’s fears, prohibitions, desires and resentments, shows us how the anti-Semite discovers in the Jew what he puts into them. Detailing the how the enemy is created out of my known but repressed desires would take us too far off course. Suffice it to say that it is one way of making the stranger familiar and a most effective way of converting the now familiar stranger into the hated enemy. Like the Reich, anti-Semites guarantee their power and status by preserving their enemy. ‘If the Jew did not exist’, Sartre writes, ‘the anti-Semite would have to invent him’ (Sartre 1972 13). The difference between the Reich, the anti-Semite and Nietzsche could not be starker. Citing them, we see that Nietzsche’s critique of anti-Semitism was not marginal to his thought. Unlike the anti-Semite and the Reich, Nietzsche is not interested in the pleasures of the power of converting the strange into the familiar. He is enhanced, not diminished, by the strangeness that threatens his stability. Seeing this strangeness as essential to the fecundity of the whole, he is set on breaking the habit of habituation. Enmity is spiritualized by exposing the error of causality. It is only by encountering the strange, strangers, enemies as strange, that they can be beautified and deified.

We agree with the 1AC, of course nuclear weapons should be reduced, but we would approach debate otherwise. We do not think that the hotel should be torn down or all games are bad, “games have an incredibly imaginative side, a marvelous narrative, a journey through which the player can be transformed into a hero. […]But now the travelers are traveled. Dreamers are dreamed. They are no longer free to move about, they are traveled by the program. They are no longer free to dream, they are dreamed by the program. […] Faced with the plethora of possibilities, what game should we play? Play at being a critic.”

Thus we would debate as critique: that is critique as a verb, we refuse final closure, refuse the close the door of our room and move on to the next. Instead, we “discern the value” of things rather than affirm one plan of action or alternative. Kant explains:

We deal with a concept dogmatically ... if we consider it as contained under another concept of the object which constitutes a principle of reason and determine it in conformity with this. But we deal with it merely critically if we consider it only in reference to our cognitive faculties and consequently to the subjective conditions of thinking it, without undertaking to decide anything about its object.

This means attending to those halls and spaces in between, rather than leaving each debate, each argument, each hope of difference, sequestered within its hotel room. Most of all, this means being open to the possibility of being changed by debate.

Bill Shanahan. “kritik of thinking.” Debater’s Research Guide. Health Care Policy. 1993.

Martin Heidegger lived most of his life in close proximity to the Black Forest in Germany. The forest permeated much of his thinking. In many of his later lectures and essays, Heidegger included at least a brief movement through the German word Weg. Weg, way or path in English, provides Heidegger's readers with a hint for understanding his sometimes difficult philosophical prose. As is often the case, Heidegger turns to the ancient Greeks for help: "For the Greeks, however, the basic feature of the way- ('method") - is that by conveying along the course, underway, it opens up a view and a perspective and hence provides the disclosure of something." (4) While walking in near-darkness through a dense forest, the trees above suddenly break and some light hits you. The experience of emerging suddenly into the light, feeling the warmth of the sun, is the movement of Heidegger's thinking. Difficult matters are engaged not to resolve them, but simply to think them. The darkness is as important as the light. Conveying along a particular path is not the answer. Views become possible, perspectives open only while underway. What allows for the moment of brightness is the moving along a way, not the reaching of a destination. On another day, the sun is absent and the moment is missing. So unconcerned with destination was Heidegger that he names a collection of his essays Holzwege, woodpaths, and offers the following description:

"Wood" is an old name for forest. In the wood are

paths which mostly wind along until they end quite suddenly

in an impenetrable thicket.

They are called "woodpaths."

Each goes its peculiar way, but in the same forest.

Often it seems as though one were like another.

Yet it only seems so.

Woodcutters and forest-dwellers are familiar with these paths.

They know what it means to be on a woodpath. (5)

Amazing! Heidegger describes his thinking as ending in an impenetrable thicket, a dead end. So why read him? - because what is important is not the end, but the way. The way of thinking does not invite the thinker to arrive, only to think. Sometimes you get shown the light in the strangest of places. Sometimes the light shows you.

            The danger of thinking in this or any other way is the way can become old, tired. When one way is followed too often or too closely, it becomes fixed. Where once fresh forest floor led the thinker, pavement now determines the way. Permanency replaces flexibility. The need to seek new, different ways is stressed by Heidegger:

The way, . . ., of the thinker does indeed go off the usual path of men. Yet we leave it open whether this "way off" is just a by-way. It could also be the reverse, that the usual way of man is merely a perpetual by-way ignorant of itself. A way off the path, however, does not have to be a by-way in the sense of what is "way out" and unusual. Even a by-way is again not necessarily an off-way.(6)

Heidegger here maintains the possibility that the way traveled for centuries just might be ignorant of itself. Notice the argumentative style: Heidegger entertains this possibility in the hopes of getting the thinking underway. His goal, at least at the beginning, is not to convince his reader of the "correctness" of this position. Too often, thinkers avoid the way off for fear of failing or losing their way. For others, acceptance and conformity prevent them from following off-ways in order to avoid being thought of as too far out. Still others simply want to win and the way most traveled in debate is policy. In fact debate is called policy debate when classified in high school and college. So certain is debate that the lines are demarcated clearly, a familiar epithet frequently hurled at the kritik runs: "Go to CEDA where you belong." No doubt a number of you who have continued to read this far endorse a similar message, perhaps substituting L-D for CEDA. At least keep the question open, maintain the possibility that the kritik has something to say to policy debate. Leave it open whether the kritik is the off-way or policy is merely a perpetual by-way ignorant of itself. Follow at least for a while along a less familiar way through policy debate.

Toppling the assad regime will likely produce mass rape and even worse indiscriminate violence

Weiss 12/21/2011 Michael, The Henry Jackson Society, “Intervention In Syria: Assessment Of Legality, Logistics And Hazards – Analysis,” http://www.eurasiareview.com/21122011-intervention-in-syria-assessment-of-legality-logistics-and-hazards-analysis/

A likely scenario is a “doomsday” situation whereby the regime releases its criminal prisoners (murderers, rapists, smugglers, drug dealers and thieves) in order to wreak havoc and disorder among the population post-liberation, again in a manner reminiscent of Saddam’s terminal stratagems in Iraq. There are already plausible reports that these elements have been released, although how their savagery will compare with what has been inflicted upon Syrian people by the regime’s own security forces and shabbiha death squads remains to be seen. Syrians might consider the state practice of raping young boys in front of their fathers evidence that psychopaths are already in their midst.

The aff authors are all conspiring against Syria  because of their stance against the US – don’t buy their propaganda!

Sabbagh 12/28/11 H, sana, “Arab Forum in Amman Organizes Seminar to Uncover Practices of Biased Channels regarding Events in Syria,” http://www.sana.sy/eng/22/2011/12/28/391172.html

The participants pointed out that the media attack against Syria is because of its Arab role and its refusal to abandon the Palestinian cause, stressing that a real media war is waged against Syria, with mass media establishing a false reality that contrasts with actual reality in order to achieve specific ends.They stressed that Arab media – specifically al-Jazeera – is playing a suspect role and is attempting to recreate the Libyan model, using the very same terms, underlining the need to counter that. The participants also reviewed the various ways mass media are twisting facts, concluding that the media war against Syria aims at summoning foreign interference in Syria's affairs, the possibility of which the participants ruled out due to the awareness and cohesion of the Syrian people.

Sqo is better for Syria – the west cannot assist democracy without destroying the entire process

Workers World 11/28/11 Workers World Editorial, “Imperialist Hands Off Syria!” Nov. 28, 2011, http://www.workers.org/2011/editorials/syria_1208/

There is no way that an imperialist intervention can create a situation where the Syrian people can independently decide the nature of their government and state. For anti-imperialists and progressives in Europe and North America, the first duty in any situation of civil conflict in a developing country like Syria is to stop the imperialist intervention. That means to oppose any imperialist aggression against Syria, whatever form it takes. No imperialist sanctions against Syria! No NATO intervention in the region! U.S., Europe, out of the Middle East!

Assad can’t deploy weapons

Weiss 12/21/2011 Michael, The Henry Jackson Society, “Intervention In Syria: Assessment Of Legality, Logistics And Hazards – Analysis,” http://www.eurasiareview.com/21122011-intervention-in-syria-assessment-of-legality-logistics-and-hazards-analysis/

Though it should be added that without a viable air force or missile system, which will have to be neutralized in the inaugural stages of intervention, the Assad regime will have difficulty deploying chemical weapons against its preferred targets.

The assertion of a global democratic moment contained in the contemporary naming and mapping of the Arab Spring reflects this same binaristic paradigm - 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)

Positioning the role of the critic as gatekeeper, the negative as police, etc., comodifies educational subjects, threating a vacuum of content liable to extinguish the potentiality of debate itself

Standish 2002 (Paul Standish, Institute for Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Dundee, Disciplining the Profession: subjects subject to procedure.  Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2002)       

Unfortunately, the rhetoric of access and lifelong learning, admirable though the underlying aims are in many respects, exacerbates the situation here. For with the shift of focus from institutions to customers, advocated by the Fryer Report (1997) for example, the spotlight on systems puts further in shadow the importance of what is actually learned. And it is not as though the customers are likely to object. After all do we not live in a world in which the stance of neutrality has an unusual prominence where the maximal availability of consumer goods and life choices is a good that cannot be questioned, and thus where the flexibility of an efficient system seems only enabling while commitment to a particular content seems unduly burdensome? The point here is not the usual one more and more people have access to less and less. It is rather that with this growing vacuum of content we have a situation where fewer people will experience what the study of a subject at a higher level that is, the discipline of this amounts to.' And soon we may have a generation of higher education managers who are themselves none the wiser.

Their framework answers are tied to a legacy of progressivism that has been co-opted and grafted onto the dominate managerialism of status quo capitalism.  Fucking hipsters…

Standish 1997 (Paul Standish, Institute for Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Dundee, Heidegger and the Technology of Further Education.  Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 31, No. 3, 1997)

Contemporary further education has been shaped by a strange alliance of forces. Predominant amongst these has been what might be called the new managerialism with its vocabulary of efficiency and effectiveness, choice and markets. This has been linked to a limited extent and somewhat incongruously with a certain legacy of progressivism. Slogans of 1960s child-centred primary education - learning through doing, group work, experiential learning, integration - have been grafted onto the dominant managerialism in such a way that lecturing staff of apparently contrary political and pedagogical persuasions have been `brought on board'. This new progressivism has been formed by a confluence of ideas from a variety of sources, some specifically concerned with the education of adults: the notions of empowerment and the pedagogy of oppression derived from Paolo Freire; the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers; the identification of experience as a defining characteristic of adult education in the `andragogy' of Malcolm Knowles.

Change has been the order of the day and this has gone hand in hand with the provision of a new style of initial and in-service education and training, the latter typically involving short and specifically targeted courses or training days. In the eyes of the new management this type of staff development is crucial to success. New social circumstances necessitate changes in the traditional attitudes and expectations of staff. New learning methods (capitalising on information technology) make possible the more efficient use of resources. Staff must come to see themselves not as lecturers, nor even as teachers in any conventional didactic sense, but as facilitators of learning.

Proponents of this new further education have constructed an over-simplified picture of traditional further education as a target. This is a picture of subject specialists with little commitment to students, where facts are presented in a non-interactive way and learners are thought of as passive receptacles. It is necessary to dispense with this crude caricature of bad practice, an easy target which ultimately does not serve the case for a new further education well. Not that the existence of bad traditional practice should be denied: entrenched attitudes, lack of commitment to widened access, impatience with the new types of student, and nostalgia about `standards' have stood in the way of the real opportunities that changing conceptions of further education and new technology provide. New management has exaggerated these failings, however, to smooth the path for the changes it seeks to introduce.

Not only do these attempts to map the components of the revolution create the impetus for imperial violence, but they are doomed to failure – revolutions are the result of complex social interactions, not linear systems – attempting to control the direction of these revolts only drives volatility underground, increasing the risk of explosive violence as Taleb and Blyth explain:

Taleb and Blyth, 2011 (Nassim, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute/Mark, Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University, “Thee Black Swan of Cairo,” Foreign Affairs, 90:3, EBSCO)

How Suppressing Volatility Makes the ................. one of life's packages: there is no freedom without noise--and no stability without volatility.

Their utilitarian lens only functions by creating a distinction between good killing and bad killing. Killing millions of foreign peoples in US hegemonic wars are good deaths, and so justified, but even small acts of violence by our enemies are bad deaths which must be prevented by our intervention.

Raju G. C.

Thomas. “The New Security and Moral Agenda in a U.S. Dominant World.” America's Intervention in the Balkans. 1997.

“The American moral principle appears to  …………….. Afghanistan, and Iraq—of “destroy and forget.”

The attempts to grasp power only reproduce its opposite.  We are in a unique time as the Obama administration is the will to will where power turns back on itself.  The Neg leave us in a double bind, either we produce the enemy which threatens us or we exterminate scapegoats.

Kroker.  2011.  “The Arab Spring: The Contradictions of Obama's Charismatic Liberalism”.  Ctheory.  Theory Beyond the Codes.  In the Name of Security.  January 27, 2011.  Accessed from: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=679. 

"Delivered on June 4, 2009 at Cairo University, this speech  …………….. opponents rather exercise brute force."

A disinterested approach to debate refuses to question the way that arguments are framed as having equal weight in a round in order to win a ballot, without paying any attention to the way they translate into binarist systems of oppression in reality, where one term is privileged over another and thus has the power to demonize its second term.

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.: When we had our  ………………. the heirs of this quantitative system of binaries."

Not only do these attempts to map the components of the revolution create the impetus for imperial violence, but they are doomed to failure – revolutions are the result of complex social interactions, not linear systems – attempting to control the direction of these revolts only drives volatility underground, increasing the risk of explosive violence as Taleb and Blyth explain:

Taleb and Blyth, 2011 (Nassim, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute/Mark, Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University, “Thee Black Swan of Cairo,” Foreign Affairs, 90:3, EBSCO)

"How Suppressing Volatility Makes the World Less  ………………. and no stability without volatility."

The United States is locked in a struggle to maintain its influence amid a wave of Arab political discontent – the affirmative’s intellectual engagement with this topic reveals a commitment to this geopolitical project. We prefer to take up a more fundamental issue – this debate is a question of competing intellectual methodologies – the question you should ask yourself when deciding the round is the benefit of endorsing their scholarship which focuses exclusively on the technocratic administration of democracy assistance.

Biswas, 2007 (Shampa, Assoc Prof of Politics @ Whitman, “Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist,” Millennium 36:1, p. 117-125, EBSCO)

_{The recent resuscitation of the project of Empire should give International Relations scholars particular pause. 1 For a discipline long premised on a triumphant Westphalian sovereignty, there should be something remarkable about the ease with which the case for brute force, regime change and empire-building is being formulated in widespread commentary spanning the political spectrum. Writing after the 1991 Gulf War, Edward Said notes the US hesitance to use the word ‘empire’ despite its long imperial history. 2 This hesitance too is increasingly under attack as even self-designated liberal commentators such as Michael Ignatieff urge the US to overcome its unease with the ‘e-word’ and selfconsciously don the mantle of imperial power, contravening the limits of sovereign authority and remaking the world in its universalist image of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. 3 Rashid Khalidi has argued that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq does indeed mark a new stage in American world hegemony, replacing the indirect and proxy forms of Cold War domination with a regime much more reminiscent of European colonial empires in the Middle East. 4 The ease with which a defence of empire has been mounted and a colonial project so unabashedly resurrected makes this a particularly opportune, if not necessary, moment, as scholars of ‘the global’, to take stock of our disciplinary complicities with power, to account for colonialist imaginaries that are lodged at the heart of a discipline ostensibly interested in power but perhaps far too deluded by the formal equality of state sovereignty and overly concerned with security and order. Perhaps more than any other scholar, Edward Said’s groundbreaking work in Orientalism has argued and demonstrated the long and deep complicity of academic scholarship with colonial domination. 5 In addition to spawning whole new areas of scholarship such as postcolonial studies, Said’s writings have had considerable influence in his own discipline of comparative literature but also in such varied disciplines as anthropology, geography and history, all of which have taken serious and sustained stock of their own participation in imperial projects and in fact regrouped around that consciousness in a way that has simply not happened with International Relations. 6 It has been 30 years since Stanley Hoffman accused IR of being an ‘American social science’ and noted its too close connections to US foreign policy elites and US preoccupations of the Cold War to be able to make any universal claims, 7 yet there seems to be a curious amnesia and lack of curiosity about the political history of the discipline, and in particular its own complicities in the production of empire. 8 Through what discourses the imperial gets reproduced, resurrected and re-energised is a question that should be very much at the heart of a discipline whose task it is to examine the contours of global power. Thinking this failure of IR through some of Edward Said’s critical scholarly work from his long distinguished career as an intellectual and activist, this article is an attempt to politicise and hence render questionable the disciplinary traps that have, ironically, circumscribed the ability of scholars whose very business it is to think about global politics to actually think globally and politically. What Edward Said has to offer IR scholars, I believe, is a certain kind of global sensibility, a critical but sympathetic and felt awareness of an inhabited and cohabited world. Furthermore, it is a profoundly political sensibility whose globalism is predicated on a cognisance of the imperial and a firm non-imperial ethic in its formulation. I make this argument by travelling through a couple of Said’s thematic foci in his enormous corpus of writing. Using a lot of Said’s reflections on the role of public intellectuals, I argue in this article that IR scholars need to develop what I call a ‘global intellectual posture’. In the 1993 Reith Lectures delivered on BBC channels, Said outlines three positions for public intellectuals to assume – as an outsider/exile/marginal, as an ‘amateur’, and as a disturber of the status quo speaking ‘truth to power’ and self-consciously siding with those who are underrepresented and disadvantaged. 9 Beginning with a discussion of Said’s critique of ‘professionalism’ and the ‘cult of expertise’ as it applies to International Relations, I first argue the importance, for scholars of global politics, of taking politics seriously. Second, I turn to Said’s comments on the posture of exile and his critique of identity politics, particularly in its nationalist formulations, to ask what it means for students of global politics to take the global seriously. Finally, I attend to some of Said’s comments on humanism and contrapuntality to examine what IR scholars can learn from Said about feeling and thinking globally concretely, thoroughly and carefully. IR Professionals in an Age of Empire: From ‘International Experts’ to ‘Global Public Intellectuals’ One of the profound effects of the war on terror initiated by the Bush administration has been a significant constriction of a democratic public sphere, which has included the active and aggressive curtailment of intellectual and political dissent and a sharp delineation of national boundaries along with concentration of state power. The academy in this context has become a particularly embattled site with some highly disturbing onslaughts on academic freedom. At the most obvious level, this has involved fairly well-calibrated neoconservative attacks on US higher education that have invoked the mantra of ‘liberal bias’ and demanded legislative regulation and reform10 , an onslaught supported by a well-funded network of conservative think tanks, centres, institutes and ‘concerned citizen groups’ within and outside the higher education establishment 11 and with considerable reach among sitting legislators, jurists and policy-makers as well as the media. But what has in part made possible the encroachment of such nationalist and statist agendas has been a larger history of the corporatisation of the university and the accompanying ‘professionalisation’ that goes with it. Expressing concern with ‘academic acquiescence in the decline of public discourse in the United States’, Herbert Reid has examined the ways in which the university is beginning to operate as another transnational corporation 12 , and critiqued the consolidation of a ‘culture of professionalism’ where academic bureaucrats engage in bureaucratic role-playing, minor academic turf battles mask the larger managerial power play on campuses and the increasing influence of a relatively autonomous administrative elite and the rise of insular ‘expert cultures’ have led to academics relinquishing their claims to public space and authority. 13 While it is no surprise that the US academy should find itself too at that uneasy confluence of neoliberal globalising dynamics and exclusivist nationalist agendas that is the predicament of many contemporary institutions around the world, there is much reason for concern and an urgent need to rethink the role and place of intellectual labour in the democratic process. This is especially true for scholars of the global writing in this age of globalisation and empire. Edward Said has written extensively on the place of the academy as one of the few and increasingly precarious spaces for democratic deliberation and argued the necessity for public intellectuals immured from the seductions of power. 14 Defending the US academy as one of the last remaining utopian spaces, ‘the one public space available to real alternative intellectual practices: no other institution like it on such a scale exists anywhere else in the world today’ 15 , and lauding the remarkable critical theoretical and historical work of many academic intellectuals in a lot of his work, Said also complains that ‘the American University, with its munificence, utopian sanctuary, and remarkable diversity, has defanged (intellectuals)’ 16 . The most serious threat to the ‘intellectual vocation’, he argues, is ‘professionalism’ and mounts a pointed attack on the proliferation of ‘specializations’ and the ‘cult of expertise’ with their focus on ‘relatively narrow areas of knowledge’, ‘technical formalism’, ‘impersonal theories and methodologies’, and most worrisome of all, their ability and willingness to be seduced by power. 17 Said mentions in this context the funding of academic programmes and research which came out of the exigencies of the Cold War 18 , an area in which there was considerable traffic of political scientists (largely trained as IR and comparative politics scholars) with institutions of policy-making. Looking at various influential US academics as ‘organic intellectuals’ involved in a dialectical relationship with foreign policy-makers and examining the institutional relationships at and among numerous think tanks and universities that create convergent perspectives and interests, Christopher Clement has studied US intervention in the Third World both during and after the Cold War made possible and justified through various forms of ‘intellectual articulation’. 19 This is not simply a matter of scholars working for the state, but indeed a larger question of intellectual orientation. It is not uncommon for IR scholars to feel the need to formulate their scholarly conclusions in terms of its relevance for global politics, where ‘relevance’ is measured entirely in terms of policy wisdom. Edward Said’s searing indictment of US intellectuals – policy-experts and Middle East experts - in the context of the first Gulf War 20 is certainly even more resonant in the contemporary context preceding and following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The space for a critical appraisal of the motivations and conduct of this war has been considerably diminished by the expertise-framed national debate wherein certain kinds of ethical questions irreducible to formulaic ‘for or against’ and ‘costs and benefits’ analysis can simply not be raised. In effect, what Said argues for, and IR scholars need to pay particular heed to, is an understanding of ‘intellectual relevance’ that is larger and more worthwhile, that is about the posing of critical, historical, ethical and perhaps unanswerable questions rather than the offering of recipes and solutions, that is about politics (rather than techno-expertise) in the most fundamental and important senses of the vocation. 21 It is not surprising that the ‘cult of expertise’ that is increasingly driving the study of global politics has occurred in conjunction with a larger depoliticisation of many facets of global politics, which since the 1980s has accompanied a more general prosperity-bred complacency about politics in the Anglo-European world, particularly in the US. There are many examples of this. It is evident, for instance, in the understanding of globalisation as TINA market-driven rationality – inevitable, inexorable and ultimately, as Thomas Friedman’s many writings boldly proclaim, apolitical. 22 If development was always the ‘anti-politics machine’ that James Ferguson so brilliantly adumbrated more than a decade ago, it is now seen almost entirely as technocratic aid and/or charitable humanitarianism delivered via professionalised bureaucracies, whether they are IGOs or INGOs. 23 From the more expansive environmental and feminist-inspired understandings of ‘human security’, understandings of global security are once again increasingly being reduced to (military) strategy and global democratisation to technical recipes for ‘regime change’ and ‘good governance’. There should be little surprise in such a context that the ‘war on terror’ has translated into a depoliticised response to a dehistoricised understanding of the ‘roots of terror’. For IR scholars, reclaiming politics is a task that will involve working against the grain of expertise-oriented professionalism in a world that increasingly understands its own workings in apolitical terms. What Said offers in the place of professionalism is a spirit of ‘amateurism’ – ‘the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession’, an amateur intellectual being one ‘who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens as well as with other societies’. ‘(T)he intellectual’s spirit as an amateur’, Said argues, ‘can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts.’ 24 This requires not just a stubborn intellectual independence, but also shedding habits, jargons, tones that have inhibited IR scholars from conversing with thinkers and intellectuals outside the discipline, colleagues in history, anthropology, cultural studies, comparative literature, sociology as well as in non-academic venues, who raise the question of the global in different and sometimes contradictory ways. Arguing that the intellectual’s role is a ‘non-specialist’ one, 25 Said bemoans the disappearance of the ‘general secular intellectual’ – ‘figures of learning and authority, whose general scope over many fields gave them more than professional competence, that is, a critical intellectual style’. 26 Discarding the professional straitjacket of expertise-oriented IR to venture into intellectual terrains that raise questions of global power and cultural negotiations in a myriad of intersecting and cross-cutting ways will yield richer and fuller conceptions of the ‘politics’ of global politics. Needless to say, inter- and crossdisciplinarity will also yield richer and fuller conceptions of the ‘global’ of global politics. It is to that that I turn next.}

The affirmative’s evidence is not neutral – their sources distort the facts to justify a particular policy agenda – the 1ACs characterization of the revolts result from an uncritical acceptance of racially biased information from elite media institutions 

Rosen 11 (Nir, former fellow at the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, fellow at the New America Foundation, and Distinguished Visitor at The American Academy in Berlin, he is a widely accalimed journalist and writer @ Jadaliyya, he has written extensively on Iraq and Afghanistan, "A Critique of Reporting on the Middle East" May 19, Online: www.jadaliyya.com/pages/contributors/2834)

_{Too often consumers of mainstream media are victims of a fraud. You think you can trust the articles you read, why wouldn’t you, you think you can sift through the ideological bias and just get the facts. But you don’t know the ingredients that go into the product you buy. It is important to understand how knowledge about current events in the Middle East is produced before relying on it. Even when there are no apparent ideological biases such as those one often sees when it comes to reporting about Israel, there are fundamental problems at the epistemological and methodological level. These create distortions and falsehoods and justify the narrative of those with power. According to the French intellectual and scholar Francois Burgat, there are two main types of intellectuals tasked with explaining the “other” to Westerners. He and Bourdieu describe the “negative intellectual” who aligns his beliefs and priorities with those of the state and centers his perspective on serving the interest of power and gaining proximity to it. And secondly, there is what Burgat terms as “the façade intellectual,” whose role in society is to confirm to Western audiences their already-held notions, beliefs, preconceptions, and racisms regarding the “other.” Journalists writing for the mainstream media, as well as their local interlocutors, often fall into both categories. A vast literature exists on the impossibility of journalism in its classic, liberal sense with all the familiar tropes on objectivity, neutrality, and “transmitting reality.” However, and perhaps out of a lack of an alternative source of legitimation, major mainstream media outlets in the West continue to grasp to these notions with ever more insistence. The Middle East is an exceptionally suitable place for the Western media to learn about itself and its future because it is the scene where all pretensions of objectivity, neutrality towards power, and critical engagement faltered spectacularly. Journalists are the archetype of ideological tools who create culture and reproduce knowledge. Like all tools, journalist don't create or produce. They are not the masters of discourse or ideological formations but products of them and servants to them. Their function is to represent a class and perpetuate the dominant ideology instead of building a counter hegemonic and revolutionary ideology, or narrative, in this case. They are the organic intellectuals of the ruling class. Instead of being the voice of the people or the working class, journalists are too often the functional tools for a bourgeois ruling class. They produce and disseminate culture and meaning for the system and reproduce its values, allowing it to hegemonize the field of culture, and since journalism today has a specific political economy, they are all products of the hegemonic discourse and the moneyed class. The working class has no networks within regimes of power. This applies too to Hollywood and television entertainment and series: it is all the same intellectuals producing them. Even journalists with pretensions of being serious usually only serve elites and ignore social movements. Journalism tends to be state centric, focusing on elections, institutions, formal politics and overlooking politics of contention, informal politics, and social movements. Those with reputations as brave war reporters who hop around the world, parachuting Geraldo-style (Anderson Cooper is the new liberal Geraldo) into conflicts from Yemen to Afghanistan, typically only confirm Americans' views of the world. Journalism simplifies, which means it de-historicizes. Journalism in the Middle East is too often a violent act of representation. Western journalists take reality and amputate it, contort it, fit it into a predetermined discourse or taxonomy. The American media always want to fit events in the region into a narrative of American Empire. The recent assassination of Osama Bin Laden was greeted with a collective shrug of the shoulders in the Middle East, where he had always been irrelevant, but for Americans and hence for the American media it was a historic and defining moment. Too often contact with the West has defined events in the Middle East and is assumed to drive its history, but the so called Arab Spring with its revolutions and upheavals evokes anxiety among white Americans. They are unsettled by the autogenetic liberation of brown people. While the Arab Spring may represent a revolutionary transformation of the Arab world, a massive blow to Islamist politics and the renaissance of secular and leftist Arab nationalist politics. But the American media has been obsessed with Islamists, looking for them behind every demonstration, and the uprisings have been often treated as if they were something threatening and as if they had led to chaos. And all too often it just comes down to “what does this mean for Israel’s security?” The aspirations of hundreds of millions of freedom seeking Arabs are subordinated to the security concerns of five million Jews who colonized Palestine. There is a strong element of chauvinism and racism behind the reporting. Like American soldiers, American journalists like to use the occasional local word to show they have unlocked the mysteries of the culture. The chauvinism issue was discussed a lot during Desert Storm, where journalists started to use "we." Liberals won’t say "we" but they are still circumscribed by Imperial, white supremist paradigms. “Wasta” is one such word. One American bureau chief in Iraq told me that Muqtada Sadr had a lot of wasta now so he could prevent a long American presence. Inshallah is another such word. And in Afghanistan, it's pushtunwali, the secret to understanding Afghans. Islam is also treated like a code that can be unlocked and then locals can be understood as if they are programmed only through Islam. Arab culture and Islam are spoken of the way race was once spoken of in India and Africa, and it is difficult to portray Arabs and Muslims as the good guys unless they are “like us”: Google executives, elites who speak English, dress trendy, and use Facebook. So they are made to represent the revolutions while the poor, the workers, the subalterns, the majority who don’t even have internet access let alone Twitter accounts, are ignored. And in order to make the revolutions in Tunisia and especially Egypt seem non threatening, the nonviolent tactics are emphasized while the many acts of violent resistance to regime oppression are completely ignored. This is not just the journalists’ fault. It is driven by American discourse, which drives the editors back in New York and Washington.}

This form of deliberation shuts down the public sphere – their impact calculus reduces the academy to a space for the empty repetition of unsubstantiated catastrophic impacts – this culminates in widespread public complacency in the face of jingoistic politics

Elmer and Opel, 2006 (Bell, Globemedia Research Chair in the School of Radio TV Arts at Ryerson University, and Andy Opel, assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Florida State University, “Surviving the Inevitable Future,” July-September, Cultural Studies, 20:4-5)

_{Throughout the media discourse over the virtues or moral failings of the policy analysis markets, broader questions about the possibility of individuals ‘knowing’ anything new was never addressed. The problem of citizens producing ‘accurate’ information under the social conditions of consolidated media implicated with defense contractors is clearly problematic. With the dominant US news media issuing a series of mea culpa explanations for their failure to investigate governmental claims about WMD and Iraq Al Qaeda connections leading up the start of the Iraq war, coupled with scandals about forged documents, non-investigative journalism and a US, presidential election campaign dominated by discussion of television ads over social issues, the possibility of a well informed electorate making accurate forecasts of terrorist activity was unlikely and rather circular people betting on possible events based on information disseminated from the government seeking insights from the general public. Nevertheless, proponents of PAM assailed the critics for injecting morality into an amoral (sic) process. What we are left with is a call to embrace a market system that is driven, not by rational judgment and intelligence, but rather fueled by the emotion of fear. Morality, dissent, criticism and analytical thought must be evacuated for the market to perform smoothly. Citizens turned gamblers take part in homeland (in)security by wagering money on potential terror outcomes, based on information provided by a media that reproduces government allegation as fact. As we saw in the height of the Wall Street Technology insider driven bubble of the late 1990s, there was no need for analysis of a businesses balance sheet, it could be assumed that a ‘new economy’ had emerged. Decisions were made based on an inevitable future where evidence and balance sheets were replaced by optimism. Conversely, with PAM the market is driven by pessimism, the fear of what will happen. Conclusion In the lead up to the presidential election of 2004, the Bush Administration repeatedly defended the strategy of preemption and the actions taken against Iraq with statements that ‘the world is safer’. This rhetorical turn exemplifies the language of the survival society, where statements about national security require little to no proof or evidence. Most Americans have no way to either refute or to affirm the central question raised: are we safer? Indeed in the face of so many troubling questions and such fearful uncertainties, facts fall by the wayside. Thus, in many respects the survivor society is sustained by a suspension of disbelief. Morality, critical thinking and dissent actively inhibit the smooth functioning of society. As inevitability becomes the dominant trope, individual agency is redirected toward survival, a hyper individualism that evacuates the possibility of critical exchange in the public sphere. Critical exchanges, dissent, hindsight and re-evaluation are said to support the enemy and undermine the preemptive efforts. Citizens are called upon to continue shopping and maintain ‘normal’ behavior because to do anything less would disrupt the flow of consumer goods and services and weaken a fragile economy. Theoretically we need to continue to question how surveillance functions in an environment where evidence is not needed to justify state violence, arrests, incarceration, etc. (America’s pre-emptive policy at home and abroad). We’ve characterized this as shift in reasoning, from ‘what-if’ simulation models where surveillance intelligence fuels forecasting models, to ‘when, then’ thinking where the future is deemed inevitable (i.e. ‘not if but when terrorists will attack’). The RAND and DARPA terrorist preparation programs and terrorist futures market examples demonstrate that’when, then’ reasoning is not as much about tracking and monitoring behaviour as it is evacuating the possibility of social critique and political debate. According to DARPA and other ‘betting’ proponents, rational thought and ethical questions about the market disable their predictive powers. Thus, in the survivor society social control is achieved through distancing the need for evidence and installing forecasting technologies that by their very nature must function critique-free. The discursive contours of the survivor society offer stark contrasts to those of the Cold War era and the emerging surveillance society. During World War II, the US government implored citizens to sacrifice for the collective good, initiating everything from recycling programs to gardening as a way to conserve resources and boost food production. Victory gardens became a symbol of civic participation, where individual actions were directed toward a collective good. These programs were materially based and discursively centered around active participation in the war effort. Alternatively, the war on terror has elicited calls for a hyper-individualism that focuses on the immaterial faith, wagering and the primacy of individual survival. Civic participation is equated with maintaining (or increasing) consumer debt, participating in the privatized ‘marketplace of ideas’ futures markets and avoiding any temptation to inject morality, dissent, criticism or analytical thought lest they aid and abet the enemy and interfere with the smooth functioning of predictive markets. This new rhetoric of the survivor society is amplified through an increasingly monolithic commercial televisual media system. Although policy documents offer more nuanced predictions about the war on terror, public statements by a host of government officials, broadcast repeatedly as sound bites, describe a stark, inevitable future of unending terror threats. The contradictions between the written documents and the public statements suggest a willful attempt to harness the immediacy (and uniformity) of network and cable news outlets to distribute and maintain an atmosphere of fear and emotion that encourages participation in the new regimes of hyper individualism. For those who resist these new regimes, choosing to dissent, ask for evidence, or request pubic documents, their actions are met with increased hostility and accusations of irrationality. Moreover, the foundational concept of preemption, predicated on an inevitable future that must be intervened, undermines the possibility of dissent. If a future is inevitable, to question that future is to question reality a mark of irrationality or worse. Debate, deliberation and reflection are by-passed by a discourse of inevitability, leaving dissent among the ranks of the delusional. Thus the new victory garden grows from the seeds of fear, fed by emotion, and harvested as a fragmented populace devoid of transparency and cut out of the democratic process. Members of the survivor society are asked to prepare themselves (as individuals) through a series of purchases and by remaining vigilant, all without any request for collective sacrifice or coordination. The neo-liberal model becomes embodied in a new response to war, a privatization of self-preservation with the possibility of becoming your own war profiteer as you wager on future catastrophes. When we each become a micro Halliburton, we can band together to resist to the impulse to investigate impropriety or ethical lapses because the fraud may be our very own.}

This form of academic engagement blinds us to the underpinnings of the US response to the Arab revolutions – democracy assistance is a shallow gesture to remove unpopular manifestations of American coercion while selectively engaging actors who remain subservient to US interests. In the 1AC, Arab democracy is welcomed, yet solely in terms of what outcome best maintains American hegemony and economic prosperity.

Marshall, 2011 (Andrew, Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization, “America’s Strategic Repression of the ‘Arab Awakening’,” Feb 10, Online:  http://coto2.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/america%E2%80%99s-strategic-repression-of-the-%E2%80%98arab-awakening%E2%80%99/)

_{This spurred on the development of an American strategy in the Arab world, modeled on similar strategies pursued in recent decades in other parts of the world, in promoting “democratization,” by developing close contacts with ‘civil society’ organizations, opposition leaders, media sources, and student organizations. The aim is not to promote an organic Arab democracy ‘of the people, and for the people,’ but rather to promote an evolutionary “democratization” in which the old despots of American strategic support are removed in favour of a neoliberal democratic system, in which the outward visible institutions of democracy are present (multi-party elections, private media, parliaments, constitutions, active civil society, etc); yet, the power-holders within that domestic political system remain subservient to U.S. economic and strategic interests, continuing to follow the dictates of the IMF and World Bank, supporting America’s military hegemony in the region, and “opening up” the Arab economies to be “integrated” into the world economy. Thus, “democratization” becomes an incredibly valuable strategy for maintaining hegemony; a modern re-hash of “Let them eat cake!” Give the people the ‘image’ of democracy and establish and maintain a co-dependent relationship with the new elite. Thus, democracy for the people becomes an exercise in futility, where people’s ‘participation’ becomes about voting between rival factions of elites, who all ultimately follow the orders of Washington. This strategy also has its benefit for the maintenance of American power in the region. While dictators have their uses in geopolitical strategy, they can often become too independent of the imperial power and seek to determine the course of their country separate from U.S. interests, and are subsequently much more challenging to remove from power (i.e., Saddam Hussein). With a “democratized” system, changing ruling parties and leaders becomes much easier, by simply calling elections and supporting opposition parties. Bringing down a dictator is always a more precarious situation than “changing the guard” in a liberal democratic system. However, again, the situation in the Arab world is still more complicated than this brief overview, and American strategic concerns must take other potentialities into consideration. While American strategists were well aware of the growing threat to stability in the region, and the rising discontent among the majority of the population, the strategists tended to identify the aim as “democratization” through evolution, not revolution. In this sense, the uprisings across the Arab world pose a major strategic challenge for America. While ties have been made with civil society and other organizations, they haven’t all necessarily had the ability to be firmly entrenched, organized and mobilized. In short, it would appear that America was perhaps unprepared for uprisings to take place this soon. The sheer scale and rapid growth of the protests and uprisings makes the situation all the more complicated, since they are not dealing with one nation alone, but rather an entire region (arguably one of, if not the most strategically important region in the world), and yet they must assess and engage the situation on a country-by-country basis. One danger arises in a repeat in the Arab world of the trends advanced in Latin America over the past decade: namely, the growth of populist democracy. The protests have brought together a wide array of society – civil society, students, the poor, Islamists, opposition leaders, etc. – and so America, with ties to many of these sectors (overtly and covertly), must now make many choices in regards of who to support. Another incredibly important factor to take into consideration is military intervention. America has firmly established ties with the militaries in this region, and it appears evident that America is influencing military actions in Tunisia. Often, the reflex position of imperial power is to support the military, facilitate a coup, or employ repression. Again, this strategy would be determined on a country-by-country basis. With a popular uprising, military oppression will have the likely effect of exacerbating popular discontent and resistance, so strategic use of military influence is required. This also leaves us with the potential for the ‘Yemen option’: war and destabilization. While presenting its own potential for negative repercussions (namely, in instigating a much larger and more radical uprising), engaging in overt or covert warfare, destabilizing countries or regions, is not taboo in American strategic circles. In fact, this is the strategy that has been deployed in Yemen since the emergence of the Southern Movement in 2007, a liberation movement seeking secession from the U.S.-supported dictatorship. Shortly after the emergence of the Southern Movement, al-Qaeda appeared in Yemen, prompting U.S. military intervention. The Yemeni military, armed, trained and funded by the United States, has been using its military might to attempt to crush the Southern Movement as well as a rebel movement in the North. In short, the ‘Arab Awakening’ presents possibly the greatest strategic challenge to American hegemony in decades. The likely result will be a congruence of multiple simultaneously employed strategies including: “democratization,” oppression, military intervention and destabilization. Again, it could be a mistake to assume one strategy for the whole region, but rather to assess it on a country-by-country basis, based upon continuing developments and progress in the ‘Awakening’.}

The impact to this unquestioned trajectory in American foreign policy is serial policy failure and mass violence – the racially charged frames filling the gaps in the affirmative’s logic mobilize public sentiment in support of perpetual imperialist interventions

Batur, 2007 (Pinar, PhD @ UT-Austin – Prof. of Scociology @ Vassar, The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide,” in Handbook of the The Soiology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 441-443)

_{Albert Memmi argued that “We have no idea what the colonized would have been without colonization, but we certainly see what happened as a result of it” (Memmi, 1965:114). Events surrounding Iraq and Katrina provide three critical points regarding global racism. The first one is that segregation, exclusion, and genocide are closely related and facilitated by institutions employing the white racial frame to legitimize their ideologies and actions. The second one is the continuation of violence, either sporadically or systematically, with singleminded determination from segregation, to exclusion, to genocide. The third point is that legitimization and justification of violence is embedded in the resignation that global racism will not alter its course, and there is no way to challenge global racism. Together these three points facilitate the base for war and genocide. In 1993, in the afermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Samuel P. Huntington racialized the future of global conflict by declaring that “the clash of civilizations will dominate global politics” (Huntington 1993:22). He declared that the fault line will be drawn by crisis and bloodshed. Huntington’s end of ideology meant the West is now expected to confront the Confucian-Islamic “other.” Huntington intoned “Islam has bloody borders,” and he expected the West to develop cooperation among Christian brethren, while limiting the military strength of the “Confucian-Islamic” civilizations, by exploiting the conflicts within them. When the walls of communism fell, a new enemy was found in Islam, and loathing and fear of Islam exploded with September 11. The new color line means “we hate them not because of what they do, but because of who they are and what they believe in.” The vehement denial of racism, and the fervent assertion of democratic equality in the West, are matched by detestation and angetr toward Muslims, who are not European, not Western, and therefore not civilized. Since the context of “different” and “inferior” has become not just a function of race or gender, but of culture and ideology, it has become another instrument of belief and the selfrighteous racism of American expansionism and “new imperialism.” The assumed superiority of the West has become the new “White Man’s Burden,” to expand and to recreate the world in an American image. The rationalization of this expansion, albeit to “protect our freedoms and our way of life” or “to combat terrorism,” is fueled by racist ideology, obscured in the darkness behind the façade of inalienable rights of the West to defend civilization against enemies in global culture wars. At the turn of the 20th century, the “Terrible Turk” was the image that summarized the enemy of Europe and the antagonism toward the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire, stretching from Europe to the Middle East, and across North Africa. Perpetuation of this imagery in American foreign policy exhibited how capitalism met with orientalist constructs in the white racial frame of the western mind (VanderLippe 1999). Orientalism is based on the conceptualization of the “Oriental” other—Eastern, Islamic societies as static, irrational, savage, fanatical, and inferior to the peaceful, rational, scientific “Occidental” Europe and the West (Said 1978). This is as an elastic construct, proving useful to describe whatever is considered as the latest threat to Western economic expansion, political and cultural hegemony, and global domination for exploitation and absorption. Post-Enlightenment Europe and later America used this iconography to define basic racist assumptions regarding their uncontestable right to impose political and economic dominance globally. When the Soviet Union existed as an opposing power, the orientalist vision of the 20th century shifted from the image of the “Terrible Turk” to that of the “Barbaric Russian Bear.” In this context, orientalist thought then, as now, set the terms of exclusion. It racialized exclusion to define the terms of racial privilege and superiority. By focusing on ideology, orientalism recreated the superior race, even though there was no “race.” It equated the hegemony of Western civilization with the “right ideological and cultural framework.” It segued into war and annihilation and genocide and continued to foster and aid the recreation of racial hatred of others with the collapse of the Soviet “other.” Orientalism’s global racist ideology reformed in the 1990s with Muslims and Islamic culture as to the “inferior other.” Seeing Muslims as opponents of Christian civilization is not new, going back to the Crusades, but the elasticity and reframing of this exclusion is evident in recent debates regarding Islam in the West, one raised by the Pope and the other by the President of the United States. Against the background of the latest Iraq war, attacks in the name of Islam, racist attacks on Muslims in Europe and in the United States, and detention of Muslims without trial in secret prisons, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in September 2006 at Regensburg University in Germany. He quoted a 14 th -century Byzantine emperor who said, “show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” In addition, the Pope discussed the concept of Jihad, which he defined as Islamic “holy war,” and said, “violence in the name of religion was contrary to God’s nature and to reason.” He also called for dialogue between cultures and religions (Fisher 2006b). While some Muslims found the Pope’s speech “regrettable,” it also caused a spark of angry protests against the Pope’s “ill informed and bigoted” comments, and voices raised to demand an apology (Fisher 2006a). Some argue that the Pope was ordering a new crusade, for Christian civilization to conquer terrible and savage Islam. When Benedict apologized, organizations and parliaments demanded a retraction and apology from the Pope and the Vatican (Lee 2006). Yet, when the Pope apologized, it came as a second insult, because in his apology he said, “I’m deeply sorry for the reaction in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibilities of Muslims” (Reuters 2006). In other words, he is sorry that Muslims are intolerant to the point of fanaticism. In the racialized world, the Pope’s apology came as an effort to show justification for his speech—he was not apologizing for being insulting, but rather saying that he was sorry that “Muslim” violence had proved his point. Through orientalist and the white racial frame, those who are subject to racial hatred and exclusion themselves become agents of racist legitimization. Like Huntington, Bernard Lewis was looking for Armageddon in his Wall Street Journal article warning that August 22, 2006, was the 27 th day of the month of Rajab in the Islamic calendar and is considered a holy day, when Muhammad was taken to heaven and returned. For Muslims this day is a day of rejoicing and celebration. But for Lewis, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, “this might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and, if necessary, of the world” (Lewis 2006). He cautions that “it is far from certain that [the President of Iran] Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events for August 22, but it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.” Lewis argues that Muslims, unlike others, seek self-destruction in order to reach heaven faster. For Lewis, Muslims in this mindset don’t see the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as a constraint but rather as “an inducement” (Lewis 2006). In 1993, Huntington pleaded that “in a world of different civilizations, each . . .will have to learn to coexist with the others” (Huntington 1993:49). Lewis, like Pope Benedict, views Islam as the apocalyptic destroyer of civilization and claims that reactions against orientalist, racist visions such as his actually prove the validity of his position. Lewis’s assertions run parallel with George Bush’s claims. In response to the alleged plot to blow up British airliners, Bush claimed, “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation” (TurkishPress.com. 2006; Beck 2006). Bush argued that “the fight against terrorism is the ideological struggle of the 21st century” and he compared it to the 20th century’s fight against fascism, Nazism, and communism. Even though “Islamo-fascist” has for some time been a buzzword for Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity on the talk-show circuit, for the president of the United States it drew reactions worldwide. Muslim Americans found this phrase “contributing to the rising level of hostility to Islam and the American Muslim community” (Raum 2006). Considering that since 2001, Bush has had a tendency to equate “war on terrorism” with “crusade,” this new rhetoric equates ideology with religion and reinforces the worldview of a war of civilizations. As Bush said, “ . . .we still aren’t completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in” (CNN 2006). Exclusion in physical space is only matched by exclusion in the imagination, and racialized exclusion has an internal logic leading to the annihilation of the excluded. Annihilation, in this sense, is not only designed to maintain the terms of racial inequality, both ideologically and physically, but is institutionalized with the vocabulary of self-protection. Even though the terms of exclusion are never complete, genocide is the definitive point in the exclusionary racial ideology, and such is the logic of the outcome of the exclusionary process, that it can conclude only in ultimate domination. War and genocide take place with compliant efficiency to serve the global racist ideology with dizzying frequency. The 21st century opened up with genocide, in Darfur.}

In spite of these trends, knowledge production and policymaking are a process – as a judge you can vote to rebuild our understanding of democracy assistance from the ground up. The alternative is to reject the affirmative’s positioning of the United States as an expert on democracy – by refusing the imposition of a Westernized benchmark on the Arab revolts and interrogating the strategic motives behind the affirmative’s policy, the ballot can politicize the debate about democracy assistance.

Hobson ‘9 _{(Christopher, Department of International Politics Aberystwyth University, Alternatives, “The Limits of Liberal-Democracy Promotion,” Alternatives #34, EBSCO)}

_{Democracy promotion is now at a transitional moment. The deeply divisive “freedom agenda” of the Bush administration helped generate a substantial backlash against a much broader and more diverse set of practices. The growing strength of China and Russia, two non-liberaldemocratic powers, is further generating an international context far less favorable to the spread and support of democracy compared with the 1990s. Nonetheless, democracy promotion has become deeply embedded in international politics, and is engaged in by a wide variety of actors: states, international organizations, NGOs, and even transnational corporations. And even if the liberal zeitgeist has faded somewhat, democracy remains the most widely accepted form of government in contemporary politics. As such, it can be expected that democracy promotion will continue into the foreseeable future, which means it is vital to consider how possible it is to move toward a more open, plural, and reflexive set of practices. This must begin with expanding how democracy is conceived, and engaging with a much broader range of democratic models. Paradoxically, the normative and political strength of democracy, which has been fundamental in embedding democracy promotion in international politics, has simultaneously operated to limit how the idea is understood. The widespread consensus over the value of democracy interacts with, and encourages, some of liberalism’s most unreformed Whiggish tendencies. The contingency and specificity of liberal democracy is forgotten or overlooked, as it is taken as a universal good, applicable to all, identified as the best panacea for the problems developing states face. Conceiving of democracy in such terms can, however, suggest a less reflexive and more absolutist set of practices, as the actors encouraging liberal democracy are overly assured of its validity. In this sense, it would be much more productive to move to a position that is more reticent about the virtues of liberal democracy, which questions its necessity and applicability, while simultaneously remaining more open to other democratic possibilities. Not only is it necessary to denaturalize the liberal democratic model and challenge the overly comfortable and misplaced universalism, but democracy-promotion practice could benefit also from showing more awareness of the different historical contexts within which democratization takes place. To begin with, clearly states now democratizing do so in circumstances significantly different from those of the first and second waves. Indeed, contemporary cases of democratization are removed from much of the third wave, which commenced over three decades ago in a notably different geopolitical climate. It is helpful to recall the major reservations the United States had about the Portuguese transition that started the third wave, with the experience initially suggesting democratization would be a destabilizing process that may impact on wider security concerns of the bloc of liberal democracies.61 The larger point is that if transitions are occurring at different world historical moments, not to mention specific local contexts with their own histories and cultures, it is perhaps misguided to expect that a similar form of democracy can emerge from such variable contexts. It is necessary to revise our conceptions of democracy to adjust to these changed historical circumstances.62 For example, in the case of the United States, liberal democracy was established in a nonfeudal environment remarkably favorable to individual liberty.63 The result was the formation of a distinctively Lockean version of liberal democracy, one in which liberalism has tended to dominate.64 This model, emphasizing the protection of negative freedoms and especially property rights, may be suitable for the United States, but it is dangerous to mistake this particular experience for something more universal. In this regard, Charles Taylor makes the important observation that:”Transitions to democracy will be very different from each other because the people concerned are moving from very different predemocratic repertories and imaginaries and are often moving to rather different variants of democratic imaginary. And these two phases are naturally linked.”65 Considering how contextual factors may influence the kind of democracy desired in different transitional settings is an important step in opening up the way democracy itself is conceived. An odd situation currently prevails in the thought and practice of democracy promotion, in which there is remarkably little debate or contestation over democracy’s meaning and the forms it can take. In political theory, democracy is the quintessential “contested concept,”66 yet in comparative politics and international relations a narrow liberal consensus dominates. An expanded engagement with democratic theory is long overdue. Even staying within liberalism, alternate versions of liberal democracy could be considered in a more comprehensive and systematic manner. While often incorporating broader dimensions of welfare liberalism into their democracies at home, abroad the United States and many other actors tend to work with a far more restrictive conception that emphasizes negative liberties and a limited state and prioritizes the economic sphere. There are alternate liberal traditions, however, with more expansive notions of liberty and community, which may be better suited in certain settings. Furthermore, the grave socioeconomic problems and inequalities found in many transitional countries may call for a form of democracy (liberal or otherwise) that accords a greater role for the state and the provision of basic social goods. Exploring and debating different conceptions of democracy is itself a worthwhile democratic process. There are a wide range of models and variations of democracy that can be engaged with and drawn upon. Among these are direct forms of democracy, inspired by the Athenian experience; democracy based on the republican conception of freedom as nondomination; social welfare versions of democracy, as found in Scandinavia; participatory models that seek to foster a much greater level of involvement from citizens compared to liberalism; deliberative democracy, which emphasizes the communicative aspects of democracy; transnational and cosmopolitan proposals that look to transcend the nation-state; and experiments in green democracy, reacting to the growing ecological crisis. Admittedly, a wholesale adoption of any of these alternate models of democracy is—for the time being—unlikely. Nonetheless, there is great potential to incorporate certain aspects into an expanded and revised liberal democratic model. For example, in 2004 the government of British Columbia formed a “citizens’ assembly” of 160 near-randomly selected citizens to consider the province’s electoral system and redesign it if necessary. This is an instructive case of incorporating deliberative ideas within a liberal democratic framework. Indeed, entertaining alternative theories of democracy need not entail abandoning liberal commitments and may assist in making it function better. Current historical circumstances differ notably from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the liberal democratic form was constructed, and as such, it is worthwhile considering how other traditions can assist in thinking about contemporary democratization. Given the huge library of democratic knowledge and experience that exists, democracy promoters are [sic] handicapping [limiting] their efforts needlessly by working within an unnecessarily restrictive liberal framework. Burnell’s suggestion that it would be “reprehensible” to promote “models of democracy that are judged too risky to entertain at home” is both overly conservative and unnecessarily peremptory.67 Indeed, one could make the argument that this already happens: Due to the Washington consensus and policies like shock therapy, the model of liberal democracy promoted is often different—considerably more liberal—than in established democracies, which have quietly incorporated a strong social democratic dimension, as Berman has convincingly shown.68 Indeed, the manner in which liberal democracy has changed in the West to respond to different historical circumstances and sets of questions suggests that the most suitable kind of democracy is not always a given. Burnell’s viewpoint is reflective of a pervasive tendency for a commitment to a particular form of democracy, usually a liberal variant, to inhibit the ability to recognize other democratic possibilities latent in specific contexts.69 External democracy promoters need to be far more sensitive to localized practices that may exist and be understood as democratic, but that do not correspond to the standard liberal model. This is something Sadiki has highlighted in relation to the Middle East, where a liberal worldview prevents recognition of other democratic possibilities there.70 Building on this suggestion that greater attention needs to be paid to different democratic experiences and possibilities, a more pluralistic approach to democracy promotion centered on communicating and sharing different democratic conceptions has considerable transformational potential. Instead of assessing the “quality” of democracy according to an ill-fitting and problematic Western liberal benchmark, there should be more openness to alternatives, combined with a humility generated through recognition of the various ways democracy can be understood and realized. Learning should be much more dialogic in nature, going in both directions: Even the most established democracies likely have something to discover from more recent democratizers.71 As Teivainen argues, “In the world of democracy promotion, this could mean that the democratic norms should be collectively produced in as democratic spaces as possible, rather than assuming that the fact that norms are based in the European democratic heritage inherently makes them legitimate and suitable for the whole world.”72 From this perspective, reshaping democracy promotion practices goes hand in hand with expanding democracy itself.}