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DISASTER PORNOGRAPHY
And, This turns case- the perpetuation of Afro-Pessimism via the Aff’s disaster
pornography creates more and more negative perceptions about Africa, and deters aid.
This is the root cause of the Affirmative harms
Olujobi 06 (Gbemisola “The Africa You Need to Know”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_the_africa_you_need_to_know/ ; Posted on Nov 28, 2006)
How does this negative portrayal affect Africa’s fortunes? These former heads of state, who should know,
because of their former and relatively still vantage positions, were unanimous that this negative portrayal
“has profound relevance to everything— including the world considering Africa as a worthy
investment venue and viewing Africa as a valuable trading partner ...it is reasonable to posit that
negative perceptions lead to negative outcomes, namely, lower levels of aid and lower levels of
investment.” Facts are sacred and the truth must be told. Despite generous human and natural endowments,
Africa is home to 32 of the 38 highly indebted countries of the world and remains the only continent where
the proportion of the population in extreme poverty is growing. Thirty-six and two-tenths percent of
Africans live on less than a dollar a day. Most African countries are at the bottom of the United
Nations’ overall human development index, which also measures education, life expectancy, gross
domestic product and other indicators of development. The overwhelming majority of African countries
are not on target to meet any of the Millennium Development Goals agreed upon at the United Nations in
2000. Sad, but all true.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 5
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
The aff gives power to disaster journalism- which exploits the suffering of others, while
causing more of that suffering itself
Olujobi 06 (Gbemisola “The Africa You Need to Know”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_the_africa_you_need_to_know/ ; Posted on Nov 28, 2006)
Putting an indelible question mark on disaster journalism, they say, “Reduced to nameless extras in the
shadows behind Western aid workers or disaster tourists, the grieving, hurting and humiliated human
beings are not asked if they want to be portrayed in this degrading way.” Has anyone ever considered
this? They also reveal that “Somali doctors and nurses have expressed shock at the conduct of film crews in
hospitals. They rush through crowded corridors, leaping over stretchers, dashing to film the agony
before it passes. They hold bedside vigils to record the moment of death. When the Italian actress
Sophia Loren visited Somalia, the paparazzi trampled on children as they scrambled to film her
feeding a little girl—three times. This is disaster pornography.”
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 9
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Media representations of Africa use disaster images instead of using useful knowledge and
African perspectives to capture attention. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where all
we can know are the images.
Makunike 93[Ezekiel Makunike, Former Zimbabwe Director of Information, Out of Africa: Media Stereotypes
Shape Images, Center for Media Literacy]
I requested permission from the news departments of those two daily newspapers to glean through their
wastepaper baskets for telex sheets from wire services containing stories transmitted from Africa. I
conducted this search for most of an entire week. While indeed not much was offered by the news
services, I was nevertheless surprised to find that much of the little that came in was either "killed" or
simply spiked for a more suitable publication date that never came.
When I asked an editor to explain these decisions, he told me that stories on Africa are routinely ignored
because of a presumed lack of reader interest. "You see," he said, "America does not know Africa well.
It never had a colony on that continent. Thus, unless the story has a strong human interest potential,
there is no point using it, since no one will read it."
Of course, the editor was both creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and ignoring an obvious fact. The
prophecy was simple: White Americans would never become aware of Africa unless they could learn
enough about it to be interested, a process the media has a lot to do with.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 10
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
The affirmative uses their disaster pornography to entertain themselves- to them its
entertaining. This is what desensitizes the world to all suffering
Moeller 99 (Susan, assistant professor in the philip merrill college of journalism at the university of Maryland,
“Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death” 1999; page 35-37)
What does it mean when we become blasé about the pictures we see? Images of suffering and disaster—
from pictures of the grieving Princes William and Harry to photos of the flattened Mercedes in the Paris
tunnel—are appropriated to appeal emotionally to readers and viewers. As The New York Times
columnist Max Frankel says, “Conflict is our favorite kind of news.” Crises are turned into a social
experience that we can grasp; pain is commercialized, wedged between the advertisements for
hemorrhoid remedies and headache medicines. In that cultural context, suffering becomes
infotainment—just another commodity, another moment of pain to get its minute or column in the
news. Our experience and our understanding of a crisis is weakened, diluted and distorted. If the news
shows prompt us to equate chronic famine with chronic fatigue syndrome we are somewhat relieved. It helps
absolve us of responsibility for what we see and can do little about. So with relief, we forget and go on with
our everyday lives—until some other crisis image seizes our attention for a second.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 11
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Representations of suffering shift the focus from a call to altruistic action to a desire to
consume suffering. This is the affirmative’s façade to win the round.
Rozario 03 [Kevin Rozario, assistant professor in the American studies program at Smith College, Delicious
Horrors, American Quarterly 55.3, 417-455]
This is a startling phrase—"delicious horror." The horror seems straightforward enough (though it is
worth reminding ourselves that while revulsion is undoubtedly the dominant modern response to suffering, it
is not as natural as one might suppose). But it is the purported deliciousness of suffering that poses the
most disquieting questions. What is so appetizing about depictions of pain and discomfort? What
makes images of suffering thrilling? And why, for that matter, was an exciting show about destruction and
suffering expected to part audiences from their charity dollars? A connection is implied in the very word we
use to describe an entreaty for charitable donations: "appeal." According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
the word "appeal" is adapted from the Latin "appelare" which means "to call upon." Thus it is that charity
organizations call upon donors for contributions. Since the late nineteenth century, however, the word has
also carried another meaning (one that was, significantly, articulated and disseminated most thoroughly by
an emerging advertising industry): the quality of being attractive, enticing—"appealing." The
producers of the Minneapolis show certainly intuited that to raise money they needed both to please and
appall audiences with shocking images of destruction and misfortune, gambling correctly that audiences
so captivated would contribute generously to the relief of San Francisco. It seems that a closer connection
exists between the appalling and the appealing than most accounts of humanitarianism have recognized.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 12
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Link: Representations
Representations of Africa create it as worthless and sub human.
Chavis 98 [Rod, U Penn, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Workshop/chavis98.html]
With the stroke of a journalist's pen, the African, her continent, and her descendants are pejoratively
reduced to nothing: a bastion of disease, savagery, animism, pestilence, war, famine, despotism,
primitivism, poverty, and ubiquitous images of children, flies in their food and faces, their stomachs
distended. These "universal" but powerfully subliminal message units, beamed at global television
audiences, connote something not good, perennially problematic unworthiness, deplorability, black,
foreboding, loathing, sub humanity, etc. On the other hand, little is said about Africa's strategic importance
to so called industrialized nations; her indispensability and relevance to world development, global
technology, and the wealth of nations, derived from involuntary African largesse, are not acclaimed in the
media. The amorphous news spin is America has to protect her strategic interests and national security.
Without access to certain raw materials from Africa, Western industrial capacity would wither much like a
"raisin in the sun". Even less is communicated via the media or anywhere else about the incalculable volume
of African art and crafts that end up in private collections and museums: books, calendars, and artistic
publications, produce minimal income and royalties, if any, for Africans creating such works of art. Mega
profits are gained by expatriate marketers in royalties, commissions, exhibitions, documentaries, movies,
shows, and other niches in the U.S and world art and craft consumer market. African unique textile designs
are now bootlegged or blatantly copied by other international economic and globally marketing groups.
Sadly, until the ban on ivory importation, elephant and rhinoceros populations were facing certain extinction
because foreign consumers, mainly in Asia, demanded their tusks for medicinal purposes and aphrodisiacs.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 14
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Link: AIDS
All narratives of AIDS inscribe it as internal to Africa – This serves to frame Africa as the
sick continent.
Chavis 98 [Rod, U Penn, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Workshop/chavis98.html]
Early inquiry into and pontification about the origin of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)
contraindicated any origin for the disease other than out of Africa. Subsequent research has rebuffed
such unsubstantiated theory. However, just recently, an article appeared in a local newspaper citing DNA
studies of a man in Zaire who had AIDS in 1959. Is it prudent for the scientific and medical research
community to find someone or thing to blame AIDS on or would resources better be used to develop public
education campaigns as well as prevention and intervention strategies that together will eliminate the threat
of AIDS to future populations anyplace on the planet? Does the scourge of AIDS restrict itself to national
or international borders or territories? Does it selectively kill? What do the media gain by spreading
dubious information, information that has not been thoroughly documented or researched prior to
reporters and journalists rushing to meet press deadlines? Investigative reports by the broadcast and print
media have devoted talent and monetary resources to influencing and shaping world opinion: AIDS came
out of Africa. Did such hype save one life?
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 15
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Of the the most sever famines in the 20th century, Africa isn’t even in the top 20- a
perception of vulnerability is what the aff exploits
Jooma 06 (Mariam; Researcher with the African Security Analysis Program at the Institute for Security
Studies, “Africa in 2006: The Humanitarian Hangover?”, Africa Watch;
http://www.iss.co.za/index.php?link_id=4059&slink_id=3464&link_type=12&slink_type=12&tmpl_id=3)
A striking piece of information relating to the vulnerability of marginalised communities in Africa is that of
the 20 most severe famines of the 20th century, none occurred in Africa. How then did Africa become
the poster-child for media depictions of hunger? A focus on the underlying causes of vulnerability,
such as the reduction of ‘networks of affection’ that are linked to macro-economic adjustments, the
impact of an urban bias for access to services, increasing desertification of land, and the effect of
HIV/AIDS on the agricultural labour force are all part of the dynamic mix of factors affecting local
communities.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 16
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Link: Sudan
The motivation of the Affirmative analogous to the media in that they only desire to exploit
the suffering of the Sudanese crisis in order to win a debate round
Toolis 99 (Kevin, a features writer for The Guardian, “Hungry for the Truth”;
http://www.developments.org.uk/articles/hungry-for-the-truth/ 9 April 1999)
Omaar’s criticism could also apply to the media – which is instrumental in uncritically promoting the
NGO charities’ message that all aid is good. What Omaar is pointing to is a largely untold contradiction
that underpins the Famine Business and the news reporting of it. It is the contradiction between the
simplistic, emotive messages of starving children – “disaster pornography” – and the messy, confused
political reality of disasters induced by war. No one can explain the complexities of Sudanese politics in
three minutes of prime time television. But everyone can relate to powerful images of starving babies.
And it is in the institutional interests of journalists and NGOs to repeat this simple message. Journalists
obviously benefit from bylines, prime time slots, even awards. The charities benefit not only from the
stream of donations from the public, but also from the flow of Government funds that are released in
the wake of public concern.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 17
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Link: Children
Representations of helpless children define African culture as desperately in need of help
and fulfill the stereotype of Africa from the occident.
Nakanjako 06[Prossy Nakanjako, Childrens Rights Activist, Who gains from pictures of suffering children?,
New Vision (Ugandan Journal), October 26]
For months, I did not see any pictures of smiling children from Africa, a memory I had from home. I did
not see pictures of children happily running around, playing 'hide-and-seek' or football, unaware of their
tattered clothes. But instead, I saw only pictures of starving children from war-torn northern Uganda,
AIDS orphans from South Africa begging to be helped, or someone begging on their behalf.
Universally, children are seen as innocent, immaculate of the injustices of the world. And when it
comes to disasters, such as war, epidemics, drought and earthquakes, children and women are
considered to be a vulnerable category in society. "Like canaries down a coal mine, children often give the
first indication that something is going wrong. Child malnutrition offers the most common index to famine; a
child being disruptive at school may be the first sign of a family at war; child prostitutes and soldiers indicate
a society in crisis; child-to-child murders are interpreted as a sign of moral breakdown," wrote one author,
when commenting about the challenges of implementing children's rights in developing countries. Yes,
suffering African children on television have delivered the atrocities, wars, famines, and droughts in
many African countries right to the living rooms of even those Western citizens who do not know where
the continent is exactly located. If childhood is viewed as a 'golden age' full of innocence but vulnerable
and therefore in need of adult protection, then negative pictures of African children portray a society
that does not give proper care to their children. If no beautiful pictures of Africa are shown, what kind of
conclusion does one expect from someone who has never been to any country in Africa, but only feasts on
negative pictures of African children on TV? Patricia Holland, author of Picturing Childhood says that,
"Pictures of children contribute to a set of narratives about childhood which are threaded through
different cultural forms, drawing on every possible source to construct stories that become part of
cultural competence." What kind of narratives then, do pathetic images of hungry, lonely and helpless
children deliver to those who feast on them in the West? Or, to throw back Mr. Oloya's question, "If we
watch these documentaries about Africa's numerous ills, so what?" Social critics say that that negative
pictures of African children aid fulfil the stereotype of Africa in the West; as a poverty, disease, war,
famine etc infested continent where development has eluded the lives of many people.
Link: “Tribe”
Representations of African ethnic groups as “tribes” ground them as systemically negative.
Chavis 98 [Rod, U Penn, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Workshop/chavis98.html]
Why is it "ethnicity" in Bosnia or Kosovo and "tribe" in Africa? Why are certain African cultural
groups, residing in "jungles" designated pygmies while northern, caribou herding Europeans of similar
physical stature are referred to as Laplanders? Why were the Sans People (South Africa) renamed
Hottentot? Can one conclude that negative reportage of events in Africa, compared to other reporting
and spin tactics, by major news organizations, like racism in America, is systemic? Can the news
chroniclers, wire services, media organizations, and other gatherers of news, find nothing of value to report
when Africa is the subject-and a sound byte at that? The media industry practice of consistently practicing
the opposite is deeply troubling.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 20
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Link: US Key
Even as they aid Africa, the affirmative caters to America- feeding the citizens reasons why
the world must subscribe to America and adhere to our culutre
Moeller 99 (Susan, assistant professor in the philip merrill college of journalism at the university of Maryland,
“Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death” 1999; page 14-15)
The Americanization of crises also plays into this proclivity. Americans are terribly preoccupied with
themselves. The Americanization of events makes the public feel that the world subscribes, and must
subscribe, to American cultural icons—and if it doesn’t or can’t it is not worth the bother, because
clearly the natives are unworthy or the issue or event is. Media consumers are tied to a tether of cultural
images. This is a fact well-known yet rarely acknowledged. Peoples in other countries know that when
they use Western icons to help define their struggles the West pays greater attention. So the student
democracy movement in Tiananmen Square made sure to carry their Statue of Liberty in front of the cameras
and protesters outside an Indonesian courtroom sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” while
facing the microphones. Would our interest in those events have been as great without those signifiers? We
draw historical parallels and make cultural connections between our world and that of the “other.” The lone
man defying the Chinese authorities by standing in front of the line of tanks was for us another Patrick Henry
shouting, “Give me liberty or give me death.” We take for granted the placards quoting Thomas Jefferson
and Martin Luther King, Jr., which are written in English—but are carried by citizens of China or Croatia or
Chechnya.
Focusing on pain and suffering in far off places allows us to maintain a distance and
superiority. The west becomes separate and benevolent and refuses to actively engage the
circumstances. Tossing aid justifies our inaction to structural changes. The aff has no long
term solvency, they just want to feel good.
Fair and Parks 01 [Jo Ellen Fair and Lisa Parks, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of
California-Santa Barbara, Africa on Camera: Television News Coverage and Aerial Imaging of Rwandan Refugees,
Africa Today 48.2, pg. 35-37]
U.S. news organizations' earlier experiences, particularly in Ethiopia and Somalia, demonstrated that at
least for a few weeks U.S. news viewers would be content to watch the pain and suffering of others as
long as the story remained an uncomplicated one of U.S. benevolence. Simplifying humanitarian
stories for domestic audiences in terms of what the West is doing for Africans allows journalists and news
consumers alike to assume a certain superiority. As a result, the West is made separate and distant
from Africa, which permits journalists to ignore questions about how historical and contemporary
western involvement contributes to current problems (Hawk 1992; Fair 1996; Girardet 1996; Myers,
Klak, and Koehl 1996). Speaking of how the U.S. media simplified its Rwandan coverage, ABC's Ted
Koppel explained: Maybe it's a natural outgrowth of the age of television, but we do prefer to keep our
crises simple, stories with a definable beginning and a predictable end. We like our villains to be
foreign and our heroes home-grown. What we do not like are long, open-ended, complicated
involvements far from home, in which America's good intentions are misunderstood. By those
standards, we will not much like even our limited involvement in Rwanda. It is one thing to respond with
American skill and generosity to a human disaster, fly in the food and the medicine, build the roads,
set up the water purification plans. But at that point, our national attention span starts to lag. If people
are no longer dying at the rate of 2000 a day
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 21
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Link: Genocide
Media framing of genocide frame violence through stereotypes of primordial tribalism for
the sake of audiences.
Fair and Parks 01 [Jo Ellen Fair and Lisa Parks, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of
California-Santa Barbara, Africa on Camera: Television News Coverage and Aerial Imaging of Rwandan Refugees,
Africa Today 48.2, pg. 35-37]
For media organizations, coverage of Rwanda's 1994 genocide was challenging. Logistically, U.S. news
media had to scramble to gain entry into a country where conditions were deteriorating rapidly.
Organizationally, because few U.S. newsgroups support regular reporting from Africa and still fewer operate
bureaus on the continent, scarce resources for international reporting had to be redirected from regions
thought to be of greater geopolitical and/or cultural interest to American consumers. Journalistically, U.S.
reporters were dropped into a region where they knew little, and where their own government
advocated disinterested noninvolvement. Hence, reporting on the Rwandan genocide was typical of
U.S. coverage of Africa generally. Journalists relied on stereotypes--thoroughly tested by news
organizations in stories set in other African countries, such as Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan--
that characterized the genocide in Rwanda as the result of some inexplicable, uncontrollable
primordial tribalism that drove Hutus and Tutsis to murder. The framing of news coverage of the
Rwandan genocide as localized Hutu-Tutsi warfare made news reports simpler to produce and easier
for U.S. television audiences to digest. Still, the Rwandan genocide was not a "good" news story for many
U.S. news organizations. Media attempts to peg events neatly as one tribe pitted against another
demanded that reporters be able to identify which tribal side U.S. audiences should support. The
problem with the Rwandan genocide story was that reporters at the outset were unable to make clear
distinctions as to which side was good or bad. This ambiguity caused the genocide story to receive far less
coverage than subsequent movements of thousands of refugees into settlement camps in 1995 and 1996
(Minear et al. 1996; Murison 1996; De Waal 1997). ).
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 22
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Link: Disaster
The Aff constantly perpetuates ignorant depictions of African people via atrocity
exploitation. All they show is disaster.
Olujobi 06 (Gbemisola “The Africa You Need to Know”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_the_africa_you_need_to_know/ ; Posted on Nov 28, 2006)
My short lecture had no effect whatsoever on my “student.” His next question was, “But, what is the problem
with Africa?” Clearly, nothing I had said could erase the “huge expanse of waste” picture of Africa
from his mind. I don’t blame him. Neither do I blame another official at a different airport who asked me if
Africans keep their cowries in banks. [Editor’s note: Cowries are shells that were used as mediums of
exchange in parts of Africa.] He was quite taken aback when I showed him a few naira notes [Nigerian
currency]. I also don’t blame some of my American friends when they ask me how I “picked up such good
English.” Far from picking up good English, I tell them, I have a background of solid British education. My
country, Nigeria, was a British colony until 1960. No one should blame these people or anyone else who
displays such profound ignorance about Africa. Rather than educate and enlighten by disseminating
fair, balanced and accurate information, all that the Western media seem to be keen on showing the
West about Africa is backwardness, disease, hunger, want, deprivation, banditry, brigandage,
slaughter fields, child soldiers, gang-raped girls, harassed mothers, wasted children, flies feasting on
the living and vultures waiting to devour the near-dead. Goodness!
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 24
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Link: Afro-Pessimism
The affirmative perpetuation of the media’s negative perception of Africa as a whole limits
progressive politics and spreads a false image of what Africa is
Olujobi 06 (Gbemisola “The Africa You Need to Know”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_the_africa_you_need_to_know/ ; Posted on Nov 28, 2006)
Hugh Hamilton in “Ownership, Diversity & Race: Confronting (Mis) Representations of Africa in the US
Media” also highlights the same thread. “The dominant images of Africa in American mainstream media
are of a dark and desolate continent, riven by tribal conflict, beleaguered by pestilence, poverty and
disease, a place of fear and futility ...of despair and depression, of a lost people languishing in a lost
land somewhere beyond the edge of modern civilization.” Their Excellencies examined the record of
coverage of some of America’s most distinguished publications—The New York Times, The Washington
Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and U.S. News & World Report. They reviewed these
publications over a 10-year period—from 1994 to 2004—and “found their coverage of the continent to be
anything but fair and balanced.” Such an incredible labor of love, considering the fact that many of them had
more than enough to do with Africa’s present sorry state. They therefore concluded that “the findings of this
(and other) surveys indicate that coverage of Africa, by the leading sources of American media is, at best,
dismissive of the continent’s progress and potential, and thus leading to continued ‘exotification’ and
marginalization of the African continent. At worst, coverage disregards recent trends toward
democratization, thus betraying an almost contemptuous lack of interest in the potential and progress
being achieved on the continent.”
The structural lens of western representations of Africa is a negative one. All reports have
to conform to the traditional stereotypes of grotesque images.
Makunike 93[Ezekiel Makunike, Former Zimbabwe Director of Information, Out of Africa: Media Stereotypes
Shape Images, Center for Media Literacy]
Influenced first by colonialism and then by Cold War politics, this contemptuous tone has long shaped
and fashioned Western media perceptions of Africa. As I learned very quickly in the U.S, for American
readers or viewers to be interested, news out of Africa must be negative. It must conform to the
traditional stereotypes in its spotlight on grotesque and sensational events. It must show misery,
corruption, mismanagement, starvation, primitive surroundings and, as in the case of Somalia, chaos
and outright anarchy.
In Somalia and elsewhere, news reports show white people feeding black people. You never see Africans
helping themselves.
Foreign correspondents in African capitals and their superiors in the media gate-keeping chain seem to
have these perceptions ingrained in them. From newsgathering in Africa to publication and broadcast
thousands of miles away, stories about Africa are looked at with these negative lenses. Even more
unfortunately, reporters and editors with a broader vision run the risk of having their stories
disbelieved and unused. Little wonder they learn to toe the expected line.
Link: Newsbites
The Aff’s exploitation of suffering and conflict through newsbites instead of actual analysis
is the main contributor to Afro-pessimism in America
Olujobi 06 (Gbemisola “The Africa You Need to Know”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_the_africa_you_need_to_know/ ; Posted on Nov 28, 2006)
Ezekiel Makunike addresses the same concerns in “Out of Africa: Western Media Stereotypes Shape
Images.” “We hear about famines and coups, but not the rejuvenation of its cities and the cultural vitality of
its village life ... about oppression and massacres, but not education, economic self-help and political
development ... about poaching and habitat destruction, but not ongoing active efforts at conservation,
reforestation and environmental awareness.” The TransAfrica Forum, a body which aims to influence U.S.
policy on Africa and the diaspora, surveyed two of the most esteemed newspapers in the United States—The
New York Times and The Washington Post—between March and August 2000. Its study showed that the
vast majority of news stories fell within only three categories—AIDS, development and conflict. The
study found no reports on regional economic or political cooperation in Africa, nor one article on the
private sector. The study concluded that “one would have expected the New York Times and the
Washington Post to make an effort to inform American citizens and policymakers in a much more
balanced, detailed, and fair manner. Failure to address this issue will contribute to an increase in Afro-
pessimism in America.”
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 26
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Link: Empathy
The desire to empathize with the oppressed and give aid is how we compensate with images
of misery. But trying to become one with the oppressed doesn’t help them. All it does is
wish away our feelings of guilt.
Jackson 04 (Michael, The Prose of Suffering and the Practice of Silence, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian
Spirituality, http://muse.uq.edu.au.ts.isil.westga.edu/journals/spiritus/v004/4.1jackson.html, prof. of Anthropology at
Univ of Copenhagen)
But men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Owen, and John Adams,
though exposed to the spectacle of mass suffering, did not themselves suffer the hardships, pain, and
deprivations that moved them so deeply. What was it, then, that drove these men to want to alleviate
the suffering of "the people," en masse, and to create a world in which equal rights included the right to
wellbeing and happiness, as well as the right to decide how one was governed? For the Americans, "the
abject and degrading misery" of slavery and African-American labor "was present everywhere."7 For
European intellectuals, urban poverty and misery was equally ubiquitous and unavoidable, and it is possible
that their revolutionary thinking was driven as much by the sheer awfulness of coexisting with such large
numbers of distressed human beings as by enlightenment and compassion. This situation reflected the
changes that had taken place in Europe as a result of industrialization. By the 18th century, the dense
concentrations of people in cities, and the intensification of urban misery, meant that the effects of poverty,
disease, overcrowding, and pollution could not be ignored. [End Page 48] In 1818, the English poet John
Keats visited the city of Belfast in northern Ireland. The scenes that met his eye are pretty much the same that
a traveller encounters in many Third World cities today, crowded with youngsters from rural areas seeking
their fortune or people displaced by war. Since the turn of the century, rural poverty and the effects of the
Industrial Revolution had "sucked so many people into Belfast that its population had expanded by 50 per
cent."8 Keats, travelling with a close friend, Charles Brown, was deeply troubled by the suffering he saw.
"What a tremendous difficulty," he wrote his brother Tom, "is the improvement of the condition of such
people—I cannot conceive how a mind 'with child' of Philosophy could gra[s]p at possibility—with me it is
absolute despair."9 But Keats' despair at how this suffering might be alleviated gives way to an
acceptance of life's unavoidable hardships, and a fascination with how one might "convert the brutal
facts of life into perceptions which might 'do the world some good.'"10 Subtly, the desire to reform a
barbarous social system is tempered by a more fervent desire to transmute the suffering around him
into a form that improves his own soul. "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an
Intelligence and make it a soul?" he wrote to his brother George in 1819, observing that this "system of salvation" was very different
from Christianity, and did not "affront our reason and humanity."11 This turn to inwardness is, of course, characteristic of
romanticism. But it is a turn that is born of a frustration to change the world politically. Faced with entrenched
inequality, and the impossibility of social change, the romantic falls back on his own emotions, his own
thoughts, his own suffering—what Coleridge called "inner goings-on" and Luc Boltanski calls a
"metaphysics of interiority,"12 and Sartre calls "magical action."13 That is to say, when action on the world
around us proves impossible, we have recourse to action on our own emotions and thoughts, thereby
transforming the way we experience the world. Unable to flee an assailant, a person may faint. Unable to win an
argument, a person may resort to verbally abusing his opponent. Unable to do anything about an impending crisis, a person may worry
himself sick about it, as if this increase in anxiety will make some real difference. Unable to stop thinking about a traumatic event, a
person may refuse to speak of it, as if silence will make the event go away—a view contained in the English saying "Least said, soonest
mended." Time does not allow me to review all these magical strategies, but a brief summary of two may be helpful. One such
strategy is to magic the problem away by merging oneself with it—identifying so completely with the
misery around you that the boundary between oneself and the object of one's concern is effectively
dissolved. Van Gogh provides a poignant example of this empathic identification. Writing to his brother
Theo in the winter of 1880, Vincent confesses that his "only [End Page 49] anxiety is: how can I be of use
in the world?" At this time he is preparing himself to be an evangelist among the coal miners of the
Borinage region, west of Mons. In order to commit himself body and soul to the poor, he feels he must
cut himself off from his family, to "cease to exist" for them. He neglects his appearance, goes hungry
and cold, and gives the little he has to peasants and workers. But who is helped by this self-abasing
sympathy? What good can come of this identification with the oppressed? Vincent feels imprisoned and
melancholic. Frustrated in his efforts to alleviate the misery of humankind, he ends up seeking to annihilate
his anguish by steeping himself in the suffering around him. But nothing is really changed. In his act of
martyrdom, the martyr has simply made his own troubled conscience disappear by a sleight of hand,
donning the sackcloth of those he had set out to save.
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The culture of imagery creates philanthropy into a commercial activity and individuals as
participants in a dream world of mass consumption
Rozario 03 [Kevin Rozario, assistant professor in the American studies program at Smith College, Delicious
Horrors, American Quarterly 55.3, 417-455]
Charity organizations took full advantage of the opportunities presented by the new mass culture of
movies and mass-circulation newspapers to beguile the public into "acts of benevolence." Even as
publicists at the YMCA and the Red Cross continued to speak warmly about the compassion and intelligence
of their supporters, they began to imagine donors in much the same way that advertisers were imagining
consumers: emotional, suggestible, (and significantly) female. Indeed, I would argue that they were fully
implicated in the dominant cultural project of the age: producing a society of consumers. In so doing
they were moving humanitarianism further out of the moral realm and into the "dream world of mass
consumption"—turning philanthropy itself into a consumerist activity. It was thus quite appropriate for
charity workers to borrow marketing strategies from movies, pulp magazines, and popular dailies. Now,
more than ever, philanthropic institutions found themselves competing with commercial ventures in a
(sensationalistic) mass culture for the attention of the public. From this point on, fundraisers would have
to devote as much attention to advertising as to ethics, and to "entertainment" as to education.
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Impact: Racism
The Aff’s depiction of African peoples mirrors Conrad’s “heart of darkness”, a dark war-
like continent waiting for a western savior – These depictions feed racism
Kperogi 07 (Daily Trust, Abuja (Nigeria), Staff, Farooq, http://allafrica.com/stories/200703110012.html)
The phrase "heart of darkness" has a lot of associative significance. It is a historically racist phrase that
has been central in the discourses of Western negrophobia. As any student of African literature knows,
the Heart of Darkness is a 1902 fictional representation of the Congo, and by extension Africa, by Joseph
Conrad, an English novelist whom our own venerable Chinua Achebe famously described as a "bloody
racist." Achebe's inimitable Things Fall Apart was, by his own confession, a response to Conrad's racist
denigration of Africans in the Heart of Darkness and Joyce Carey's equally condescending characterization of
Africans in Mr. Johnson, another racist fictional work set in northern Nigeria. I do not want to bore readers
with the storyline of Conrad's novel. It suffices to say, however, that Conrad deployed the motif of
"darkness" to encapsulate his sense of the barbarism, backwardness and spiritual death of Africans
whom he portrays as inhabiting a dreary, lifeless and colorless jungle in contradistinction to the
"civilization" and spiritual light of Europe. Since Achebe called global intellectual attention to the racist
underpinnings of the phrase "heart of darkness," most careful academics, journalists and public
commentators don't use it to refer to Africa lest they should be accused of racism. But CNN's Anderson
Cooper, in 2007, called Nigeria the "heart of darkness" using Jeff Koinange's tendentious report on the
Niger Delta as a convenient cover. And no eyebrows were raised from the plethora of anti-racist and anti-
defamation groups in America! When I called the attention of a CNN editor to this, his only response was
that he didn't watch the domestic version of the report and could therefore offer no comment. The truth is
that the report fits perfectly well with the mental pictures Americans are made, even forced, to have of
Africa. A report that was supposed to highlight the plight of Niger Deltans under the tyranny of oil
companies and the Nigerian state became, in reality, an informational staple to feed the ever ravenous
racist fantasies of Americans about Africa. In the video, we see menacing, hooded "militants" dancing
themselves to a state of "trance," aiming their guns at poor kidnapped Pilipino oil workers, and insisting that
they would only grant CNN an interview in the middle of the river for "spiritual" reasons-and such other
racist banalities that are irrelevant to the core of the story. And then you have naked children walking in fetid
refuse dumps, and half-naked men in filthy, begrimed makeshift huts fishing on the bank of the river. We all
know these are atypical scenes. But the object of the report is not to highlight the desperate state of the
Niger Delta, but to provide a journalistic endorsement (by an "African" journalist) that Africa is indeed
(still) the "heart of darkness" where people are notoriously superstitious and backward; where people live
in a state of nature, wear no clothes, live on trees or at best in mud houses, are untouched by the
faintest sprinkle of "modernity"-and maybe in need of a white "savior." This caricature of Africa
achieves two purposes: it reminds white Americans how truly racially superior they are, and makes the
Black American population feel so grateful that their ancestors were enslaved by white brutes and
brought to America that demands for reparations for slavery not only seem unreasonable but also
preposterous. And these calculations have worked perfectly over the years.
African disaster exploitation is selected with completely different standards- the media
doesn’t even think twice before exploiting Africans anymore
Gidley 05 (Ruth; Staff writer for AlertNet; “Aid workers lament rise of 'development pornography'”;
http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/112669283410.htm;14 Sep 2005)
Oxfam's Davis said pictures from Africa were often selected using totally different standards to those
that would normally apply elsewhere. For example, he said, picture editors would usually think at least
three times before publishing photographs of naked children, unless they were African famine victims.
"But naked famine's okay, it seems," Davis said. "Using pictures of bare-breasted women in a society
where the only other place we see that is salacious tabloids is not acceptable."
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Impact: Dependency
These images create false illusions, strip agency and ensures longterm dependency
Omaar and De Waal 93[Disaster Pornography from Somalia, Center for Media Literacy, Winter, Issue 61,
Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal, co-directors of African Rights (NGO)]
Reduced to nameless extras in the shadows behind Western aid workers or disaster tourists, the
grieving, hurting and humiliated human beings are not asked if they want to be portrayed in this
degrading way.
Do pictures of Somalia show herdsmen tending large flocks of well-fed camels, or farmers cultivating
ripening crops of sorghum and maize? Do they show vegetable markets flourishing in Mogadishu? Are we
allowed to see clan elders negotiating a local cease fire, or the women who have turned their homes over
to orphanages, filled with the laughter of healthy children? All these are just as much facets of life in
Somalia today as looting and starvation, but they are not what we are shown.
The truth is that, even in the areas of the country stricken by famine, outright starvation is the exception.
Most deaths are the result of disease. The great majority of people will survive-largely due to their own
efforts. International food aid is much less important than food grown by local farmers, the maintenance of
animal herds, having roots and berries to eat and charity of relatives and friends.
The most respectable excuse for selectively presenting images of starvation is that this is necessary to
elicit our charity. But famine relief experts concur that the total impact of our charitable giving is less
than what can be achieved if the stricken people are enabled to help themselves.
If "Operation Restore Hope" is to live up to its name, first it must restore humanity, self-respect and
dignity to the Somali people. This cannot be done while the press corps makes disaster pornography
pass for a true portrait of the Somali nation. No more, please.
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The K turns case- abundance of suffering depictions deters people from advocating aid
Moeller 99 (Susan, assistant professor in the philip merrill college of journalism at the university of Maryland,
“Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death” 1999; page 35-37)
New York University communication scholar Neil Postman was not surprised by the comments of those
interviewed in The Times. “The sheer abundance of images of suffering will tend to make people turn
away. People respond when a little girl falls down a well. But if 70,000 people in Bangladesh are killed,
of course people will say, ‘Isn’t that terrible’ but I think the capacity for feeling is if not deadened, at
least drugged.” “People seem to be paralyzed or just giving up,” observed Tom Getman, director of
government relations for the Christian relief organization World Vision, in 1991. “They seem to be saying
to themselves, ‘With so much going on, there’s little one person can do.’” The public can imagine the
rescue effort needed to rescue one trapped little girl, one starving child threatened by a vulture, but the
mind boggles at the logistics necessary to save millions. Some people don’t want to be reminded of
their helplessness. “I get upset watching the babies dying,” said Caroline Trinidad, a housewife and
mother of four interviewed in The Times article. “Who the hell wants to see that? I switch the channel.”
Others feel drained by all the tragedy and by the seemingly repetitive crises. “Americans just get tired
of seeing starving people on television,” said Al Panico of the Red Cross. “They end up just turning the
television off.”
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Zizek Continues…
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 48
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Negative western media reporting is something that needs to be stopped- the alt solves the
aff harms by telling the true stories about Africa
Njeru 05 (Mugo, “Africa at large: Media challenged to correct negative image of
Africa”; http://www.wworld.org/crisis/crisis.asp?ID=480, May 31, 2005)
In a session on reporting Africa, Rwanda's President Paul Kagame said African news from both local and
Western media must be based on facts and the various contexts which have shaped the history of the
continent. President Kagame, whose country is still recovering from the 1994 genocide in which about
800,000 people died, said Africa was not seeking sympathy from the West, "but rather, a deeper
understanding." "There is a fundamental need for change in the way we have been covered. The
constant negative reporting kills the growth of foreign direct investment. There has even been a
suggestion that it is meant to keep Africa in the backyard of the global economy. You can help change
this," he said. He added that Africans must, however, take responsibility for the failures that occur in their
societies. "We in Africa must ask ourselves why we lag behind in spite of the resources at our disposal. Why
is it that the Western journalists see only poverty, disease, corruption, civil war and conflict? Can we give
hope to our future generations?" he asked.
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Text = Imagery
Text generates rhetoric which makes suffering a spectacle just like imagery.
Rozario 03 [Kevin Rozario, assistant professor in the American studies program at Smith College, Delicious
Horrors, American Quarterly 55.3, 417-455]
In recent years, some charitable institutions have begun to react against the saturation coverage of violence and
misery in movies, news broadcasts, television shows, and magazines, declaring an intention to resist making
spectacular appeals. Oxfam, for example, has moved to head off compassion fatigue by announcing a principled
refusal to subject potential donors to "heart-rending photos calculated to play on your emotions." What the
organization promises instead is "a straightforward case for one of the most effective humanitarian aid
agencies anywhere in the world." 106 But even this mailing surely depends in part on the phantom spectacles of
suffering that are conjured up imaginatively even as they are renounced rhetorically: we won't show you
gruesome pictures. Humanitarian texts have always been sites for encountering horror, and so they remain. In
a sensationalistic mass culture it seems inevitable that some of their appeal comes from the opportunities they
grant the "virtuous" for dwelling upon representations of death and suffering. It may be dismaying to
acknowledge that our virtues are commingled with our vices, that the pain many feel on behalf of suffering
strangers is often inseparable from a sense of relief that it is them not us, and perhaps even from a strange
voyeuristic fascination that borders on titillation. It may be discomforting to discover that feeling good (in the
moral sense) often depends upon feeling good (in the pleasure sense). But the fact remains that the histories of mass
humanitarianism and modern sensationalism have always been inseparable. It is on the basis of this understanding
that cultural critiques of sensationalism and humanitarianism should proceed.
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Impact: Afro-Pessimism
Representations of diseased bodies allows the western imagination to view crisis as Africa’s
natural condition. Understanding of history, politics, and culture are ignored.
Fair and Parks 01 [Jo Ellen Fair and Lisa Parks, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of
California-Santa Barbara, Africa on Camera: Television News Coverage and Aerial Imaging of Rwandan Refugees,
Africa Today 48.2, pg. 35-37]
As Malkki's statements suggest, defining refugees as "problems" to be cared for by states and international
agencies permits the symbolic and material reentry of refugees into a national and global order in which the
distinction among "nationals" and "foreigners" is clear. To make this distinction, the West constructs
refugees as "problems" in at least three ways. First, because refugees are on the move they often violate
national boundaries and so signify the failure of the nation-state to contain them. Second, refugees are made
visible in U.S. media only as crowded masses of "dirty," "unhealthy," "fatigued," "diseased" bodies
and therefore are understood as the vulgar antithesis of western norms. Finally, the western
imagination locates refugees on a revolting, tumultuous, war-torn continent that has historically resisted
and resented white colonial domination. Thus, when Africa flickers across America's "radar screens," it
is automatically coded as a crisis or catastrophe, allowing any political and social turmoil and upheaval
to be imagined as Africa's natural environmental condition. Refugee images of the sort described in this
paper reinforce the mindset of Africa as a place of crisis. Whether taken on the ground or from the sky,
these images ignore the middle scale, the regional scene where history, politics, and culture play out.
Here is where news organizations, if they looked, would find cause and explanation. And here is where the
American public, if it had the necessary information and patience, might begin to achieve a level of
understanding.
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Western representations report one-sided stories that don’t offer the complete picture and
positive things occurring in Africa. It ignores the possibility of Africans helping
themselves.
Makunike 93[Ezekiel Makunike, Former Zimbabwe Director of Information, Out of Africa: Media Stereotypes
Shape Images, Center for Media Literacy]
This dynamic explains why the life of Africa's varied and diverse countries is missing. We hear about
famines and coups, but not the rejuvenation of its cities and the cultural vitality of its village life...about
oppression and massacres, but not education, economic self-help and political development... about
poaching and habitat destruction, but not ongoing active efforts at conservation, reforestation and
environmental awareness.
Most telling of all, in Somalia and elsewhere, news reports show outside white people helping the black
people. They never show black people helping themselves.
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AT: Altruism
The belief that help is altruistic and pure is naïve at best. Aid is always accompanied by an
ideological and political agenda. The Aff claims that they just want to “save Africa” don’t
accurately represent the reasoning behind such intervention.
Narman 97 [Anders, Development Thinking: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice, Geografiska
Annaler: Series B, Human Geography v79 n4 Current Development Thinking, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0435-
3684%281997%2979%3A4%3C217%3ADTBTGB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C, Ass. Prof. at the Dept of Human and
Economic Development Goteberg University]
Regarding the question of what development stands for, students just entering the course normally take a
rather neutral stand. To most of them development means a process of change, which hopefully moves in a
positive direction. Often it is also claimed that embedded in the concept of development we find
environmental concern, individual well-being, self-articulation and peace. If asked to identify common
barriers to development we find, at that stage, a list of basic needs, e.g. education, health and
infrastructure. This is coupled to normatively positive words, such as peace and democracy. In some
cases the dependency structures and power relations are also mentioned as essential. In the majority of
cases, students of Development Studies consider that a general interest, coupled with the need to overcome a
general lack of knowledge on international issues, motivated them to apply for this particular course. A
major role in sensitizing the students to development issues before their enrollment in the university is
often played by various television programmes. Commonly, this is through pictures of starving
children or other disaster pornography. In most cases students have found that the analysis of why a
certain problem has come about is seriously lacking. Even if the times of intensive solidarity manifestations
of 1968, with the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, are not prevalent today, students are
influenced by major debates--on the European Union, nuclear power etc. Discussions on the concept of
development, on the basis of the issues mentioned, tend to turn into a virtual shopping list on what we in the
north can do to assist the poor people of the world. Somehow the notion acquired during such a debate
seems to be that we still live largely in a harmonic environment, in which we in the north are willing to
give up part of our material well-being in favour of the less advantaged. For those continuing the course
up to the field visit, many are taken aback from this idealistic naiveti. When returning to the same issue,
i.e. the meaning of development, during the end of the field course another picture emerges. Most of the
students, at that stage, mention that their visions of development have become increasingly complex.
Contributing to this has been the academic reading, as well as the confrontation with African reality.
Suddenly the gap between theory and practice has widened enormously. Attempts to establish a
universal ground to explain development are constantly challenged during the time in the field. Development
tends to acquire more of relativity, in the dialogue with the other.
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AT: Complicity
The affirmative tells you to vote aff or else horrible things will occur and we’d be complicit-
this mindset desensitizes us to suffering.
Moeller 99 (Susan, assistant professor in the philip merrill college of journalism at the university of Maryland,
“Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death” 1999; page 9)
Most media consumers eventually get to the point where they turn the page. Because most of us do pass
the advertisement by, its curse is on our heads. “Either you help or you turn away,” stated one ad. “Whether
she lives or dies, depends on what you do next.” Turning away kills this child. We are responsible.
“Because without your help, death will be this child’s only relief.” In turning away we become culpable.
But we can’t respond to every appeal. And so we’ve come to believe that we don’t care. If we turn the
page originally because we don’t want to respond to what is in actuality a fund-raising appeal,
although in the guise of a direct humanitarian plea, it becomes routine to thumb past the pages of news
images showing wide-eyed children in distress. We’ve got compassion fatigue, we say, as if we have
involuntarily contracted some kind of disease that we’re stuck with no matter what we might do.
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The image focused media grab public attention only until the next image and halt
structural change.
Makunike 93[Ezekiel Makunike, Former Zimbabwe Director of Information, Out of Africa: Media Stereotypes
Shape Images, Center for Media Literacy]
As a journalist I understand that "news" is still defined as a usually negative departure from the norm. I
also recognize that in the eternal media race for larger circulations and higher ratings, profits and the
bottom line dominate concerns about values and ethics. As in Somalia, the "hit-and-run" mentality of
Western media makes it easy to briefly light up trouble spots, while the years of exploitation and
deterioration that produced them are left in the dark. The "here today, gone tomorrow" nature of
much international reporting, with star newspersons briefly crowding each other at media feeding troughs,
then jetting on to the next venue, doesn't help. By definition such journalists know little of the language
and less of the cultures they cover. They certainly never appreciate the subtleties and nuances of local
history and interactions that take years to learn. They are neither accustomed or equipped to observe,
understand or explain developmental situations that may change slowly over time. As a Zambian, my
observations are necessarily "out of Africa." But these observations of Western media shortcomings could be
applied to many parts of the developing world. Admittedly, the negative patterns of coverage I've described
were often conditioned by colonialism and Cold War politics. Unfortunately, they reinforced a pattern
of ignorance and distortion that has not changed with the changing political systems. In the case of this
news blackout at least, it is still very much a dark continent.
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1. Increases education – choose depth over breadth; PIKs force in depth research into the
assumptions behind the aff
2. Most real world- minor amendments are added in congress, lawyers lose on they way
they present their arguments.
3. Opens up new space for discussion- if we win our framework, we can discuss not only
what is bad, but what can be done to fix the problems with the presentation of the 1AC.
1. Potential abuse is not a voter – we didn’t do it and it’s impossible to quantify. Since the
ballot doesn’t set a precedent, in-round abuse is the fairest way to judge theory.
2. Reject the argument, not the team – the punishment paradigm rewards theory over
substance, decreasing education. Plus, they can’t prove a reason why we jacked their
ability to beat the rest of our positions.
3. Err neg on theory-
a. Structural side bias – the aff has first and last speech, picks the framework for the
debate, and has infinite prep.
b. Topic specific side bias – infinite things that could be detained and lack of kritik
links off of a decrease in authority guts neg ground.
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AT: Perm
Permutation debate- group it:
1. It’s not competitive: There is no alternative to permute- our argument is that your use of
remembering atrocities to justify political action is bad and causes the harms of the 1ac to
continue
2. Its severance, which is bad and a voting issue: in order for the permutation to solve it
would have to overcome all of the solvency deficit arguments implicit in our link and impact
claims; this can only occur through the discursive severance of getting rid of evidence that
supports our link claims from the 1ac- that’s bad b/c it means the negative would always lose
to aff conditionality, making all our arguments not competitive b/c the affirmative spike
would always loom- it makes them a moving target, they could get out of all our links to
disads and k’s- voter for fairness and competitive equity
3. The perm will always link: as long as they attempt to achieve political action in the interest
of preventing another said atrocity, they will still link.
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Liberal claims to solvency are only tactics to soothe our conscience, not ways to alleviate
and decrease suffering in the world.
Jackson 04 (Michael, The Prose of Suffering and the Practice of Silence, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian
Spirituality, http://muse.uq.edu.au.ts.isil.westga.edu/journals/spiritus/v004/4.1jackson.html, prof. of Anthropology at
Univ of Copenhagen)
But can the intellectual succeed in accomplishing what the sufferer cannot? Or are our attempts to
communicate or publicize the pain of others little more [End Page 54] than stratagems for helping us
deal with the effects this pain has had upon us? In a world in which human misery is increasing as the
divide between haves and have-nots widens, and wars are waged for control over scarce resources, liberal-
minded anthropologists may have no other options than those that have been invoked and deployed by
European liberals for the past 200 years. We all fall back on time-worn liberal assumptions that
improved knowledge—in this case, ethnographic knowledge of people's lives in marginal environments—
will somehow facilitate real, practical interventions, or that exposing the self-serving interests that lie
behind the discourses of dominant States and corporations will somehow embarrass the rich and powerful
into making life less burdensome and miserable for the powerless, or that describing the intolerable
conditions under which the poor live and die will "speak truth to power" and somehow alter the way
power is wielded, or we show that suffering is somehow redeemed by the creativity with which people
rebuild and reimagine their lives, 31 the patience and stoicism with which they go on. But these
arguments are often forms of wishful thinking—ways of salving our consciences rather than saving the
world—and make anthropology, in Boltanski's terms, a "politics of pity" rather than a "politics of justice."32
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1. Your evidence frames the way in which you represent the harms presented in the
1AC- if we garner a link off of it, you must defend it. The aff has infinite prep time
and if they can sever out of complete ideas in their evidence, they could just get up after
any 1NC and say “we’re sorry, that’s not what we meant”.
3. You have infinite prep time. If you cannot endorse your own authors, then they
shouldn’t be in your 1ac.
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***AFF ANSWERS***
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Disaster pornography plays a key role in raising funding for people in need- it’s the only
way to solve
Gidley 05 (Ruth; Staff writer for AlertNet; “Aid workers lament rise of 'development pornography'”;
http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/112669283410.htm;14 Sep 2005)
Jenny Matthews, who has made a career photographing women in conflicts and is frequently hired by aid
agencies, said that sometimes a striking picture of a suffering infant needed to be used. "It's a truth,"
she said, pointing to a picture of a baby in her mother's arms being fed by tube. "I'd stand by that."
And fundraisers say the starving baby pictures tug heartstrings and bring in cash - especially at a time
when NGOs are sprouting up all over Africa and competing for limited funds from a Western public
that some say is experiencing "compassion fatigue". According to Tafari Wossen, a former public
relations official with the Ethiopian government, there were only seven NGOs involved in the aid response
during a famine in his country in 1974. "The number of NGOs is now uncountable," he said. Lizzy
Noone, who works for Irish agency Concern, is part of a team writing new guidelines for European agencies
to help staff choose pictures that can raise money without taking away the subjects' dignity. "The fundraising
department argue that softer images don't bring in the money," she said, but added: "If all the agencies
did it at once, and people were willing to take that little drop of income for the transition period, the
public would get used to it very quickly."
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Compassion ID w/ Other
The compassion of the aff is premised on identifying with the condition of the Other. This
is an attempt to understand it through the lens of another history and identity.
Porter 06 [Elisabeth Porter, professor and head of the School of International Studies at the University of South
Australia, Can Politics Practice Compassion, Hypatia 21.4, pg. 97-123]
Most theorists understand compassion as some combination of three factors—feelings, empathy, and co-
suffering. First, compassion involves a "feeling with" another person. In an early influential article,
Lawrence Blum discussed "compassion as a kind of emotion or emotional attitude [with] an irreducible
affective dimension" (1980, 507). Blum categorized compassion as an altruistic virtue given its regard
for the well-being of others. What marks the subject of compassion is the graveness of a situation in
which persons or groups experience serious pain, anguish, torture, misery, grief, distress, despair,
hardship, destitution, adversity, agony, affliction, hardship, and suffering. Blum explained that compassion
is not a simple feeling, "but a complex emotional attitude toward another, characteristically involving
imaginative dwelling on the condition of the other person" (509). This imaginative dimension visualized
what the other person, given his or her "character, beliefs, and values is undergoing, rather than what
we ourselves would feel" in a similar situation (510). Often, we come to some understanding of someone's
plight by imagining what our reactions might be, for example, to having our city bombed, or our daughter
raped in war, or our friend called a terrorist simply for looking Middle Eastern. "The limits of a person's
capacities for imaginative reconstruction set limits on her capacity for compassion" (510). Later, I give
instances of politicians' conspicuous lack of imaginative identification with many groups who clearly are
suffering and desperately in need of compassion.
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***REFUGEES ANSWERS***
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